Villages, Women, and the Success of Dairy Cooperatives in India: Making Place for Rural Development By Pratyusha Basu

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

Chapter 1:

Introduction: Seeking Success, Finding Farmers

Read

ABOUT
- Data
- Description
- Reviews
- About Author
- Cover
RESEARCH
- Bookmarks
- Notes
FONT
- Font Size
  - x-small
  - small
  - medium
  - large
  - x-large
- Line Height
  - 1.00
  - 1.25
  - 1.50
  - 1.75
  - 2.00
- Letter Spacing
  - Default
  - 1 pixel
  - 2 pixels
  - 3 pixels
  - 4 pixels
DOWNLOAD
- Complete Edition
PAGE
- TOC
- Copyright
- References
- Endnotes
- Index

This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.

misses out on interrelations between towns and rural areas. Highlighting the various ways in which villagers were not confined to the space of the village—at the very least, due to rules of village exogamy which meant that people had to travel outside the village for marital alliances (8)—Breman stated that

migration in pre-colonial Asia should not be understood as the mere movement of peasants from one location to another, as a temporary moment of action representing a break in a “normal” situation of stasis. I consider mobility to have been an essential part of the rural system under the ancien regime in which the village, as a social formation, played a subordinate role only. (27)

In all this, the suggestion is not that villages do not exist, but that the quintessential village does not exist (42).

One way in which to broaden discussions of the village beyond the confines of cultural identities is to situate them within the livelihoods that comprise rural places. Since national development planning in India links villages to small farmers, the political construction of agricultural identities becomes another significant strand in meanings of the rural.

Small Farmers and Agrarian Politics

Dairying in India is an occupation of small farmers. (A. Patel 2003, 7)

[T]he physical elements [of dairy development] such as a collection center, milk cans and a tanker are less important than who the producers are and why they have decided to get together. (George 1985a, 81)

Most evaluations of dairy development have focused on the characteristics of village cooperative membership as a measure of the program's antipoverty orientation. As depicted in the quote immediately previous, cooperative dairying is usually connected to “small farmers.” But are small farmers a coherent identity outside the realm of development? Or