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

but retains significance in terms of the collective organizing that allows access to resources. Jeffrey, therefore, was pointing to the ways in which postcolonial democracy has politicized the meanings of caste, a trend that becomes key to understanding agrarian social movements. Second, between the studies of Bailey and Jeffrey, the meanings of caste emerge in terms of comparative juxtapositions across places and cannot be read in terms of one single location.

But what is the role of the village in such discussions of caste? As Breman (1988) pointed out, while village studies in India have focused on caste identity within the village, they have not sufficiently dealt with the matter of the construction of the “village” as a category of analysis. Breman was especially critical of Srinivas (1987) on this account, arguing that though Srinivas sought contextual versions of caste, he did not similarly view the village as contextually defined. There remains a need, therefore, to engage with the spatial meanings of villages, in order to ensure that the village does not become an artifice of power but remains attentive to the actual geographies that comprise rural experiences (R. Das 2001).

Breman's (1988, 38) focus was on colonial constructions of the village in Asia, within which the village appears as an immutable, immobile, and homogenous unit. In fact, the idea of the village as an isolated, self-sufficient, and self-regulating unit was being promoted even as the village was being transformed by colonial policies (3). For Breman, “[this] alleged respect for traditional institutions might have masked the wish for low-cost government administration” (2) so that colonial policies, in fact, utilized existing structures of power in the village to further their own control. Yet nationalists also held to such notions of the egalitarian, unchanging village, which enabled the invocation of a glorious past opposed to the colonial present and enabled the village to assume mythic status. In the process, nationalist strategies explained the inequalities of actually existing villages as consequences of colonialism. Breman thus extended his analysis to argue that considering the village as the primary unit of rural Asia ignores the diversity of social organizations that are likely to have constituted the rural landscape, and