I found myself more interested in the reverse of that story: What kept the women inside in the first place? How did women spend their lives?

At this point I delved into a world of shocking statistics. Despite India’s prolonged economic expansion, the percentage of women in the work force remains dismally low — lower than in any country in the G-20 other than Saudi Arabia — and it is dropping. More than 70 percent of women say they have to ask permission from a parent, husband or in-law if they want to leave home to visit a health center or to see a friend in the neighborhood.

Peepli Khera seemed like a good place to learn why this state of affairs had persisted. Life there was being rearranged in tangible ways by economic growth — specifically, a booming buffalo meat export industry. Last summer, the increase in female employment in the village had erupted into a raw power struggle, with the conservative male caste leaders demanding that the women resign from their jobs. I thought we — the photographer, Andrea Bruce; the interpreter, Ravi Mishra; and I — would merely plant ourselves there and watch them duke it out.

This was easier said than done. In the end we made nine reporting trips to the village, staying until late at night — when the whiskey kicked in — and arriving before dawn. We collected firewood with the women, accompanied them as they went looking for work, and tagged along on court dates. We spent so much time in the village that the people there began to regard us with sincere pity.

Then they began to ignore us. This is when the work began to bear fruit. We became professional eavesdroppers. Four months into our reporting, we were in the village for a series of tense, clamorous late-night meetings, in which the elders grudgingly decreed that the women could return to work.

That night, the headman, Roshan, pushed us out of the village with his hands pressed against our backs; later he admitted that he had done so because he did not want us to witness violence. We returned to New Delhi and almost immediately learned that a large group of villagers had assaulted Geeta and her friends, also leaving her husband badly injured. We returned to find our subjects utterly changed — unhurt for the most part, but humiliated and shrunken. One teenage girl never forgave us for failing to protect her.

In real life, stories do not have crisp endings, and the battle of Peepli Khera was no different: When we returned this month, it looked as though Geeta and her friends had gotten much of what they had wanted. They had held on to their jobs and avoided begging for forgiveness or paying a fine.