The scholarship on postcolonial feminism is a growing field of knowledge production and South Asian feminist works have emerged as an important part of this scholarship in the last couple of decades. The rich and diverse social and cultural anthropological studies have contributed to this field by successfully interrogating and often re-defining the relationship amongst feminist politics, ethnographic writing and the ethicality of representation. Debarati Sen’s book is a valuable contribution to postcolonial South Asian feminism for its rigorous research, self-reflexivity and lucid language. Nepali women of Darjeeling cease to be the objects of knowledge in Sen’s observations and become subjectivities in the making—contesting, negotiating and challenging the changing social and political processes around the production and marketing of tea. Sen writes, ‘They [women plantation workers and women farmers] are not just born out of simple kin networks, labor unions, or political parties, but out of decades of contesting local developments, individualized and/or limited women’s empowerment strategies, which collude with male patriarchy and ignore women’s grounded micro-strategies’ (p. 15). Sen argues that the dominating discourses and practices of Fair Trade in the contemporary tea industry of Darjeeling seem to be a continuation of the older regimes of big plantations and labour unions in terms of the ideas of gender justice. The critique of liberal modernist transnational gender justice regimes informs Sen’s work in different ways as she makes a case for social sustainability beyond measurable outcomes, emphasizing how women in rural Darjeeling ‘demonstrate social innovation and social entrepreneurship, CSR social work buzzwords—with great finesse and sagacity’ (p. 21).
The book is divided into eight substantive chapters along with an Introduction and Conclusion. One of the striking features of the book is its continuous unfolding of methodological questions through the principal chapters after Sen familiarizes her readers with the key debates on feminist ethnography in the first chapter ‘Locations: Homework and Fieldwork’. An interesting discussion on researching the ‘backyard’ vis-à-vis the multiple locations occupied by a feminist researcher makes this chapter a kind of curtain raiser for the mobility in transnational feminism, carefully mapped in the following chapters. Sen has also briefly discussed the tension between the positions occupied by feminists as activists and academics, prudently designating her work as academic with an acknowledgement of activists’ contribution in the production of knowledge. The layers of ‘doing’ feminist politics either through activism or academic research begin to shape the course of her arguments from her very first chapter. The range of source materials covered in this research is referred almost conversationally, without making heavy weather about interdisciplinary research, and gets the point across that feminist ethnographies are more about the ability to read diverse and uneven sources through each other rather than cross-checking of ‘data’ for validity.