LAUSR

merely as ideological or instrumental pawns in political parties. Thwarting the assumption that women only play second fiddle to men in political parties, either as subordinates or proxies, Bedi argues that women have managed to use the social expectations of their gender creatively, to produce a distinct kind of political presence. This presence borrows heavily from the traditionally allotted cultural and domestic spheres of women, and merges them with their political ambitions and personal styles, to manifest as a system of doing politics, unheard of in the rational-legal definitions of politics. Drawing from the ideas of Laura Ahearn (‘Language andAgency’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 109–137, 2001) and Saba Mahmood (Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) on agency, Bedi contests the jaded template of agency as oppositional, rational and liberal, as is prevalent in the western feminist context. Instead, she fixes her lens on the micro-level dynamics of local transactional politics, where women are key actors. For the women in question here, it is often the co-option of male registers of action, rather than resistance to them, that enables agentive action. Bedi’s own act of wearing a sari, green bangles andmangalsutra (a necklace symbolizing a woman’s marital status) for her fieldwork, which she calls her ‘costume’ (83), and her ability to navigate freely and unhesitatingly amongmale and female party workers, is tellingly agentive and useful. Manifested in the trope of ‘adjustment’, which many of her informants refer to as ‘daily negotiations’ in their domestic lives which enable their public roles, are spaces of agentive action, which can be both conforming or subversive in nature. Within the party’s non-liberal framework on gender relations and its rigid structural restrictions for women, these women locate gaps and seize opportunities for expressing their innovative and unique political personalities. Not only are these women recipients of patronage, they are also fixers and distributors of political favours. This positionality, which enables women to receive, disperse as well as fix political transactions, despite structural odds, is what Bedi has called ‘women’s political matronage’. Bedi’s conceptualization of ‘political matronage’ introduces a new vantage point for investigating the female subject in urban local politics, a subject who is simultaneously powerful and vulnerable, giver and receiver, actor and spectator, conforming and subversive. This book contributes to debates on women in religious and cultural-nationalist political parties in India, and to scholarship on political charisma, brokerage and grassroots-level politics. It argues for a new theory of the ‘feminist political subject’, provoking us to rethink and redefine theoretical boundaries and material markers of women’s engagement with politics, and the intersection of the private, public and political.