Adivasi Women, Agrarian Change and Forms of Labour in Neo-liberal India

This article elaborates the different dimensions of the gendered nature of semi-proletarianization and proletarianization of the adivasi social groups after the period of neo-liberal reforms. It shows that the integration of the adivasis in general, and adivasi women in particular, has been a result of agrarian distress and macro-economic trends that have structured the patterns of dispossession, displacement and urbanization in the last two decades. In doing so, the article contradicts the view which holds that communitarian structures have been playing an important part in the division of labour within adivasi communities. This article also contests the view that there is an autonomous sphere of existence of the subsistence economy of the adivasis and that the role of the adivasi women is largely confined to unpaid labour within the sphere of subsistence. As the analysis here shows, the blurred boundaries between subsistence and commercial activities have ensured that there is hardly autonomous space for the adivasi households to carry out their activities, which has several implications for the life of adivasi women. Lastly, the article counters the oft-repeated proposition that communities and communitarian structures can stand in opposition to the labour market and protect the interests of the adivasi women if they are democratized. It is shown here that both matrilineal and patrilineal communities have similar degrees of semi-proletarianization and proletarianization of adivasi women, although such a process is influenced by regional trends and landholding patterns. Thus, the thesis that communitarian production and distribution systems guide the class formation process does not, in fact, hold in the case of most adivasi regions. Rather, the labour market is guided by macro-economic processes that often neutralize the influence of these structures.