After My Garden Grows

Monika Barman is a teenager in rural West Bengal participating in the Girls Project, launched in 2011 by the West Bengal government and the non-profit organisation Landesa to train adolescent girls in land-based livelihoods. As part of the programme, she tends a small kitchen garden at home, using some of the produce for her family and selling the rest at the local market. The pressures of marriage follow Monika throughout the film. In one scene, Monika, her mother, and her married sister discuss rising dowry rates. Her mother floats the idea of delaying marriage, but her father insists that a girl needs to be married off early. The film also portrays how economic activity, even when initiated and sustained by women, remains controlled by men. Monika grows all the produce by herself, but her father accompanies her to the market, negotiates the prices, collects the money, and hands her her share at the end. Men populate the market entirely. Early marriage and exclusion from economic decision-making are not separate pressures here but linked expressions of the same logic of gendered dispossession. Land rights and agricultural independence do not offer a way out of that logic, but for the rural girl child they can alter its terms—delaying marriage, and opening, however partially, the question of what else might be possible.