The greater India experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast

Abstract

delicate balancing-act between domesticity and entrepreneurship. Hewamanne’s interlocutors are feisty women who desire autonomy and independence even as they yearn for romance, sexual pleasure, and belonging. Their married lives, however, are marked with disappointment. The chapter on ‘sex in the village’ is a candid portrait of thwarted desire. Their longing for respectability means they must continue to perform as ‘good women’ by muting their transgressive selves. Hence, the politics of contentment points to the limits of women’s desire and the price of virtue in enduring disappointment. The book raises questions about using the neoliberal subject as a frame to analyse these women’s lives. It is true that living and working in the FTZ enabled young rural women to free themselves of the guardianship of families to live economically independent lives, experience romance and sexual pleasure, and learn feminist ideology through women’s organisations; whether these experiences, according to Hewamanne, ‘introduce[d] Sri Lankan women to neoliberal ways of fashioning themselves’ is a moot point. Their neoliberal subjectivity derives from their continuous dependence on global production networks for economic survival long after they believe they have escaped the FTZs extractive working conditions, and also in the primacy of financial success in enabling social mobility and status in the village. The spirited creative women these former FTZ workers have become, however, challenges the primacy of capitalism in crafting meaningful lives – an observation Hewamanne makes in the conclusion. Contrasting the village and the FTZ create problematic dichotomies about neoliberal subjects; the ethnography’s strength lies in illuminating the politics of location in understanding the particularities of gendered subjectivities.