In Rewari: Toiling Away, In a Field Not Her Own

Written by Raman Rewaria about his mother, Sumitra, this article offers an account of the caste and gender relations shaping agricultural labour. A landless Dalit woman from Asiaki Gorawas, Haryana, Sumitra has worked as a daily-wage labourer since she was 13 years old. Her day begins before dawn—she queues up for water, prepares the household, continues through fieldwork, and ends the day with more domestic tasks. This domestic labour largely remains the responsibility of women, even as they undertake wage work.

Rewaria notes how women transplant paddy, bent over for hours in muddy water under the sun, while temperatures reach 45°C, making the process physically punishing. Wages are low and work irregular as mechanisation and competition from migrant workers have further reduced employment opportunities. A noteworthy dimension of the article is Rewaria’s parents’ determination to educate their children so they are not compelled to take up agricultural labour. The work exposes a larger contradiction: the labour required to sow and harvest staple crops such as rice remains so poorly remunerated that those who perform it hope their children will never have to. Rewaria’s relationship to his subject brings an ethnographic and affective richness to this account of landlessness, heat, and water stress, and the domestic burdens that Dalit women agricultural workers have to bear.