Capable Women, Incapable States: Negotiating Violence and Rights in India. By Poulami Roychowdhury. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 252 pp. $110.00 (cloth), $32.95 (paper). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190881894.001.0001.

Abstract

Although women in India have legal access to criminal and civil remedies for domestic violence, reporting and conviction rates remain dismally low. It is in this space between the law on the books and its enforcement on ground that Poulami Roychowdhury’s debut book Capable Women, Incapable States is situated. Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork in West Bengal, Roychowdhury follows 70 women in their pursuit of justice. These women are exceptional in that they have recognized the injustice of domestic abuse and are seeking a solution by the time Roychowdhury encounters them. However, only three of them are seeking formal legal redress at the outset. Chapter 2—an excellent stand-alone resource on the social, economic, and legal conditions governing domestic violence in India—explains why. Marriage in this context is at once ubiquitous and highly unequal. Women’s exit options from marriage, and their bargaining power within it, are severely limited by their economic dependence on men and by gendered social norms that equate exit with ostracization. Meanwhile, the state and law enforcement are unfamiliar and unlikely allies to them: “Intimate violence was familiar in a way that the potential violence of the state was not” (48). The puzzle, then, is not why so few women seek legal redress, but why any do at all. Roychowdhury describes women’s journey toward the law as “accidental but systematic” (14). The key lies with pivotal “violence brokers.” Chapters 3 and 4 explore these brokers’ identities, incentives, and sources of efficacy. Women brokers (didis) are mostly individuals affiliated with NGOs and women’s self-help groups, while themen (dadas) comprise party workers as well as individuals with