As a contribution to the anthropology of democracy, this book examines a local governance reform in India - focusing particularly on the 33% women's quota entailed. It highlights the interrelatedness of "doing gender" and "doing politics" and delineates the transformations of gendered political spaces and the shifting boundaries within which women of various castes and classes negotiate the meanings of politics. The book investigates the vernacularization of democracy and analyzes local politics as socially embedded - a framework that allows the frictions and contradictions of local politics to be explained without having to take recourse to dichotomies of "traditional vs. modern" or "formal vs. informal" politics. (Series: Anthropology / Ethnologie - Vol. 53)