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

according to the will of development agencies. Development is thus likely to entail a negotiation between imposition and appropriation, and the struggles that are unleashed as a consequence can be followed in debates over the meanings of success and failure in the context of dairy development.

Rural India, meanwhile, has been a popular object of cultural and social analysis (e.g., Baden-Powell 1957; Marriot 1955). Such studies have recently become a site of conflict between the extent to which villages provide a glimpse into the essence of traditional Indian (read: Hindu) identity, and whether their historical construction militates against such essentialist understandings (e.g., M. Sharma 1978; Béteille 1965; Bailey 1964). One way in which to rethink the village is to contextualize it in terms of both space and time, and this book operates on the basis that a grassroots understanding of rural development cannot be constructed without engaging such contextual meanings of villages. Ultimately, the meaning of the village in India is most often clarified in terms of its economic dependence on and social arrangement around agriculture (e.g., A. Gupta 1998; Pandian 1990; Harriss 1982). Yet, the identity of “farmer” often serves to hide the class and gender complexities of the rural rather than to convey them with any degree of accuracy (e.g., Chowdhury 1994). A differentiated notion of rural identity is therefore key to approaching the cooperative dairy program as a multifaceted entity—partly constructed in the mobile space of the village on the basis of local desires to reshape access to development.

Beyond Success and Failure

The extremes that mark approaches to dairy development are exemplified by the kinds of studies that the program has inspired. What follows is an illustration: consider the two volumes—Reasons for Hope (Krishna, Uphoff, and Esman 1997) and Reasons for Success (Uphoff, Esman, and Krishna 1998)—that count India's cooperative dairying, among other rural development programs, as an exemplary instance of the ways in which rural development can be designed to achieve its stated aims. Now contrast these with an edited volume spearheaded more than a decade