The politics of hopeful citizenship: Women, counterinsurgency and the state in eastern India

Abstract

Anthropologists have posited that citizenship takes on multiple meanings and forms based on citizens’ everyday engagements with state and non-state actors. This article examines forms of citizenship that materialize vis-à-vis the state. In particular, it deals with new imaginaries of citizenship that emerge through interactions between state actors and poor women in counterinsurgency settings. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the erstwhile Maoist zones of eastern India, I show that, despite knowing the violent face of the state, poor women nevertheless rely on the developmental face of the state to hope for social transformation and imagine better lives and livelihoods. I argue that in doing so they engender an idea of hopeful citizenship.