Caste, Class, Gender

Gender and agrarian relations

Social Class
• Studies on ‘social stratification’ occupy a prominent place in sociology.
• Distribution of power, wealth and prestige in various societies is the main concern
not only of sociologists but of a variety of thinkers from other disciplines.
• Their understanding has resulted in a range of studies divided widely across
ideological and philosophical grounds.
• The early phase of writings on ‘social class’ can broadly be divided into two
polarized streams: the conservative approach (in Weberian tradition) where the
concept of ‘social class’ is treated like other major concepts: occupation, income,
life styles, ownership of property, positions of influence, etc.
• In contrast, the radicals (in Marxian tradition) have been impressed by the
conflict between the classes of owners and workers.
Class
• In Marxian writings class is a political economy category referring to a
social group embodying certain relations of production.
• As a social group it is located in a mode of production.
• The ruling class or classes are the owners of the means of production.
• By means of production we mean resources that range from land,
water, property factories, technology or knowledge.
• The means of production are owned by a ruling class/classes and the
ruled are those who are engaged in labour for these classes and are
subject to exploitation by them
• Class structure has been changing across times and it differs
according to contexts.
• Class structure has been changing across times and it differs according
to contexts.
• From the feudal societies to capitalists one, class has been changing
and in its wake bringing about new kinds of social and production
relations.
• Class legitimises itself through welfarism and cultural hegemony.
• It is important to understand how class has continued through the
periods of feudalism well into capitalism in new and different ways
• In post colonial societies of south Asia the process of class formation
is different from modern European societies as colonialism did not
eliminate feudalism as it brought along capitalism.
• In some of the south Asian countries this was interconnected with
caste and presented itself quite differently.
• These experiences also showed how a reading of class alone is
incomplete without a reading of caste, ethnicity, tribe and patriarchy
in the South Asian context.
Caste
• Marginalisation, exclusion and exploitation based on class, gender, race and
ethnicity have been part of every society including the Indian society.
• But what is typical of India and Nepal for instance is the caste based
exclusion and exploitation.
• Caste has been one of the most dominant and determining factors not only
in social but also in economic and political spheres.
• According to B R Ambedkar, "caste is a system of graded inequality in which
castes are arranged according to an ascending scale of reverence and
descending scale of contempt".
• The caste system ascribes positions within the social hierarchy based on
birth
• Gender pervades our lives in every possible way.
• It is manifested in how we act, behave, what clothes we wear and the norms and values that we
emulate.
• Gender gets manifested through different kinds of controls on women – on their production,
reproduction, sexuality and mobility.
• Gender is embedded within other social stratifiers that mediate different outcomes for men and
women.
• Women’s position in the entertainment and leisure all are implicated in the social construction of
masculine and feminine sexuality.
• Gender inequality in sexual relations between men and women reflect and serve to maintain
subordination.
• Gender intersects class and caste as well as ethnicity and tribe in significant ways.
• In understanding gender we need to see its relation with each of these since they shape each other.
• Women are poor because of the specific ways in which the various
aspects of their social identities interact
• they are poor because of their precise positions in wider structures of
power relation
• In the Indian caste context, women's participation in paid work
outside the home becomes a major signifier of caste status and also
of class.
• In rural south India women and men are very differently positioned in
relation to existing power structures - structures that are primarily
constituted by gender, caste and class.
• To illustrate the ways in which gender, caste and class participate in constituting the
political economy of poverty in rural Tamil Nadu Karin Kapadia in her paper on
‘Mediating the Meaning of Market Opportunities: Gender, Caste and Class in Rural
South India’ has discussed on three different contexts, in each of which the
organisation of labour and the agency of poor women themselves are differently
constructed.
• First, the context of impoverished pallar women, who are of scheduled caste and are
landless agricultural labourers.
• Second, that of poor middle-caste soliya vellalar women who work as bonded
labourers in the synthetic gem- cutting industry.
• Third, low-income middle- caste women beneficiaries in a major government
income-generation programme, the Development of Women and Children in Rural
Areas (DWCRA) programme
• Access to market opportunities that could provide ladders out of poverty - to employment and
to credit in particular- are strongly mediated by gender, caste and class in the three case studies
that was carried out by Karina Kapadia
• First Case Study q11 (6)
• Pallar women agricultural labourers in Aruloor village were organised in informal work groups.
• In time-rate work they worked individually, but more commonly they worked in groups doing
'contract' piece-rate work.
• They went on strike collectively for higher wages, from time to time.
• These scheduled caste women perceived themselves as being greatly exploited by their
employers, who were landlords of much higher castes.
• Pallar women mocked at and criticised their employers.
• In turn, they were routinely represented, by landlords, as headstrong, difficult women who
made unreasonable wage demands all the time.
• Pallar women were both vocal and active in challenging their exploitation
by their employers even though their efforts met with limited success.
• Their proto- trade union type activity was very signi- ficantly related to
their caste status, their class status and to their gendering - that is, to the
specific way in which women were gendered in this 'untouchable' caste.
• As a community, the pallars, both women and men, saw themselves as
marginalised and humiliated in many everyday contexts by the upper
castes. T
• hey also, increasingly, recognised that they had been denied the
opportunities that they saw other castes enjoying - especially higher
education and salaried government jobs.
• They therefore had little sympathy for the higher castes.
• Most crucially, within the contexts of pallar caste, kinship and household, pallar women enjoyed far
greater independence than any caste-Hindu women in Aruloor village did.
• This independence - which included full rights to divorce and remarriage - was also related to their
traditional economic role as equal providers for the household.
• The social expectation that pallar women would work to provide for their families on an equal basis
with pallar men, was one of the most striking differences between the pallars and the other upper
castes.
• This is an expectation that exists in all the poorest castes, whether 'untouchable' or 'caste-Hindu'
because it is an expectation born of dire economic need.
• Pallar women have slaved under the burning sun, standing in muddy paddy fields, not because they
wanted to do so, but because they have had to do so.
• Economic need dictated that pallar women had to be independent, resourceful, full of initiative.
• They had to be mobile, ready to seek agricultural labour far from their own village.
Soliya Veilalar Women in Tannirpalli Village,
Tiruchi District q12 (6)
• The gendering of middle-caste soliya vellalar women workers in
Tannirpalli was very different from that of untouchable caste pallar
women.
• Soliya vellalar, meant that virtually all gem-cutting workshop owners
were of the same caste as their workers. In the context of labour
relations, this was extremely significant.
• omen gem- workers (like men) were often not only of the same caste
as their workshop owners, but also of the same extended kinship.
• Actual kinship with one's employer has a strong impact on the muting
of worker resistance to oppression
• Class difference was enormously important in Tannirpalli.
• Both women and men workers often castigated the arrogance of 'the rich' - their
wealthy employers (both kin and non-kin) - and the exploitation of 'the poor' -
themselves.
• Soliya vellalar women, did not walk out of their marriages. Some of them wished
to, but they could not do so.
• They were fenced in by far greater con- straints both because they were middle-
ranking caste-Hindu women and because their caste aspired towards higher caste
norms.
• In customary practice soliya vellalar women were allowed divorce and remarriage
- these customs suggest that their community had originally shared lower-caste
values.
• Soliya vellalar women were in bad marriages, with abusive or
exploitative husbands.
• While some women were quiet and other talked about their problems,
and their complaints clearly articulated their resistance to their domestic
subordination.
• These hidden mutinies and cries from the heart remained hidden in the
better-off households where the women only spoke to us in? the
strictest confidence.
• But in the poorer households these conflicts were revealed in public,
sometimes with the distraught wife shouting and weeping in the street.
Reasons
• Women's ability to voice their critique of their husbands openly was
their steadily increasing.
• Their protests, both private and public, and their resentment of their
husbands and these women struggle to feed their children on their
meagre earnings
• On the one hand they were full-time workers with a highly skilled
earning capacity that was essential to family survival.
• But on the other hand they were required to be subordinated and
submissive wives even to husbands who had abdicated their role as
family provider
Gendering, Work Organisation and Women's
Agency
• Most soliya vellalar women appeared to find it extremely difficult to view
themselves as being in open confrontation with their employers, as
pallarwomen did.
• This inability to adopt an oppositional identity is apparently connected with
their kin relationship with employers (in some cases) and their caste-
relationship with their employers (in all cases).
• Why they showed little open resistance to their employers is more profoundly
connected with two fundamental' intersecting structures of constraint:
• first, the nature of soliya vellalar gender relations and,
• second, the organisation of work, which is intimately shaped by gender
relations.
• First, the nature of gender relations. It was apparent that several
women felt that their exploitation as wives at the hands of their
husbands was considerably worse than their hardships as workers
• These women were aware that they were underpaid and were
worked too hard - but they also felt that they were getting an even
worse deal from their husbands
• They also felt that they had been drawn into bonded labour because
they had married bonded workers.
• Thus the enormous stresses and daily frustrations of bonded labour,
were associated, in their minds, with their identity as wives
PALLAR WOMEN: LABOURERS FIRST,
WIVES SECOND
• Pallar women strongly identify with their role as workers, for several
reasons. It is a role which their community regards very positively:
• women's paid work is valorised and it is seen as admirable in a woman to
show initiative in finding daily paid work.
• This work is not mediated through their husbands - pallar women are
independent workers who receive a wage that is paid into their own hands.
• Equally importantly, they retain control of their earnings and decide how
their income -should be spent.
• Pallar women labourers tend to work in large work-groups (work-gangs) for
most agricultural taskcs, and have a strong sense of their collective interests
[Kapadia 1993].
• With the steady increase in piece-rate work in recent times, individual
time-rate work - such as weeding, which used to be done by individual
women labourers - is, instead, today often given to women's work groups
on piece-rate as a 'contract' job [Kapadia 1996b].
• Thus both the organisation of work and the payment for this work are
becoming increasingly collectivised.
• This encourages strong solidarity within women's groups, even though
there is competition between them for work.
• But, despite competition, there is absolute solidarity between all groups
when strikes are called - these women are well aware of the need for unity
when challenging their employers.
• The major male agricultural task, ploughing, has been largely mechanised. None of the
female agricultural tasks has been mechanized.
• Further, with the move from paddy cultivation to the increasing cultivation of cash crops like
banana and sugarcane, the need for female labour for weeding has increased significantly.
• Thus wider agricultural trends have strengthened the position of women labourers -
employers need them more than ever, while there is less and less work for male labourers.
• This helps to explain why it was always pallar women who initiated strikes - pallar men
followed.
• Unlike pallar women, pallar men did not normally work in gangs, but tended to work as
individual labourers.
• They thus lacked the group solidarity that enveloped pallar women.
• Further, most pallar men were involved, at least to some degree, in long- standing client-
patron relations with their upper caste employers
• These relationships derived from earlier times when pallar men had
been the tied labourers ('pannaiyal') of big landlords.
• The tied labourer system disappeared, they depended on these patrons
for access to contacts who could provide them with the non-farm
employment that they had to increasingly turn to. They were therefore
reluctant to antagonise these employers.
• Pallar women, on the other hand, were excluded from these male
patron-client relations and therefore lost nothing by initiating wage
demands.
• This work-context, where the fact of social exclusion is central to the
formation of an oppositional identity.
• Obedience to husbands was not a virtue that pallar women were required to cultivate .
• It was not a quality prized by pallar caste culture. On the contrary, pallar women were
expected to play an equal role in providing for their children, so they had to be
independent, resourceful and full of initiative in seeking work.
• The upper caste norms which legitimise the notions of male authority and male
superiority rest on a material base where the male is the breadwinner and the female is
the dependent.
• Within the impoverished reality of pallar life there was no material base for male
claims to either superiority or authority.
• Pallar men contributed only a limited part of their earnings to their households,
expecting their wives to provide too.
• So pallar women saw no reason to obey male authority at home
• pallar men did sometimes try to invoke these upper caste norms and
to enforce female obedience, but with little success. So pallar women
lacked the social indoctrination that made soliya vellalar women such
desirable workers in the gem workshops.
• This was quite apparent to their upper caste employers, who
grumbled that the pallar women never worked satisfactorily but
always made outrageous wage demands.
• Clearly, questioning male authority at home gave pallar women a
distinct advantage: it encouraged them to challenge it regularly in the
work place too.
• Poverty was felt most harshly in the bonded labour regime in
Tannirpalli due to the constant surveillance by employers and the
workers' lack of freedom. Yet the irony is that the soliya vellalar women
gem-cutters of Tannirpalli had more stable and secure employment
than the impoverished pallar women labourers, who, despite their
relative autonomy in gender relations, were deeply vulnerable as casual
daily workers.
• Thus , there happens to be a close correlation between class, caste and
gender, for it is the lowest caste - the 'untouchable' pallars - who
remain the poorest, are most vulnerable in their employment and who
remain in the sector that shows declining returns - namely, agriculture
Gender and Agrarian Relations q11 (6)

• Globally more than 400 million women engage in farm work, although they lack equal
rights in land ownership in more than 90 countries.
• Women worldwide engage in non-mechanised farm occupations that include sowing,
winnowing, harvesting, and other forms of labour-intensive processes such as rice
transplantation.
• According to Oxfam (2013), around 80 per cent of farm work is undertaken by women in
India.
• However, they own only 13 per cent of the land.
• Recent statistics released by the University of Maryland and the National Council of
Applied Economic Research (NCAER, 2018) state that women constitute over 42 per cent
of the agricultural labour force in India, but own less than two per cent of farmland.
• Women in agriculture are affected by issues of recognition and in the
absence of land rights, female agricultural labourers, farm widows, and
tenant farmers are left bereft of recognition as farmers, and the
consequent entitlements.
• The root of the problem begins at the official lack of recognition of the
female agricultural worker, and the resultant exclusion from rights and
entitlements, such as institutional credit, pension, irrigation sources, etc.
• According to the India Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2018), 83 per
cent of agricultural land in the country is inherited by male members of
the family and less than two per cent by their female counterparts.
• In 2011, M S Swaminathan, Rajya Sabha member (2007-13) proposed
the ‘Women Farmers Entitlement Bill’, which lapsed in 2013.
• With increasing recognition being given to the contribution of
women in agriculture such as by commemorating the ‘Rashtriya
Mahila Kisan Divas’, it is time that such legislations and institutional
reform in agriculture are addressed.
• According to the general recommendation # 34 of the United Nations
(UN) Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women
(CEDAW, 2014) on the rights of rural women, ‘land rights
discrimination is a violation of human rights.’
• In the past, several steps have been introduced in this regard, proper
implementation of which has remained tardy.
• The Hindu Succession Amendment Act (2005) granted coparcenary
rights to daughters and equal inheritance rights.
• The draft of the National Women’s Policy (2016), prepared by the
Union Ministry of Women and Child Development recognised the
importance of land rights for women
• However, issues related to tenure security, and most importantly, the
chasm between land ‘ownership, accessibility to entitlements, and
control,’ are important challenges affecting the economic
empowerment of women in agriculture.
• One example here is that of proxy sarpanches or ‘sarpanchpatis,’
where the control is often vested with the husband of the elected
woman representative under the aegis of Panchayati Raj Act (1993).
• According to Bina Aggarwal (1993), a number of factors constrain
women in exercising their legal rights including patrilocal post-marital
residence, village exogamy, opposition to mobility from men,
traditionally institutionalised gender roles, low female literacy and
awareness, male dominance in administrative, judicial, and other public
decision-making bodies at all levels.
• It should be noted that low awareness about women’s right to land
aggravates the magnitude of the problem.
• Additionally, reluctance of women to avoid any conflict with male
members of the family and relatives are other factors that inhibit
accessibility to agricultural land to women.
• Aggravating the issues further is the improper maintenance of land
records, poor management of data, and limited digitisation of land
records, which affect implementation of agricultural schemes meant
to uplift farmers in general, as such challenges make identification of
beneficiaries difficult.
• For instance, some of these challenges have been pointed out in fairly
implementing the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana,
announced in Budget 2019.
• Recently, a survey conducted by the Mahila Kisan Adhikar Manch
(MAKAAM, 2018) of 505 women farmers (whose husbands committed
suicide due to farm crisis) in 11 districts across Marathwada and Vidarbha,
found that 40 per cent of women widowed by farmer suicides between
2012 and 2018, were yet to obtain rights of the farmland they cultivated.
• Among them, only 35 per cent had secured the rights to their family
house.
• The survey also found that 33 per cent women didn’t know they were
entitled to a pension, which makes it evident how women have been
excluded from accessing institutional rights and entitlements, in the
absence of them being recognised as farmers.
• According to the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO, 2011),
empowering women through land and ownership rights has the
potential of raising total agricultural output in developing countries by
2.5 to 4 per cent and can reduce hunger across the world by 12-17
per cent.
• The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG #5. a.1), seeks to grant
property rights and tenure security of agricultural land to women.
• Policy paralysis in granting entitlements to women in agriculture and
farm widows needs to be addressed to empower rural women
economically, politically, socially, and psychologically.
• The most critical issue that needs to be addressed a gendered
friendly policy
• To minimize the gulf between ownership versus control of land
• Patriarchal conventions and bottlenecks in interpersonal legislations
needs to be dealt.
• To achieve economic equality across gender according to the Indian
Constitution, Article 14.