Women: The Invisible Burden Carriers
By Moin Qazi
16 September, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Photo Crdit: Imow.org
It is an image of resilience: women bending over rice fields, women bending over to lift sacks, bending over to tend children, bending over to draw water from wells, bending over a patch of embroidery, bending over all the time. A woman’s work is never done. The most vivid image of village women is that of a woman as a daily wage farm labour, or on a family plot, legs straight, her body forming a V as hour after hour she is bent over double, hoeing, sowing, weeding, day in and day out, under clear skies and hot sun. Sometimes this work is done with a baby on her back and the only rest might be when the infant cries in hunger and mother finds a place at the edge of the field to nurse her child. She can be in her field as early as 5-30 a.m. and she will work until midday when the sun, high in the sky and burning hot, is too harsh to work under. Men will help with seasonal tasks; clearing the land, for example, ploughing the fields particularly if the plough is drawn by cattle. The image of women producers is reaped millions of times throughout the vast terrain. It is this huge and invisible workforce, which forms the backbone of our economy. And, alas the grueling nature of work that the ‘second sex’ does not appear in any statistical records.
The “typical” Indian woman, , lives in a village. She comes from a small peasant family that owns less than an acre of land, or from a landless family that depends on the whims of big farmers for sporadic work and wages. Her occupation is field work, chiefly harvesting, planting and weeding, for which she often receives less than twenty rupees a day – in many cases, half the wage that a man receives for the same amount of work.
From 5 a.m. in the morning, she is up and around, working about house, taking care of the family and the whims of her husband. Millions of such women are also wage-earners, working the whole day in the farm. Back home in the evening, it is back to cooking and more chores. Yet, these women match their male folk in everything – hard work, initiative, patience and adjustment. At the economically lower end of the strata, women are saddled with husbands who only drink and help produce children, but they still work from dust to dawn, providing succour to their families, including a drinking allowance to errant husbands.
She has to juggle this labour with her other full-time job, the care of the house and the children. Her husband does not help her; indeed he does not even consider what she does at home as work. A village woman starts her life from scratch every day. Even a single chapatti, the Indian flat bread, has behind it a chain of drudgery that has not changed in thousands of years. To make chapatti, a woman needs water, which is often several miles away by foot. She also needs wheat, which she must harvest by scythe, under a blazing sun, in a back-breaking bent-forward motion, and then grind it by hand. To cook the bread she needs fuel, either firewood, which she collects herself, or cow-dung cakes, which she makes herself. To get the dung she must feed the cow, and to feed the cow she must walk several miles to collect suitable grasses (this assumes that the family is lucky enough to even have a cow; many do not). The bread is at last prepared over a small mud stove built into the dirt floor of her hut. While she cooks, she breast feeds one child and watches three others. If she fails in any of these tasks, or performs them too slowly, her husband often feels it is his prerogative to beat her. And yet invariably she considers her husband a god. Years of servitude have taken their toll. The village woman wants and needs love, compassion and understanding.
The Indian woman is shackled by obstructions such as inheritances laws for agricultural land in favour of men, preference for sons, patrilocal marriage, female seclusion from decision making etc. Few rural women own or control land and this handicaps them in warding of poverty for themselves and their families. She is a victim of not just these circumstances, but of social attitudes. She is a victim not of culture as much as of its digression. Yet, somewhere, the woman is trying to emerge. The urban woman may present a different picture to a certain extent. But it is the rural woman whose visage has to change if the country at large has to reflect a healthy, non-complexed female gender composition. The house cannot move without her. Take family planning. Take education, caring or bearing children, which have been conventional duties.
The rural woman may have moved out of traditional roles, only to bear responsibility for half of the world’s food production and produce 60 to 80 percent of food in most developing countries. Women are the mainstays of small-scale agriculture, the farm labour force and day-to-day family subsistence. In rural areas it is the women who produce secondary crops, gather food and firewood, process, store and prepare family food and fetch water for the family.
This is her condition in the age of women empowerment, in an age when local self governments have already granted her 33 percent reservation and when a debate for special reservation in national politics is storming all platforms. Probably, the basic ill is that her empowerment itself has been viewed narrowly. It practical implementation has been lost in its voluble cacophony. Financial empowerment gave her the freedom to step out of the house and work. But not for her own freedom or pleasure. But only to add to the family income or decrease her husband’s and other male member’s share of work on the farm.
(Moin Qazi is a well known banker, author and Islamic researcher .He holds doctorates in Economics and English. He was Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester. He has contributed articles to Indian and foreign publications including The Times of India, Statesman, Indian Express, The Hindu, Third World Features (Malaysia), SIDA Rapport (Sweden), Depth News (Philippines), Far Eastern Economic Review and Asiaweek (Hong Kong).He has authored several books on religion, rural finance, culture and handicrafts. He is also a recipient of UNESCO World Politics Essay Gold Medal and Rotary International’s Vocational Excellence Award. He is based in Nagpur and can be reached at [email protected])
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