Politus (1 989) (9)2 28-33

BEHIND WHOSE THRONE?: POWER AND IMAGES OF WOMEN IN BANGLADESH

Sarah White

BY CONVENTION politics in Bangladesh is a male business. While they may vote, women’s participation in formal political structures is strictly limited, from village to national level. With a few Clite exceptions, women rarely achieve political prominence. At the same time, discussion of ‘women’s issues’ has always been highly political. There are two dimensions here which feminist critiques draw out. First, in problematizing gender, feminism shows the presence of the political in the personal. Second, in problematizing knowledge, feminism shows the partiality in allegedly objective’ discussions: how a dominant perspective excludes and suppresses others. At the same time, postmodernist epistemology stresses the need to look at, not just fhmugh texts; that the wider context in which texts are produced has a profound influence on what they say and how they say it.

In this article, I draw on these perspectives to explore power as conceptualized in the context of women and the market in rural Bangladesh. The colonial history and continuing aid dependence of Bangladesh make the politics of knowledge particularly relevant. I there- fore begin by outlining the general background against which texts on women in Bangladesh are produced. I then draw on field research in a village in north-west Bangladesh over ten months between October 1985 and December 1986 (White, 1988). This aimed to find out who had what kind of access to which resources and what this showed about interpersonal power relations. I conclude that the predominant model of ‘separate spheres’ and preoccupation with ‘female status’ inhibits understanding of gender relations. Instead I advocate extending conceptions of ‘the market’ to include aspects of (particularly) women’s activities that it gener- ally excludes.

The final section of the article shifts gear to reflect on how its analysis fits in the wider context of discourse on women in Bangladesh and the power relations that expresses. This makes clear that its approach is highly selective, following substantially the same agenda as those studies it was aiming to criticise! Sharma (1985) talks about the ‘shadow’ cast by any piece of research: while it lights up some areas, it also throws others into darkness. In part this is a question of individual authors’ interests, styles of research and so on. But beyond this, it is clear that to some degree the ‘shadow’ is syshatic, a feature of the wider discourse in which individual texts participate. While this discourse clarifies, it also obscures, by the way it defines ‘issues’ and how to approach them. Through ‘tracing the shadows’ in the particular case of my own field research, therefore, I aim to challenge the dominance of the discourse as it is now and suggest some alternative approaches to the investigation of gender.

The Political Setting

Politics has always been a feature of debates on ‘women’s issues’ in Bangladesh. Histor- ically, concern with ‘the status of women’ in Indian society emerged in the context of British imperialism (Mani, 1986). This implied Indian ‘backwardness’ in comparison with allegedly more egalitarian British practice. In so doing it sustained both colonial and gender domin- ation: it fostered British attitudes of racial superiority and obscured the degree of gender inequalities within British society (Alam and Matin, 1984).

While formally independent, Bangladesh is now heavily reliant on overseas aid - amount- ing to almost 80 per cent of the national development budget Uansen ct a f , 1989, p 12). The ‘status of women’ debates reappear in concerns that ‘women’s programmes’ be included in a portfolio of aid projects. The influence of this context on discussion of gender issues has been extremely profound: almost nmy key text on women in Bangladesh for a general or academic

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BEHIND WHOSE THRONE? POWER AND IMAGES OF WOMEN IN BANGLADESH 29

readership in the 1970s and 1980s has been sponsored by an aid agency. Of course the donors are not homogeneous and the studies cannot simply be regarded as functions of the funders’ interests. Nonetheless, it would be naive to ignore the impact these have on the overall qmda for discussion. The danger, clearly, is that the concern for gender issues, which appears in radical guise, has come to express and reinforce relations of cross-national dominance.

In stating this I do not mean to imply any simple opposition between outside intervention and some kind of ‘indigenous culture’. Neither side is monolithic; in each there is consider able diversity - and conflict. In Bangladesh at present, for example, the politics of ‘women’s issues’ are very evident in moves of influential groups within the Government and outside towards an increasingly Islamic identity for the state. In this they favour fundamentalist inter- pretations of Islam which place a high value on more orthodox pMhh observance, and its ideal of seclusion for women. In potential at least, this conflicts with the aims of aid programmes to make women more economically active, either to bring them out of the house or to enlarge the say they have within it. Meanwhile, a growing number of Bangladeshi femin- ists are trying to establish a position of some autonomy relative to these polarities. The simple assumptions of many ‘women and development’ approaches that local gender relations are set and specifiable (and need to be changed) are invalid. The point, rather, is to explore how gender bears a multiplicity of ‘local’ meanings and power relations and how cxtcrnol intervention articulates and integrates with these (see also McGregor, 1989).

Looking at Power

A first step in strengthening gender analysis in Bangladesh is to move h m looking at the status to the power of women. This stress on women’s activity is vital if studies are not either to reproduce a maltbiased perspective which stresses how women are pncciucdand makes them passive objccls of disadvantage; or simply to substitute a ‘female perspective’, which values ‘feminine’ qualities but fails to express the realities of power. It also gives scope to explore differences bchocm women - by class, age, community, marital status.. . . Power is conceived after Foucault (1981 , p 99) as not primarily negative, but representing ‘matrices of transform- ation’ which may variously transform, strengthen or reverse existing relations of domination. Power is immanent in, not superstructural to, other types of relationships (1981, p 94). It is therefore through daily confrontations in particular relationships - of knowledge or employ- ment or credit or marriage - that power relations should be explored.

In my fieldwork I rejected the common focus on ‘decisions’ as an index of power. First, decisions are made through complex processes perhaps over an extended period, with multi- ple factors and actors affeting the final outcome in ways that are often difficult to assess. Second, a focus on ‘decisions’ implies that action issues primarily from ‘choice’ and this is contentious. As Lukes (1974) notes, power inheres in the definition of the opriom, not only in the resolution of expressed conflict. The notion of ‘decisions’, moreover, implies a particular construction of persons (‘individuals’). and action, which cannot be cross-culturally assumed (see Strathem, 1987).

Instead, therefore, I aimed to generate stories of particular transactions, following up a flex- ible census type questionnaire survey of the village (230 households) with more detail from 29 case study households. The stories describe who did what and how things were done in the household economy: crop, vegetable and livestock production; fuel and food; businesses and

.budgets; marriage and child care. By being specific, the stories were more open to the unexpected than direct questions, which tend to produce conventional answers. Also, they gradually intermesh to form a more complete picture of the activity and relationship network of individuals and households as a cross-section of the present and as they extend through the past. Furthermore, they indicate the parameters within which activity takes place. Power does not devolve simply through interpersonal dynamics, but these express further societal constructions of values, rights and mpnsibilities. Analytically, it is thus important to reflect

30 SARAH WHITE

on the kandr of assets which different sets of people exchange and the lmnr on which trans- actions take place. This indicates the resources on which different actors can draw and through which power is exercised.

Market or Markets?

In rural Bangladesh, the weekly market (hat) is preeminently male: no woman goes there without very good reason. This both ensures and expresses male dominance: men are not only the economic but also the social and political representatives of their households as they gossip, bargain, make matches, lobby and so on, as the buying and selling goes on. This clearly lends itself to imagery of dichotomous ‘male/public’ and ‘Cemale/private’ spheres.

The literature on women and work in Bangladesh challenges this picture on two counts. First, studies stress that women’s work even luifhin the household is ‘productive’ rather than simply ‘domestic’. The weakness of this argument is its artificiality: it derives from a social context very far from the peasant society of rural Bangladesh. Second, women’s entry into the wage market has attracted overwhelming interest. The dominance of this focus is so strong that for months I felt I had gone to the ‘wrong village’ as I could find no shift of Bengali women into paid employment in male tasks - though I tried hard to surprise them at it! There is a very strong sense that women moving into ‘men’s work’ is the interesting aspect of women’s work: because it is expected to raise female status.

I cannot enter here into the content of these debates. Rather, I want to point out that their framework accepts a male-biased conception of the market: by a sleight of hand, the markcl is conflated to the (predominantly male) rnarketjdace. Women are counted in only when fluy mfer on ‘ma&’ h m , that is as individual sellers of labour. Women moving into waged labour is clearly highly significant for them and their families, and I do not mean to underestimate this. To focus on this done, however, is to erase by definifion many other aspects of women’s activity. It also contributes to identification of the economy as ‘male’ and so to the exclusion of women and gender issues from class analysis.

In fact, however, looking only at the markt+hcc arbitrarily abstracts one moment of exchange from the process as a whole. While women may be absent from the point of trans- action, goods may be produced by their activity, they often detail what should be bought/ sold, they are eager to see and comment on (sometimes abusively!) the quality and price of goods their men have exchanged. In addition, women may buy and sell their own livestock in the weekly market through a male intermediary. Women are in fact intimately concerned with and knowledgeable about the market transactions on which the management of their households relies.

Furthermore, a large number of transactions take place outside the formal market-place. Goods may be bought from itinerant traders or from one of the stores or another household in the village. Women are involved in many kinds of market relationships - in employment, livestock production, loans and so forth. They are not isolated in their own homesteads, but continually interacting - albeit sometimes through the mediation of children, servants or kin. The picture is not one of a single market, but rather of many different ones, each with different characteristics, in which people participate to different degrees. It is in these diNerences that the significance of the market in both gender and class relations resides.

Markets in rural Bangladesh can be divided into two broad sets, according to the scale of resources. The divisions are associated with gender: markets for the major assets are predomi- nantly male, with new technology, land, draught cattle, agricultural labour and major loans largely in male hands. By contrast, markets between women concern relatively minor resources: smaller animals, female labour, smaller scale loans. There is no doubt that the overall segregation of markets by gender is at once a potent symbol and a prime means of sustaining male dominance within households and in the community more generally. Nonetheless, the gender association is not rigid: women commonly act as broker in ‘major’

BEHIND WHOSE THRONE? POWER AND IMAGES OF WOMEN IN BANGLADESH 31

transactions; shifts between involvement in ‘major’ and ‘minor’ markets can be significant indicators of intra- and inter-household power.’ In the following section a particular case is used to indicate some of the power relations expressed by different kinds of market inter- action.

Inter-locking Markets

Khalek and Kaniz are landless. They sharecrop land from Tozimember and buy water from him for irrigation. Their son works on his land; Kaniz does various tasks around his homestead. Their daughter works alongside her as a domestic servant, returning to their own home only to sleep. One day Tozimember heard that they had just sold some paddy. He demanded they loan him half of the money (Tk1500 - f35). They could not refuse: in lean times they depend on him. He repaid them no cash, but did not charge them for irrigation. A year later he still owed Tk300 - with no question of interest being paid, though the common rate is 50 per cent per season (four months).

The money had been for their daughter’s dowry: they were having difficulty getting her married since she was seduced when working in Tozimember’s uncle’s house. During the two years she had worked for Tozimember, she had been given only her food and grain worth half the cost of one sari and petticoat. They finally decided that she should leave the job. Her mother, Kaniz, put it like this:

In shame we didn’t ask for more. We have shame, they have none. So my daughter is coming home. Why work there, if we have to eat from home, buy our own clothes, even a little oil to put on our hair? They say to me, we give you paddy (unhusked rice), hasn’t that value? But can two people be employed for 320 Ibs (paddy)2 a year? You tell them this in your country, they’ll be amazed.

‘Counting in’ women’s activities as in this case highlights a number of points. First, it clearly breaks down the picture of women’s helpless dependence by pointing up their economic involvement. Second, it shows how closely men’s and women’s activities are interconnected - both within and between households. Third, it demonstrates the importance of sociuf links to economic relations, particularly sharply in the forced loan. The market model can be streng- thened to include alongside matniaf resources - assets such as land, livestock and income -, also human resources - personal skills and abilities -, and sociai resources - inter-personal relationships. Access to these three kinds of resource is vitally interconnected.

The forced loan example makes clear the vulnerability inherent in such a relationship for the poorer party, but this should not lead to too monolithic a picture of power. Kaniz’s protest that they have no ‘shame’ shows her sense that the advantage Tozimember’s household takes of their dependence is illegitimate. Also, part of the reason the daughter could ultimately leave work was the additional margin they had since her brother had begun to sharecrop (Tozimember’s) land. Cross-class relationships reflect negotiation of interests, not simply brute force. They show some mutuality, as well as contradiction. This is true of both the ‘minor’ markets between women, and the ‘major’ markets between men. There is no basis here for easy assumptions of ‘sisterhood’ between females, nor, conversely, for confining discussions of class to males.

T h e case of Khalek and Kaniz illustrates also a rather different point. For years Khalek has let things go and Kaniz has been responsible for running the household, more recently in consultation with their son. One day, however, Kaniz came crying into a neighbour’s house, badly swollen after Khalek had beaten her. The ‘reason’ was that she had protested that he had hired two labourers (costing Tk40) to work on their house, rather than doing part of the work himself. However great her practical responsibility, it did not translate to formal author ity. Male structural advantage in employment, inheritance, politics, mobility, marriage law and customs acts like a fly-wheel in actual relationships, adding a huge weight to the male

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side in any encounter. Through violence, Khalek could still make the crudest expression of male dominance.

Conclusion

In part, then, it is politics internal to Bangladeshi society that obscures much of women’s activity. While it is important to recognise informal forms of power (such as personal influence and brokerage), the extent to which Bangladeshi society prescribes male dominance should not be underestimated. In response, women collude in a complex web of conventions and petty deceits which disguise the extent of their activities. This, first, is a means of retaining control: secrecy is the prime means for women to avoid family plunder of their goods. Second, women’s dependence has a high cultural value: it is a matter of shame if a husband cannot ‘support’ his wife in full. In the interests of good relationships in the household - and social status in the community - it is thus important that women present no challenge to the formal authority of their men.

Third, and most crucially, w h t c w r women do is subsumed within their famiry roles. In these, particularly as mothers, women are conceived in relationship to others, and so dcfinztion cannot be ‘independent’. It is these relations that determine the use of resources within the household, not simply by brute force (‘I am under my husband’) but crucially even in meas of Wsonal choue (see also Whitehead, 1984). This identity does not change when women work outside the household: Kaniz, for example, saw what she did asfilfi‘lling not in conflict with, her family role (see also Sharma, 1980). For many women it is in fulfilling cultural ideals of motherhood (which include household management) that they gain some dominance (see also Dubisch, 1986). It is the key paradox of women’s gender construction, that these relations, which deny them rights in the material products of their activity, constitute their key resource.

This is the point at which the market motif breaks down. ‘Counting in’ women shows the importance of social links in economic transactions - amongst men as well as women. By implication, it also shows how economic interests are involved in behaviour which is commonly seen as ‘merely social’. In so doing, it makes its own construction problematic. First, there is the assumption of separate economic and social spheres. How accurately does this reflect the ways that people in fact experience their lives? Second, ‘the market’ invokes a world of free transacting individuals of an ideal-typical ‘male’ model (Geof Wood, personal communication) which is very far from the reality for either men or women.’ ‘lhis is not solved by recasting the model with ‘the household’ as the unit of interaction. Rather, there are ques- tions raised by the notion offami4 - understanding of self, persons, identity, community - that press beyond the whole framework of an economics-based analysis.

This recalls the notion raised in the opening section of the ‘shadow’ studies cast and the ways it can reflect the wider political context. Models based on ‘the market’ and ‘production’ are clearly congruent with the growing penetration in rural Bangladesh of international capital through aid intervention: this strictly constrains the kinds of question they can pose. Also, the concern for policy initiatives has tended to concentrate attention on women rather than gender. This carries the danger of reifying gender difference, by building the problem into programmes aimed to combat it. It is now well accepted that women are deeply divided by class, age, marital status, community and so on. But this is only to go part way. Academically, the point is not to divide the category ‘women’ into various subgroups that can again be operationalized. It is rather to recover the complexity and plasticity of gender relations in bearing meaning and identity as well as structuring resource access. A feminist critique is central to this, but it must be genuinely self-reflexive: not a simple concern with gender, or worse ‘women’ but a developing analysis which questions and tests as it utilizes feminist approaches.

The use of ‘gender’ as a proxy for women in writings about Bangladesh probably means

BEHIND WHOSE THRONE? POWER AND IMAGES OF WOMEN IN BANGLADESH 33

that these questions cannot be tackled head on. Perhaps, instead, studies should explore identity through culture: through song, poetry, film, humour, religious observance, kin c e l t bration . . . Such oblique approaches might introduce some dative autonomy between academic texts and policy discussion. This would revitalize dialogue between them and be in the longer-term interests of both. The need for greater sensitivity to the politics of gender was put forcefully to me by a village woman, Minu, exasperated with my repeated questions about who is responsible for what: ‘What is his is mine, and mine his. Isn’t that how it is in your country?’

Notes

1. Martin Gmley, personal communication. 2. 3. Ceof Wood, personal communication.

’lbeir family would consume 10 Ibs of paddy daily.

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