Articles by Karin Kapadia

“Better to have never been born than to be born a woman!” I have heard this sentiment expressed numerous times by low-income Dalit and lower-caste women friends of mine in Tamil Nadu. Married women in urban slums and low-income settlements have a tough time keeping their families functioning.

Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratisation in Tamil Nadu by Hugo Gorringe; Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005;
KARIN KAPADIA This remarkably useful book on dalit political movements combines detailed interviews with front line dalit activists, with a perceptive analysis of the dilemmas and paradoxes facing dalit political mobilisation. The battery of references is impressive: Gorringe trawls a wideranging secondary literature in politics, sociology, anthropology and social history to make helpful comparisons. He also considers the relevance of theories analysing the new social movements and other analytical frameworks to his data.

An Agenda for Research Karin Kapadia FROM December 10 to 13, 1997 an international conference entitled 'The World of Indian Industrial Labour' was held in Amsterdam, Supported by the American SSRC it was organised jointly by Jonathan Parry of the Anthropology Department of the London School of Economics and Jan Breman of the Centre for Asian Studies, Amsterdam. The conference proved to be immensely fruitful, with a number of very stimulating papers. Twenty three papers were presented during the four days, dealing with a wide variety of issues, both historical and contemporary. Through the questions they raised, many of the papers implicitly sketched an agenda for further research. As the papers were of great value and likely to be of considerable interest to a wide audience they are briefly reviewed here.

Research on poverty that focuses solely on access to employment runs the risk of implicitly being an approach that neglects the gender dimension of poverty, In the context of inequitable gender relations within households, poor women may have access to employment, but still be sharply subordinated, so that they have very little control over their earnings. Women's control of their earnings or of credit cannot be awarded to them by development agencies. Such control over resources is intimately connected with gendered power relations and with perceptions of gendered needs and rights.

Bonded by Blood: Matrilateral Kin in Tamil Kinship Karin Kapadia The steady fall in status of women in upwardly mobile groups in rural Tamil Nadu and growing anti-female bias in such 'progressive' groups that are benefiting from rural development, is closely linked to the change in marriage system, within these groups, from bride-price to dowry, which in turn has greatly weakened the importance of the matrilateral affinal kin in Tamil kinship. It is the matrilateral kin who to a large degree guaranteed a woman's security and welfare and thai their marginalisation is a major reason why women in upwardly mobile groups are increasingly at risk.