Progress for Women through Volunteering? Development, Transnational Cooperation and Gender in Rural South Asia

South Asian women contributed to rural reconstruction programmes between the 1920s and the 1970s. They designed and implemented development schemes for rural women in colonial and postcolonial India and Ceylon/Sri Lanka in three key areas, namely health, education, and sustainable livelihood. My presentation zooms into the voluntary work of activists from two such women organisation, namely the Bengal-based Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial Association and the Ceylonese Lanka Mahila Samiti. Their voluntary work made rural areas an important place for the gender-specific organisation of development and political participation. Both organisations maintained close contacts with state authorities, with each other as well as with various international actors, such as the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW). In my talk, I explore the activists’ motivations to engage in rural development and ask, how did the women organisers understand their commitment? Furthermore, I examine collaborative efforts in rural development by analysing the transnational networks of cooperation between the Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial Association, the Lanka Mahila Samiti and the ACWW. The objective is to gain insight into how South Asian activists engaged with the knowledge domains and discourses of rural development and to reflect on transnational rural development activism in south-south relations. Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia with a special interest in the history of international organisations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and gender and ideologies in the 20th century. Maria received her PhD from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011. Her doctoral thesis was published in 2013 by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt as Delhi-Rome-Berlin: The Indian Perception of Fascism and National Socialism in India, 1922–1939. The book addresses the transfer of fascist ideas and concepts from Europe to South Asia, with a particular focus on the colonial context of the subcontinent.