Remaking the State examines how development becomes a tool of governance in India's counterinsurgency efforts, with a particular focus on women's experiences in the Jungle Mahals of West Bengal. Through a rich ethnography of the state's non-military response to Maoist insurgency, the book explores how policies designed to win “hearts and minds” intersect with gendered assumptions of empowerment and pacification. Kamra shows how programmes like Muktidhara, a microcredit initiative for rural women, function as mechanisms of both governance and negotiation, as women respond not with resistance, but with strategic engagement. Situating these dynamics within broader histories of colonial and postcolonial state-making in insurgent margins, the book develops a compelling framework for understanding how states are remade from both above and below. Bridging political science, feminist development studies, and critical security studies, this volume offers a timely intervention in debates on democracy, sovereignty, and gendered governance in South Asia.

‘In this sensitive and thoughtful ethnography, Lipika Kamra shows the everyday and the spectacular ways ordinary Indian women negotiate their lives and well-being with a state that wages a relentless counterinsurgency against them, garbed in the cloak of development. A must read on the quotidian practices of state-making and self-fashioning.'

Laleh Khalili - Author of Life in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies

‘Remaking the State: Women, Development and Counterinsurgency in India offers a compelling rethinking of state-making at the margins. Kamra's central and most provocative argument is that insurgency is contained through the feminisation of development itself. By placing women at the heart of development programmes, the state reconfigures political loyalties and undercuts radical mobilisation, working in tandem with a relatively low-key coercive apparatus. Methodologically, the monograph combines multi-sited ethnography with archival and historical research to produce a richly textured analysis. In doing so, it attempts to resolve a long-standing puzzle: how a Maoist movement that once helped unseat a three-and-a-half-decade Communist regime in West Bengal was ultimately tamed with scarcely a whimper.'

Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya - Author of Government as Practice: Democratic Left in a Transforming India

‘This layered historical ethnography demonstrates the complex processes through which the state is made and unmade in its longstanding margins. The postcolonial state's instrumentalization of development as a counterinsurgency measure is powerfully depicted, as is the interlocking of state-making with counterinsurgency. Contemporary statecraft is analyzed through a much-needed gendered lens, wherein we read about-and hear and sense-women who might have participated in Maoist politics-hungama or jhamela-who also can and do simultaneously engage with the developmental state. A wonderfully rich and fascinating account of the state, development, counter-insurgency, and women's lives in India.'

Nayanika Mathur - Author of Paper Tiger: Law, Bureaucracy and the Developmental State in Himalayan India