ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on interviews which was conducted by the author. The interview was part of a wider project on the changing nature of puberty and maternity among rural Tamil women from labouring classes in Chengalpattu District. Kumar’s representation of women learning to ‘confront capital and the state’ is itself a register for a more widespread phenomenon, the depth of intellectual engagement in India with a broad left socialist tradition. The language she uses springs from a faith in modernity’s emancipatory horizons, a tangible sense of the potential it held out as a liberator from the burdens of caste, class and gender oppression. The author met Victoria as an NGO worker in Stella’s new organisation, the Rural Education and Animation Centre, in the 1990s. Her narrative affords a glimpse of how a familiar, seemingly outmoded, discourse can nevertheless be renewed and given fresh significance by a Dalit woman who integrates it into the specificities of her own life.
