What transformation might be: storying with an Adivasi single women's collective in India

This thesis reflects upon a 11-year collaborative action-research project inquiring the process of transformation in a rural village in Odisha, India. This project began in 2013 with Adivasi single women farmers exploring their condition of singleness. While generating consciousness at the interface of being single, being woman and being Adivasi, 40 single women in Emaliguda and I forged a single women’s collective, we call the Eka Nari Sanghathan (ENS). We work towards co-creating diverse possibilities of shared survival and well-being by engendering an alternative praxis of transformation, beyond ‘development’. In this thesis I explore the question: What can be learned from Adivasi single women farmers engaging in alternative practices of transformation? I deploy storytelling as a decolonial feminist approach to sharing knowledges and practices, while exploring nuances of collaborative knowledge production that emphasize storytelling as itself transformative (Iseke, 2013; Nagar, 2014; Simpson, 2014; Cajax, 2015). In the rural Indian context socio-economic transformation is framed as ‘inclusive development’ and delivered via micro-finance programs and industrial agriculture interventions, placing women at the centre of development programmes. These practices of inclusive development, termed bikas (an Odiya derivative of the Hindi term vikas, meaning growth), deploy capitalist and Orientalist logics, and aim to launch ‘underdeveloped’ spaces onto the path of growth-based development. Departing from this development imperative, ENS and I have been engaging in reframing and enacting our own practices and strategies of transformation, which we call paribartan. While bikas envisions a step ladder agenda of progression, the praxis of paribartan pursues dynamic and collaborative processes of reflective becoming. These processes help cultivate transformative relationships to the self, to each other, and with the human and more-than-human world around us. ENS and I embarked on our journey of transformative possibilities in 2016 after critically foregrounding our differences with growth focussed development interventions. The third world framing underpinning ‘development’ did not align with postdevelopment imaginations and matters of concern that were of interest to us. We have been curious about questions of interdependent existence and alternative forms of knowing, being, doing and relating that inform our praxis of paribartan. These explorations have led us to decolonial and postcapitalist-feminist ways of “surviving well-together” while enacting collective agriculture processes (in the words of Gibson-Graham, Cameron and Healy, 2013, p.89). In remaining attuned to our departure from bikas and disruptions within ENS, I explore what possibilities and meanings does paribartan hold between women coming together and engaging in collective practices of agriculture, while also encountering experiences of fragmented collectivity and “radical vulnerability” (Nagar, 2019, p. 30). I draw upon what we learnt about the micro-processes and strategies of paribartan through sharing of stories that represent our journey. These stories are insights into our collaborative excitements, experimentation, collective joy and labouring, while also speaking of the challenging, messy and complex realities that is the process of becoming a postcapitalist-feminist subject.