Transient Spaces, Temporary Alliances: Harvesting breathing spaces in India’s sugarcane fields

Overview

Marathwada is a historically drought-affected and caste-ridden region in Maharashtra, and a reflection of India’s story of exclusionary economic growth. Poor rainfall, extractive agrarian practices, and social exclusion have forced nearly one million marginal farm families and landless communities to harvest sugarcane in neighbouring districts. They are recruited in pairs, as a koyta, almost universally comprising husband and wife, and live and work on different sugarcane fields for six months a year. This article first describes the asymmetrical power relations and day-to-day practices of gendered public space that shape the lives of female cane harvesters as women, wives, and migrant labourers. It then illustrates the temporary friendships and inter-generational alliances that have emerged in these shared life/work spaces, referred to as ‘breathing spaces’: on their co-ordinated walks to complete morning ablutions in the open fields, in their shared kitchens outside their makeshift homes, and on the tractor-trailers that ferry them from one sugarcane field to another. Here, they express themselves and engage in both casual banter and serious discussion about their alcoholic husbands and abusive labour contractors, sexual and reproductive health problems, and even anxieties and dreams. It is in and through such smaller, transitory spaces within the larger spaces – in the absence of men – that the article presents the myriad ways in which the female koyta workers (re)produce social relations and reclaim their own little pockets of freedom to ensure safety, relief, and recovery. The article is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study, including inter-generational conversations, focus group discussions, stakeholder interviews, and thick field notes documented between October 2020 and August 2021.