This research has two defining research questions:

• How has financialisation of rural credit through microfinance within the Indian state changed the contemporary postcolonial Indian state?
• How does microfinance engender women’s identities and economic activities and how do women enact, challenge and resist financialised credit practices at the intersection of state and private entities?

In asking these questions together, this research will study:

1. how states and markets are (historically) co-constitutive;
2. how gender is produced at the intersection of state, markets in the case of a ‘civil society’ phenomenon of microfinance.

This research places the state not as a pre-given, unified entity but rather, undergoing changes in its articulations and practices across scales as a developmental state and ‘using’ microfinancial entities to expand into marginalised regions in novel ways. It further posits that expanding markets give shape to the state. The state doesn’t simply ‘retract’ in the face of growing scope of markets, but in fact uses these growing markets to charter new roles for itself. Microfinance provides a relevant intersection for the state, (global) markets and civil society which is becoming the largest source for credit in countries in the Global South such as India.

In studying finance and financialisation, the research will build upon historical materialism in locating capitalist relations of production and finance however in non-deterministic ways that conceive of the state as a Gramscian web of social relations encompassing diverse political claims and relations. In this, finance and economic production are not ensconced in classical Marxist ‘superstructures’ but rather in a version of the state (and finance) conceived around: ‘everyday’ practices and discursive evocation of ‘state’, highlighting the interconnections between practices and ideas. This research is focused on debt and the experiences of debt, and how debt constitutes subjects and their gendered social relations. This will aim to bring to light the power relations within which financialised debt forms are embedded and which they recreate.

In doing so, this research will bring political theory of the state (in relation to markets) in conversation with feminist international political economy (IPE) scholarship to arrive at empirically-based insights on (postcolonial) states. This will bring to bear gender and gendered relations to political theory on states and markets. This will be done through detailed field research conducted in West Bengal.

Publications

Kaushal, Tanushree. 2022. The Aestheticisation of Governance in India: The Appeal of Urban Aesthetics in Microfinance. International Development Policy | Revue internationale de politique de développement. 14(1).

Events

Decoloniality and the Politics of the Urban, 27 October 2022.

What is the politics of the divide between the urban and the non-urban (semi-urban, peri-urban and the rural), in contemporary postcolonial and metropolitan contexts, as well as historical colonial contexts? The divide is fundamental to the emergence of modern states as political-economic entities - European, colonial, and developmental. It expresses a politics of concentration/scale, productivity, specialisation, and movement to be governed. Crucially, colonial histories and categories of urban and rural and their relationship to productive and unproductive labour give shape to internal hierarchies of citizenship within states. The politics of these categories manifest themselves in historic rubrics of retribalisation, and contemporary politics of internal labour migration and populist resentment. The divide is of interest as at once a material site, political framework, and historical stage for the making of colonial and postcolonial states – and potentially for the continuation of an “unfinished project of decolonisation”.