Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: ...

2.5 acres]; Planning Commission 2009a), the cooperative dairying program becomes a useful entry point for understanding the economic and social futures of a large segment of the country (A. Patel 2003). In the process, questions that are persistently addressed to rural India regarding transitions to capitalist social relations in agriculture (U. Patnaik 1990) and the changing resonances of caste in postcolonial politics (Jeffrey 2002) can be clarified in terms of their contemporary manifestations.

This introductory chapter focuses on the theoretical and methodological frameworks that enabled a turn towards village-level studies of dairy development, shaped the conduct of village-level fieldwork, and shadowed the task of writing. To begin with, this study is situated within four broad strands of interdisciplinary inquiry: critical analyses of discourses of development, historical constructions of the space of the village, the political economy of agriculture and rural development, and feminist perspectives on women and their work. The focus then shifts to the two case study villages that are the subject of comparative and ethnographic analysis, highlighting the ways in which traveling and storytelling combined in the fashioning of a methodological framework that is attentive to differences in dairy development across space and within places.

Development, Villages, Identities

The keywords at the center of this study cannot simply be defined given the intense debates that have shaped their meanings; thus, what follows are a series of perspectives on these debates. Contemporary international development is considered by its critics to have originated as one part of the geopolitics of the Cold War, with the United States attempting to stem Soviet Communist influence over the Third World through offers of expertise and aid (Cowen and Shenton 1996). Alternative and critical development scholars and activists have very adroitly revealed the losses of knowledge and control that followed such transfers (e.g., Escobar 1994; Sachs 1991; Shiva 1988). Yet, it can be argued that development is not just a neocolonial move, but has also become part of postcolonial identities (A. Gupta 1998), so that transfers do not proceed only