Listening for Other Modernities: Women’s Oral Histories, Caste and the Indian State from the Emergency to Liberalization

Akanksha Sharma, University of Punjab

This paper will use oral history with working class and lower caste women in Chandigarh and Jammu to unsettle familiar stories about Indian modernity as a linear journey from colonial rule to national development and economic liberalization. Taking seriously women’s remembered encounters with police, health officials, party workers and local brokers during the Emergency and its aftermath, I ask how they narrate the state, citizenship and respectability in terms that do not fit either celebratory accounts of progress or liberal narratives of rights denied. Drawing on life histories recorded in resettlement colonies, small towns and migrant neighbourhoods between 2018 and 2025, I trace how women recall forced sterilization, housing drives, ration shops, and later welfare schemes as dense clusters of fear, opportunity and moral judgment. Rather than treating these testimonies only as sources that confirm what we already know from files and reports, I read them as arguments in their own right about what counts as a good life, a decent household, or a trustworthy ruler. The paper follows the language of the narrators themselves, especially idioms of izzat, sharafat and sarkar, to show how caste and gender shape very different evaluations of the same state initiative, sometimes within a single family. By placing these Indian voices alongside contemporaneous global conversations on population control, urban planning and women’s work, the paper makes visible a set of “vernacular theories” of modernity that have rarely been allowed to define the field. The paper therefore invites debate on three fronts: whether modernity should still be anchored in European timelines; how caste and domestic labour reorder existing feminist accounts of the Indian state; and what it would mean for social science history if subaltern oral testimony set the terms of our key categories, rather than simply illustrating them.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 132. Labor, Discipline, and the Gendered Social Question