‘Resilient’ Women, ‘Resilient’ Agriculture
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Abstract
Indian agriculture remains the mainstay of India’s economic trajectory both in terms of growth rates as well as an increasingly residual provider of employment especially for those who are being thrown off the main pages of this non-inclusive growth path. This is so not only historically but also very much today particularly in the aftermath of a disastrous and uncaring pandemic response policy that has long-term gendered impacts. The concept of ‘resilience’ consequently has to be viewed in the context of whether this ‘resilience’ is voluntary or forced, whether those who are ‘resilient’ have a choice at all, and what cost to gendered well-being and development does this ‘resilience’ entail. This keynote address focuses on the multiple forms that this flexibility has mutated into in the prevailing agricultural scenario and the manner in which the tenets of gender equality are being subverted. The result is – and this needs to be stated at the outset – the reinforcement of patriarchal divides and rigidities at numerous levels. Using the lens of what I term as Feminist Finance (Dewan, 2019) to analyse the policies of the macro-patriarchal State in the specific context of demystifying and demythifying prevailing gendered ‘resilience’, this paper is divided into several sections, moving logically from economic fundamentals to the unrecognised and increasingly devisibilised forms of ‘resilience’ that especially women in rural India are being increasingly condemned to undergo and endure.