On a hot summer day in 2015, I sat down alongside Sushila, a middle-aged woman who is the leader of her village’s women’s movement.1 We sat on a woven cotton blanket on her front porch sipping chai while she recounted her transformation from being a woman constrained to the domestic sphere and forbidden to leave her house without permission into being a woman with power and voice in village politics today. Sushila’s personal transformation mirrored a transformation in her village, where historically women were not even political outsiders, but seen as apolitical, and now are a political force to be reckoned with.