ABSTRACT
Since 1985, Jana Sanskriti, a cultural organization composed of peasants and agricultural workers, has built village theater teams in the Indian state of West Bengal as sources of political theater and political activism. Much of their work on and off stage dramatizes and demands the right to work in their villages rather than depend on migration for rural viability. Yet, in the summer of 2005, Jana Sanskriti (JS) did something seemingly counter-intuitive to their ongoing demand for rural livelihoods. Th ey mobilized a roadblock along the highway, halted the traffi c of goods and people along the main artery of the local economy, and demanded an end to a lucrative and widely prevalent means of rural livelihood-liquor production. From JS’s perspective this anti-liquor struggle articulates, rather than contradicts, their ongoing refusal to accept a world of shrinking possibilities. Liquor production, in their view, is an unacceptable source of local revenues given its destructive community impact. While development might be represented as entrepreneurial opportunity, the choice and nature of new business is not a neutral matter. To the extent that a market episteme of development forecloses debates on nature and choices of new business by privileging employment and revenue-generation alone, such an episteme aff ords minimal regard for community destruction as a result of development. Further, other ways of thinking, such as those of JS and its constituency of women who envision development as a process of constructing a healthy rural community, are excluded from view thus re-inscribing existing gender and class inequalities.
