Introduction

Be it in the colonial or early post-colonial periods, or in the latest period of ‘globalization’, women have at all times been participating in the peasant movements in West Bengal. The role of women in the Tebhaga peasant movement during the late 1940s has become legendary in the annals of women movements of India, in which a number of women lost their lives in confrontations with the police and the forces of the landlords. The later peasant movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s were also marked by substantial participation of women in them. In the latest movements against land acquisition in Singur and Nandigram, located in two districts of West Bengal, women have played significant roles not only in spearheading the movements at the initial stages, but also in the stages of resistance when people tried to thwart the attempts of the government to forcibly take over the possession of the lands. In fact, a major proportion of those arrested in the Singur land conflict was women. All these unambiguously show the extent of women's participation not only in the making of the movements but also in determining its course and final outcome.

On the other hand, women have seldom been participating in the village-level gram sansad meetings or in varied forms of the panchayat activities. Chapter 4 reveals that most of the women are not interested to attend the gram sansad meeting for many reasons. Other scholarly researches also suggest that they are not even invited to the gram sansad meetings (Bhattacharya, 2002; Ghatak and Ghatak, 2002).