Gendered Governance of Microfinance: Transformation of rural finance in/by the Indian...

Gendered Governance of Microfinance: Transformation of rural finance in/ by the Indian State

This research approaches the state across (porous) scales such as the global, national, regional and local to study how the state is constructed, articulated and practiced across scales. This follows extensive fieldwork in New Delhi and West Bengal (the Indian State with highest and expanding concentration of microfinance) to interview women borrowers, debt collectors, state officials and financial actors and elicit the connections and contradictions linking the state and finance in engendering credit practices. The driving questions here are: how expanding microfinance changes the practices and character of the postcolonial state and how microfinance engenders women’s identities and economic activities, and how women borrowers enact, challenge and resist financialised credit practices. This will be done by studying how the state (and finance) are discursively constituted and the effects that this has on borrowers and their (gendered) social relations. This will place the state in a dialectical tension between structuralist and post-structuralist modes of power.This brings scholarship in political theory of the state in conversation with rich empirical evidence that traverses distinct scales to grasp the state and highlight how gendered social relations are constructed as the state and markets intersect and co-constitute with the phenomenon of microfinance. This research is intended as an in-depth study of rural contexts of a historically indebted region (West Bengal) in order to provide rich empirical data that can allow for analysing the broader processes at work in financialisation of rural credit.