Women in Agriculture: Their status and role


Book Description

This is the first specialised volume with a holistic approach dealing with the most vulnerable and neglected section of workers in unorganised sector of agriculture. Tracing women's role and status in the historical perspective, existing situational analysis and making future projections are the main sub-themes discussed threadbare. Women workers in different agro-ecological and types of farming have been analysed by various scholars. Papers on technology and women bring out, among other things, a situational analysis, work conditions in home and farm, wages, bearing on her farm employment and participation. Prospective role and status have been projected in the changing techno-economic context that warrants about the displacement of women workers in developing agriculture. In the series, this volume focusses on the issues of educational problems of the rural women in general and specialised training needs, facilities available and utilization of these in particular for providing them appropriate place in the prospective agriculture. Training needs of different groups in different agroclimatic and cultural contexts have been compiled at one place. Multiplicity of institutions has certainly benefited women fold but mushrooming of voluntary agencies is not desirable in spite of the best performance of voluntary agencies. What role different institutional structures have played in the education and training of women is discussed at length and future course of involvements is debated. Different agricultural development strategies adopted since independence have been critically examined for assessing the place of women in them and urgent action needed to meet the future challenges.







Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India


Book Description

Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India: Tempest in Teapot is a unique book that brings together a holistic theoretical approach on the subject of witchcraft accusations, specifically those taking place inside a tea workers' community in India. Using a combination of in-depth and extensive qualitative methods, and drawing on sociological, anthropological, and historical perspectives, Chaudhuri explores how adivasi (tribal) migrant workers use witchcraft accusations to deal with worker-management conflict. Chaudhuri argues that witchcraft accusations can be interpreted as a periodic reaction of the adivasi worker community against their oppression by the plantation management. The typical avenues of social protest are often unavailable to marginalized workers due to lack of organizational and political representation and resources. As a result, the dain (witch) becomes a scapegoat for the malice of the plantation economy. Within this discourse, witch hunts can be seen not as exotic and primitive rituals of a backward community, but rather as a powerful protest by a community against its oppressors. The book attempts to understand the complex network of relationships—ties of friendship, family, politics, and gender—that provide the necessary legitimacy for the witch hunt to take place. In most cases examined here, seemingly petty conflicts within the villagers often escalate to a hunt. At the height of the conflict, the exploitative relationship between the plantation management and the adivasi migrant workers often gets hidden. The book demonstrates how witchcraft accusations should be interpreted within this backdrop of labor-planters relationship, characterized by rigidity of power, patronage, and social distance. Witches, Tea Plantations, and Lives of Migrant Laborers in India should appeal to criminologists, sociologists, anthropologists, labor historians, gender scholars, labor migration scholars, witch hunt and witchcraft accusation global scholars, adivasi scholars, South Asian scholars, and anyone interested in India’s tribes, witchcraft accusations, gender in a global world, labor conflict, and Indian tea plantations.




A Time for Tea


Book Description

In this creative, ethnographic, and historical critique of labor practices on an Indian plantation, Piya Chatterjee provides a sophisticated examination of the production, consumption, and circulation of tea. A Time for Tea reveals how the female tea-pluckers seen in advertisements—picturesque women in mist-shrouded fields—came to symbolize the heart of colonialism in India. Chatterjee exposes how this image has distracted from terrible working conditions, low wages, and coercive labor practices enforced by the patronage system. Allowing personal, scholarly, and artistic voices to speak in turn and in tandem, Chatterjee discusses the fetishization of women who labor under colonial, postcolonial, and now neofeudal conditions. In telling the overarching story of commodity and empire, A Time for Tea demonstrates that at the heart of these narratives of travel, conquest, and settlement are compelling stories of women workers. While exploring the global and political dimensions of local practices of gendered labor, Chatterjee also reflects on the privileges and paradoxes of her own “decolonization” as a Third World feminist anthropologist. The book concludes with an extended reflection on the cultures of hierarchy, power, and difference in the plantation’s villages. It explores the overlapping processes by which gender, caste, and ethnicity constitute the interlocked patronage system of villages and their fields of labor. The tropes of coercion, consent, and resistance are threaded through the discussion. A Time for Tea will appeal to anthropologists and historians, South Asianists, and those interested in colonialism, postcolonialism, labor studies, and comparative or international feminism. Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.




The Darjeeling Distinction


Book Description

Introduction : reinventing the plantation for the 21st century -- Darjeeling -- Plantation -- Property -- Fairness -- Sovereignty -- Conclusion : is something better than nothing?




The Status of Women


Book Description

India. Monograph analysing the labour force participation rates of woman workers as recorded in the censuses of 1961 and 1971 - focusing mainly on non-agricultural occupations, reports on trends in rural areas- urban areas variations, employment opportunities and occupational status, compares working conditions and participation by sex in traditional, modern and mixed types of occupations, etc., and includes details of the statistical analysis performed. Bibliography pp. 201 to 203, graphs, maps and statistical tables.




Women Plantation Workers


Book Description

This pioneering collection of essays brings together a description and analysis of women workers and the socio-economic systems of plantations world-wide. The plantation remains a formidable force in many areas of the world and new trends towards tree farming call for further examination of its agriculture. Women have, in the past, constituted a considerable precentage of the work force in this milieu, and continue to do so.Using specific case studies of historical and contemporary plantations, an account is given of the history of female labour, focusing on the colonial and post-colonial eras. The essays examine reasons for women's degraded status and emphasize, in particular, issues relating to migrant workers.The gradual move away from traditional family roles is, to some extent, reflected in variations in the position of the female plantation worker. However, where inequalities in class and status continue to characterize plantation life, capitalist and patriarchal control prevails.Both chilling and bracing, the sufferings of plantation labourers may seem remote to most of us, but they are still very much part of the contemporary world. Providing a close insight into the lives of the female protagonists, these essays have given an opportunity for their stories to be heard.




Changing Status of Women in North-eastern States


Book Description

C. Lalkima, b. 1942, former Professor, Dept. of Public Administration, Mizoram University; contributed articles.




The Tea Labourers of North East India


Book Description

Papers presented at the Seminar on Anthropo-Historical Perspectives of the Tea Labourers with Special Reference to North East India, held at Dibrugarh during 7-8 January 2005.




Gendered Inequalities in Paid and Unpaid Work of Women in India


Book Description

This book explores Indian women's economic contribution through paid and unpaid work in different sectors of the economy and society in extremely diverse life situations and geographical locations. It highlights gender implications of interlinkages between local, national, regional and global dimensions of women's paid and unpaid work in India. It encompasses a vast canvas of life worlds of working women in the metropolitan, urban, peri-urban, rural, tribal areas in manufacturing, agricultural, fisheries, sericulture, plantation and service sectors of the Indian economy. It provides nuanced insights into intersectional marginalities of caste, class, ethnicity, religion and gender. The chapters are based on primary data collection and triangulation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. It presents the multiple marginalities of Indian women in the globalized political economy of the 21st century. It not only focuses on emerging issues but also suggests evidence-based policy imperatives. This book is an essential read for researchers, scholars, policymakers, practitioners and students of women/gender studies.