Beyond development : postcapitalist and feminist praxis in adivasi contexts

This chapter introduces ‘action research’ undertaken in the Rayagada district of Odisha, India. The work began with the identification of the experience of ‘singleness’ among Kondh adivasi (indigenous tribes) women farmers in a village named Emaliguda. The dialectic of oppression and resistance resulting from the condition of singleness led to the emergence of a collective called Eka Nari Sanghathan (Single Women’s Collective) in 2013. Attending to single women’s lives marked by experiences of pain, violence and otherness (by the violence of hetero-patriarchy, of primitive accumulation and capitalist development) and to the adivasi life-worlds sustaining noncapitalist class processes in a largely capitalist world, this contingent-emergent collective engages in enacting a possible postcapitalist-feminist future, a future beyond dictated developmental agendas. This chapter explores connections between the rem(a)inders of resisting and negotiated gendered processes and subjectivities (‘singleness’) and noncapitalist economic processes and subjectivities (‘world of the third’) in order to work towards a possible postcapitalist-feminist praxis. Embedded in postdevelopmental thinking and praxis, this chapter largely examines how questions of economic transformation and gender work come to co-exist in the adivasi context.