CAPABLE WOMEN INCAPABLE STATES

by Roychowdhury

In recent decades, the issue of gender-based violence has become heavily politicized in India. Yet, Indian law enforcement personnel continue to be biased against women and overburdened. In Capable Women, Incapable States , Poulami Roychowdhury asks how women claim rights within these conditions. Through long term ethnography, she provides an in-depth lens on rights negotiations in the world's largest democracy, detailing their social and political effects. Roychowdhury finds that women interact with the law not by following legal procedure or abiding by the rules, but by deploying collective threats and doing the work of the state themselves. And they behave this way because law enforcement personnel do not protect women from harm but do allow women to take the law into their own hands.These negotiations do not enhance legal enforcement. Instead, they create a space where capable women can extract concessions outside the law, all while shouldering a new burden of labor and risk.
A unique theory of gender inequality and governance, Capable Women, Incapable States forces us to rethink the effects of rights activism across large parts of the world where political mobilization confronts negligent criminal justice systems.

Genres: India

252 pages, Paperback

Published December 3, 2020

Reviews

[shrums · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gayathri Spivak, points out, that in the South Asian context, responsibilities exist as the more notable category in comparison to rights. In this light, Poulami Roychowdhary’s investigation of violence against and rights for women in India, through the concepts of ‘capability’ and ‘incorporation’ becomes telling. Of the many themes that encapsulate this book, Roychowdhary’s curious navigation of the Indian judicial system, one that she recognises as the product of a developing, postcolonial democracy, and its weakness, in determining and enforcing rights especially to those marginalised is recurring. In her book, she unpacks how and which women approach the state, what repercussions they face and the repetitive notion of collective strength.

The state, in its judicial and protective capacity, she claims has been set to protect the state and disallow dissent, owing to the structure of its colonial past. She points out that India has “nineteen judges for every million civilians” and “one police officer for every 720 civilians”. Coupled with capacity constraints and political threats, there exist moral prescriptions, that is deduced from a long shape-shifting ‘culture of control’. It is here that the state provides an entrance point for organised actors like NGO’s, women’s committees and other informal actors, through the process of ‘incorporation’. Echoing Roychowdhury’s understanding, ‘incorporation’ like other neoliberal mandates entails a system of governance in which states exercise control from a distance by which risk is minimized and civilians are encouraged to manage social problems. The Indian law enforcement system does this, by often asking complainants to run ‘parallel claims’.

It is through this process of state ‘incorporation’ that women’s ‘capabilities’ have been realised. The author suggests that capabilities are to be understood as an alternative to rights and not to be confused as a product of rights. Sen provides a fitting explanation by suggesting that, “capabilities are what people come to have when their rights are recognised and assured by democratically accountable states”. Roychowdhury suggests that through incorporating organised women, the indian law enforcement system demanded for them to be capable as opposed to passive and innocent. Women, in order to defend their rights had to perform “emphasises aggression, perseverance and resourcefulness as meaningful forms of femine conduct”. Often, in this portrayal of capability, they were negating the fundamentals of a “good victim” and often depicting its contrary. To benefit from state protection, women needed to be virtuous and meek. To be autonomous and demanding of one’s own rights would not match society’s category for who deemed to be a victim. Apart from the difficulty emulating such behavior in the process of fighting a legal battle with a messy and broken justice system, it is apparent that “poor, undocumented, racial minorities, trans or queer women would not fit under this label. However, the merits of being capable came with many nefarious outcomes. The dangers and uncertainty surrounding their new-found social positioning posed risks of violence. It required them to “shoulder a new burden of responsibility, work and physical hazard on top of all the vulnerability they had already experienced”.

Organised actors through their expertise, networks, reputation and money guided women in reclaiming their own agency and in their battles for reparation by challenging thor pre-conceived and existing moral prescriptions as well as the financial hurdles they face.

In reading this book, I was reminded of Hook’s piece on theory as liberatory practice. Her suggestion that theorising had the potential to be liberatory, revolutionary and to heal was a constant echo. I confronted this book through similar notions of shame, fear and guilt that have been long ingrained through moral prescriptions. Roychowdhury’s stylistic choice to provide gripping and detailed personal accounts makes her book stand out, providing it an extra edge. Her careful consideration of her selected case-studies in her time researching is a thought-provoking detail.