Examining the gendered nature of debt among economically vulnerable families in twenty-first-century Kerala, the article critically examines the new economic relationship forged between the state and lower-middle-class women in Kerala in the 2000s, based on low-interest self-help loans at a time when social reproduction called for greater resources for poor families. We treat Kerala as a special case in which the state appears as the mediator, assuring the interests of both creditors and debtors, which produces a specific, unique form of indebtedness that undergirds the state-feminised civil society relationship. The implicit but intense presence of the language of ‘moral debt’ owed by women to the state is crucial to enabling the extraction of considerable amounts of governmental labour from them. Second, we pay attention to the existence of an abject ‘outside’ to this civil society. Third, we attempt to identify the diverse ways in which different groups of women try to modify their status as welfare beneficiaries and resist immobilisation through economic debt and moral obligation.
Devika et al. (Mon,) studied this question.