Great ideas often visit us when our minds are at their dullest and our hearts at their faintest. We acknowledge a stark reality of everyday life, wherein a feat is all about managing to accomplish the ordinary and holding on to it. In the everyday life of women, feats rarely come in leaps and bounds; instead, they chug along like painfully slow passenger trains, showing up on shabby platforms. The beauty lies in arriving late but arriving nonetheless.
Feats are often defined as acts of extraordinariness achieved with great courage, boldness, and skill. Perhaps it is time to de-edify such words from the dictionaries, whose diktats fail the tests of life and render meanings nonsensical.
For working women, everyday life is full of feats. Imagine juggling household responsibilities and professional goals. Racing against time, all the time. Yet, this is the everyday reality for many urban working women. A journey from 'nowhere' to 'don't know where!' It is all about sustaining the semblance of progress in an environment where deadlines loom, opportunities slip by, and the grind never pauses. Urban women strive to find meaning in their professional and personal roles, often without applause and acknowledgement. And, dear society is still comfortable with unequal pay!
Working women in modern societies often experience guilt for balancing professional and personal responsibilities, desiring flexible working hours and leaving to balance their dual roles, and feeling torn between workplace demands and societal expectations. Where is the sense of belongingness in cultures and traditions that undervalue flexibility and shared responsibilities?
While noting the struggles of the urban women and their white-collar jobs, we are reminded that our narrative overlooked the rural women, the invisible workforce forming the backbone of rural and agricultural economy and society. We decided to glorify their lives. Exhibit their mythical world of emancipation and charisma. But what feat can the poorly-fitted patriarchal lenses achieve?
The camera captured women with veiled faces, subdued tongues, cracked heels, and sore bodies, letting the wrinkled tattoos tell the tales of survival through their mundane lives, outrunning men to chisel the fields with tools that don’t even fit into their hands. For them, moulding the hands according to the tools was a feat, as was enduring backbreaking labour, fetching water, gathering firewood, and safeguarding precious seeds from pests and rot.
These women also bear the weight of preserving cultural practices, water conservation techniques, folk traditions, and rituals tied to agriculture. Yet, their health and hygiene are often neglected. Malnutrition, anaemia, and other health conditions are common, but these women persist, often with smiles, masking their struggles. They suffer silently, and their resilience is often mistaken for strength.
Despite all of this, they remain the backbone of agriculture. Their efforts are not limited to producing food; they also engage in post-harvest processing, animal husbandry, and small-scale trades to supplement their income. There is an urgent need to address their challenges, from providing sustainable tools that reduce their physical burden to improving their health and hygiene facilities. Policies focusing on their holistic well-being could transform their lives and amplify their contributions to agriculture and rural economies.
What left one restless was how the hands that count seeds and sort grains with such precision falter when asked to count rupees. How is it that women who measure rain in spoonfuls and know the worth of every drop struggle to measure the worth of their own labour?
Sadly, one realises that their real feat lay not in remaining invisible but in surviving a system that kept its accounts and balance sheets hidden. Numbers passed them swiftly, never stopping long enough to be comprehended. Loans were taken without consent, and profits were calculated without their share.
This has made the need for investing in research a societal necessity. It paves the way for policies that empower women economically, socially, and culturally while contributing to the nation's broader goal of equitable and sustainable development. We acknowledge the support from the Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi (ICSSR), in enabling this critical research on the dynamics of women in agricultural livelihoods in one of the most backward regions of the country, the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. Such funding is crucial for generating actionable insights that address the challenges faced by women in agriculture and help improve their quality of life.
Let us celebrate these “invisible farmers” who carry the weight of rural livelihoods on their shoulders. Their ordinary struggles—borrowing small sums from moneylenders (while the repayment time bomb ticks!), walking miles to fetch resources and managing homes amidst economic challenges—are feats of extraordinary resilience. It is these enigmatic female farmers who fill in the vacant seats post-migration by the men of the household. They suffer incessantly yet sing soulfully at weddings and childbirth. What a feat!
In collaboration with ICSSR and Sushil Chaturvedi, David Bhaskar, Ashish Gupta, Manish Srivastav.
Alka Jain is an assistant professor and tweets at alka28jain@gmail.com
