After the shock came adaptation and self-organization
A farmer in the village of Murkata, in northeastern India, on December 23, 2020. Biju Boro/AFP
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“Everything is collapsing”, is something we were often told during the first weeks of the lockdown. Its harshness and speed turned lives upside down. Male migration to cities, construction sites, and labour-intensive agricultural regions had at that time become an essential component of family income and mobility aspirations.
As with other moments of acute crisis such as times of wars or famines, a reorganisation of the sexual division of labour took place. In this instance, women became the cornerstone for family survival. With few exceptions, urban incomes – most of which are earned by men – have evaporated. Commercial agriculture had been steadily gaining ground in recent decades, making India one of the world’s leading exporters of products such as rice, meat, spices and cane sugar. It was severely affected when sales channels and agribusinesses came to a standstill.
The only alternative was subsistence agriculture using crops such as rice, sorghum, millet and vegetables, which is more often based on local circuits. Such agriculture had become devalued by modernisation and become highly feminized. Now it has proven its full usefulness: feeding families and creating employment.
Women have moreover been campaigning for landowners to revive production on their fallow land to create local work. They have been negotiating a return to manual, more labour-intensive techniques, be it for irrigation, ploughing or harvesting. The women share this work and accept small payment or payments in kind. They reinvent local sales channels – the markets were closed for over six months, leading to the proliferation of itinerant or temporary roadside sales. Some men help out, while others leave this survival business to women.
Women have also been sharing food with their neighbours. They cook collectively, sometimes with outside support. They will queue for food for hours at public distribution points, which as cornerstones of Indian social policy have proven highly valuable during the crisis, albeit with very different results depending on the region.
One key concern is that the government’s still-suspended public employment program, which is a cornerstone of Indian social policy. The most fortunate women, who are often the richest as they are supposedly more “creditworthy”, have been able to access specific subsidised Covid loans, to buy livestock or to pay off debts. But as elsewhere in India, the promised cash transfers have only reached a tiny minority.
In recent decades, Dalit families had slowly managed to break away from their dependency on high-caste landowners. During the crisis, women returned to knock on the doors of their former landlords, begging for a little rice or to pawn their jewellery. They cook only local vegetables and have gone back to picking wild plants. During the strict lockdown, they negotiated with the police to be able to move around, more or less successfully. They have also campaigned against harassment from financial companies seeking their dues.
The men, who had previously been away due to migration, are now also at home. Some are proactive, trying to get a few hours or days of work here and there, including as daily agricultural labourers, which had been a denigrated occupation and left to women. But many now seem shattered, as though in shock, and most certainly threatened in their masculinity due to the sudden loss of their role as breadwinner. “We are not ashamed,” the women regularly say when we ask them about this apathy among the men.
