Abstract: South Asian women contributed to rural reconstruction programmes between the 1920s and the 1970s. They designed and implemented development schemes for rural women in colonial and postcolonial India and Ceylon/Sri Lanka in three key areas, namely health, education, and sustainable livelihood. My paper zooms into the voluntary work of activists from two such women organisation, namely the Bengal-based Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial Association and the Ceylonese Lanka Mahila Samiti. Their voluntary work made rural areas an important place for the gender-specific organisation of development and political participation. Both organisations maintained close contacts with state authorities, with each other as well as with various international actors, such as the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW). In my paper, I explore the activists’ motivations to engage in rural development and ask, how did the women organisers understand their commitment? Furthermore, I examine collaborative efforts in rural development by analysing the transnational networks of cooperation between the Saroj Nalini Dutt Memorial Association, the Lanka Mahila Samiti and the ACWW. The objective is to gain insight into how South Asian activists engaged with the knowledge domains and discourses of rural development and to reflect on transnational rural development activism in south-south relations.

Bio: Maria Framke is a historian of modern South Asia and a research fellow at the History Department of Erfurt University, Germany. For the winter semester 2024/25, she is the substitute professor for Indian History at the University of Heidelberg. Maria has researched and published on the history of international organisations, imperial and nationalist politics, humanitarianism, and gender and ideologies in the 20th century. She received her doctorate from Jacobs University Bremen in 2011 on the topic of Indian engagements with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism in the interwar period. Her forthcoming second book with CUP examines South Asian humanitarian relief under colonial rule from 1914–1946. Her current research project “Hidden histories: Women’s role in rural development programmes in India, c. 1920–1966” examines Indian women’s contributions to rural reconstruction schemes in three key areas, namely health, education and sustainable livelihood.