Book review: Devaki Jain,The Journey of a Southern Feminist and Devaki Jain,Close Encounters of Another Kind: Women and Development Economics

Within a context where the reference to the women’s movements is often made while discussing the #Me Too movement, the repeal of rape laws and the introduction of sexual harassment law (POSH) in India, the books by Devaki Jain, remind one of the long-drawn struggles by a forerunner Indian feminist economist who had straddled the academic and activist spaces to shape a post-colonial economic history that takes on the two Goliaths—global capitalism and patriarchy.

Devaki Jain belongs to the league of feminist foremothers who paved the way for Women’s Studies research in India within and outside the portals of universities, chipping steadfastly at patriarchal mindsets within academia, planning and policymaking. Jain refers to herself as belonging to the generation before ‘midnight’s children’ and recalls the debates on women’s position as ‘equal but different’ in post-independent India. Through these two volumes, Jain encourages the reader to comprehend the complexity of interlocution of the domestic and global by interrogation of disciplinary boundaries and their limitations from women’s lived experiences.

The Journey of a Southern Feminist covers Jain’s journey through a life that has been influenced by Gandhian philosophy on the one hand and the body of knowledge that she had built posing interesting questions like ‘why are women’s employment figures so low?—a question pertinent even today—to explore what is the work women do and how to interrogate the world of definitions and measurements; ‘what is wrong with Economics? (p. 197; a question which Durgabai Deshmukh posed to Jain referring to Finance Ministries not allocating budgets to social welfare work) and in more recent times—‘are we in India forfeiting the unique advantage we have to build growth with equity?’ (Close Encounters of Another Kind, p. 297). In both the volumes, several chapters demonstrate the influence of Gandhiji’s values and principles on Jain’s views and analyses where she built an indigenous feminist discourse through homegrown knowledge.

Close Encounters of Another Kind makes extensive inroads into several concepts in development thinking and practice through her reading ‘against the grain’ style. Some of the significant areas are discussed here. To begin with, women’s work and the inadequacies in comprehending the same in a series of surveys, census and National Sample Surveys provoked Devaki Jain to carry out the first every time use survey of women’s work in India in 1982. The study of women’s unpaid work undertaken through Indian Social Studies Trust (ISST) via a meticulous collection of time use data in rural areas became a benchmark in building evidence to advocate a change in definitions of ‘work’ and ‘worker’ in census enumeration. Jain argues that when definitions do not net women’s work, it leads to a ‘baseline invisibility’, which gets accentuated when there is lack of wage work and women get further displaced into intensifying their invisible work for the survival of households. She recommends that ‘time’ has to be a measure to gather employment statistics rather than ‘wages’. The issue of women’s unpaid, unrecognized labour is still an unfinished agenda, which is one of the targets in the Sustainable Development Goal 5 (UN, 2015).

Jain’s writings question terminologies that create a hierarchy of valuation and significance of the contribution of the large majority of the poor and of women. For example, the term ‘minor forest produce’, which is foraging and collecting forest resources, has a lower value compared to ‘major forest produce’ which is timber felling. Similarly, ‘subsistence farming’ versus ‘commercial farming’, ‘informal sector’ versus ‘mainstream/formal sector’ and so on. She suggests replacing the term ‘subsistence’ with ‘self-reliance’; ‘home-based work’ with ‘household enterprise’ and an out-of-the-box suggestion of replacing the term ‘home’ with ‘workplace’ (The Journey of a Southern Feminist, Vol. 1, p. 57). To her, this is an important exercise to give value and legitimacy to post-colonial countries’ modes of production, exchange and social organization and resistance to Eurocentric labelling and theorizing. Perhaps redefining terminologies, values and mindsets about how we think about resources, people and development, is much more imminent now with global climate change warnings. These are issues about which feminists like Devaki Jain and eco-feminists such as Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva warned the world several decades ago.

A critique of development thinking and development practice is a recurrent theme in many of the chapters in both the volumes. In Chapter 1, ‘Letting the Worm Turn’ in Close Encounters of Another Kind—a critique of poverty alleviation programmes—Jain points out the need to help the poor to escape from poverty by building their capabilities and creativity in the place of short-term poverty alleviation projects with monitorable and measurable indicators. Chapter 3 is a commentary on the ‘Gender and Poverty in India’ report of the World Bank, Jain points out the need to foreground the global economic and political contexts that cause poverty; these lie beyond immediate causes like access to education and employment. She proposes the need for ‘a women’s perspective of global development’ and a ‘women’s plan for national development’—clearly a departure from the integration of women in development.

As a member of the South Commission, Devaki Jain had engaged with addressing global financial and political architectures to create an alternative development strategy. Several chapters in both the volumes provide insights into her interactions and meetings with world leaders such as Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. These are backed up with visual images. Jain, however, points out that the Commission could not make any dents in the Eurocentric thinking of the men on the Commission on the key development questions plaguing each of the countries. However, her interactions with women from the Global South etched a new beginning for Southern feminists to go beyond the liberal feminist understanding of equality.

The paradigm that considers resource-intensive, consumption-oriented, market-led capitalist development as ‘development’ has been questioned by Jain along with feminists from the Global South through a platform and a perspective document called Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN). The DAWN document brought into focus the impact of famines, debt crises, militarism and fundamentalism on poor women of the South and offered alternative visions. Macro-economic issues were firmly ensconced in the agenda of the women’s movements of the Global South and continue to influence the development debates.

Using the phrase a ‘fistful of salt’, invoking the symbolic gesture of resistance that Gandhiji used against the British rulers’ salt policies, Devaki Jain, in many of her lectures, urges the women’s movements to roll back the overwhelming force of the current paradigm of development. Drawing further from Gandhiji’s idea of an economic vote along with a political vote, where people vote for the kind of economy they want, Jain talks about the need for an economic democracy that provides an opportunity for transparency and participation leading up to her favourite—‘bubbling up theory of growth’ (Close Encounters of Another Kind, Chapter 14) as opposed to GDP growth-lead economy that breeds further economic inequalities. To the overwhelming response that Thomas Piketty received for his book titled—‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’, Jain fondly acknowledges the contribution but, like a wise old woman, maps five major global pre-Piketty reports that highlight all this in Chapter 14, titled ‘Exploring Economic Inequality: From Piketty through Adiga to Gandhi’ (Close Encounters of Another Kind, pp. 295–317).

Across various chapters, Jain mentions that women are ‘minds’ and not ‘bodies’ alone that require nutrition, health, protection against sexual violence and so on. Across the country, women have been leading various struggles against state policies to protect natural resources and their livelihoods. Jain extols the women’s movement saying that ‘our voice and our movement has to now go beyond gender equality, violence against women and gender budgeting, and begin to engage with global policy ideologies, challenging and reconstructing them with our gendered experience of political economy’ (Close Encounters of Another Kind, pp. 126–127).

The two books covering 14 and 15 chapters each have papers that Devaki Jain has written over five decades. Some papers are reprints from books and journals but most are speeches and talks given by her to distinguished national and international audiences. It is worth noting that every lecture that she had given is diligently written, footnoted, referenced and archived. Some of the chapters also recall conversations of and with key members in meetings and the insights those provide. Apart from the content of the books, it is important to acknowledge the extent of everyday discipline that must have gone behind all the note-taking and writing up of lecture notes in place of cut and dry PowerPoint presentations. Both the volumes have elaborate endnotes and references to books, reports, journal articles and unpublished works. The writing style is lucid, witty and has a blend of an Oxford training in statistics and the rooted, earthy fragrance of Devaki Jain’s phrases and expressions. The publishers have done justice to have her profile picture, 50 years apart, as the cover pages of the books, a recognition of the author as an academic and activist personified.

These two books are remarkable contributions by a veteran feminist economist with an experience that spans the early period of India’s independence, forays into socialism and globalization and marks the unfolding of the women’s movement through these periods. These books are a must-read for all women’s studies, development studies, international development studies students, scholars and gender practitioners to understand the nuances of contemporary feminist theory and praxis.