A woman returning from field after collecting firewood and fodder in a village in Nagaland (March 2014).
Before dawn, when the village is shrouded in darkness with a somewhat eerie silence, sleeping under the silhouettes of tall bamboo groves and mountains in the background like endless shadows, Nivi wakes up—instinctively—as she does every morning. Without disturbing her three children and husband, she tiptoes to the kitchen of her one bedroom bamboo house to prepare for the day.
Are Naga women
active economic agents?
At 4:00 am, she splashes cold water on her face, freshens up and gets into an automaton mode: she makes fire, digging out the previous night’s firewood buried deep into the hearth that had survived till morning, but transformed to red hot coal.
active economic agents?
At 4:00 am, she splashes cold water on her face, freshens up and gets into an automaton mode: she makes fire, digging out the previous night’s firewood buried deep into the hearth that had survived till morning, but transformed to red hot coal.
By 4:30 am, with the fire raging and heating the large blackened ‘water-boiling’ pot, the mother of all utensils in most Naga kitchens, Nivi rushes off to fetch water from the village watering hole down the slope with a ‘Golchi’ in a basket strapped to her head and cisterns in hands.
Past 5:00 am, her 18 chickens are up and running amok. She feeds them and begins cooking for her family - a pot of rice, a vegetable or meat dish and another dish of greens. She simultaneously chops an assortment of leaves collected from the forest the previous day to mix with cooked maize for her pig.
By 5:30 am, the pig is fed, and the children are up flocking around the kitchen fire asking for tea. With the cooking almost done, it is time to assist her children to wash up, check their homework, feed and dress them for school, and tidy the house.
At 7:00 am, the husband is finally awake asking for tea. Her husband, a daily wage labourer, gets “work opportunities” once or twice a month; he takes care of the terraced rice field for their annual supply of rice.
Married at 21, Nivi did not have a church wedding due to many complications, besides not having enough resources to host a ceremony that would seem “socially fit.”
“I had to take a lot of ridicule in the early years, I thought it was better for me to just die… both my husband and I are school drop-outs… we had no income source, our relatives refused to speak to us. It is said that a woman is the accomplice of the serpent, like Eve, and it is she who ensnares men to sin… I realize that it was my sin that caused so much grief and struggle, but God has been merciful,” the 33-year old mother of three says.
Nivi’s day, under the burden of the sermon, goes on. Her other tasks begin after sending off her children to school and her husband is fed. She goes off to the Jhum field, toiling for her family’s food supply. Throughout the year, she toggles between the rice field and the maize field, her husband’s lands, as she has no right to property and land inheritance.
Her children’s monthly school fee adds up to Rs. 1150. “Sometimes we cannot pay for 3-4 months… I have to work my field properly to sell some maize and rear the pig that will sell at least Rs. 12-15,000 by the end of the year and I can save for my children’s admission fee of over Rs. 6000 and for the uniforms and books… I want my children to go to a good school,” she narrates.
Most times, by afternoon she completes the day’s farming and heads home with a basket load of firewood and vegetables. The morning chores are repeated in the evening with additional tasks – washing the husband’s and children’s clothes, collection of fodder and cooking for animals, attending church and visiting relatives. The routine continues day after day.
Responding to what her overall economic role is in the household, Nivi iterates, “I would say it is my husband who economically supports the family because he brings lump sum money and the land belongs to him; I don’t really earn anything substantial except for the animal sale once a year.”
Like Nivi, thousands of women in rural Nagaland, working from dawn to dusk every day, besides bearing the responsibility of childbirth among other roles, still do not see themselves as active economic agents of society. Bound by socially-conditioned biases, they themselves subscribe to the thought that all major decisions should be executed by men who do the “real work,” such as planning of village road construction to the watering hole, which mostly women use, decided inside the traditionally women-free Village Council Hall.
