Book review: Praveen Jha,Avinash Kumar and Yamini Mishra (Eds.),Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India

In a brilliant Introduction, the editors of Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India sketch the common themes emerging from the otherwise diverse contributions, to demonstrate broadly how ‘growth trends have little relationship with the wellbeing of the mass of the population’ (p. 1), which situation is harsher for women, whatever be the angle from which one views it or the methodology that one deploys to capture ‘women’s work’. The papers of the volume are divided into (i) methodological issues in measuring women’s work, (ii) interlinkages between paid and unpaid work, (iii) private property, the commons and structural changes, (iv) employment trends and the feminisation debate, (v) need for universal social protection and (vi) the challenges before women’s movement.

The flagging of the theme of the interface between the ‘Women’s Question and the Labour Question’ (p. 3) deserves special mention; unfortunately, the limited discussion does no justice to, nor engages much with, what contributes to the widening disjuncture between the two, are there possibilities of bridging this divide (since several scholars traverse both fields), why does labour studies accommodate women as workers and women’s work but does not theoretically or methodologically reformulate the labour question to reflect the patriarchal underpinnings of capitalism? Thus, for example, while the demands of sex or surrogate workers to be recognised as ‘workers’ and brought under existing labour legislation could be part of the labour question, the stigma that is an integral part of such work becomes the responsibility of the ‘Women’s Question’. Consequently, even though the volume purports to address issues and challenges in contemporary India, as of now, we have no resolution to the question of what would be the implications of, or what would it take, to officially recognise such stigmatised work, document and register the persons (if willing) involved in such work to even begin the process of making them eligible for existing labour legislation, if that be one of our aims in attempting an interface between Labour and the Women’s Question.

Apart from the Introduction, Labouring Women consists of twelve papers, and a brief discussion of each is in order. In ‘Women’s Labour through Life Narratives’, Mary John provides a broad sweep of the challenge that ‘women’s labour’ poses to anyone trying to comprehend it; according to her, the enormous body of literature currently available suffers ‘from a remarkable degree of ideological, disciplinary and thematic compartmentalization’ (p. 17), and further, that, ‘the interconnected yet conflicting characteristics of women’s labour—unpaid and paid, domestic and public, structured as much by caste and sexuality as by class—are not sufficiently highlighted’ (p. 18). Through a critical reading of select autobiographies spanning over a century, John attempts to open up for discussion, ‘sources of the problem’ (p. 18), and explore ‘what we can learn about the place and value of labour imposed upon very different women, from the kinds of conflicts and problems they articulate and find worth telling’ (p. 18). This exercise, as John herself admits, has ended in ‘some answers and more questions’ (p. 36), but it is unclear how this otherwise very engaging reading of the select autobiographies places John’s essay above the (unspecified) ones that she has so trenchantly criticised.

We have a range of articles that take us through the now very familiar terrain of how our data systems capture ‘work’, what meaning feminists make of available data despite their enormous shortcomings and the implications for women, the economy and society of recognising/not recognising certain kinds of work as work. Jayati Ghosh’s ‘Time Poverty and Women’s Work’ demonstrates, through a reading of National Sample Survey (NSS) data, what constitutes ‘time poverty’ and how it adversely impacts the lives of the poor, women in particular: ‘the poorer the people, the less are the chances to afford buying various goods and services from the market, and if these are not provided by the public policy, then they can only consume them if they produce these goods and services themselves’ (p. 44). Application of the notion of ‘time poverty’ enables Ghosh to link fall in income to: increase in unpaid work; loss of leisure; restrictions in capacity to engage in paid work, apart from subsidising the marketised part of the economy as revealed by the disproportionately large percentage of women (in excess of 60%) in domestic work (NSS codes 92 and 93).

In ‘Women’s Participation in Domestic Activities: Leisure, Care Services and Status Production’ Vinoj Abraham’s discussion of women’s disproportionate presence in domestic activities is concerned more with finding an explanation that makes him fall back on the household/family. Deploying the concept of ‘status production’, Abraham attempts to show how patriarchal norms stigmatise women’s paid work; through data extracted from unit-level records of the NSS, Abraham explores domestic activity participation across marital status, relationship type with male members of household, type of household (nuclear or extended families) and place of stay (natal or marital homes). This exercise suggests ‘that women who are probably subjected to greater control by males through marriages, living with rising income levels, have a greater possibility of engaging in domestic activities’ (p. 91). While the dimension that Abraham brings to the conundrum of rising women’s participation in domestic activities is interesting, it stands in contrast to several feminist arguments of lack of decent job opportunities combined with inability of households to address the issue of affordable child and elderly care, a point that Neetha N’s paper ‘Exploring Paid and Unpaid Work Dichotomy: A Care-Employment Perspective’ picks up for examination, again using NSS data. Neetha finds that ‘the growing areas of paid employment are those which have a ‘natural’ link to women’s care work, and the timings of which are seen to enable them to fulfil their domestic responsibilities’ (p. 145). In the light of her data that reveal that the labour force participation of women declines with increased presence of small children up to the age of three, while that of men shows an inverse relation, Neetha poses the question of whether the pressure on men to provide for the family with such small children could be an explanation for men’s increased participation. What is, however, clear is that, only focused field-based studies will throw light on which explanation is more plausible, in what contexts and under what circumstances.

In ‘Back to the Barracks: Changing Pattern of Women’s Work Participation in India’, using National Sample Survey Organisation data, Nisha Srivastava and Anjor Bhaskar sketch the changing pattern of women’s work participation in rural India. This broad-brush exercise covering the whole country reveals how sluggish growth in agriculture combined with mechanisation and lack of development of new industries account for women’s non-presence in the labour force leading the authors to exhort authorities to revive the rural economy, create more productive jobs for women as well as make provisions for child and elderly care. What these data do not capture and what could make these suggestions non-starters is their inability to account for regional ‘changing’ patterns, growing reluctance among (educated) youth to remain in rural areas and in agriculture in particular, increasing unviability of the farming sector to provide sustenance to households, thereby pushing members from even landed families to migrate.

In ‘Labour Relations within the Household’, Archana Prasad and S. Krithi’s field-based study of domestic workers in the National Capital Region maps the variations in tasks, timings, wages and conditions of work of domestic workers in the different areas covered by the survey. While the details are rich, the paper could benefit more with a tighter framework to tie together the range of findings on caste, class, religion, task and area covered. Further, claiming in the concluding section that the paper has demonstrated that ‘a large portion of the paid wage labour of a domestic worker can be perceived as “unpaid” or unaccounted for work’ (p. 183), or, that ’the stigma theory of work can be explained through the labour theory of value if the complex interrelationships between class formation and social structures is adequately analysed’ (p. 183) is not warranted since it is neither comprehensible nor self-evident from reading the paper.

Ritu Dewan’s discussion of ‘unrecognised and hence unquantified forms of livelihood generating activities’ (p. 187), almost bordering on the bizarre, is a poignant account of what some women are forced into for survival. For example, the collection of sea buckthorn that grows on common property resources (forest and uncultivable wastelands) is done by women’s collectives; however, there is no official record of women as workers. While, as on date of the field work, the author found a remarkable system of sharing of gains among the cooperatives, it was disquieting to learn of the impending conversion of commons into private property with disastrous consequences for the women dependent on it for their livelihood. Foot-fishing or mud-fishing—is an activity undertaken largely by single, deserted, aged and/or disabled women for sheer sustenance of themselves and those dependent on them. Dewan describes this fishing (in the west coast of Maharashtra) as a form of activity which is not just, not recorded or reported, but not even acknowledged. It is referred to as ‘zol takane’ (to throw a net’), but which is thrown on the mud portion of the beach after the tide recedes. This is the only part of the sea that women have access to ‘fish’—mud-lizards, newts, tiny crabs and shrimps. These fetch absurdly low prices but for the women it fetches much needed cash. Another occupation that ‘illegally’ deserted women and/or women made landless are forced to undertake is to stand for hours as a ‘scarecrow’ with wages being generally paid in kind.

The very pertinent observations that the author has recorded in the light of her findings include the sheer inhumaneness of the proposal to allow private appropriation of common property resources without any consideration of its implications for women dependent of these resources for survival; the ignominy that foot-fishing women have to endure even as they labour to feed themselves; in the case of the ‘women as scarecrow’, how does one even begin to comprehend such a dehumanised occupation much less attempt to capture it officially. In a couple of places, Dewan alludes to ‘strategies of survival being non-linear’ (p. 186) and again ‘non-linear rural context’ (p. 200), which has not been clarified and therefore not intelligible. Perhaps Dewan could have explained what she meant a bit more.

Kanika Kaul and Saumya Shrivastava’s paper on public investment towards promoting women’s livelihoods explores, among other things, fiscal responsiveness towards issues concerning women in particular. The examination of such an important theme, however, is not systematic and at times even disjointed. For instance, discussions relating to budget allocations are not followed up with details of revised estimates or actual expenditure, to give a better sense of why outcomes are poor. The authors thereafter jump to exploring the phenomenon of women’s underpaid labour in some of the flagship schemes of the Union, without the discussion being properly anchored in what implications it has for government’s fiscal policy.

Sumi Krishna’s long engagement with the theme of women and environment is reflected in the manner in which she is able to critically assess how ‘development’ has brought in resource rights but failed to dislodge old resource regimes, how women are ‘caught in a cleft stick: on the one hand is the felt need to resist the appropriation of resources by the state and market; on the other hand, is the reluctance to fall back upon the inequities of tradition’ (p. 259), thus making it difficult to address the institutional basis of marginalisation. Similar thoughts are echoed in Smita Gupta’s paper aimed at addressing the gendered formulation of the land question. Additionally, Smita has outlined ‘four cornerstones of a democratic women’s land rights agenda in urban and rural areas—access to commons, gender-sensitive redistributive land reforms, environmental regeneration and determination of land-use policies’ (p. 269), the achievement of which will necessarily mean confrontation with patriarchy and neoliberalism.

Chirashree Das Gupta, Isha Ralli and Mohit Gupta’s elaborate paper titled ‘Capitalism and Unpaid Work in India’ covers a range of issues held together by their exploration of the institutional premises defining the macroeconomic structure. Through a critical examination of four major interventions in post-Independent India—land redistribution, labour rights, property rights and progressive tax structure—the authors demonstrate the ‘the institutionalised substitution of paid labour by unpaid labour’ (p. 122) facilitated through the ‘patriarchal basis of holding structures, property rights, tax privileges and definitions of work and worker to facilitate labour cheapening as the sole basis of profitability and capital accumulation in India’ (p. 122). However, the authors need to re-look at their interpretation of Tables 4.2A and 4.4B: No data have been provided on the total number of child workers or for adult males/females (main or marginal). How is ‘intensification of marginalisation’ being read and interpreted from these tables?

Anita Gurumurthy’s ‘New Cartographies of the Digital Commons’ calls for re-imagining the internet through a governance design that can enable ‘digital citizenship for all’ (p. 306), and that would ‘give the marginalised a place of their own in the networked world, while supporting new encounters and solidarities’ (p. 307). However, the tone and the tenor of the essay at places (p. 299, for example) become stridently anti-technology, providing no space for a discussion of where technology is urgently required and where not; similarly, in the absence of any discussion of how dismantling of the welfare state, disinvestment by the state in the reproduction of the workforce has pushed women’s bodies to the brink—constitutes ‘informational imperialism’, it is difficult to comprehend the significance of the use of these jargons in this otherwise very important contribution.

In conclusion, reading between the lines, Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India, while effectively revisiting some of the continuing challenges that have come to define ‘women and women’s work’ in India, also highlights, among other things, the limitations of macro data-based policy recommendations that are out of sync with ground realities. Integrating field-based research findings that go beyond economics to interpret and make sense of why data show what they show or do not show reminds us that we still have a long way to go in our endeavour to emancipate, empower and recognise women as ‘workers’.