(Illustration courtesy of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation)
India, or at least the ancient notion of it, was rooted in the philosophy of वसुधैव कुटुंबकम (the world is one family). India’s fragrant spices, cornucopia of foods, and breathtaking biodiversity compelled despots and discoverers alike to traverse its mystical landscapes, from the mighty Himalayas to the valiant Deccan.
While Gandhi is revered as the father of this nation, it is loved across generations as Mother India. And in making this civilization walk erect with endurance and imagination, India’s women have been her spine. Often portrayed in Western feminist literature as the disempowered, the excluded, and needing rescue, India in fact continues to be reinvented by the heads, hands, and hearts of her women—from farmers, to craftswomen, to political leaders, to social reformers.
India is also an allegory of triumph and tragedy, meandering across three epochs—the ancient, the extant, and the imminent—rebounding in every era because of, and not despite, its ability to transcend borders between ancient and diverse customs, languages, faiths, foods, political ideas, and traditional wisdom, while rising after successions of floods, famines, and the brutality of colonization.
But this essay is neither about romanticizing India’s valor nor another endeavor to get Indian women their due ascension in the stereotypical narratives of empowerment portrayed as a skirmish between patriarchy and coloniality. This is instead an exercise in liberating the constructs of creativity from being the prerogative of the Western, masculine, or the allegedly educated, while reclaiming what rural women of India have championed for thousands of years.
Over time, rural women of India, as women of many Global South communities, have found ways to leapfrog legal, societal, and colonial constrictions chiseled on their lifeworld and longings. And in doing so, they have relentlessly decolonized what land and food have meant for my people.
India: A Story of Food and Her Women
Women have been overcoming especially those boundaries incised during the British Raj (British rule) that attempted to civilize the “barbaric natives.” While the fight to salvage the condition of the woman was fought between Indian men, British men, and British women—the battleground became the “backs of Indian women.” Another set of boundaries Indian women are disentangling relates to ownership and property rights. The fervor of the British Raj, and now of transnational corporations and local elites, to shift lands from community ownership to private control of a few (usually) affluent men continues to denigrate women’s status from being equal and prolific members of an agrarian society to dependent wives with limited access to productive resources.
Many famines ravaged India during the Raj, predominantly due to British greed and mismanagement. Notably, nearly five million people perished in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943-1944, as grains were redirected to British soldiers overseas. The global share of the Indian economy, once 24 percent in the Mughal era, plummeted to 2 percent by 1947. As a result of this systematic hollowing of India’s food basket, today India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry, 60 percent of which are women. With 65 percent of the population living in rural areas, agriculture is increasingly feminized where women perform 80 percent of farm work. However, they constitute hardly 14 percent of landowners, owning 11 percent of farmland in rural landowning households. This is concerning data, as weak control over land invariably leads to diminished food security. And inequities are exacerbating because Indigenous peoples are often not granted legal rights for lands under their customary rights.
The Future Is Cooperative
Albeit, over the centuries, women have finetuned their ways to challenge, protest, and innovate through designing cooperative architectures that have served them well in reclaiming power from these inequitable histories. The neoliberal epitaph of privatizing profit and socializing risk cannot be more fervently challenged than through cooperative social mechanisms embraced by Global South women, aiding them across countries to regain control, access, and decision-making vis-à-vis their roles in food systems.
For example, in Togo the Femmes Vaillantes, a women’s cooperative created in 2007, is producing premium parboiled rice. With the profits from increased sales, the cooperative acquired an additional 2 hectares of land, with the goal of even further increasing production. The members have expressed experiencing less economic and food insecurity in their lives since the founding of the enterprise.
Also, cooperatives like the Tuzamurane Cooperative of women pineapple farmers in Eastern Rwanda are proving impactful. The name literally translates to “lift one another up.” Before the cooperative, women were selling pineapples at a much lower price and were stuck in a cycle of poverty. Once the cooperative was set up with support from civil society 10 years ago, the collective progress has become visceral. Women are seeing an increase in income and are able to send their children to school, access health care, acquire more land, and diversify their earnings through other small businesses.
Another such program is a Cooperative Farming Scheme started in 1948 in Pakistan after achieving independence from British rule. The cooperative’s goal was to rehabilitate landless refugees and increase access to markets. Its scale was vast, with nearly 142,928 acres of state land allocated to 132 Cooperative Farming Societies. A study of Pakistan’s cooperative farming has revealed that the cooperative initiatives have been overall more beneficial and economical than individual farming, although long-term stability was sometimes affected by factors such as lack of education and internal conflicts. This is a lesson for other cooperative initiatives to prioritize building resilience into their operations.
In India, many large-scale cooperatives have been thriving over time. Megha Adivasi Mahila Agriculture Producers’ Cooperative and Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Cooperative Federation are two such cooperatives that leverage integrated operations models that offer economic assistance, public health access, and leadership trainings for communities. They truly celebrate holistic well-being and shared progress with their members.
The world’s largest cooperative dairy is also in India. The Amul Dairy was founded in 1946 and “milk became a symbol of protest” when two village dairy cooperatives resisted the exploitative practices of trade cartels serving as middlemen. Today, Amul has more than 16 million milk producers and 185,903 dairy cooperative societies making India the world’s largest milk producer.
In several of these cooperatives, either governments or civil society or development institutions have played roles as catalysts to sow the initial seeds. But in many, women themselves have collaborated to launch a cooperative, and the cooperative movement has expanded beyond the agriculture and rural labor sectors to include cooperatives for childcare, midwifery, handicrafts, and banking and microfinancing.
A cooperative model of operations and ownership stands in contrast to organizing businesses as corporations and giving these lifeless entities personhood. Cooperatives are ecosystems where living beings organize to enrich mutual social, cultural, and economic interests. It’s difficult to trace the exact beginnings of such reciprocal arrangements, but the modern cooperative movement emerged in Europe in response to reckless mechanization threatening livelihoods. Cooperatives have been big or small, multi-issue or focused on one, but what makes them unique is how they prosper through collective success.
Although time-tested, the United States has quivered in wholeheartedly espousing such economic schemata to structuralize work, production, economy, and life that elevates mutual dignity, interdependence, and freedom of all members involved. In the United States, 40,000 cooperatives still exist, but in India nearly 900,000 cooperatives operate in almost 100 percent of villages, and 30 percent of the population are cooperative members.
The United States could stand to learn from such paradigms and lead a transition from a corporate, profit-driven worldview to a well-being-driven one that contributes to a global ecosystem of cooperative societies.
Thresholds of Changemaking
In addition to cooperatives, women have been leading social movements to regain economic control of food systems and improve people’s lives. Women played key roles in direct actions in India—from Gandhi’s Salt Satyagrah that defied the British salt monopoly to the farmers’ protest of 2020-21 that compelled the government to retract controversial farm bills deemed detrimental to farmers’ food sovereignty. After the famine in 1940s, peasant women mobilized against gender exploitation and economic extraction in the widespread Tebhaga movement of 1946, a response to colonial and feudal oppression. In the famous Chipko Movement of the 1970s, a handful of tribal women in the Himalayan foothills opposed the powerful logging industry to protect their livelihoods by hugging trees. In the decades following, environmental and food justice protests have garnered steadfast solidarity from women—from the 1980 Anti-Nuclear Power Plant Protests, to 1984 protests against Union Carbide after the Bhopal blast, to the 1985 Narmada Dam protests. Refusing to remain bystanders, women have embraced active participation as leaders, organizers, and even security guards.
Women co-led the Right to Food Campaign, a massive social movement to address endemic hunger that pushed India to follow Brazil and South Africa in legally recognizing the right to food as an inalienable and constitutional right and adopt its Right to Food Act in 2013. And lest we forget, hunger knows no borders, and nor do rights, or the lack thereof. In India, this constitutional right has further enabled civil society and the government to dedicate legislative attention and economic resources to initiatives aimed at tackling hunger and malnutrition. With 10 percent of the US population experiencing food insecurity today, establishing such a fundamental right can serve as a catalyst for resolving this mounting crisis.
In 2002, the Working Group for Women and Land Ownership (WGWLO) was founded in my state of Gujarat to facilitate grassroots action and policy advocacy for women’s land and food rights. As 86 percent of arable land in India is under private ownership, largely passing from fathers to sons, WGWLO works in 17 of 33 districts with membership of over 40 nonprofit and community-based organizations to help women secure land rights and advance food justice.
Over the years, the network has trained revenue officials and paralegal workers, as well as community defenders known as Mehila-Kisan-Sakhi (woman farmer’s friend) and convened Swa-Bhumi-Kendras (centers for land ownership) to foster change. It has created what experts have called the Middle Space between social movements at the grassroots and legislative transformations at the state level, allowing thousands of women to access land rights and safeguard food sovereignty, while for the first time being legally acknowledged as farmers by the government. Women are now able to register on government’s I-Khedut (farmers) portal and access public schemes and trainings via initiatives such as Krishi-Vigyan-Kendras (agricultural science centers). They are now profiting from growing native crop varieties, while also revitalizing age-old methods to produce traditional remedies.
I call these dynamic middle spaces thresholds of changemaking, as they sprout at the frontiers of past and the future, loss and gain, scars and repair. In the United States, such spaces can serve as portals for political debate, diffusing ideological polarities to help create a more pluralistic vision.
From Borders to Chowks
I have deep roots in this India, one that’s pluralistic and pulsating. While spending monsoon season back home this year, I witnessed lethal floods washing away homes, mountains, and aspirations—the impacts of climate change too visceral to ignore. And I wondered like I have a hundred times before how life goes on here, unabashedly. In this, cooperative dream-building and collective movements have continually unveiled how pivotal women have been in regaining ground, literal and figurative, back from our colonial histories, and all forms of domination.
While the women of once-colonized worlds unravel those lingering borders tightly braided through their lives by conquests and customs, their peaceful revolutions reveal powerful crossroads they cocreate to summon new resolve, to share old stories, and to heal in spaces once stolen from them. Be it through WGWLO in South Asia or La Via Campesina in South America.
Rural women of the Global South can teach a lesson or two to the United States on how to metamorphose borders into chowks, Hindi for borderless village commons where each day they convene, converse, cooperate, and coalesce to quilt our collective future.
As borders have histories, they have vulnerabilities too. The physical ones are subservient to the whims of nature, and others to the wins of the vanquishers. Let the wins of this era not be the borders some lineate, but the chowks we together liberate.
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Read more stories by Ashka Naik.