Culture or freedom? The gendered intimacies of modernization in Rajasthan, India

This dissertation explores the intimate relationships engendered by modernization projects designed to "free" women in Rajasthan, north India. Contemporary political discourse marks Rajasthan as both the site of authentic Indian culture and the place most oppressive to women, where their basic well being in terms of literacy and standard of living is most compromised. The continued tensions between culture and freedom motivate a vast administrative and bureaucratic apparatus designed to improve women's condition, while at the same time producing projects in which such efforts can only appear to fail, overwhelmed by the backwardness of Rajasthani "culture." This dissertation attempts to trace the affects of the culture or freedom paradigm as it becomes embodied in efforts to improve the lives of Rajasthani women.;Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Jaipur District on family planning, microcredit, dowry relief, and child health projects, I explore the kinds of relationships that are forged under the sign of women's freedom and the unpredictable social paths that emerge as such projects become part of daily life. I highlight women as subjects, rather than objects, of modernization projects by attending to what they do, what they hope, and how they interact with one another through and despite efforts towards their improved well-being. I argue that modernization projects are always necessarily enacted culturally, but the cultural enactment of modernization projects and women's inability to perfectly inhabit their terms of engagement disqualifies the concerns of project participants from the public sphere, producing effects of failure. I therefore attempt to listen to what is excluded from contemporary public discourse about women's freedom by providing thick descriptions of the kinds of struggles that emerge in intimate moments of engagement as they embrace, resist, and negotiate the projects undertaken in their name.