The past decade has seen the Indian state emerge as a chief architect of a massive transfer of land from marginal communities to industrial and other corporations. Ostensibly carried out to further develop the country by facilitating the transition of the Indian economy in a more industrialised direction, forcible land transfers have been met with considerable popular resistance almost across the country.
This paper focuses on one such instance of popular resistance to forcible land transfers, namely that in Singur, West Bengal, against the acquisition of farmland for setting up a Tata Motors car factory. Here, as elsewhere, village women played key roles in the local protest movement as activists but also, crucially, as mobilising symbols. This paper examines the role of women in the making of this popular movement against state-led, development-induced displacement by focusing at three interconnected levels of analysis: (1) The gendered impact of the land acquisition; (2) The activist work of village women; (3) Their incorporation into the movement’s mobilising symbolic registers.
