Devadasis Organizing -- 3
Devadasis Organizing for Social Change: Discourses of Power and Resistance
Communication scholars have reported the significance of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Papa, Auwal, &
Singhal, 1995; 1997) and the women’s cooperatives of the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in India
(Papa, Singhal, Ghanekar, & Papa, 2000; Boyd, 1999) for the individual and collective empowerment of people and
their emancipation from oppressive socioeconomic conditions. While these studies address the dynamics, paradoxes
and contradictions of empowerment processes, they have been thin on extending discussions of power to understand
contra-power or resistance to intervention programs and the norms and rules of cooperatives. Additionally, clear-cut
hierarchies and structures dictated the researched cooperative movements. What are the implications of
investigating power relations in organizing processes where the organizational structures are less stable and static,
and where an intervention for social transformation occurs at the intersection of multiple and conflicting discourses?
The present study examined the communicative dimensions of organizing women, referred to as devadasis,
1
for
social change but more specifically the micropractices of organizing that produce and reproduce power relations.
The paper is developed from an ethnographic inquiry of an intervention program in Belgaum, a district
2
located in
the North of the state of Karnataka in Southern India. The approach undertaken in this intervention program is
similar to the Grameen in Bangladesh and the NDDB in India. The women are organized into sanghas or women’s
clubs, equivalent to the cooperatives in Grameen or the women’s cooperatives in NDDB. These women’s clubs are,
however, different from the cooperatives in both Grameen and NDDB because of the lack of a formal institutional
infrastructure to guide the practices of organizational members vis-à-vis the women. There are advantages and
disadvantages to such a set-up, however, the ethnography focused on understanding the dynamics of organizing and
less on organizations.
Organizational communication scholars have consistently articulated the need to examine power relations as
they manifest in different discursive systems. Some recent studies (See Clair, 1998; Edley, 2000; Murphy, 1998;
Trethewey, 1997) have developed discussions on the construction of power and resistance as coexisting processes of
the everyday socio and microanalytic organization of power. Clearly, with the extension of organizational
1
A more thorough understanding of the devadasi system is developed in the next section of the paper.
Convention