Knowing Your Onions in Murshidabad

This article looks at the lives of Mal Pahariya Adivasi women living in a settlement in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district in the run-up to the 2024 general elections. The women featured here are employed to sort onion bulbs from stems. They earn ₹20 for a sack of onions weighing 40 kilograms, drink water bought from a private supplier at ₹10 rupees a jar, and bathe in an infested pond also used for jute-retting—a process that separates plant fibres from their woody core. Their ration cards, their votes, their homes, and their language, all belong to a village 60 kilometres away, from where they travel to seek employment. Since they do not belong to the constituency, they cannot be beneficiaries of the local welfare schemes. “We don’t have votes here… So, no one cares about us. And we don’t stay there all year… so, we don’t have much say there either…we belong neither here nor there,” Anjali Mal, 19, who is already a mother, says. The article highlights that while outmigration due to the climate crisis-induced agrarian crisis is heavily gendered, that does not preclude women from migrating too. Furthermore, migratory agricultural labour displaces women farmers not only from their land and their families, but also from the democratic process, compounding dispossession.