“Traditional” women, “modern” water: Linking gender and ...

Geoforum 37 (2006) 958–972www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

“Traditional” women, “modern” water: Linking gender and commodiWcation in Rajasthan, India

Kathleen O’Reilly

Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 607 S Mathews Avenue #220, Urbana, IL 61801, United States

Received 22 November 2005; received in revised form 5 May 2006

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the connections made between women and water in a Rajasthani drinking water supply project as a signiWcantpart of drinking water’s commodiWcation. For development policy makers, water progressing from something free to something valuedby price is inevitable when moving economies toward modernity and development. My Wndings indicate that water is not commodiWedsimply by charging money for it, but through a series of discourses and acts that link it to other “modern” objects and give it value. Oneof these objects is “women”. I argue that through women’s participation activities that link gender and modernity to new responsibilitiesand increased mobility for village women involving the clean water supply, a “traditional” Rajasthani woman becomes “modern”. Water,in parallel, becomes “new”, “improved” and worth paying for. Women and water resources are further connected through project staV’seVorts to promote latrines by targeting women as their primary users. The research shows that villagers applied their own meanings tolatrines, some of which precluded women using them. This paper Wlls a gap in feminist political ecology, which often overlooks how gen-der is created through natural resource interventions, by concerning itself with how new meanings of “water” and “women” are mutuallyconstructed through struggles over water use and its commodiWcation. It contributes to critical development geography literatures bydemonstrating that women’s participation approaches to natural resource development act as both constraints and opportunities for vil-lage constituents. It examines an under-explored area of gender and water research by tracing village-level struggles over meanings oflatrines.© 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Keywords: Water; Gender; India; NGOs; Development; Latrines; CommodiWcation

1. Introduction

On a highway leading into Jaipur, Rajasthan’s (India)capital city, a large billboard displays Company X’s pro-motional campaign featuring a married woman in a whitelab coat holding a bottle of mineral water. This housewife/scientist advocates clean, hygienic Company X brand waterfor (her family’s) health. Playing upon familiar tropes,Company X’s spokeswoman represents urban, modern

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womanhood—a concerned middle-class mother with scien-tiWc savvy and the good sense to protect her children.1

Although the development project that is my case study isheaded by a non-governmental organization (NGO), not aCEO, its marketing strategy bears signiWcant resemblanceto the advertisement of Company X. Project staV meet theirvillage constituents in the form of experts, aiming to convince

1 She wears two obvious symbols of marriage: red powder (sindoor) inthe part of her hair and a red dot (bindi) on her forehead. In Rajasthan aselsewhere in India, a couple is expected to produce children soon aftermarriage (Padmadas et al., 2004), so the ad’s indication that she is marriedimplies that she is also a mother.

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K. O'Reilly / Geoforum 37 (2006) 958–972 959

them likewise of the need for clean water and hygienic prac-tices. While no one wears a white lab coat, discussionsbetween staV and village women are replete with images ofmodern, scientiWc housewifery (see also Berry, 1997). Theovert message carried by WeldstaV is about water andhealth, but with it, I suggest, travels a process whereby staVseek to “remake” village women, through a women’s par-ticipation component, into modern consumers like thewoman in Company X’s advertisement.

This paper seeks to Wll a gap in feminist political ecology,which often overlooks how gender is created through natu-ral resource interventions, by concerning itself with hownew meanings of “water” and “women” are mutually con-structed through struggles over water use and its commodi-Wcation. Unlike previous work on (a) how shifts in theutilization and meanings of natural resources have speciWcgendered implications (e.g., loss of access to forest resourcesis felt most keenly by women) or (b) how gendered strug-gles are constitutive of environmental interventions andchange (e.g., men’s control of women’s labour leads to con-Xicts aVecting agricultural production), the focus of thispaper is on how shifts in constructions of gender haveimplications for natural resources. The research indicatesthat water is not commodiWed simply by charging moneyfor it, but through a series of discourses and acts that link itto other “modern” objects and give it value (e.g., projectWeldworkers arriving in private jeeps in an area wherealmost no one has their own vehicle). One of these objects is“women”. It is argued that through women’s participationactivities that link gender and modernity to new responsi-bilities (e.g., serving on village water committees) andincreased mobility (e.g., attending public meetings) for vil-lage women involving the clean water supply, a “tradi-tional” Rajasthani woman becomes “modern”.2 Water, inparallel, becomes “new”, “improved” and worth paying for.Water’s commodiWcation depends on reconWguring gen-dered connections to water that add value to women andwater.

After an introduction to my case study and methods, Idiscuss the discursive and practical underpinning of theproject’s women’s participation agenda. Women are tar-geted as those with the most at stake in the arena of waterprovision but are allowed only limited roles within the pro-ject. In the empirical section I show how village womensubvert categorization and notions of their powerlessnessthrough actions and words that challenge the particularforms of gendered modernity project staV seek to establish.I demonstrate how links between water, latrines andwomen have been imagined and reworked by project staVand local users. I then discuss water’s commodiWcation asnegotiations between staV and villagers over meanings ofwater, village women’s practices, and competing visions ofmodernity.

2 “Traditional” and “modern” are categorizing terms that I put inquotes to indicate awareness of how power-laden these terms are. Evenwhen they are not in quotes the reader should bear this in mind.

2. Case study and methods

In 1997, I travelled in northern India visiting NGOs thatwere tackling issues of women and water. Eventually I wasintroduced to the staV of a large drinking water supply pro-ject in Rajasthan’s three most northern districts (Churu,Jhunjhunu and Hanumangadh) that was just beginningWeld operations. Fifteen women employees (out of a totalstaV of 70) had recently been hired for implementation ofthe women’s participation component. As I studied thisproject over the next 5 years, I came to understand thatmany project staV believed that access to clean water was akey to mobilizing village women’s participation and hopedthat their activities within the project would lead toempowerment. I also learned that for other project actors,women’s participation was a minor focus and of littleimportance. In addition to these two general positions werevillage men and women’s own ideas about developmentand empowerment which both coincided and diverged fromthe project’s agenda.

This project of Indo-German economic co-operationwas established to provide drinking water at German qual-ity standards to local residents of Rajasthan’s saline waterbelt, where groundwater is too salty for drinking. The pro-ject area covered nearly 20,000 km2 and is estimated to costmore than $170 million dollars (Fig. 1).

Water Xowing from the Himalaya in the north to theThar Desert of Rajasthan through the Indira Gandhi Canalis tapped, treated and piped into area villages. Phase One ofthe project covered 378 villages and two towns with a 24-hsupply at public standposts (taps; Fig. 2). Unlike the pre-existing GOR water supply, villagers are expected: (a) topay for water based on a division of the total bill by village

Fig. 1. The Our Water project area. (Map courtesy of Dick Gilbreath,University of Kentucky Cartography Lab.)

960 K. O'Reilly / Geoforum 37 (2006) 958–972

households;3 and (b) to maintain the underground pipesand public standposts.

Each village has a meter where the pipeline enters itsboundary; each household contributes to bill paymentaccording to their number of family members and livestock.As of 2005, payment remained at nearly 100%. The Gov-ernment of Rajasthan (GOR) is expected to maintain thesystem infrastructure and respond eVectively to villagers asconsumers, not beneWciaries. Community participation inmanaging, maintaining and paying for the drinking watersupply system was understood by project planners and staVas critical to its long-term sustainability. In order to meet itsfundamental goal to improve overall health in the region,the project also sought to help Wnance and build latrines in40% of area households. An early survey determined thatless than 10% of households in the project area had latrines;most villagers defecated in the open.

In a project of this size, it is diYcult to speak about vil-lages except in general terms, as they vary a great deal insize, caste and class composition, and even language (e.g.,the local language of Marwari varies from village to village,even those a short distance apart). Almost half of all vil-

3 Water prices vary with amount used. The maximum price charged is 4rupees (approximately 10 US cents) per 1000 l. At these rates, revenues willnot cover building or operation and maintenance costs.

Fig. 2. A project public standpost. Each standpost provides drinkingwater to approximately 250 persons (Author photo).

lages in the project area house fewer than 1000 residents.The smallest among these contain about 100 people, whilemost populated villages have about 5500 residents. Mostvillages have a majority (68%) of intermediate castes (e.g.,Jats) and high castes (e.g., Brahmins and Rajputs), somedalit (oppressed) or “untouchable” castes (known legally asScheduled Castes, 24%), few low caste groups (knownlegally as Other Backward Classes), few Muslims (6%) andvery few, if any, aboriginal people (2%). Median householdannual income in the area is Rs. 13,000 (US$289). Roughlyone half of household incomes fall below this Wgure androughly one half of household incomes fall above thisWgure.4 Distance to villages from the main oYce diVeredfrom 2 to 5 h, but distances between project area villagesthemselves are relatively short (less than 15 km) as popula-tion density is fairly high in the region.

Our Water was made up of a technical side (derivedfrom the GOR Public Health and Engineering Depart-ment) that was building the massive supply system infra-structure, and a social side (hereafter, the Project SocialSide or PSS) that was responsible for community andwomen’s participation. The PSS had a management staV ofseven Indian Program OYcers (1 woman, 6 men) and aGerman consultant as required by the German donor bank.Approximately 50 Indian WeldstaV (36 men, 14 women)worked in area villages. Each Weld team (1 woman, 2 men)was expected to: (1) set up a village-level bureaucracy forpayment of water; (2) establish village-level water manage-ment committees; (3) educate villagers about health andsanitation; (4) build latrines in select households;5 and (5)form women’s groups for women’s participation activities.Male Weldworkers generally took responsibility for man-agement, payment and latrine-building activities. FemaleWeldworkers assumed the task of women’s participation,which included the formation of women’s groups, healthand hygiene training, and microcredit schemes. Despite thecollective terminology, individuals working for the PSS didnot act as a single unit. They came from a variety of placesin India (including the project area), had varying educa-tional and professional experiences, and engaged in Weldpractices that signaled great diVerences in understandingsabout “development” and “women’s participation” (seeO’Reilly, forthcoming).

Throughout my Weldwork and my writing, I embraceBurawoy et al.’s “extended case method” (2000, pp. 26–28)which calls for long-term, participant observation of socialprocesses as part of an eVort to extend existing theory byexplaining contradictions arising in the Weld. The anomalythat sparked my inquiry was the obvious disjunctionbetween categorical constructions in project documents of

4 Data on village size, caste composition and household income comefrom surveys undertaken by, or commissioned by, Our Water in the period1991–2002.

5 Households considered below the poverty line by the GOR were eligi-ble for subsidized latrine packages, which covered most costs if householdmembers supply manual labour.


Rajasthani village women as traditional and disempoweredand evidence of their modernity and empowerment in theirdaily lives. I seek to add to existing theories of gender–nature connections by demonstrating how gender andwater are simultaneously reconWgured through women’sparticipation, and the impacts of this reworking. Six sepa-rate research trips to the project between 1997 and 2002have given me extensive experience over many phases andchanges of personnel in the project. The main oYce, WeldoYces, and villages (in the company of staV and on myown) were all research sites. I interviewed Program OYcers,oYcers from the donor bank, consultants, WeldstaV, andvillagers in Hindi, English and Marwari. I also collected avariety of project documents for discursive analysis. Tas-neem Khan contributed to this research as my assistant inthe year 2000.

3. Women’s participation in drinking water supply

Since the 1970s, when women’s gendered roles and expe-riences began to be recognized by mainstream developmentpolicy makers, women’s participation in drinking watersupply has encompassed a range of approaches. Participa-tory approaches have sought to gather women’s knowl-edges in their roles as water carriers and resource managersas a way of maximizing the beneWts of supply improve-ments or accessing women’s essentialized capacity for envi-ronmental protection (Coles and Wallace, 2005). Women,in the 1980s, were included in water provision projects as ameans to increase project eYciency by drawing on theirlabour (Coles and Wallace, 2005). As the state’s role inwater provision was increasingly viewed as ineYcient andexpensive during the 1990s, participation was intended toincrease local women’s investment in projects through a“bottom-up” approach that would incorporate them intoproject decision-making and planning at its earliest stages.In the case of the Our water’s women’s participationcomponent, women as the primary water consumers invillages were mobilized to pay for water and maintain thenew drinking water system. A combined empowerment-through-participation approach has also emerged, whichseeks to empower women and bring lasting social changethrough women’s participation in projects (Sen andGrown, 1985; Crewe and Harrison, 2000; Wallace andColes, 2005). This approach was also in evidence withinPSS plans for women’s participation, and I was told by aGerman consultant in 2000 that it had been included inorder to make the project acceptable to the donor bank.6

Development projects involving natural resources oftenbase their interventions on a “naturalized” relationshipbetween women and the project’s targeted resource. Exist-

6 The donor bank took a largely “hands-oV” approach to the PSS, buton oYcers’ yearly missions to the project area, diVerent elements of theproject received special attention. In 2000, that element was women’s par-ticipation. Attention to women’s participation increased over the years Istudied the project (O’Reilly, 2004).

ing gender–resource relations are then built upon or slatedfor change according to the needs of the project. The OurWater project built on an established division of labourthat equated “water work” with “women’s work”. In north-ern Rajasthan the collection of water, household cleaningand children’s hygiene are the responsibility of the womenand girls of a household (with some exceptions). A lookinto the project’s Handbook on Women’s Participation indi-cates that village women’s mobilization was based ondomestic, traditional roles, which were extended to includepublic activities pertaining to water. Women’s participationmeant building modern relationships between women andwater in their homes (e.g., covering water pots; teachingkids water-based hygiene) and empowered relationshipsoutside the home (e.g., speaking in front of men in publicfora).

Geographic and feminist work criticizes such develop-ment interventions and their planners for (a) failing toquestion the socially constructed division of labour behindthese gendered roles and (b) for continuing to ignore thecriticisms and political implications that have emergedfrom gender-environment theories (e.g., Shiva, 1988; Agar-wal, 1997; Schroeder, 1999).7 These include arguments thatdevelopment projects increase women’s exploitation (Jack-son, 1993) and constrain self-determined change (Mosse,2001) and meanings (Cleaver, 2001). Moreover, evidencefor the power of development discourses and practices tochange gendered social relations emerges through each casestudy (Carney and Watts, 1991; Schroeder, 1993, 1999;Mutersbaugh, 1999; O’Reilly, 2002). Far from being “natu-ral”, women’s relationships to resources are revealed associally created and negotiated by development actors (seealso Haraway, 1991; Rocheleau et al., 1996).

An additional element inherent within development dis-courses is a dualism of progress/modernity versus back-wardness/tradition (Ferguson, 1990; Watts, 1995). As manyscholars have shown, meanings of development contain amodernist teleology (see Ferguson, 1990, 1999; Manzo,1991; Mitchell, 1995). That is to say, development dis-courses echo modernity’s narrative that progress occurs ina forward-moving straight line until a nation-state achievesthe socio-economic condition of Western, industrial coun-tries (Gupta, 1998, p. 36).8 This teleology is gendered, withwomen often cast as an obvious target for modernizationthrough “empowerment” or “participation” programs—apoint I will take up below. Development policy makers andpractitioners seldom speak in terms of empowering men;most often empowerment comes marked with a gendermodiWer, i.e., women’s empowerment. Flowing into villageswith the project’s clean water supply is a promise of incom-ing modernity: modern water for modern women.

7 See Moeckli and Braun (2001) for an excellent summary of gender-environment theories.

8 See Ferguson (1999) for a clear refutation of development’s linearity.For other research addressing inherent contradictions within developmentdiscourses see Cowen and Shenton (1996) and Mitchell (1995).


A unique feature of this drinking water supply projectwas its requirement that villagers pay for water and assist inmaintaining the system. Before the arrival of the project,villagers received their water supply irregularly from theGovernment of Rajasthan (GOR) free of charge (Fig. 3)and harvested water during the annual monsoon from roof-tops and other rain-catching structures.

The logic behind asking villagers to pay for water wasthat people will waste less water and will maintain better awater supply that they have to pay for, which will lead tosustainability. In the words of one project promotional doc-ument: “Active participation of the people in implementa-tion, operation and maintenance of the scheme at [the] locallevel, as well as payment for the service, help to create asense of ownership and awareness” (PSS Leporello LeaXet,n.d.). Simply put, water was being commodiWed. OurWater’s Chief Engineer from the GOR Public Health Engi-neering Department (PHED) remarked:

The water supply systems throughout the State [ofRajasthan], executed and operated by the PHED, faceserious problems on account of lack of communityparticipation and consequent poor cost recovery. Inorder to have the system sustainable, it is essential to

Fig. 3. Before the Our Water project, villagers received their water supplyfrom the Government of Rajasthan at public taps such as this one. If thesupply was delayed, as on this day, women would queue their pots(Author photo).

have community participation both at the planning aswell as in the operation and maintenance stage. Costrecovery from the beneWciary is an issue withoutwhich no system can become sustainable. It is there-fore decided to make community participation andcost recovery as an integral part of the Project (PSSAchievements, 2000, p. 6).

The Chief Engineer blamed water supply problems on afailure of local communities to pay and participate (whichhe conXated), not the GOR’s failure to provide clean waterto villages. The issue in the project area was not a lack ofwater, but that it was free. Within neoliberal developmentdiscourses, water “progressing” from something “free” tosomething valued by price is an unequivocal good (seePage, 2005; also Coles and Wallace, 2005). In keeping withdevelopment’s modernist teleology, it is implied that thecommodiWcation of water is inevitable when movingtoward modernity (see Page, 2005 for other sides of thisdebate). The ‘goodness’ of water’s commodiWcation runsparallel to trends in India toward commodiWcation, privati-zation and statization of other natural resources (Shiva,1988; Agarwal, 1992; Saberwal, 1999; Agrawal, 1999).

I suggest that the staV of my Indian case study wereinvolved in the marketing of water in a modern package—institutionalized, rationalized and commodiWed. Projectdiscourses categorically created women of project areavillages as “traditional” in opposition to this new watersupply scheme. But a “modern” water project needed“modern” women to sustain it; thus village women imag-ined as “traditional” were marked for change by staV. Iargue in this paper that the promotion of modern water byproject staV ran parallel to a marketing of modern woman-hood and consumerism coded as “women’s participation”.Modern womanhood came in the form of a project compo-nent—women’s participation—that linked gender andmodernity to “new” responsibilities for women involvingthe clean water supply, including paying for it. Women’sresponsibilities, in turn, supported water’s repackaging as“modern”.

Regardless of development policy makers’ assumptionshowever, forms of modernity had already arrived in projectvillages by road, radio and television. In everyday interac-tions with Weldworkers, village women asserted their ownvisions of modernity in ways that did not necessarily coin-cide with those of the project. A power struggle emerged ata microlevel between project staV and village women overwhose modernity was going to be put in place. Close inves-tigation of these processes demonstrates the agency of vil-lage women and project staV, and leaves no doubt as to thepower of these actors to disrupt unquestioned gender–nature relationships upon which project plans were built.Development policy makers may ignore power dynamicssurrounding naturalized relationships at a local level (Fer-guson, 1990), but Weldworkers must regularly negotiatewith powerful, village-level actors (O’Reilly, forthcoming).Village women for their part, demonstrated their ability to


engage elements of the project that interested them andavoid the rest. This power struggle ongoing over the courseof project implementation raises the questions of: (a) whatlinkages were made discursively between empowerment,modernity and women’s participation; and (b) whether ornot women’s participation-cum-empowerment activitieswere constraining or enabling opportunities for villagewomen.

4. Developing gendered modernity

A combination of ecofeminist and feminist environmen-tal approaches informed PSS discourses on women’s rela-tionship to water. Ecofeminism, most closely associatedwith the work of Vandana Shiva (1988), essentializeswomen as a group, arguing that, because they are female,women have a unique knowledge about the environmentand are “natural” protectors of natural resources. Feministenvironmentalism accepts the ecofeminist premise thatwomen are victims of environmental degradation in genderspeciWc ways, but seeks to add a more material basis forunderstanding the links between gender and nature, e.g.,gender, class, race, and caste-based structures of produc-tion, reproduction and distribution (Agarwal, 1992, 1997).Women’s participation in natural resource management isseen as a potential solution to their particular environment-related vulnerabilities. Within PSS documents, women—asa category—were understood to have an invested relation-ship with water because of their roles as mothers andhousewives. They clean the house, collect water, and carefor dependents. Women’s material relationship to waterwas naturalized in PSS documents through an unques-tioned acceptance that it is women who should care for thehousehold and children. The following excerpt comes froma PSS didactic brochure:

Active participation of women is essential to improvehealth and living conditions as women are the mainusers and organisers on the consumer side of watersupply, as well as the main providers of care and edu-cation. (PSS Leporello LeaXet, n.d.)

Project staV took this relationship for granted as the basisfor women’s participation in the sustainability of the sys-tem, e.g., “ƒ because women are the main users of water,women know best about water and will be the most com-mitted” (PSS Handbook on Women’s Participation n.d., p.27). Project logic suggested that women in their role aswater consumers would see to it that the new supplyremained sustainable. Women would take care of the sys-tem because it is they who depend upon it; women’s labouron behalf of the project was supported by women’s “essen-tial” capabilities as wives and mothers.

PSS plans for women’s participation as natural resourceusers/experts left unquestioned the division of labour thathad women as principal users in the Wrst place. Jackson(1993) oVers a nuanced approach to women’s participationin natural resource management that considers women’s

relationships to environment in the context of a gendereddivision of labour, generational diVerences among women,women’s lifecourse, marriage practices, property rights,and household negotiation, among other things. Seenthrough Jackson’s optic, PSS plans for women’s participa-tion placed village women in a category without recogniz-ing power and social relations as factors inXuencingindividual women’s actions, decisions, and ideologies. Bas-ing women’s participation on women’s water knowledgesand customary roles increases women’s exploitation.

The repercussions of categorizing women are well-expressed by Mohanty (1991, p. 64) who writes that when afemale subject is reduced to her gender identity (e.g., classand caste are left unconsidered), then sexual diVerencecomes to mean female subordination. Considering womenas a group coincides with gendered, binary divisions ofpower: men have it, women do not (p. 64). When the cate-gory “oppressed woman” is combined with “underdevel-oped” the result is the production of the “oppressed thirdworld woman”, who is automatically deWned as ignorant,backward, traditional and domestic (p. 72). Hegemonic dis-courses of development serve to objectify village women bypresuming they are a coherent, stable group before enteringthe development process (p. 63). Women Weldworkers aresimilarly categorized, regardless of their diversity (O’Reilly,forthcoming). Such hegemonic thinking in developmentrobs women of their agency; it also indicates a powerimbalance between those making the plans, and the womenthey plan for.

However, power disparities in development interven-tions cannot be thought of as simple binaries with develop-ment staV and planners having all the power andconstituents having little or none (Ferguson, 1990; Bebb-ington, 2000; Crewe and Harrison, 2000; O’Reilly, 2003).Feminist political ecologists (e.g., Rocheleau and Ross,1995; Agarwal, 1997, 2001; Schroeder, 1999) include therole of NGOs and other social institutions in challenging orsupporting particular gender–nature connections, but theydo not go far enough in their examination of individualWeldworker-constituent interactions.9 Discourses of women’sparticipation do not simply objectify village women—theyare rehearsed, put into practice, and subverted through theactivities of men and women Weldworkers (O’Reilly, forth-coming) and men and women villagers. In addition, villagewomen can be shown to already act as powerful agents inways that occasionally PSS staV overlooked because theydid not “Wt” with project plans. I argue, moreover, that toanalyze the practices of PSS Weldworkers as if they com-pletely accept a category of traditional, backward villagewomen reduces their agency. On the contrary, WeldstaVwere well aware that some of their goals for project sustain-ability relied on women as active subjects (although this didnot mean that village women consistently chose to exercise

9 See also Springer, 2001; Arce and Long, 1992; O’Reilly, 2002, 2003,2004; Villareal, 1992; Nagar, 2000 for more on NGO Weldworkers andtheir relationships to village clients.


their agency in ways beneWcial to the project). The agencyof both project staV and village men and women broughttogether in the analytical picture illuminate some of theobstacles that arose during PSS eVorts to modernizewomen and commodify water.

Micropolitics in context and the details of individualagency are critical to an understanding of how meanings ofwomen, water and modernity were negotiated by PSS Weld-workers and villagers. Beyond “discourses” and “institu-tions” are “utterances” (Bakhtin, 1994) and “agents”(Escobar, 1995; Bebbington, 2000). Meanings are con-stantly negotiated and never fully controlled (Bakhtin,1994; O’Reilly, forthcoming). The uttered words of staVand villagers capture a sense of social life in its subversiveand transformative moments, something that discourseanalysis cannot quite do (O’Reilly, under review; Collins,1999). Such an epistemology and methodology are neces-sary if we are going to investigate successfully real people’sexperiences of modernity in their daily lives (Watts, 1992).Development and other modernizing agendas have theireVects at a local level, where some type of modernity has aprevious existence and is renegotiated when there is aninXux of new possible meanings (Watts, 1992; Bebbington,2000; Everett, 1997). Development projects may be seen asbringing to local places new possible meanings. By detailinga variety of interactions between project staV and villageactors, I trace the commodiWcation of water throughattempts to emplace a certain type of gendered modernitythrough the women’s participation component.

In the empirical section below, I detail the logic andprocesses behind PSS plans and Weldworkers’ attempts to“remake” village women into modern consumers, and theirimplications for water’s commodiWcation. PSS staV simul-taneously endeavoured to bring women into the projectbased on women’s “traditional” roles and encourage theirparticipation in the project as “modern” consumers ofwater. Put succinctly, staV plans called for village women asobjects but they also needed village women to act as sub-jects (O’Reilly, 2003). I demonstrate that women–waterconnections within the project were complicated by multi-ple visions of modernity and struggles over whose visionwould emerge.

5. Modern water, modern women

The project’s women’s participation component emergedhistorically as somewhat of a hodgepodge of activities, butfrom early on the rationale for women’s participation wasclear. Program OYcers and German consultants to the PSSwrote the Handbook on Women’s Participation in the estab-lishment phase of the PSS (1994–1996) before my arrival.While it is unclear from the Handbook itself what sourcesthese staV members drew on for suggested activities andideas about women’s participation, it is reasonable to inferthat the Handbook is an amalgamation of their previousexperiences (whether in India or not) and developmenttrends of the time. In it, women’s roles hinge on two general

assertions: “[w]omen are (1) the main users and managers ofwater as well as (2) the main providers of care withinthe family” (PSS Handbook on Women’s Participation n.d.,p. 1).10 These two claims are bolstered by a third:

[women] have all the knowledge about water. Theydecide which water source to use for various pur-poses, how much water to use and how to transport,store and draw the water (p. 27).

An assumption is made that women as water consumerswill be responsible and use water appropriately. In addi-tion, “[w]omen are usually more conscientious and commit-ted to a cause than menƒ So we can expect them tobecome eYcient activists and supportersƒ” (p. 5).

Precepts from the PSS Handbook on Women’s Participa-tion continued to inXuence women’s participation activitiesand were repeated in project materials. Discourses such asthese served to stabilize the category of “village women”and their “traditional” roles. They also characterized thenew water supply as a cause that women would rallyaround and take responsibility for. Women’s participationconnected water’s commodiWcation and women by linkingwomen’s water management knowledges and practices tosustainability and payment. Sustainability depended onboth commodifying water and women’s labour. Villagerswould not waste water that they must pay for, and villagewomen would aid in monitoring usage because they had themost to lose should the project fail. Additionally, improve-ments to the supply required “improvements” in women’spractices. After training in household and personal hygiene,a “modern” Rajasthani woman would know to use morewater, but for the right purposes. By linking water as aneconomic good and training village women as its responsi-ble consumers, processes of commodifying water take on adistinctly gendered character.

Women’s participation in the project as described in theHandbook neatly divides into two spheres of inXuence: theprivate, where their power is great (e.g., “ƒ often theirpower within the home is considerable” p. 4) and the public,understood as men’s domain (e.g., “women are not permit-ted by men to take part in discussions on a community level”p. 4). Village men are characterized as the obstacles towomen’s public lives. Women, within their homes, “areresponsible for hygienic practices” and “teach and superviseyoung children in their defecation practices and ensure thatthey maintain personal hygiene ƒ” (p. 1). Therefore,“women must play the major role” (p. 1) in appropriatelyusing water and latrines, and adopting good hygiene prac-tices at home. Children, policy makers expected, wouldlearn these techniques thus bringing about long-lastingchange. Secondly, women must be encouraged to come outfrom “the privacy of their homes and to get involved in the

10 The style of the Handbook includes large portions of emphasizedtext. Hereafter, all emphasis is indicated as in the original unless otherwisestated.


public domain of our Project planning, implementation andmaintenance” (pp. 1–2). Thus, it was generally known that:

ƒ the creation of women’s groups must Wrst and fore-most serve the purpose of making the water supply sys-tem sustainable in the long run, i.e. women must bemobilised to take responsibility for the water manage-ment of their village. (p. 2)

Through women’s groups, women would give their opin-ions about where neighbourhood standposts should beplaced, they would monitor the standposts for water useand misuse, and one among them would become an unpaidstandpost attendant, responsible for cleaning. One or morewomen’s representatives would sit on village water commit-tees to put forward women’s views on the issues. Womenbeing “more committed to a cause” were ideal for thiswork.

Women’s lack of public presence was accounted for inthe Handbook (p. 4) as follows:

ƒ they are kept in the isolation of their homes,divorced not only from general society and politicallife but also from other women except for some spo-radic contact with their kin.

With the formation of women’s groups, women’s isolationwould be relieved, e.g., “ƒProject activities can become awelcome opportunity for the women to come out of the isola-tion of their homes which otherwise they would not have” (p.5). Women could leave the house to attend women’s groupsor to attend public meetings of the village’s water commit-tee as a women’s representative, although Handbookauthors anticipated that “there is likely to be some resis-tance from the men” (p. 8). The same Handbook goes on toarticulate a hope that women’s groups will eventually solveother problems, e.g., “empowering the women of a village tohelp themselves and organise for the solution of other prob-lems which are not necessarily related to water and sanita-tion issues” (p. 2). PSS Program OYcers and WeldstaVbelieved to varying degrees that women’s empowermentwould occur through women’s groups or other projectactivities (O’Reilly, 2003).

5.1. Modernization and empowerment

Modernization for women came coded within PSS plansas “women’s empowerment” or “women’s participation”.Pigg (1992) argues that the terms “modern”, “develop-ment”, and “empowerment” are conXated such that eachpromises change from a current, negative condition (tradi-tional, backward, and powerless) to a future, brighter one.Within development discourses, if women (as a category)are ignorant, illiterate, backward, traditional and domestic(Mohanty, 1991), then a women’s empowerment programwill propel her from such a condition to a modern future.To become empowered is to become modern. Empower-ment is clearly gendered; men (as a category), in contrast towomen, are powerful (Mohanty, 1991), and therefore

already modern. Similarly, women defying traditionalbehaviour signals their modernity and empowerment. Forexample, women not covering their heads or faces symbol-izes “progress” for Ravinder,11 a male Weldworker whogrew up in this area where women veil. As pictures fromproject didactic materials show (see Figs. 4 and 5), a “tradi-tional” woman with access to the old water supply is atloose ends: her children are unkempt and needy; her houseis a mess; she herself is overwrought. In contrast, a “mod-ern” woman, with the new water supply, sits calmly: dinneris prepared; her house is neat and clean; her children well-kempt, sanitary and healthy. (The girl child stands passivelyin the foreground.)

“Third World” women’s disempowerment is discursivelyand spatially located within the home or the private sphere(Mies, 1982; Mohanty, 1991). To be domestic is to be tradi-tional is to be disempowered, as Fig. 4 shows. Despite aclaim in the Handbook that women have considerablepower at home (which may explain why no men are presentin either Figs. 4 or 5), project rhetoric maintains that men“exercise control over the women folk in their families” (p.3) and “cash income which comes into the household is usu-ally controlled by men” (p. 4). PSS discourses attribute somehousebound power to women, only to take it away again!Smyth (1998) argues that women’s exclusion from publiclife is a preoccupation of western feminists, who see theirabsence from public as both a symptom and cause ofwomen’s subordination. While arguably a preoccupationof (exclusively) western feminists, the analytical separationof private and public realms pervades PSS discourses ofwomen’s subordination. Women’s participation was theanswer to this problem. Thus plans for women’s participa-tion sought to entice women out of their houses intowomen’s groups or onto their village’s water committee asa women’s representative.

Such plans were not easily implemented however. Ten-sions were created when staV tried to bring women out oftheir houses because local gender norms call for women’sseclusion (purdah) unless a family needs a woman’s publiclabour (Luthra, 1976; Unnithan-Kumar, 1997; JeVery andJeVery, 1998). Married women, who have left the villageswhere they grew up (piihar) and joined their husband’sfamilies in their in-law’s village (sasuraal) practice purdah(literally “curtain”) which involves: not leaving the house;covering the face in front of strangers, senior men, andsenior women (ghuunghat); and staying silent or loweringone’s voice in the presence of these people (Raheja andGold, 1994; Joshi, 1995). PSS staV were aware that villagemen would need to be convinced that women’s participa-tion was benign or would bring beneWts. Male Weldworkersdownplayed women’s participation as a project componentwhen discussing it with men in villages. Women Weldwork-ers reported that after a period of suspicion about their

11 Names of all Weldworkers and villagers have been changed. For thepurpose of keeping women Weldworkers’ identities anonymous given theirfew numbers in the PSS, any woman Weldworker is called Kavita or Savitri.


activities, village men decided that they were “harmless”(Kavita, interview October 2000).

Watts (1995) argues that populist approaches to devel-opment, such as participation, provide resolution to anxietycreated by the on-rush of modernity that accompaniesdevelopment projects. By appealing to traditional values asa check on development and modernity, participatory

approaches allay fears of unchecked progress. According toMcClintock (1997) and Chatterjee (1993), gender also pro-vides resolution to tensions between tradition (embodied inwomen occupying private spaces) and modernity (embod-ied in men active in public spaces). Through the mainte-nance of a gendered, spatial divide, societies can have“progress” but still maintain “tradition” and history. Thus

Fig. 4. PSS didactic image representing a village woman before the new water supply.

Fig. 5. PSS didactic image representing a village woman after the new water supply.


a women’s empowerment agenda that seeks to bringwomen into public upsets any resolution to tradition vs.modernity sought through gender. The PSS’s participatoryapproach for women stretched the limits of both resolu-tions when it attempted to appeal to collective “commonsense” (e.g., women’s traditional roles as household manag-ers and water users) in order to argue for women’s publicinvolvement (i.e., empowerment) in the project. If womenrepresent “tradition” and a check against rampant “moder-nity” in popular imagination, then the PSS set itself an(almost) irresolvable problem pursuing women’s participa-tion.

I see a partial resolution to this dilemma in staV appealsto women’s potential contribution from within their homes.Women Weldworkers found ways of pointing out to womentheir power within the household, and expanded this powerin their discussions with women about water handling prac-tices (as depicted in Fig. 5). In the following excerpt awoman Weldworker named Kavita recreated in an interviewwith me (November 2000) her argument for villagewomen’s domestic power:

How does your husband know whether you havecleaned [his] plate or given him food just like this only[carelessly]. Only you do all this with food, right? Orsome women just clean utensils with their veil (odhni)or so much sand (ret) is in a plate and they give foodin that plate.12 Or they give water in a lotaa (metaldrinking vessel) without cleaning it. So that is notcleaning, and men will get sick from it. Then it comesin her mind that what you say is right—that you saywomen can do everything like keeping the houseclean. I say it is in the hands of women to keep chil-dren safe, to keep men [safe].

Women’s work such as this is acknowledged by womenWeldworkers as important to social reproduction, but fewbesides Kavita actively realized the power women alreadyexercised through it. She extended the women’s participa-tion task of household hygiene into a demonstration ofwomen’s agency and empowerment at home—a placewhere men do not know what women are doing.

Village women of all caste groups frequently argued theyhad no power when asked to perform tasks by WeldstaV,which both suggests images of themselves as powerless, anda clever way of resisting staV plans by appealing to widelyheld views of women’s powerlessness. Kavita countered thisargument by claiming that women have an important roleto Wll as “agents of the household”. She cleverly argued fora form of women’s modernity/empowerment that mightpersuade women to adopt hygienic practices and keepswomen’s activities within traditional roles while increasingtheir importance. The message Kavita employed to high-light women’s power at home was sanctioned by the PSS

12 Dry sand is often used to scour dirty dishes, after which they are wipedoV with a piece of cloth or clothing. Obviously, the practice reduces wateruse.

management; however, not all women Weldworkers drew onit during their discussions with village women. I view PSSsanctioning of household hygiene activities for women assigniWcant because it emphasized both women’s power andthe power of the new water supply.

By concentrating their eVorts on women’s empowermentat home, particular concepts gained importance for theremaking of women as modern consumers. For example,Kavita connected cleanliness and health with women’shousehold responsibilities as suggested in the Handbook.To be a good housewife, Kavita implied, is to keep men safethrough cleaning. Such gendered connections reproducewomen’s traditional roles and link to modern tropes of san-itation and hygiene that are rife in development discourses(see Burke, 1996). Following Kavita’s argument through,we see that village women can simultaneously maintaingender norms and also be modern and empowered bywashing dishes with water (see again Fig. 5).

Village women, for their part, did not simply acceptWeldworkers’ meanings and instructions. One strikingexample of this appeared in the words and behaviour of apowerful village family’s matriarch, Dadima. Dadima, aRajput (high caste), told me during a visit to her house inAugust 2001 that she listened to what women Weldworkerssaid about household cleaning but in her words, “Who doesit at home?” She recounted that women Weldworkers toldher that washing with sand is bad (i.e., dirty) and washingwith ash is good (i.e., clean). She went to the meetings—theycall her because of who she is—but she got bored, she said.While her hygiene practices did not Wt the ideal held byWeldworkers, it cannot be denied that she exercised agencyby refusing to change her habits. Furthermore, that sameday, Dadima related an incident to me in which she left thehouse to settle a dispute about where a project standpostwould be located. The following is an excerpt from myWeldnotes:

Dadima said that Savitri [a female Weldworker] calledher to settle a dispute about where a public tap shouldbe. Everyone wanted the tap to be in front of theirhouse. She said it should be between the four mostdistant houses. Savitri was unhappy with Dadima’sdecision but it stood. Someone said that it appearedthat Savitri wanted to favour some households, butcould not since the decision was out of her hands. Iasked Dadima, “How did others feel about this?” Shesaid “They listen to us”.

She did not want to go out in public, she said, but theycalled for her and she felt a responsibility as a member of apowerful village family to oVer her assistance when called.This example highlights how women exercised power inways that did not necessarily coincide with project plans orplans of staV. Dadima chose not to change her “traditional”dish-washing habits at home, but she arbitrated a local dis-pute with conWdence and power. PSS activities provided avariety of opportunities for women like Dadima to displayher “modernity” in relation to the new water supply.


In the case of the project, a “women-know-best” logic,combined with their traditional roles, supplied the reasonsfor women’s participation. Frequent mention of the needfor women to come out of their houses centred on the PSS’sown need for women to perform public tasks for the beneWtof project sustainability. As Jackson (1993) notes, develop-ment approaches that fail to examine their own mobiliza-tion of women’s socially accepted labour roles perpetuatewomen’s exploitation. I would add that not only maywomen’s exploitation be perpetuated, it may be increasedby these means. Village women noticed this, of course, andnoticed that the project is foreign-funded and therefore,rich. They ask women Weldworkers to pay them for theirwork. Sita, a Daroga13 mother-in-law, justiWed her refusalto serve as a standpost monitor saying that just as Kavita ispaid for her work, “if she wants us to work, we should alsobe paid”. By age and generation, women gave diVerent rea-sons for not attending meetings. One older woman, forexample, explained that she would not go to meetings say-ing, “During my lifetime there will be enough water in thekund (passive rainwater storage and harvester)—this pro-ject is for younger people”. Priya, a young woman marriedinto a project area village, told me in December 2000 thatshe did not go to the PSS meeting the previous day, and shewould not go to meetings in the future. “There’s too muchwork to do myself to do more”, she said, referring to herwork burden as a daughter-in-law. As consumers, somewomen spoke clearly, although perhaps not in ways plan-ners anticipated. A few older village women angrily threat-ened two new, young women Weldworkers that they wouldvandalize the standposts if something were not done aboutthe improving the water supply. In another case, womenfrom the ruling caste group (Jat) of their village complainedloudly about the poor construction quality of the stand-posts in their neighbourhood.

In general, women were in favour of the new water sup-ply, though their reasons varied. Village women seldom, ifever, spoke of an interest in the new system because itpromised hygienic water or modernity. Upper caste and/orwealthy women’s families often had their own water supplyfrom traditional rainwater harvesting sources, but wereinterested in the piped supply because it would be constantand not saline. Low caste and/or poor women commentedthat they wanted the new supply for its convenience, sincethey had no private sources. Rainwater was preferred by allas drinking water, but since water must also be fetched foranimals and washing, a more conveniently located, regularsource was desired. Most often women spoke of women’sparticipation activities in terms of an unwillingness toincrease their work burden, and many were reluctant tobecome involved in women’s groups unless they providedmaterial beneWts (e.g., access to latrine subsidies). Villagersrecognized that staV sought to change women’s behaviourand public mobility. Occasional staV discussions of ceasing

13 Low caste, legally an other backward class.

to veil (ghuunghat karnaa) were met with smiles and laugh-ter from women, while village men charged that PSS staVsought to break tradition (paramparaa; O’Reilly, underreview).

Just as the introduction of a new water supply set inmotion a process of redeWning women and water, so too didPSS eVorts to promote latrines demonstrate a variety ofmutually supportive connections between women andlatrines. As I shall demonstrate below, the project’s sanita-tion component targeted women, but the justiWcations fordoing so changed as villagers applied their own meaningsabout latrines and their uses.

5.2. Latrines as sites of struggle

Women were expected to be the primary users oflatrines for a number of reasons: (1) convenience, i.e., nothaving to wait until dark or early morning to walk to theWelds; (2) decreasing the “risk of being bitten by snakes”;or (3) avoiding being “attacked by bad elements” (PSSHandbook on Women’s Participation n.d., p. 18). The PSSattempted to make latrines available to village families bysubsidizing costs and organizing materials and masons,in the hope that suYcient coverage would lead to reductionin disease in conjunction with the new water supply.Following the construction of latrines, Weldworkers gaveusers’ training (usually in separate groups for men andwomen), which instructed villagers on the proper useand maintenance of the latrines. On numerous occasionswhen travelling with women Weldworkers who would per-form spot-checks of latrines, we would Wnd latrines dusty,covered, or used as storage units. I discovered accidentallyquite a few latrines that nobody seemed to use. One day ata village meeting, I left the room with Kavita (a womanWeldworker) and walked through the village in search of alatrine. I opened the door to the very Wrst latrine we cameto. One look, and Kavita and I both started laughing. Thelatrine was buried deep in sand and someone had droppeda rag into the trap. From the looks of it, no one lived in thehouse at all.

Project reports declare that latrines are in use by chil-dren and women but not by the elderly and men (PSS Quar-terly Report 1998, 1999). Fieldworkers explained to me thatlatrines had become status symbols and simply having onewas important. For example, staV claimed that Jat commu-nities captured latrine subsidies for themselves, perhaps as away to increase their status compared to their upper andlower caste neighbours. Numerous reasons were cited asfactors in lack of latrine use and maintenance including:lack of water in villages that are not yet on line and villag-ers fearing that the waste pits below the latrines would Wllup too fast (PSS Quarterly Report, 1998). Another explana-tion I heard was that latrines, as status symbols, were to beused by guests, and therefore family members did not regu-larly use them. In one village, Savitri (a woman Weldworker)and I inspected the latrine at a household we were visiting.Savitri told me that the latrine was new. I then heard her


tell a woman in the household that the latrine was not onlyfor guests (mehamaan). While WeldstaV maintained that vil-lagers did not understand the health beneWts of using alatrine (signifying their backwardness; see Pigg, 1992), I seelatrines representing a struggle over meanings. Individualsin village households wanted latrines for diVerent reasons,some of which were those PSS staV suggested, some werenot.

The project’s early plans expected that women would belatrines’ primary users and this appears correct. But latrinesalso came to have a number of other meanings that pre-cluded women using them as easily as expected. Project staVencouraged a practice of having women choose the locationof the latrine in the family compound so that it could belocated in a place women could come and go from dis-cretely (Program OYcer interview, July 2000). Too oftenlatrines would be placed in the family’s front courtyard,where guests and men often gather. Such positioningdecreased their use by women of the household. As part ofa women’s empowerment agenda, attempts were made toput latrine packages in women’s names with the idea that awoman’s ability to bring a subsidized latrine into herhousehold would build her social capital. Latrines and theirsigniWcance as modern objects exceeded the relationshipproject staV expected to establish for women and latrineusage.

Williamson (in Burke, 1996) argues that advertisingcontains references to what people already know, there-fore they accept the advertisement’s message. For exam-ple, in the introductory billboard example of this paper,family health as mother’s responsibility, the correctness ofscience, and the impurity of tap water are understood. It isto those who accept these three unspoken elements thatbuying bottled water will appeal. Individual villagersreceived advertisements in the form of Weldworkers’ expla-nations of latrines within their own context and derivedfrom them their own sets of meanings (See Burke, 1996).For some a latrine was a stinking room not to be allowednear the house; to others it was a special facility for guests.Modernity—in the form of a private, household latrine—mixed with local contexts to create new meanings of wholatrines were for and what was their best use. FieldstaVcould not control these meanings although they tried toinXuence them. I also suspect that WeldstaV appealed tovillagers’ desires to have or not have a latrine for anynumber of reasons, including those they personallybelieved were important. For example, Gopal (a maleWeldworker) told me that he thought that women usinglatrines was not such a good idea because it eliminated,for some women, the only chance they had to get exercise.This Weldworker’s concerns do not indicate that he has yetto be “convinced” (Pigg, 1992) but instead, that he has hisown ideas about the meanings of latrines and their rela-tionship to women’s seclusion. In the next section, I ana-lyze the possible implications of negotiated meanings andpractices surrounding connections between women, waterand latrines.

6. Modern women, modern water

I have argued in the sections above that the task ofupdating women was key to an enhancement of water.Women from all castes and classes were recruited to partic-ipate in project activities not just as mothers and householdmanagers, but as a category of consumers of a valuablenew drinking water supply. Institutions (e.g., village watermanagement committees), payment schemes, and hygienetraining (Burke, 1996) involving women all operated tosupport these relationships. Their intent was to instruct aparticular kind of woman on how to utilize, conserve andappreciate improved water most eVectively. For example,project staV promoted the presence (or at least the selec-tion) of women’s representatives to a village level watermanagement committee. This women’s representativemight already be an elected leader in her village or awoman from a low caste group. Either way, she was to rep-resent ‘women’ on the committee. Water becomes modern-ized in part through its association with mixed gendermanagement—women’s public presence being viewed as a“progressive” (and occasionally unwelcome) shift in anarea where women’s seclusion is practiced. Just as categori-cal meanings of women are built upon and changed, water,in parallel, acquires new meanings, and importantly, value,at the intersection of tradition and modernity. The wordsand practices of villagers and PSS staV served to link waterto other modern objects like updated women, new latrines,and a foreign-funded development project. Women’ssocially accepted roles as mothers and housewives wereexpanded as part of a participatory approach to shiftmeanings of water from something free and taken forgranted, to something valuable, worth paying for andworth taking care of. An emphasis on water-based house-hold hygiene emphasized both women’s power and thepower of the new water supply to change women’s lives, asdepicted in the dramatic contrast between women beforeand after the project (Figs. 4 and 5).

Processes of water’s commodiWcation and institutionali-zation were not simply accepted however; Weldworkers andvillagers actively engaged in promotion and resistance tonew relationships between women and water. Women’srefusal to adopt project-sanctioned practices may be seen(by some) as a kind of belligerent ignorance, but may alsobe seen as a demonstration of agency—one that reXects awoman’s age and position in her household. PSS staVlearned that empowered women did not always behave inways that their plans intended, and women leaders camefrom all caste and class groups. As water consumers, villagewomen went beyond the limits imagined for women’s par-ticipation—when poor women asked to be paid for theirwork, or when women from a variety of caste groups jointlyclamoured for health camps and income generation pro-jects. Some women wanted the new supply, others felt itunnecessary, but their reasons varied at the household leveland across villages. Far from any kind of docile acceptanceof project plans, village women found ways of expressing


their visions of development in actions that PSS staV couldnot ignore, and they did it in ways that tore down ‘women’as a general category.

As in the case of the Rajput woman, Dadima, hybridversions of modernity emerged through interactions of pro-ject staV and village women. Village women rejected partic-ular constructions of gender (e.g., women’s work is cleaningpublic standposts) and deWnitions of resources (e.g., water isfor washing dishes) in ways that reXected their perceptionsof themselves, their status, and their communities. For aBrahmin woman, project water might be puriWed at a newtreatment facility, but she was still not interested in riskingcontamination by sharing a standpost with other familiesbesides Brahmins (see Joshi and Fawcett, 2005). Jat womenmight have aided their families by getting a latrine subsidyin their name, but never used the facility. In these ways,women—inXuenced by caste, age, marital status, class—actively engaged in remaking meanings of women andwater, and reworking relationships between gender andnature that disintegrated the sexist binaries upon whichproject discourses and planned activities were based. Vil-lage women engaged in “empowered” behaviours and pub-lic activities that remade them as “modern”, as deWned byproject staV. They also engaged in powerful behaviours thatran contrary to project plans, but were in keeping with theirown ideas.

PSS Weldworkers, for their part, adapted project preceptsto Wt their needs at the moment. Even as project discoursescast village women into “backward” and “traditional” roles,it was clear that village women’s “modernity” alreadyexisted. StaV also found that they could not ignore the ten-sions created between gendered tradition and water’smodernity, so they compromised, thereby attempting torelegate women’s contributions to the household sphere. Asthe women’s participation component of the project devel-oped and WeldstaV began to implement activities in projectarea villages, the discursive category “village women” fellapart as did the binaries and presumed women–water con-nections upon which staV were supposed to build. Assump-tions about women’s powerlessness gave way to recognitionof women’s already existing power within all caste groupsand forced Weldworkers to modify their approaches forinvolving women in the project. Strategies were arrived at tocombat village men’s resistance, e.g., refusing to let a publicmeeting begin until women representatives were present.Other contradictions arose, e.g., women may have gainedsocial capital by being those who could seek out loans forlatrines, but that did not mean that they would be able touse them once they were built. Latrines and struggles overtheir usage subverted straightforward project plans and gen-erated a variety of meanings for both latrines and women.PSS staV attempted to create women as modern consumers,only to discover that they were already. In place of binaries(“progress/modernity/empowerment” versus “backward-ness/tradition/powerlessness”), other, more complicatedgender–nature relationships emerged and come into playduring development interventions.

Participatory approaches can be viewed as a process ofproducing acquiescence to demands of the powerful, or lessharshly, as meanings and practices that intersect as strate-gies of the more and less powerful (Cooke and Kothari,2001; O’Reilly, forthcoming). This view stands in contrastto mainstream meanings of participation that generallyconsider participation in terms of an “opportunity” forlocal populations to have a “say” in their own development(see Paley, 2001). Participation is a widely accepted concept,even by repressive regimes (Rahnema and Bawtree, 1997)which should alert us to its potential tyrannies. Julia Paley(2001) attacks romantic notions of participation by arguingthat the rhetoric of people’s participation can be used tocreate meaning and limit resistance simultaneously. Paley(2001, p. 146) argues that participation paradoxically“oVer[s] a sense of meaning to citizens at the same time as itlimit[s] avenues through which citizens [can] act”. That is tosay, the connections between women, water and hygienemay be implicated in a lack of resistance to water’s com-modiWcation. For example, on a few occasions, suggestionswere promptly quashed that the PSS organize a village levelprotest against the GOR’s provision delays and poor ser-vice. In contrast to discourses of participation as accessingcommunity knowledge and leading to empowerment,women’s participation served as a means to access women’slabour. Only certain forms of empowerment were accept-able, e.g., protesting poor service was not, while keeping thehousehold clean was.

Meanings attached to women’s water work through pro-ject discourses and staV activities were meant ostensibly tolead to women’s empowerment, but these meanings mayhave served to constrain women’s opportunities within theproject. In this light, participation served to depoliticizewater’s commodiWcation, i.e., the impact of women’s partic-ipation on water means it was updated, increased in valueand modernized through women’s labour. The potentialvenues for challenging water’s commodiWcation weredecreased by connecting women and water in speciWc, lim-ited ways. However, we see that staV and villagers’ meaningsof women, water, modernity and latrines mixed togetherwith local contexts to create new meaning and complexityfor these categories and new roles. Relationships and mean-ings were reworked by villagers and WeldstaV alike. Womenwere empowered to request additional activities besidesthose project staV had planned. Villagers both paid forwater and resisted the emplacement of certain meanings.

Presently, villagers are arguably paying for waterbecause the previous GOR supply is so unreliable and theprices being charged are so low. But the contradictionremains: empowerment and modernity are melded in such away in this project that paying for water and acquiescing toproject demands limit a rejection of the commodiWcationprocess. In December 2005, all 378 villages and two townswere reported to be receiving the new water supply and thePSS ceased to exist as a functioning NGO. Future researchwill further investigate the questions: are women and theircommunities being co-opted through project plans into


accepting a resource that they previously had been gettingfor free? Will payment remain near 100%? How will theGOR respond to villagers when problems with water sup-ply and quality arise? If village-level protests about the newwater supply and its commodiWcation develop, who will beinvolved, what shape will they take, and what will be theGOR response?

7. Conclusions

In this paper, I have depicted how gendered develop-ment plans for a new drinking water supply, as exempliWedin the PSS Handbook on Women’s Participation, intendedwomen to be included based on existing gender–naturerelationships. As household caretakers and mothers, “tradi-tional village women” were imagined as the water supply’smain beneWciaries and those most invested in maintainingthe system. However, “modern” women were required forsystem sustainability, thus WeldstaV embarked on a missionto remake village women from traditional housewives intomodern consumers. Parallel to staV plans for remakingwomen ran water—improved and commodiWed. New rolesfor women as public representatives, powerful householdmanagers, and public standpost caretakers supported themaking of modern water. For example, the presence ofwomen on public committees simultaneously establishedwomen as public (in addition to domestic) water managersand identiWed the new water supply as the reason for thosechanges. Women’s backwardness might have highlightedwater’s modernity in some aspects, but those new roles alsoadded value to water. I maintain that as the project evolved,mutually supportive relationships arose that upheld shift-ing meanings of women, modernity and water. The gender–nature binaries established and reproduced by developmentdiscourses did not hold over the course of project imple-mentation. Instead existing relationships and new onesemerged to complicate project plans. I Wnd that genderedparticipatory approaches play important roles in addingvalue to natural resources, while providing opportunitiesfor the reworking of meanings that project plans assume.

Acknowledgements

The research and writing of this paper was generouslyfunded by the University of Kentucky OYce of the VicePresident for Research, the American Institute of IndianStudies, a University of Iowa Fellowship, the Stanley–Uni-versity of Iowa Support Organization, and the Universityof Iowa Center for Global and Regional EnvironmentalResearch. The generous comments of Katie Willis andthree anonymous reviewers were very helpful; I give thanksto them. I am also indebted to the insights of Tad Mutersb-augh, Jane Moeckli, Amy Trauger, Ed Carr and PratyushaBasu at various stages of this paper. Special thanks to Sita‘Kaki’ Chaudhary, Tasneem Khan and their respectivefamilies. I would also like to thank Blackwell Publishing forpermission to reproduce Fig. 1.

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