DEBT AND RESISTANCE: A STUDY OF AGRARIAN WOMEN’S PROTESTS IN SRI LANKA

Abstract

This dissertation foregrounds debt as a site of resistance and a site of reinventing the future incontemporary society. Based on twenty months of participatory action research alongside a women’s movement against predatory microfinance in Sri Lanka, the study explores how women became debtors and how and under what conditions they struggled against predatory microfinance. While discussing women’s lived experiences tackling a complex system of financial, family, and societal violence, the study presents a feminist reading of debt, development, and resistance. While drawing from participatory observation, the study illustrates how women in debt instrumentalize the devaluation of their ability to re-birth the eventual everyday at the household, i.e., providing for children’s education, health care, food, family’s well-being not only today but also the obligation to make things better for tomorrow, to create a space for resistance. In their quest to preserve life from predatory lending that exacerbates the labor of recreating life in the household, women bolt their doors, evade debt collectors, and postpone debt payments to disrupt the circuits of finance. Mutuality and proximity of using these weapons of the weak sometimes lead to in(formal) security arrangements in close neighborhoods to fend off debt collectors. The case study demonstrates how the ‘sociality of debt’ – collective lived realities of indebted women, enable them to unite to build a political movement from below, emboldening them to re-imagine poverty alleviation, development, and community credit. Over six chapters, the study documents the evolution of the women’s debt resistancemovement with thick narrative descriptions of the women’s lived experiences and conceptualizes resistance against debt as a crisis in post-colonial development. I argue that efforts to integrate women into development without a critical appreciation of the historical roots of exclusion connected to colony capitalism have resulted in new exclusions. Rather than promoting financial inclusion and empowerment, microfinance has constituted a financial enclosure taking over women’s customary rights and credit commons and entangling them in predatory finance. Reliance on the judiciary and prosecution to recover unpayable debt related to microfinance criminalize debt with the threat of imprisonment. I point out how women expressing their anger and indignation at odious debt have forged a feminist assembly that symbolizes feminist solidarity and agency. The debtors’ movement has enabled them to transcend their victimhood and vulnerability, assume a resurgent identity, and believe they can bring about change. By repudiating debt, women in the movement refuse to pursue dreams in a foreclosed future and declare they can create new insubordinate futures.