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Nayma Qayum, "Village Ties: Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
01:02:46
An interview with Nayma Qayum
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Shraddha Chatterjee
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Nema Kayum
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
Hi. You're listening to a New Books Network podcast. My name is Shraddha Chatterjee and I'm currently a doctoral candidate and Vanier Scholar at York University in Toronto. Today I have the pleasure of talking to Nema Kayum about her new book, village women NGOs and informal institutions in rural Bangladesh. Dr. Khayyim is an associate professor of Asian Studies and Global and International Studies at Manhattanville College in New York. Thank you so much for coming on the show and speaking to us today.
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Nema Kayum
Dr. Kayam, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
Thank you. And I'd like to begin by asking you my first question, which is could you tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey, especially as it leads up to the framing of this book? Book essentially, what made you realize this book needs to be written and how does that journey frame the book itself?
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Nema Kayum
Yeah. Thank you so much for this question. So the book essentially grew out of the field work I did for my dissertation, but it ended up being an entirely different project from the dissertation itself. I grew up in Bangladesh and I lived there until I was 14. So I've spent many summers there since. And really that is home for me. And I have very strong connections to the place, the language, the people. But I always felt like I didn't really know my country. So in many ways, the book was for me a sort of coming home in that way. And in terms of the topic, I think I was always sort of obsessed with this idea of informality, you know, this idea of this hush hush, backdoor politics, these backdoor rules that govern our way of life and so much of the global South. And in particular, when rules don't work for those of us, for people who are, you know, disenfranchised, how do we make the rules work for us, right? It's kind of like this. Somebody I knew carried around, always carried on 10 taca in their pocket. And I was like, what for? So I can get a meeting with somebody, you know, or the hoops that my mom had to go through to pay her electricity bill because somebody cut off the electric line while digging the roads, right? So I'm like, I've always sort of thought about, okay, like, there is ways to get things done and what does that really mean for our politics and political life? So even things like treating someone to tea and sweets as a return, you know, as thank you for a favor. But there is like a thing, right? Like you buy someone tea for this kind of favor and you buy them sweets for that kind of favor. All of these for me were really informal rules and informal ways of doing things that were both sort of unseen. But also, we are at least standardized in a way because we all know what those rules are. But if somebody comes from the outside and sees them, they won't be able to tell what they are. So. So in terms of how I end up with BRAC and this project, I was always familiar with brac. I was a BRAC intern right out of college, and I sort of knew I wanted to study this organization. I just really love the idea of these women sort of claiming their agency in this way. And when I started studying police amaze this organization, I was at first looking at women's participation as a political science student. Those were the things that we were taught to look for. And I wrote my dissertation of participation. And then I realized, wait a minute, there's another story here, right? Because I was looking at what was happening underneath that participation, all the motivations. And I was like, okay, there is this whole informality thing going on here too. So I think for me, I realized that these informal rules are sometimes obviously very disadvantageous, especially for the oppressed, especially for women, because, you know, you have questions of class and patriarchy and what women can do and can't do, but sometimes they're good. And one of the major themes for me in the book was really the ways in which the formal and informal intersected. Right. To create this really complex tapestry of actions and the norms that shape them and these outcomes, some of which are good and some of which are bad.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
Thank you for sharing that. And I have many questions, of course. It's almost like you're describing this kind of informal sociality that's also very instrumental. And you're right in pointing out that in many ways, so many of us know what these rules are, even though they're not explicitly told to us or taught to us in some ways. But before we get into that, I just want to quickly ask you, could you describe what BRAC is for our listeners?
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Nema Kayum
Yeah. BRAC is at this time, I believe, the world's largest nongovernmental organization. BRAC was created in 1972, right after the war, the liberation war in Bangladesh, and in the context of a cyclone and the war, and sort of as a. In terms of an organization that was immediately provide those providing recovery efforts. But eventually, I mean, it was always woman centered. It was always centered on social development. And eventually it grew beyond that into this sort of incredible organization that operates in so many different countries. And I think that. So Braxton, you know, it's got microfinance projects and agriculture projects and provides legal aid to women. So it's got all of these different things that it does. But I was sort of always. I just really love the idea of women's social development, and I just really loved their mission of centering those ideas.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
Thank you for sharing that. And that allows us to jump right into my next question, which is, what would you say are the central arguments of your book and how is your book organized in terms of the chapters?
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Nema Kayum
Thank you. So in the book, I argue that women's development programs that center on the collective can empower rural women from the global south to bring about institutional change if they embrace certain characteristics. So. So if they're anti oppression, if they're deliberative, and if they're embedded in their communities. And it rests on the premise that poor women's lives are embedded in their social relationships. So whenever we're studying women's agency or women's participation or women's empowerment. We cannot assume that women can do whatever they please, right? Or that we will teach them something and they'll be like, all right, we're gonna go do this. It doesn't work like that. Because their lives are not just governed by the rules that we see the. On paper, but also on these, you know, they're governed by these social norms, the rules on the ground, or as Elinor Ostrom calls the rules and use. That's the term I use in my book, sort of the do's and the don'ts, right? Given. Given that women have certain social roles and based on the social roles, what is deemed as appropriate behavior. So it's, you know, just all of these amazing things are being done by women's organizations where laws are being changed, and then we're still like, wait, why is. Why does dowry still exist? Or why do child marriages still exist? Right? So I think the next step is then to look at how these norms dictate human behavior. So in terms of framing of the book, I push back a little bit against the concept of neoliberal development. The development industry, especially as it unfolded, as it developed, as it sort of was established in Bangladesh, was very much centered, is very much centered on this idea of individualized service delivery programs, right? You give. You hand out welfare, you hand out all these different, you know, even training or teach women to do certain things. And. And men too. But since I kind of want to focus on the women because, you know, this is a book about women. And so the industry embraces the neoliberal mindset, which is so centered on the individual, right? On individual enterprise and individual empowerment. And it sort of assumes that people are rational and free to make informed, independent decisions. However, you know, poor women in rural Bangladesh cannot make those decisions freely, right? So service delivery programs, while they're amazing and do wonderful things, they don't really. They don't, you know, they don't really empower women to challenge their power structures around them, right? And sometimes, you know, and sometimes actually as critiques of microfinance, it actually harm women and what they expect women to do. So as opposed to these programs organized, the PolishAMAJ and other organizations like it, so the women of politics, they negotiate with state, state and society actors to try to change the rules of the game and try to change the do's and don'ts on the ground and alter these sort of. And challenge these informal norms and practices that dictate how poor People live their lives, or at least try to tell people how they should live their lives. So in terms of structure, it's so interesting you asked that question because this is such a big challenge. And I was so excited about the way I was going to structure the book. It's actually divided methodologically more than it is thematically. I have three parts. The first part is the history and the context and the setup. The second part is the quantitative part. And there's logic to this, which I'll get to in a minute, which has got the quasi experimental models. And I talk about two different issues there. Just to sit back a little bit. The book addresses three different issues. One is welfare, the distribution of welfare. The second issue it addresses is a legal system. And the third is women in governance. But instead of organizing it that way, I did the quant stuff first. So I basically looked at whether the areas where police knowledge exists and the areas where they don't exist. Are they different and what are these differences and how. Because when I'm trying to measure institutional. When I'm trying to measure informal institutions or norms, the first way to know that something is different or something exists is by looking at differences, because they're not on paper. So the only way I'll know is if people are doing something different. So that's what I did in the second part of the book. And the third part was looking at how the women are negotiating with state and society and how they're changing these norms. And really, the sort of central argument there is that they do it by changing expectations. They do it by reshaping. Right. Like. Or sort of renegotiating what the standard of behavior is, what is appropriate. So I do want to talk a little bit about the history section, since we're there, because that was actually one of my favorite parts to write in the history section of the book. The first part of the book, the history chapter, I try to tell a sort of a gendered history of Bangladesh, which was really, really exciting for me, and really focus on what Bangladesh's historical trajectory meant for women. And so Bangladesh, when Bangladesh became independent in 1971, it has survived a brutal war of succession, a devastating cyclone, and years and years of resource drain under united Pakistan. So. And now it's a poster child for human development, right? So the story is what happened there when it came to women's lives. And I sort of found that there were four things that were happening separately that also kind of came together. And the first is as Bangladesh came out of this crisis or was trying to come out of this crisis. Scholars like Naomi Hussein have written that Bangladesh governments have embraced an aid based development strategy which allowed NGOs to enter the villages because they were in need of the support. And Naomi Hussain writes about this really wonderful in her book where there was this pact that was made between various actors that we sort of cannot be in this place ever again. So now you have all of these foreign organizations and local organizations working with the rural poor, but there's also a long history of women's movements, right, that sort of goes much further back from pure of independence. And Elorisha Botinache has a brilliant book that just came out looking at this history. But what happened since then is that a lot of women's organizations have what we call NGOized over time, meaning they're starting to take development funds, they're starting to take donor funds. And while they're trying really hard to stick their mission, and many do, there is a bit of a compromise to be made there, Right? Then you have this long standing religious influence in the villages where you have Islamic organizations that are, some of which are also foreign funded and donor funded. And so the question is that what happens as all of these different forces are trying to tell women what to do? Because NGOs are telling them, step outside the house, go to school, become independent, right? And then the religious organization are like, no, no, no, you know, but women have to stay in the house or women have to do certain things. So it is within this context that the story of Wali Shamaj unfolds.
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Nema Kayum
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Shraddha Chatterjee
Thank you. I think that was such a great explanation for what happens in the book, and it also allows me to reflect on the book again in a more, I think, intricate kind of way. Before I jump into my next question, which is about your methodology, and I think that's one of the more exciting things about the book too. Before I jump into that, I just want to quickly ask you, what exactly is the relationship between BRAC and Polish ummaj? And then also, what made you choose the Polish so much, particularly as your almost unit of study?
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Nema Kayum
Yeah. So Polish RAMASC is one of BRAC's social development programs. And just to kind of elaborate on the relationship, I work with BRAC's at the time Research and Evaluation Division, which was sort of always been BRAC's independent research wing. It doesn't exist anymore. It's been merged with various institutions in the university, et cetera. But Polish so much was run by brac's at the time social development program. It's called something else now. And in many ways it was almost as when official told me, BRAC neglected program because the donor money goes into things like microcredit. It goes into things like to some degree, like agriculture. Right. All of these cool sort of. This was kind of like nobody seemed to really care about it. Right. But I mean, except for the people who are running it, who are obviously incredibly dedicated. But I almost feel like when I went to the field, it was almost like that gave them the independence to do what they wanted because the donors weren't really invested in making this go in a certain direction. Right. And because of the funding and also nature of the program, there was very minimal oversight because Brad did have staff members they call program officers or POs on the ground. But this POs would just arrange the meetings. But mostly the women will be on their own.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
And I think that's so exciting. And you know, in a way, you're right. And I think, like, what is very exciting about that is precisely that the Polish homage was almost independent because it was neglected and that allowed it to become something may be different from the imagination of BRAC itself. Right. And we'll come to that. But very quickly, let me just ask about your methodology. And also I'm very interested in finding out how it shaped the findings in your book. And you know, you write that you did 10 months of fieldwork during which time you were the lead researcher on a different project with brac, if I'm not wrong. And you and the research team conducted over 6,000 interviews. So how did that, like, sheer scale shape the arguments in your book? And, you know, I. I guess if I ask the question a different way, what did the meta perspective that you engaged with as a BRAC researcher allow you to do with this book? Particularly with the Polish homage and the women of Polish homage? And, you know, again, why did you choose to house your research with brac?
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Nema Kayum
Yeah. Thank you. That is such a good question. So initially, when I went to Bangladesh, I actually started my work in an urban hub of Dhaka city. And then I realized, no, no, no. The real. Like, there is a lot. Like, there's a really solid story to be told in the villages. And who do I go to for that? I go to Bragg because I've worked with them before. I know what they did. I know what they do. And their focus has always been on social development and always been on women, right? So it felt like the right place to go. And I was really. Because I was looking through these programs, and I realized that actually had very little influence. It had very little connection with this neoliberal development. I mean, there are intersections with other programs, but, you know, there's no loans involved. There's no money involved. The women don't get anything for. For being part of it. Right? So I was just really intrigued by.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
This.
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Nema Kayum
Essentially collective, you know, collective mobilization effort, right? Like, how do you. How is this even happening? How are you getting these women to come together? And the groups are really big. I mean, the average group is 60. So how do you get 60 women to sit in? You know, it was just absolutely fascinating for me. So I went to them and, you know, they were looking for somebody to lead the program. Our stars were aligned. You know, I applied, and it kind of worked out. So it was really overwhelming. I will tell you. I was a young doctoral candidate. I was like, what am I doing? I have no idea. Right? But I did bring a certain theoretical perspective to the project. And what I picked up and what I learned from my colleagues at BRAC was the field methods. I mean, they are phenomenal ethnographers. They are phenomenal methodologist. And I just learned there was something so exciting about just being deeply immersed in this, in this story and just being in the field for that long. I mean, I was with BRAC for a total of two years, and I did three projects, big projects. With them. This was the first. I think that I traveled a lot, and I traveled from site to site instead of being at one site for a long time. And in terms of meta perspective, it was pretty amazing to see how universal informal institutions are. And just like watching this everywhere, in places that are so different, you know. So, for example, in North Bangladesh, which is sort of more liberal, you see young boys and girls, like, you know, outside school talking together. And then you go to south Bangladesh, where we're just so much more socially conservative, and you see the commonalities, the differences too. But. But. But it was really kind of incredible to see all the commonalities unfold in this way. But one other thing I want to talk about is the sort of the different areas I was looking at also, because if you think about welfare and legal issues and women's governance, it's three very different topics. So sometimes I felt like I was writing three different books, and I'm like, how am I going to do this? But then when the stories came together, I think, as you said, the meta review, it really sort of the pieces fell together in that way. And I think that with BRAC also, BRAC has this incredible infrastructural presence. Their programs exist in so many different places, which was really important for getting these diverse perspectives.
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Shraddha Chatterjee
I think that makes a lot of sense. And I do think that your book took a certain kind of path and became what it was because you were involved with brac, and that allowed you a different kind of access, I think, into the whole. Into your field at large. But also it offered you a different kind of perspective too, I think. And that was very interesting for me as I kind of read through the book. And you've brought this up already a little bit, and you've talked about how there is a bit of a critique of neoliberal development in your book. And I think what you do very, very well is hold on to this kind of ambivalence that's associated with developmentalism and anguization. And in that way, I think, at least for me as a reader, that ambivalence is more important than taking a position that a lot of texts on development do. So either they're a critique or they're in support of a kind of development and NGOization model. But because you hold on to the ambivalence, it allows you to shape the book in a certain kind of way. And you write about how, on the one hand, these organizations offer women the possibility of accessing resources and state processes that would otherwise not be available to them. But then on the other hand, you also talk about how these organizations work in conjunction with the state and arguably then strengthen the state machinery and mechanisms. So how do you see this play out in the context of your research? And I think in some ways, I'm also curious, how do you think that shaped the lives of the women of the Polish? Homage?
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Nema Kayum
Yeah, thank you. This is such a fascinating question, and thank you for asking it. As you mentioned, this debate appears very prominently in the literature. And actually in Bangladesh, it's a very. It's not just a debate, it's a disciplinary divide, it's a political divide. You know, and so on the one hand, you have the sort of very economic centered body of research that does. That does randomized control trials. And, you know, and it's very focused on women's economic lives and really sort of glorifies what NGOs have done for women. I mean, you know, of course, credit to be is to be attributed that they've done amazing things for women. But on the other hand, there is this massive critique that comes from anthropologists and especially feminist anthropologists who argue that these programs have their limitations. And some, such as Lamia Karim, scholars such as Lamia Karim, argue that they actually harm women too. So I found this debate to be both extremely important but also debilitating because it puts us in this deadlock and we can't seem to get out of it. So, you know, then I read Elora Chaudhary's book, and there she talks about exactly this and she says, hey, what if we push this to the side and see what actually happens? And I was like, wait, I want to do that also. You know, and let's just center the women and not center ourselves. And our sort of paradigm divides and like. And see what happens when you actually see what these women do. Interestingly, in Bangladesh. I'm going to take a second, please, if that's okay. Interestingly, in Bangladesh NGOs, the relationship between NGOs and the state is a very interesting one because they seem to operate, they operate in a kind of partnership because the NGOs are partners of the government. And in fact, they exist everywhere, even in places where government officials don't go. But scholars have said that NGOs such as Bragg are actually a sort of shadow state. Right. Because they do things that the state is not there to do. Right. In many ways, you know, when we think about, for example, legal institutions in Latin America, et cetera. Right. The way in which shadow institutions exist there, it's a sort of similar argument. And I saw this in some remote areas, like shallah, where Ashley Brac began its operations in 1972. And I have a really interesting story there. I tried to take a car there, and we got stuck. And we were stuck on the road because cars don't usually go there. And I'm like, what am I doing? This girl from America, not knowing how to travel. And it was a place where you have the paddy fields on either side, and in the summer you take boats to get there, and in the winter you get on a tractor to get there. But while I'm stuck there, I'm having these conversations while I'm trying to figure out how to get out. And some of the, you know, the officials were telling me that, and it was these women who were the program officers, and they were saying that they ride their bicycles to these villages, but they were like, you know, we go to these villages where a government official hasn't been in years. It's kind of amazing, you know, to see these young women sort of just getting on these bikes and doing it. But that is a sort of. That shows you what kind of infrastructural presence organizations like BRAC have or. And particularly BRAC has. So I think, you know, to sort of pull this together, bring this together. My work gave me a chance to step away from these debates and to really look at how collective mobilization can work. Right. And I mean, and how polishama is actually sort of. And Polishama particularly, actually allows us to do that because it's not a microfinance program. So I can sort of be like, let's put those debates to the side, because it doesn't have those sort of financial power relations in it. So I think the particular nature of the program also gave me a bit of freedom to do this.
- [30:06]
Shraddha Chatterjee
I think that's a great way to kind of explain what's going on. And. And again, I think for me as a reader, this is what was very exciting about the book. That you were able to somehow put that debate about neoliberal development aside, almost to really focus on what it, you know, what the women's lives look like. And, you know, to do that through this while maintaining a kind of meta narrative based on just the scale of your research was, like, very interesting for me to see. And that's why I feel like your book does something very different from, you know, the usual kind of ethnographic work on NGOs and. And, you know, does something different and. And offer something very unique there. And And I think, like, I, I left, you know, I left the book kind of still very, very curious about the women of the Polish omaj, you know, like, I wanted to know more about their lives, how, like, what they were doing and how they were navigating that every day. So my next question comes from there, which is, could you talk a little bit about how the women of the Polish navigate power? So how does their collective participation in the Shomaj translate into other aspects of their life? And then how do they negotiate power even amongst each other, or address disagreements that may happen during their organization or collectivization? And I guess I'm just curious to kind of find out how the empowerment that polishomaj offers them then translates into power dynamics between them.
- [31:44]
Nema Kayum
Yeah, thank you. First of all, thank you so much for your kind words. I sort of. There's so much actually that, you know, now that you ask, you know, ask me this question, I'm realizing so much didn't actually make its way to the book, right? I'm like, should I start with the book? Should I start with what I'm going to start with, what's in the book? So I think one of the central. When I think of a woman in power, my first instinct is to separate into, you know, rural elite versus the rural poor and then look at the women themselves. And I don't think that works because there's so many intersections, right. Of class, of patriarchy, of partisanship, right? Because even within the organization you have the wealthier women. And interestingly, the women of police homage actually tend to elect the wealthier, more established women as their leaders because they find these women to be eloquent and good at bargaining. And then we get into a whole different conversation of, but how do they not exert that power within the organization, right? How is there a sort of democratic process there? And I'll get to that. The women generally, I think one of the central elements things in my book is how the women negotiate and how they negotiate to change those expectations. So, for example, when they are bargaining with local officials to change how welfare goods are distributed in rural society, the bargaining starts from inside the organization. So when they discover that, hey, the government is sending some ration cards to the village, they get the news and they're like, what do we do? So in their next meeting, they will discuss in the larger group of 40, 50, 60 women who are the most deserving recipients in the village. So as they do that, they're sort of changing expectations, displacing old expectations about should get resources because in the past, traditionally resources like this would be distributed among sort of through clientelest relations, right? The clients of the wealthy or the people who have loud voices and will go and bark in. But now they're saying, no, no, we're going to decide who actually gets them as the people who deserve them most. So they have these, these very public meetings where they negotiate who's going to get the resources. And there they change the expectation from one of where the wealthy and powerful will get the resources to one where the most deserving will get the resources, right? And I think there is something very powerful about doing this publicly. It creates accountability, it creates transparency because. And most of the groups meet in open spaces because they're so big. So sometimes people will be standing around watching, right? And once that, when they have made that decision together, that decision is there to stay, that these are our 10 people, they're the ones we're going to bargain for. And then they go and bargain with the local officials to get those resources. And sometimes it's sort of, you know, they, they exert like, they try to hold the officials accountable. They're like, we voted for you. You need to give us these. Right? And something sort of different, but also similar works in case of legal issues like dowry and child marriage, where now they're bargaining with the families in question because when they find out that there is a wedding taking place, a wedding scheduled, and the girl is underage, they will go and try to bargain with the family, right? And the power relations there is a little bit different because sometimes the mother of the girl will want to say something but won't be able to because the male family members and older family members would be like, no, no, this is what girls have to do. So the expectation there is obviously the girl's sort of social role or her social destiny, right? Her ultimate goal is of marriage. She is going to be a wife and she's going to be a mother. But how do you sort of displace that and challenge that? Right? So the women start like negotiating by saying things like, you know, talking about the, the dangerous of early marriage, the dangers of dowry, right? The fact, you know, the, the fact that dowry is linked to intimate partner violence, all of those things. And I think the expectation changes from one of. So here I think I'm also thinking of the role of the parents, right? Because with parents, for them, their ultimate duty is to get their daughter married, right? That is because the girl's role is to be the wife, but theirs is to be the good parent. So then their expectation, the expectation of their role changes from one where a good parent is one that marries the daughter off to one where a good parent is one who cares about the safety of their daughters. Right. So in many ways, I think they're using the information they have at hand. They're kind of challenging one set of appropriate behaviors with another set of appropriate behaviors. And something very similar also happens in local governance. So for example, when you have local elections and the women are trying to get one of their own to compete against the wealthy rural elite to win local elections, they're displacing the expectation of who gets to govern. Right. Is it just the wealthy? Because even when women win local elections is often women from wealthy privileged families. So they're saying no. Right. Poor people can also win elections. 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Shraddha Chatterjee
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Nema Kayum
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- [38:53]
Shraddha Chatterjee
I think that was great and it really like allowed me to almost get a glimpse of what I wanted more of after I finished your book. You know, again, like I said that I was always curious about the women of the world. So much. So this Allows me to kind of visualize their lives a little more, I guess. And my next question is also focused on that, which is you said, and you say this in the book as well, that the most deserving women will be then advocated for. But I'm curious as to how that deservingness is decided.
- [39:32]
Nema Kayum
Yeah.
- [39:33]
Shraddha Chatterjee
Collectively. So could you talk a little bit about that?
- [39:35]
Nema Kayum
Absolutely. I have been to so many Polish meetings and I love watching it every single time. So actually, when they're looking at deserving recipients, they're not just looking at women, they're looking at women, men, everybody.
- [39:48]
Shraddha Chatterjee
So.
- [39:51]
Nema Kayum
For them, I think one of the things I've heard repeatedly is that everybody in this village is poor, Right. When you look at who gets cards, it will always be somebody who's poor, but is it somebody who deserves it the most? So really, their focus almost always is on the most helpless, the most disenfranchised. So people who are chronically ill and can't work. Right. People who are. Who are just unable to work, who.
- [40:15]
Shraddha Chatterjee
Are really old.
- [40:18]
Nema Kayum
Sort of women, single women. A single mother led households. Right. A woman who's been abandoned with like four or five children, so she has to choose between work and taking care of. So I think one of the things I heard repeatedly is people who cannot work, for whatever reason, they start there. Shweta, I want to actually go back to, I think, something you raised, which I don't think I got to, which was how do they handle disagreements amongst themselves? And I kind of want to go back to that, because the question of power comes up there too. Right. There's two things I want to mention. The first thing is that when people pick recipients, others get mad, because a lot of organizations do deliver services. So there are women who join Puli Shamas thinking, oh, we're going to get something, because NGOs give things. So when the most disenfranchised people are chosen, they're like, wait a minute, we've been with this organization for so many years and we didn't get something. So they'll go and threaten the leaders and say things like, oh, you took bribes from those people. You are corrupt. Right. And then they end up leaving because they don't get anything. So that sorts itself out. But there's also another dimension of power, which is that if those elected are the most powerful in their villages, how are they in the organization not bullying the other women? Right. And I think that there is something about the sheer number of women, because even the smallest group is like maybe 30. I've seen groups of like 150. Right. Even if not all of them show up at the meeting. Those are. So it's hard to sort of exert your authority in that way over a group that big because the collective voices will always drown you out. And also the leaders can be reelected every three years, so women can just vote you out if, you know, if they don't like you.
- [42:07]
Shraddha Chatterjee
I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think this is exactly why I was curious about how these dynamics play out between them. Because I don't think any organization, whether it's the police or really even a smaller organization, can function without these disagreements, which are kind of part of the process. And I'm always curious to kind of find out how those disagreements are handled, because that, I think, says a lot about how the organization is structured, how it's framed and what it intends to do. And I also. This leads me to a related question, which is we talk a little bit about how disagreements kind of frame the actions and the workings of the police so much, but how do friendships frame. And like, you know, how do friendships frame the work of the police so much, but also how do the friendships kind of form through the somaj, like, what's really happening there?
- [43:02]
Nema Kayum
Yeah. And I don't know if I have any solid data that makes it say or interviews that make its way into the book, but I can tell you what I saw in the field, right. Which is that there is a camaraderie there in terms of, for example, who takes. So, for example, when they decide that this person's running for local election sometimes or is going to take a leadership role, sometimes the husbands or the in laws would be like, who's going to do her household work then? And the women will band together and be like, we will go cook in our house today. Right. So they will take care of each other and manage those other responsibilities so their friends and comrades can sort of take on their leadership role. I saw a lot of that shared sort of caregiving for children. Right. Sharing household responsibilities. And also, for example, when you're bargaining for resources with the local government, these women have to make several trips to the local government office and literally just sit there. Because when they're there, the officials will be like, we won't see you today. We won't see you today. And they'll wait there until they're like, no, you have to see us. And then their family members will get upset because they'll be like, you're shirking your household responsibilities. So pooling Money for that travel, covering for each other at home when they're doing those things. You know, that was. I definitely saw a lot of that.
- [44:34]
Shraddha Chatterjee
And I think that's really great because it also allows us to really kind of see that the, you know, even the kind of closed circuit of the family begins to open up a little bit because, you know, women are now banding together. And I'm not talking here about, like, a very big change in the sense that, you know, women are still responsible, it looks like from your anecdote, still responsible for doing the household chores and, you know, kind of maintaining the household in that way. But I think through this, like, node of friendship and, you know, collectivization, it also opens up the structure of the family a little bit. It allows other women into the home and then allows everybody to kind of do a kind of collective. Collective work that is still nonetheless gendered, but not isolating in a way that domestic life can be isolating for women. And I guess I'd also be, like, curious to kind of find out what that leads to. Does that allow women to have more of a say? Does it reduce, say, the whole domestic violence might have on women's lives, or does it reduce the incidence of dowry, for example? And I think those are some questions I would have.
- [45:53]
Nema Kayum
Yeah, those are wonderful questions, Shanta. And I think two things come to mind. One is that these meetings are also often held in open courtyards in front of the president's house or in front of somebody else's house or on their veranda. And that also opens up spaces. Right? So women are opening up spaces, claiming spaces as their own. And people are watching them sometimes suspiciously like, what are these women up to? But sometimes in awe. Right. Sometimes their husbands will come and be like, I want to see what bad behavior she's up to. And then they'll be like, oh, this is actually kind of nice, you know, so there is that claiming of space in that way as well. I had another thought that I lost. Oh, so your question about dowry and all of that. So interestingly, or a lot of the dowry and child marriage incidents that the women contested were within their own members because. And. And, you know, it's. They try. So when they hear of something in the village, they will go and. And. And push back. But when. When someone seeks help, it is usually somebody from their group, because those women know that that help is there. So there's a lot of. Sort of. A lot of the success cases were also when it comes to women in the group who, you know, somebody who was getting their sister married or their daughter married, and the women intervened. Domestic violence is a bit of a harder one. And I think that it is the one where is the one thing where I found there actually wasn't that much of a difference between Polish and non policemaj areas, which really shows. I was really disappointed because I thought that would be the case. But when that really shows a gravity of the problem. Right. Because even anecdotally, I heard from a lot of women that they know that some of the members are in really violent situations in their homes, but they won't say anything or they won't do anything about it because it is just normatively so accepted.
- [47:54]
Shraddha Chatterjee
Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think you're right. That does raise questions about the gravity and also, I suppose, the ubiquity of domestic violence. And I think I want to switch gears a little bit because you said something that made me very curious at the beginning of the interview. And it's also there in some part in the book that you said that working in. In Bangladesh was almost like coming home or returning home in some way. And I'm always curious about what that dynamic or what that kind of affective attachment of going home does to your. Your sense of fieldwork. So, like, how did it kind of structure the work? What did it really allow you to do or not do?
- [48:52]
Nema Kayum
Yeah, no, thank you for that. That is really. I think there's a bit of a personal element to it and there's an intellectual element to it too. And I'll get to both, I think, from. In a personal. From a personal sort of perspective. I think I got to travel a lot and do things, see my country in a whole new way. And it. It's not. I don't think I took on this project thinking that, oh, I'm going to travel a lot. Right. It kind of just happened. And I got to see the country in a way that, you know, my. Even my family members who lived there for so many years and get to see, to go to these places and to understand the sheer diversity. Right. In terms of language and dialects and geography. Right. And culture. So to see all of that, I mean, you know, my first field visit was in a place called Tamorhad, which, where I was just going to go sort of scope out Polish Ramadan. I was tagging along with friends who were doing a different study, but colleagues who were doing a different study, but the idea was to just understand Polish, stay with them for a few days and come back and sort of design the Questionnaire. And this was a place I was bordering India and I was just like, oh my God, the girls are just, you know, it's so different from what I expected rural Bangladesh to be, right? There is so much freedom, like young people, there's just so, you know, are hanging out together, having tea. And then somebody was like, do you want Shawar Kami's outfits? Because they come across the border. I'm like, what? I'm like, I'm not here to shop, but just watching, you know, the sort of the markets where you see the cross border trade and the, and the diffusion of cultures with India, which is really amazing, right? And then, and then going to the south, which was just so different and socially so much more conservative, where women were so much more, like they wouldn't even come out of their, you know, of their house if there is a male, if somebody male present. So navigating those differences. And, and also, by the way, my first field visit, I mean, my Bengali is really good, but I was just so conscious speaking Bengali, I'm like, am I going to speak city Bengali? Like, how do I do this? So it took me a couple of days to sort of do all, you know, to understand all that well. But I think I want to make the intellectual connection as well. For me, a big challenge in the book was dealing with the translation because my interviews were in Bengali and that is my mother tongue. So I did my analysis in Bengali. Actually, I didn't translate anything until I was actually writing it, right. So I did my analysis, coded it all in Bengali, and then I did the translation because I wanted to be authentic. FYI, I did take a couple of MFA classes while I was writing this book. So you might see that in the way, like, you know, in a lot of the liberty I took with language, but a couple of colleagues and I were taking MFA class and we're talking about writing. And I realized I was reading all these writing books and they weren't helping because my challenge wasn't in writing English. My challenge was in how to write Bengali in English, right? And especially because it was my mother tongue, I felt such an attachment with words. And. And one of the things that I learned was that for me, as I started to unpack words, they became entire concepts. So I was talking about one term which was shangshak or shangshara is family. So I'm like, what does shangshakara mean? And how do I. So I had this Twitter conversation with friends and then it turned into this huge thing in the book where I just Talked about what was shangshakara meaning doing the family, Meaning what is the woman's role. Right. So it's starts with her role as a wife, as a daughter, going into being a wife and being a mother and cooking and cleaning and so. And you know, her. Her sexual and reproductive roles, all of that. Right. So there were so many instances where just being connected with a language became its own intellectual journey. And I had a lot of fun with that, I think.
- [52:40]
Shraddha Chatterjee
Thank you for sharing that. And I think, you know, so much of that resonates so deeply. And I think it's also like, especially your example of Shawnshahr Kaura. Like, I don't think there's a literal translation in English because we wouldn't code in English. Like, grammar is not set up in a way to code it in that way, because to me, when I think of the phrase Shankshar kaura, it kind of centers the woman's work. You know, it focuses on the woman's work in reproducing these institutions, these structures. And in a way, like in, you know, in the English speaking world, we have to make that work visible, whereas this phrase already visibilizes that, you know, like in a. In a very banal kind of way. So I think that's very interesting. And of course, my own research is bilingual, so I always, you know, like, especially with coding or with analysis, it's always difficult to go back and forth. But anyway, I think there is so much more to get into here. But I will ask you, I think my concluding question, which is, what are some of the provocations you would like to leave your readers with, and what are some of the projects that you're excited to work on in the future now?
- [53:58]
Nema Kayum
Yeah. Thank you. So I think one of the key lessons for me coming out of this book was that we really need to understand the local not just for what it is, but also for how it changes our understanding of existing concepts and theories. So, for example, when we start to talk about local, the framing is often in terms of words like tradition or culture. And there is amazing scholarship around that. But the framing is often in terms of this deviation from these Western centric concepts. Right. So the scholars are now asking what happens when you take this understanding of local and feed it back into these colonized concepts, and how do these concepts change as a result? Can we decolonize concepts? Can we look at these practices as more than just corruption or more than just patriarchal, even if they are in some ways, but look at these underlying dynamics and see if that changes our understanding of what these big words like corruption, meaning can we de. Stigmatize these practices? Right. And sort of these.
- [55:07]
Shraddha Chatterjee
Almost like.
- [55:07]
Nema Kayum
So can we decolonize these concepts? That was my main thing, my main kind of concern here. So in the book, I talk about one such thing, which was a topic of much conversation, when people sort of realize what I was talking about, I call it transactionalism. And it is when women, poor women, or poor people pay a small fee, a small bribe for welfare service. And you know, of course this is corruption in donor terms. But I'm also thinking before transactionalism, it was clientalism. Poor women did not get services at all. Now, if they can pay a small fee or a small bribe, if you want to use that word and get it, it's still there. You know, it's inclusive in a way that clientelism was not. Right. So if we just put the blanket term corruption on this and don't look at what it is, we're missing out on the fact that this closed net, which is what Abrax said he calls this net of clientelism as it's unraveling, we're missing the opportunity to observe how that happens. So one thing I didn't get to talk about in the book, and I hope I can look into more in future work, is where does this come from? How do we go from clandilism to this bright paying? Right. So another example is, for example, village courts that I talk about in the book, which are often patriarchal, elitist. Yes. But they also provide opportunities for conflict resolution when courts are not absent, where courts are not present, when the legal system is not present in the formal way. And actually now NGOs and even the government, even the courts are trying to push cases to the village courts because they can't handle the sheer volume of cases. Right? So. So I think that was my first point. I want to make my second steward. Provocative thought is a methodological one. Because when I started writing this book, I realized there was no way I could tell the story if I didn't blend this quasi experimental research with this sort of immersive, qualitative work. And I was like, oh my God, people are going to hate this book. Every discipline is going to be like, she doesn't know methods. And I was like, am I going to do this?
- [57:18]
Shraddha Chatterjee
And.
- [57:19]
Nema Kayum
And then a couple of years ago, I was at APSA and a scholar who I really, really respect was speaking, and she said that the way you do good work is you don't have to Follow the prescribed path, right? You kind of carve your own path. And she was talking about her advisor who was also a giant in political science who had basically no patience for paradigm devites. And I was like, yes. So I decided very early on in the book that if I had to write it, I had to push aside these paradigm divides, whether methodological or sort of theoretical. Right. And it's a huge gamble for a first book. But I was like, I'm going to do it because there is no other way this can be done. So I do want to sort of say that when we do this, so much more comes to the surface because the only way I could tell the story. So my job in this book was to measure informal institutions, right? You can't see them. And the first way, you know, I want to go back to a point I made earlier which was, you know, they exist because you compare in B and B is different. And then you look at how B is different, right? So B could be different because expectations are different. B could be different because somebody was enforcing some kind of informal rule in a way. But I had to mix methods in that way to do that work. One final thought I want to. It's a sort of more development industry oriented thought, which is that in the development world we're still leading with this idea of economic development first, even if it's been challenged. I want to ask what happens when we push that aside and say, let's look just at social development, you know, let's look just at women's empowerment separate from their economic lives and the complications therein. Right. Like what happens then and what happens when we sort of prioritize social development instead in terms of future work, My book had me thinking very hard on the intellectual connections between informal institutions, the political science literature, and how the development industry looks at social norms, which is much more sort of the way the economics do it. So one body of new work I'm really excited about is understanding social norms from a global and multidisciplinary perspective. And I have a sort of reflective paper coming out on how these social norms manifest in people's pandemic related behaviors like vaccination and masking. And I'm working on another paper which sort of tries to integrate social science and special institutions into sort of public health related questions of vaccination and masking when it comes to Global South. And I have a second larger project that I'm working on on informality in urban spaces. So again, a sort of meta ish project. This is more about Participation and how informal behaviors sort of whether our understanding of informal behaviors can sort of change what we know about participation and whether we can wrestle participation back from these western centric models of participation equals voting and things like that. I will end here by saying that I suppose I'm also trying to decolonize participation as a concept, but we'll see where that goes.
- [60:55]
Shraddha Chatterjee
I mean, all the projects sound very exciting and even your provocations for what we could take away from the book and think more about is great. And I think especially the question of methodology and mixed methods research, because I'm from gender studies, I feel like it's such a given that we will do good gender studies research is mixed methods always because there's almost like because the field is interdisciplinary, there is this conventional understanding or this understanding that has become, I think now grounded or commonplace now that we know that lives are messy. So we know that disciplinary models are often just ways to kind of impose a binary or a boundary onto the lives of our participants. And that's not what good research does. Good research focuses on the participants, so the methods focus on that messiness. So of course it's going to be mixed. But thank you so much for talking to us today. I think I had a great time and I have many questions even at the end of this, but let's not make it too unwieldy. And again, thank you so much. I think for our listeners, I'd like to quote some lines from the book to end the interview. And I'm quoting now. Decades ago, women in development advocates believed that women could uplift their communities as they help themselves. This ended up putting the burden of development on women. I hesitate to suggest that we weigh women down with more responsibilities than they are ready than they already bear. However, a one time investment in large scale grassroots organizations can engender structural changes that benefit women for years, perhaps generations. Women can usher in development, but real transformation can only occur if instead of struggling to survive the institutions that hold them back, women overturn the institutions themselves. End quote. And I think these are some great, great words from you that kind of summarize for me some of the great provocations of this book and village ties, women, NGOs and informal institutions in Rural Bangladesh is now available in bookstores and online. Thank you.
- [63:15]
Nema Kayum
Thank you so much, Ratha. It was so wonderful being here.