1. Gender, Language, and Development in Kumaon
The Himalayas have, for centuries, been a subjectof awe and mystery for the
world owing to its magnificent and almost un-chartableterrain. Consequently,
even though many geographers as well as ethnographers havemade attempts to
understand the land and its people, the area is still largely shrouded in secrecy
and much research is needed to fully comprehend its cultures and knowledge
systems. Therecent (post independence) interest in decoding the hill cultures
should be understood in the context of emerging national boundaries that lay
claim to various parts of the Great Himalayas and therefore in order to secure
these national boundaries it becomes imperative to understand and conquer the
mighty mountains. After the occupation of Tibet, the Chinese government
developed roads and railway lines as well as other modes of communication to
establish controlover the far- reaching corners of the region including the Indo-
Chinese border. This has created immense anxiety for competing nations (such as
India and the United States) to respond to the perceived threat posed by the
Chinese expansion. Hence these nations also feel the need to establish some form
of controlover the Himalayan region and its people.
In his seminal work ‘Hindus of the Himalayas’, Gerrald Berreman explored the
social and political history of western Himalayas (presentday Uttarakhand) and
explored how various ruling regimes- starting fromthe Nepalese conquest, the
British conquest, and finally the government of independent India- dealt with the
region and its people. Whereas the British government exploited the region for its
timber, it was largely indifferent towards the use of forests and its products by
the natives. Widespread deforestation took place in the present day Uttarakhand
during the colonial rule, but the naivety of the hill people hampered their
comprehension of this larger exploitation. On the other hand, as the government
of IndependentIndia took charge of the new nation, they claimed control over
the forests and as a result discouraged free useof these resources by the hill
people. Unfortunately, due to rampantcorruption and inefficiency of the new
state, the non-hill elite took over the exploitation of the hills as natives watched in

2. utter disbelief creating an atmosphereof mistrusttowards thegovernment. The
new national elite took over the unfinished task of the colonial elite with renewed
vigour, using the Himalayan forests to meet their personalcommercial interests.
The brunt of this deforestation was, needless to say, borneby the most
vulnerable natives of the region who depended entirely on forests and its
products for their basic needs. Depletion of water resources, landslides, and other
natural calamities followed which obviously didn’t affect those‘non-native’
contractors who lived far away fromthe hills.
The resistance of the hill people over controlof their forests has been very strong
since independence, so much so that it can be identified as the mostimportant
demand of the natives. The formation of Van Panchayats was a responseto this
resistance, but clearly large scale deforestation by non-nativecontractors
continued unabated, as a result of which the demand for a separate hill state of
Uttarakhand was made. The key idea behind the demand for a separate state was
the exploitation of hill people by the non- natives or ‘plains’ (referred to as ‘desi’)
people. Fromnatural resources to government jobs, the desipeople were taking
over what rightfully belonged to the ‘paharis’ (hill people). However, a decade
and a half has passed since the formation of Uttarakhand and the exploitation of
natural resources has notstopped, albeit the elite of the state have now joined
the bandwagon in exploiting the resources of the most vulnerableand
ecologically sustainable communities of the region.
Itis therefore evident that this desi-paharidichotomy is mostimportant when it
comes to the idea of development in Uttarakhand. What does this dichotomy
refer to? Is it pertaining to native and non-nativeand if that’s the case who is a
real native? Or does it refer to people who live in the hills and consequently in a
certain culture(s) which has developed over millennia and is based on the
knowledgesystems developed by the people of the hills (to makea life in the
harsh terrain of the Himalayas). The fact is that people have lived in the Himalayas
for millennia and survived and this is no mean task as the ‘developers’ both
national and international are now realizing as they started working in the region
with these communities. So who is a pahariand whatdistinguishes paharis froma
desis?

3. The author attempts to understand the idea of development in Uttarakhand
through the conceptualization of language as the foundation on which reality is
constructed. This view has been the focus of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee
Whorf’s worksand the author believes that in order to truly decode any culture,
it’s imperative that we decode its language- not only in terms of transliteration
and translation but also understanding the larger socio-economic and cultural
context in which it is spoken. According to the author, the very idea of
development proposed by the governmentas well as international funding
agencies that are pumping in millions of dollars to ‘develop’ paharis, does not
correspond to the idea of development of the paharis. No wonder they have been
labeled as ‘incompetent’ and ‘lazy’ people who don’tmake an effort to co-
operate with those who wish to ‘empower’ them. The author shall be examining
the Watershed Development Projects in Uttarakhand that are being funded by
the World Bank and question- firstly, the very idea of development that is being
expressed through these projects, secondly, the means through which this
development is being implemented. Linguistic analysis of the projectand its
strategies shall be employed.
The paper shall also make a gendered analysis of the development in kumaon by
examining whether the languageof women automatically creates a subordinate
position for them in social institutions and systems of Uttarakhand. The idea of
difference between the language of men and women has been explored in the
works of Robin Lakeoff and Dale Spender. Later Jennifer Coates’ phenomenal
revelation of difference among women’s language based on their socio-economic
and political contexts debunked the myth created by this sweeping generalization
that women’s language places them in a subordinateposition across cultures. The
author attempts to study the language of Kumaoni women and understand how
this language allows (or not) their empowerment. Uttarakhand is a so-called
‘money order’ and subsistenceeconomy wherethe nature of work as well as
excessivemale migration makes women the primary participants in cultural as
well as economic sphere.

4. The language of the developers
The World Bank, through the Uttarakhand Watershed Development Project, has
invested $170 million in the state (cite directorate). In the face of rampant
deforestation and a resultant water scarcity, international aid poured in and
focused on ‘developing’ the naturalresources of the state. In its 1992 World
Development Report titled Development and the Environment, the World Bank
envisaged the need to “integrate environmental considerations into development
policymaking,” arguing that “continued, and even accelerated, economic and
human development is sustainableand can be consistentwith improving
environmental conditions.” In the Foreword to the report, Lewis T. Preston, the
then President of the World Bank espoused the idea of ‘tradeoffs’ between
income growth and environmental protection, rather than ‘an absoluteapproach
to protection’, only for the policy makers dealing with ‘scarceresources.’
So nations with depleting environmental resources as well as low income growth,
which in other words arethe so called ‘Third World’ nations are the ones that
would have to manage constant tradeoffs between environmentand income
growth. This rhetoric automatically excludes rich nations that are already high on
income growth and have smartenvironmentalpolicies focusing on outsourcing
environmentally damaging activities. The focus falls on the very nations that are
paying the price of other people’s development.
Even though the reportmakes a compelling argument for the restoration of
environmental damage and emphasizes how the poor of developing nations are
the ones that bear the bruntof depleting quality of air, water, and land, their idea
of ‘development’ stresses on the inevitability and necessity of growth. The larger
aim is still to join the bang-wagon of developed nations and envision capitalistic
neo-liberal development as the only possibility. The reportlacks any scopefor
imagining an alternative model of development that might be more in sync with
the socio-culturaland geographic needs of various communities across
developing nations.
The situation here can be looked at froma ‘post-development’ perspective(which
draws it’s idea from Post-modernism’swhatLyotard termed as ‘incredulity

5. towards metanarratives’) thatfoccusses “on the texts and words of development-
on the ways that development is written, narrated and spoken; on the
vocabularies deployed in development texts to constructthe world as an unruly
terrain requiring management and intervention; on their stylized and repetitive
formand content, their spatial imagery and symbolism, their use (and abuse) of
history, their modes of establishing expertise and authority and silencing
alternative voices; on the forms of knowledgethat development produces and
assumes; and on the power relations it underwrites and reproduces.” (Rai, 2002.
cited fromCrush,J (1995) ThePower of Development)
In the case of Uttarakhand, this becomes relevant because development work
planned and implemented by foreign aid agencies completely neglects the
cultural responses thatcommunities in this area have developed over several
millennia. By assuming that these communities need to be empowered, and that
the ‘how’ of this empowermentmust come fromoutside experts and knowledge,
there’s a sweeping generalization that only western scientific knowledgecan
providethe answer to environmentalproblems. We shall discuss this in detail in
the subsequentparts of this paper wherethe author discusses how many efficient
indigenous systemof knowledgeand economy are dying as a result of this neo-
liberal mindset popularized by foreign agencies, unwittingly.
Nancy Fraser has discussed the ‘post-socialist’ condition in her book Justice
Interruptus, which can be employed to explain the larger picture behind
acceptance of capitalist neo-liberal development. She argues that after the fall of
the Soviet Union in 1989 thereemerged a stronger acceptanceof capitalism
mainly because of the “absenceof any credible progressivevision of an
alternative to the present order…whathas collapsed, in other words, is not justa
set of (erstwhile) actually existing institutional arrangements but belief in the
principal ideal that inspired struggles for socialtransformation for the last century
and a half. The immediate consequence is what Jurgen Habermas has called “the
exhaustion of (leftwing) utopian energies.”

6. She further examines the post-socialistconditions by pointing towards a general
“de-coupling” of politics of recognition and redistribution in an either/or pattern.
The demands for recognition havebeen projected in such a fashion that the
demands for redistribution haveeclipsed. In the context of Uttarakhand, the
strugglefor a separatestate (fromUttar Pradesh) was based on this very duo of
recognition and redistribution. The people residing in the Himalayan region of
Uttar Pradesh wanted a separatestate mainly because they felt cultural and
economic exploitation at the hands of the ‘plains’ people. Itwas believed that the
resources of the hills werebeing plundered for the development of non-hill
people. Even in the public sector, most job vacancies in the hills were being taken
by candidates that werenot paharis.
However, in the aftermath of the formation of Uttarakhand, development
became more about cultural recognition of ethnic paharis and exploitation of the
natural resources by paharielite was ignored by intellectuals and media alike.
The third, and mostprominent feature of the post socialist condition is “a
resurgenteconomic liberalism.” As the demands for recognition are separated
fromdemands for redistribution, the latter takes center stage and what follows is
rising global inequality. In the era succeeding the 1990s wehavewitnessed not
justsoaring income inequalities, but as Fraser points out, inequalities in
“capabilities as measured by access to clean water and air; education,
contraception, and health care; paid work and nutritious food; freedomfrom
torture and rape.”
Examining the case of Uttarakhand Watershed Development Projects fromthis
point of view, we can see how the project, albeit emphasizing the need to restore
water and soil in the region, works under a larger neo-liberal capitalistic set up
and doesn’tchallenge the fact that depletion of natural resources arethe
consequenceof this uncritical rhetoric of growth. Unlimited accumulation of
resources for never ending growth is one of the key features of a capitalistic
economic structure. As Marx pointed out, alienation of labour fromhis/her
productas well as the act of producing is an integral part of capitalistic
production. The consequence is that human beings do not enjoy the very essence

7. of life- activity- because activity is now appropriated by the owners of means of
production and turned into a dull activity that needs no creativity on the part of
the producer. This activity becomes a mere means to earn a living and life actually
starts at the end of the work day.
In the villages of Uttarakhand, as Berreman pointed out, before ‘development’
arrived, the villagers would work with and for each other. He describes how if
someone wanted any kind of personalwork to be done, which couldn’t be
accomplished by a family, they would invite the village people to help them. This
invitation was never ignored by the villagers and mostpeople, both men and
women turned up for help. This used to be more of a leisure activity than work
because people chit-chatted, had snacks offered by the hosts, and worked
together. Similarly during the harvestseason, peoplehelped each other because
very few families could afford to hire labourers.
Furthermore, the assumptions of ‘under-development’ and ‘un-empowerment’
need to be critically analyzed. There needs to be someclarity on the causeand
effect of this equation- are people of Uttarakhand better off after decades of
integration within the larger capitalist industrial developmental ideology of the
nation? Is their current state of ‘underdevelopment’ a consequenceof decades of
forcefulintegration within a larger national capitalistic-industrialdevelopment
which neglects their socio-culturalsensitivities? Berreman, in his field work
conducted in the late 1950s in Uttarakhand, noted that, “The poverty of Paharis is
proverbial, but this reputation is based on their frugality, the simple clothing and
equipment they possess by plains standards, and their inelegant and unvaried
diet wherein coarsemillets substitute for rice. They do not sharethe precarious
life of many plains people in food-deficit areas. They have sufficientlands, regular
rainfall, and a tradition of maintaining the productivity of their fields by crop
rotation and fertilizers, so that they havea consistently adequate food supply.”
Linguistic constructionof reality andunderstanding the ideaof development
throughdecoding the languages of Uttarakhand
During her field visits, the author had the chance to speak with many NGO
workers who areresponsiblefor community mobilization in the project. These

8. workers, mostof them are high caste, hindi/kumaoni speaking, and upper middle
class literate people who unanimously echoed the problems caused due to the
fact that all the paper work had to be done in English. “They are trying to work for
the people of Uttarakhand but expect to communicate with them in English which
is hardly even spoken by literate people in the hills. Imaginehow they can ever
connect with people for whomeven Hindi is the language of outsiders?”
complained Dr. Dinesh Joshi, eminent social worker and founder of Himalaya
Study Circle, Pithoragarh (an NGO). He compared this with the case of Nepal
whereforeign aid has been much better utilized becauseNepali remains the
official language of communication even for expat officers.
Languageas not justa mapping tool but the very foundation on which reality is
constructed, is the lens through which the author looks at the case of
Uttarakhand. The difference between the two opinions can be understood with
the fact that in the former there’s an assumption that there’s a given objective
reality which is decoded through language. Therefore, any language is good
enough to do the job, which also insinuates that there is nothing wrong with
homogenization of language and that if ultimately a handfulof languages take
over the whole world then mankind won’t really lose much. On the other hand,
when we look at language as the foundation of reality, we believe that there is no
given objective reality and that what we speak of is what we see. GeorgeW.
Grace explained it succinctly in these words, “..it’s thespeaker who choses what
kind of event he/she will representit as being. The choice is not dictated (except
in a very general way) by whatactually happened. However, it’s limited… by the
kinds of acts and objects and individuals which the particular language recognizes
(i.e. has words for).” (Grace, 1987-pp33)
Grace asserts thatone of the assumptions with which this reality-construction
view of language is defined is, “that a language is shaped by its culture, and a
culture is given expression in its language, to such an extent that it’s impossible to
say whereone ends and the other begins.” In the development work being
conducted in Uttarakhand, the talk of ‘community participation’ and ‘grass-root
mobilization’ appears hollow when the planners do not, to start with, understand
that the culture of the hills doesn’tsupport, for instance, a money oriented

9. economy, nor do the people understand rational bureaucracy (Weber, 1978)
wherethere is de-personalization of the office. “We worked in the hills of
Kumaon for almostseven years, trying to bring about positive development. By
the end of it the projectwas labelled successfuland villagers ended up making
good money. But they lost the senseof solidarity because now they thought of
themselves as either projectmanagers, contractors, labourers,etc- they were no
more members of a close knit community where everyoneused to work for
everyone. All of them started thinking of money and power before doing a job,”
lamented Dr. Joshi.
Why the author argues that this is a negative development can be understood
with the help of Malinowski’s idea of culture as a responseto biological needs.
The culture of the hills has developed over millennia to enable its communities to
cope with a terrain, climate, vegetation, etc that is very different fromthe
geographicalbackground of other communities, especially the communities of
those who are in-chargeof bringing about development in the state. By
neglecting the language, and consequently the cultural know-how of the hill
people, the experts might, albeit unwittingly, be causing more damage than
development.
The most important difference between the languageof the developers and the
ones that need development is the fact that the prior (both hindi and English
speaking) speak a language that has its script, whereas the latter speak an oral
dialect. Malinowskiworked extensively on Melanesian languages that are oral in
character and made a similar point about the inherent problem in trying to
understand people who work with a different language system.
This is relevant for Uttarakhand since all the languages and dialects spoken here
are oral in character. He argued that in an oral language, “a statement, spoken in
real life, is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered. For
each verbal statement by a human being has the aim and function of expressing
some thoughtor feeling actual at that moment and in that situation, and
necessary for somereason or other to be made known to another person or
persons- in order either to servepurposes of common action, or to establish ties

10. of purely social communion, or else to deliver the speaker of violent feelings or
passions…. Sincethe whole world of ‘things-to-be-expressed’ changes with the
level of culture, with geographical, social, and economic conditions, the
consequenceis that the meaning of a word mustbe always gathered, not froma
passivecontemplation of this word, butfroman analysis of its functions, with
reference to the given culture.”
Women and language
When studying the economy of Uttarakhand it’s imperative that the role of
women be acknowledged as the state registers rampantmale migration leaving
women as the de facto heads of families. This and the primacy of subsistence
agriculture enlarges the role of women in the economy of Uttarakhand. Women’s
language was broughtin focus by Robin Lakeoff and Dale Spender, both of whom
argued that women’s languageis non-assertiveand submissiveand that is the
reason for their subordination in the larger society in general. Jennifer Coates, on
the other hand, through her path breaking work on the private conversations of
women, debunked this myth and asserted that such a sweeping generalization
results in a false analysis that stereotypes ‘feminine’ language.
“..Lakeoff included hedges in her account of women’s languageand claimed that
they were an important aspectof female speakers’ style, a style she described as
tentative and unassertive… (this) is incorrect… hedges are multifunctional and can
be used… wherewe need to be sensitive to the face needs of others, wherewe
need to qualify assertions to avoid total commitment to a particular point of view
which we might wantto withdraw from, wherewe engage in the struggle to find
the rightwords, wherewe wantto avoid taking up hard and fastpositions and
want to facilitate open discussion… (they) area valuable resourcefor speakers, a
resourcewe should never underestimate.”
The point is that any development projectin Uttarakhand should emphasize not
only on the native languages but especially on the language of women. During her
field visitin Bageshwar districtof Kumaon, wherethe projecthas been running
with much fervor, theauthor found that the modus operandiof community
mobilization focusses only on public speech and debates, and there is no effort to
mobilize the women at the grassroots by entering the domain of the private

11. sphere. The project directorate website can be studied to understand how
women are encouraged to first participate in the public spherethrough public
meetings, and take up jobs that are based on a very western idea of separation
between work place and home. The project neglects the private lives of women
and only mentions the activities that they indulge in, in the public sphere.
The culture of the hills doesn’tmake this distinction between the public and the
private. Work and leisure are entangled in such a way that it’s impossible to say
whereone ends and the other starts.
Gender and Development in Kumaon
The development discoursein the state is leaning against the interests of women
as can be seen in the increased emphasis on growing cash crops. Oneof the
objectives of the watershed development programs is to encouragethe
production of cash crops for sale in urban markets. This has come without any
effort to combat the negative effects of cash crop production that has been
witnessed across the world wherein women are usually relegated to food
production whereas men take up the task of cash crop production, resulting in a
“gendered shiftin the management of household resources” (Rai, 2002; pp 7). In
Uttarakhand, women anyway havethe added responsibility of gathering forest
products and fetching water over long distances, in addition to household chores,
upkeep of cattle, and if they still have sometime left, farming with the men. The
introduction of cash crops withouta careful strategy to combat its negative
effects in the household resourceallocation can make the situation worse.
In its report(World Development Report, 1992) theWorld Bank espoused that
subsidies on fossilfuels and other essentials like water be revoked by the third
world states, and it was in this context that development aid was forwarded to
these nations in the succeeding decades. The effect of reduced state spending on
basics havehad “an overall negative impact on the social indicators for the poor
of both sexes. However, wesee gendered differentials in the ways in which these
policies are played out.” The increased burden of providing alternatives in the
face of cuts in subsidies fall inevitably on women.
The development aid has been pouring into the third world nations post the
globalization of economies (in India post 1990s).Itis obvious that mostnations

12. have been forced to globalize as a penalty for being unable to pay back massive
loans to the World Bank and IMF. StructuralAdjustmentPrograms havebeen
imposed on these nations to ‘save’ their economies and thus the terms of
globalization have been favourablefor the developed nations at the cost of
developing states. The feminist movements, in most parts of the world, that have
emerged in the postglobalization era, have echoed the need for recognition at
the expense of redistribution (Rai, 2002; pp 10). However, women in Uttarakhand
have equally focused on the politics of conservation (Chipko Movement) and
consequently demanded their sharein the natural resources that are key to their
survival. Thedevelopment workers mustkeep this in mind as all the talk about
recognizing women’s place in the economy is ineffective unless a change in policy
towards redistribution is broughtabout. This is wherethe privatelanguage of
women becomes a very potent tool in analyzing what is real development for the
women in Kumaon.
Distrust towards the government
The educated paharielite fromurban areas of Uttarakhand like Almora, Nainital,
Pithoragarh, Haldwani, etc, weremuch involved in the National Freedom
Struggle, however the samecannot be said for villagers living in far flung areas of
the state. Moreover, for many communities, especially those that lived near the
Indo-Tibetborder, the question of exchanging the colonial master with an elite
indian master was not of much relevance.
The people, in general, wererather unperturbed by the fact that they werebeing
ruled by colonial masters. The British administrators in the hills did not meddle
much with the socio-culturalset up of natives, and, most importantly, even
though there was rampantde-forestation (by colonial masters) for infrastructural
development in North India as well as meeting the needs of the two World Wars,
forests wereopen to the public.
Therefore even after independence, as corroborated by Berreman’s accounts of a
garhwalivillage, the discourse of national development by the newly formed
governmentwas not taken very well by the people of Uttarakhand. The
restrictions on forests and traditional forms of agriculturethat involved burning

13. crops and fallow lands, were a direct blow to vulnerable farmers who depended
on these for their survival. Thepopular rhetoric pertaining to mass participation
in the freedomstruggle, and later an easy acceptance of nationalist development
in the region stands contested in the light of available data.
Hence, it is questionable that people of Uttarakhand chose to follow the larger
national planned industrial development, rather they had little choice but to
integrate into the system. The constantopposition towards the ways and means
of the newly formed state, which was infested by large scale corruption, and the
exploitation of the forestresources by non paharicontractors and the
governmentof Uttar Pradesh, erupted in the formof social movements like
CHIPKO.1
The case of the Bhotiya communities that inhabit the high altitude zones of
Central Himalayas and are known for their ability to survivein one of the toughest
Himalayan terrains throws light on the implications of ‘development’ and
integration into the main stream. Bhotiyas are mobile communities that have
lived in the Indo-Chineseborder areas for centuries and carried on trade through
difficult passes in the Higher Himalayas. These communities not only moved
across various destinations for tradepurposes2
, butalso developed efficient
knowledgesystems pertaining to animal husbandry, crop production, and forest
use that are “interdependently linked through seasonalmigrations and energy
flows.”
1 Many more social movements,albeitata smallerlevel,followedCHIPKO.The resgular
occurence of anti timbermafiaandanti alcoholismmovementsinUttarakhandisanexample.
2 Takingproducts like sugar,grain,andwool productsfromIndiaand exchangingthem
for salt,raw wool,borax,etcinTibet.

14. The bhotiya trade reached it’s highestpoint around the end of the 19th century
as wool machines wereintroduced in the Indian markets that demanded raw
wool broughtin by these traders. Moreimportantly, the period was marked by
lowest tax rates and duties on the Bhotiyas by the British administration. Even
though with rising industrialization in the plains the bhotiya trade lost out, but the
biggest blow came with the closureof India-China border following the war in
1962. As a consequence these communities started migrating towards the plains
to secure education and employment opportunities, leaving behind a treasureof
indegenous knowledgedeveloped over centuries of life experience in the hills.
“One of the gravestforms of Indian state intervention was a large military road
building program, which opened the lowest parts of all the Bhotiya valleys in
Uttarakhand.” (cited fromRawat & Sharma 1997, by Bergmann, et al. 2008).
The bhotiya communities of Kumaon came together for the first time with the
formation of Kumaon Bhotiya People’s Federation in 1947 articulating their
aspirations for unlimited access to forests and grasslands. (Bergmann etal. 2008)
In this push and pull relationship with colonial masters and the governmentof
IndependentIndia, the main objective of adminitrators was to securea sortof
legitimacy based on the idea of “civilization and civility, which, in turn depended
upon powerfulconstructions of gender and gender relations.” (Rai, 2002) Gender,
therefore, was an important area that was on the centrestage of this tug of war.
As Rai points out in the context of third world colonized nations, that “feminist
discourses werecaughtbetween two impulses, and fractured further as the
nationalist movements progressed. Oneimpulsewas universalist- therecognition
of global patriarchy. (However) their particularist, intimate narratives of the lives
of women under traditional cultures were, however, often co-opted by imperialist
media to re-inforcethe message of ‘the civilizing mission’ that was the ‘white
man’s burden’. Women within nationalist movements largely dissociated
themselves from these ‘imperial maternalist’ discourses. However, they too were
caught between the attraction of a universalistlanguageof citizenship rights, and

15. the particular cultural and historical boundaries whin which they knew women
worked and lived.” (Rai, 2002. pp- 20)
The opposition towards the state’s effortto exploit nature in the serviceof
modern capitalism, pronouncing indegenous systems of agricultureas ‘backward’
and in-efficient’, as well as the “priviledging of environmental knowledgebased
on Western experience,” was gendered as evident in cases like CHIPKO
movement in Uttarakhand. Women, in Uttarakhand, thereforeplayed an
important role in setting up the discourseof development through their collective
agency based on their own real life experiences.
Conclusion
The author attempted to look into the intersection of Language, Gender, and
Development in Uttarakhand through examining a particular development project
funded largely by the World Bank that has added to the discourseof the
inevitability of marketoriented growth in the state, even though the means to
achieve that growth is rooted in nature. It’s thereforeargued that an efficient
decoding of the languages of Uttarakhand can reveal whether the people of the
state actually believe in this particular concept of development, and sincewomen
are important socio-political as well as economic stakeholders in uttarakhand it
becomes even morerelevant to study this situation based on their linguistic
styles.

16. Submitted by
Ruchika Rai
M.Phil CSSS/SSS
2nd
semester
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