Left-behind Bhumihar Women

It is common to see men of this village outmigrate after schooling. However, in recent decades, Bhumihar men have migrated in bulk to urban centres both within and outside the state in search of work. Many men have migrated for the first time in their late thirties or early forties. So, there is late-age male migration along with the dominant phenomenon of young male outmigration.

Bhumihar left-behind women are diverse in age—young, middle-aged, and a very few older women). Their reasons for staying back also vary. Generally, the term ‘left-behind women’ implies that women suffer from a lack of choice in whether to migrate with the men or stay back as they do not have any role in decision-making, which is their men’s domain (Das 2018). This assumption, which treats women as passive actors, has not gone unchallenged. Archambault (2010) cites the example of women, especially older women, left behind in rural Tanzania who stay back to maintain ownership of family-owned land and strengthen important social networks. Miranda Das (2018, 29), in her study in Bihar, finds that ‘left- behind women had no desire to migrate, even if they are given a chance’. It is important to argue that left-behind women are not passive actors, but it would be inaccurate to generalise that these women always stay back willingly. In the case of the Bhumihar left-behind women in my field village, their perception varied according to their age group.

Young Bhumihar women I spoke with strongly desired to migrate with their husbands and earn. In most cases, the husband’s earnings did not support the wife’s migration. Hence, they lived in the village in the company of elderly women of their family. In a few cases, young women chose the middle path between migrating with their men and staying back in the village—they moved to the nearest town for their children’s education. For instance, Renu’s husband, Mukul, works in Sikkim at a private firm and comes home once a year. Initially, Renu stayed in the village with her son and widowed mother-in-law. When her son turned five, she migrated to the nearest town, only 6 km from the village. Renu wanted her son to be away from this village’s mahaul (social environment) and get educated in an English medium school. She did not want to go to Sikkim, nor did she wish to stay back in the village. Therefore, Renu came up with the proposal to migrate to the nearest town. Initially, her husband and mother-in-law disagreed and refused to allow it, but eventually, she convinced them. Some young left-behind women like Renu – although very few – whose husbands earn a good amount choose this middle path between their husband’s destination and origin place.

The middle-aged left-behind women did not express such desires; on the contrary, they found the village more comfortable and even livelier. These women have reached the age where they can easily move outside their household (although within the marked boundary of their settlement) and interact with women of their age group, which is not available to young women. Also, the upgradation of women’s status from wife/mother to mother-in-law/ grandmother changes the power dynamics within the household, and they gain more autonomy than they had at a young age. There are considerable differences in opinion across ages relating to staying back, which challenge the notion that women left behind are passive actors or always prefer to migrate.

Migration literature has established a close association between left-behind women’s workload inside and outside the house and their men’s absence (Datta and Mishra 2011; Paris et al. 2005). Remittances received at the village do not always fulfil the monetary requirement to sustain the family. Hence, the women left behind must work to fill the income gap (Jetley 1987). It has been noted that in the absence of their men, left-behind women have various responsibilities such as supervising their farm, working as labourers on farms and taking care of cattle, in addition to their familial and domestic responsibilities. This is true in the case of ‘lower-caste’ left-behind women, who constitute the larger part of left-behind women and are additionally disadvantaged (Das 2018). The Bhumihar left-behind women present a different picture.

Most Bhumihar households with only men migration are not economically well-off. In most cases, the men do not generate sufficient income to send enough remittances. But even when the remittances are insufficient, Bhumihar left-behind women do not involve themselves in farm-related or other labour-intensive activities for income. This does not mean that Bhumihar women are absent from paid jobs. In recent decades, the number of working Bhumihar women has increased. Many Anganwadi, Shikshamitra, and ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist)³ posts, which require basic educational qualifications, are filled with Bhumihar women. Also, Bhumihars use their political power through the Panchayat to ensure these appointments. Usually, when the women are in such jobs, their husbands are present in the village, acting as proxies for their wives at block and district meetings. No one among the left-behind Bhumihar women in the study village had a paid job. Most elderly and middle- aged Bhumihar women were either illiterate or partially literate. The young Bhumihar women are educated but are usually discouraged from working outside the village.

Bhumihar women have recently become active outside the village spaces but still do not go to their fields to work on or supervise the farm. It is still taboo for Bhumihar women to step onto a field. Earlier, Bhumihar women were responsible for processing agricultural produce, such as boiling the paddy, making flattened rice, and cleaning and storing the grains, which were done within their domestic space and considered domestic work. With machines coming, Bhumihar women need not do this work anymore. Although those chores were strenuous and labour-intensive, the women liked the fact that they were passing their day working in the company of other women of the same or neighbouring families. These days, they complain about the absence of means to engage themselves in their free time between morning and evening chores. There is a clear segregation of work between gharelu kaam (domestic work) for women and duwar⁴ ka kaam (outside domestic work) for men or ‘lower-caste’ women. It signifies two things. First, Bhumihar women’s mobility is subject to caste and space norms in a different way from that of women of marginalised castes. Despite the financial burden, these women cannot work and support their families even if they wish. Second, Bhumihar women do not have additional workloads on top of their household and domestic responsibilities, unlike the women of marginalised castes.

Bhumihars’ caste normative system largely restricts their mobility within the village. Those who deviate from it are regarded as ‘lesser’ Bhumihars. For instance, Reena, a forty-two- year-old left-behind Bhumihar woman, is an exceptional case who engages with duwar ka kaam in her husband’s absence. This includes cleaning her duwar, feeding cattle, milking the cows, and making dung cakes. Reena’s family had moved away from the joint family over domestic issues. Her husband earned well working in a private firm in Patna until he had an accident and injured one leg. After this, he became a security guard in a school in Patna, with a reduced salary, which was insufficient to support a family of six members. To fill the income gap, Reena keeps three cows and sells the milk for extra income, with her husband handling the work of buying and storing the cattle fodder. However, she is severely criticised by other Bhumihar women for being involved in what is considered ‘lower-caste’ work.

Reena justifies her work as an extension of her domestic work. She explained that caring for cattle differs from working in the field. Reiterating the moral position of her caste, she argued, ‘Bhumihar women should not work in the field even if they are dying of starvation.’ Most of the Bhumihars who have migrated have either given their land for sharecropping or left it fallow. While as noted above, women of marginalised castes, irrespective of age, are active in village spaces such as other caste settlements, duwar, village shops and agricultural farms. Caste position and morality norms shape women’s social experience in the village spaces.

After this broad picture of left-behind Bhumihar women, I will provide a detailed description of two left-behind Bhumihar women⁵, showing how they imagine the city space, often different from the village space, the aspirations they hold, and how the migration of their men conditions their life in the village.

Women’s Narratives

City as a Space of Emancipation

Priya, approaching thirty, got married at the early age of eighteen. In her first eight years of marriage, she lived less at her sasural (husband’s natal home) and more at her maike (girl’s natal home). Her stay at her sasural increased after her six-year-old son was admitted to a private English medium school in the village. With the marriage of her brother, the family dynamics also changed at her natal home. So, she reduced the frequency of her visits and days of stay at her natal home. She acknowledged the compulsion to develop a sense of belonging at her husband’s house and with his family. But from the very beginning, Priya has had problems adjusting to her sasural, the most prominent one being loneliness.

Priya lives in the village with her mother-in-law, Kamala, and her younger son. Priya’s husband, Rajesh, and father-in-law, Madan, have both migrated for work. Rajesh migrated before his marriage and has lived in Patna for over ten years. After many failed attempts at business, he opened a small grocery shop against the wishes of both Priya and Kamala. Madan works at a dam in the nearby village and comes home more frequently, once or twice a month for a day or two. In the absence of both men, their land is given for sharecropping. Both Priya and Kamala consider Rajesh’s migration to Patna impractical because he is not in a monthly paid job, and his earnings from the shop are low, barely enough to support his expenses in the city. Instead, they have suggested he open a shop in the village. Rajesh refuses to return to the village. It would be a blow to his self-esteem as it would signify his failure in the city. Priya has no say in her husband’s migration nor in her staying back in the village.

Staying at Naygaon, Priya is primarily confined to the inner space of the house. In the absence of the men, Kamala is responsible for fetching the ration and vegetables from the shop in the settlement. Kamala likes to spend her time in the company of women her age. She attends a Bhumihar women’s (all middle-aged and above) gathering near her settlement and visits two or three houses of her close caste kin daily. In Kamala’s absence, Priya is all alone in the house. Even after eight years of marriage, Priya is not allowed to go to the rooftop in daylight or near her house’s main gate. In her free time, she watches Bhojpuri movies battling frequent power cuts. Priya said despairingly, ‘Imagine, the whole day, I am alone. I have no one to share my feelings with, whether good or bad.’

Like Priya, most young left-behind women live with their mother-in-law. In the absence of their men, the young women have only the company of the elderly women of the village. The power relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and the generation gap between them dissuades many young women from freely expressing their feelings and thoughts with the older women. Very few unmarried daughters or women visit the young married women; even if they visit, the mother-in-law would be around. Young married women do not visit the house of their close blood or caste kin until they reach a certain age or for an occasion like marriage. Young married women do not get to interact with women of their age group, as they are all subject to similar norms. However, young women of the village sometimes exchange phone numbers through their children or others and speak over the phone without the mother-in-law’s knowledge. Once, I delivered Priya’s number to her neighbour, Kanti, who also lives with her mother-in-law in her husband’s absence. There are many such strategies these young women use in their everyday lives to negotiate and adjust to the norms.

Priya’s narrative reveals that loneliness constitutes a large part of her everyday life. Before labelling it solely as an ‘impact’ of her husband’s absence, one must consider the knitted system of norms and values induced by her caste position, which conditions her seclusion and loneliness. Many feminist writings on caste and gender have established that gender is significant in the perpetuation of caste hierarchy through control of sexuality and exploitation of the sexual-economic labour of women (Yalman 1963; Chakravarti 1993; Rao 2003). Also, caste structure, in the form of rules and regulations, invades women’s lives differently (Dube 1997). It has also been noticed that when a caste aspires for a higher position in the caste ladder, what first comes into play is the attempt to control their women.

Bhumihar women, as with many other caste women, are subject to constant supervision, which does not end with their marriage. Restricting women by keeping them within the inner space of the house suggests that these spaces are projected as intensely moral realms (Niranjana 2001). Everyday expressions, such as a mother-in-law’s instructions or admonitions to her daughter-in-law — do not peek through the window, do not appear in front of every man and woman, do not go to the roof before the sunset, do not come to the main door, don’t you know how to talk or laugh softly — carry implicit references to shame, honour, chastity, and female sexuality.

A mental map of the house interior is created where the private space is clearly demarcated from the public spaces. The innermost part of the house, including the cooking hearth, worship place, bedrooms and attached courtyard, is where young married women are restricted, which constantly invisibilises them from other parts of the house. They get access to the more public parts of the house only after attaining a certain age. As a newlywed, Priya was restricted within the inner space of the house. Moreover, with the changing composition of the family structure, from joint to nuclear households, women like Priya feel lonelier. These young women have access to newer technologies such as TV and mobile phones, but Priya’s experience shows the limitation of these technologies, with the longing for company persisting despite this access.

Priya is happy when her husband visits home, but it is momentary. He comes home after a gap of four to five months and stays only for a few days despite living only around 60 km from the village. Priya recalled some of the happy moments she spent with Rajesh when he came home, such as watching Bhojpuri movies together, listening to music, laughing and playing with their son. However, Kamala taunts Rajesh for spending so much time inside the home, particularly inside the room in Priya’s company. Priya can move around with her husband, visiting religious sites, markets, and even the hospital. During his brief visits, she does not bring up her issues and tries to cherish his company. She remarked, ‘Once he leaves, my life becomes monotonous again.’

Priya’s narrative indicates that as a daughter, a woman (up to a certain age) has relative freedom for movement in the household and the duwar; the streets and fields are more accessible. However, as a daughter-in-law, the boundaries of access and freedom of movement are fixed. Even as they cope with the commonplace but powerful transformation of marriage, in terms of changes in physical place and moral registers, the husband’s migration leaves these women desolate.

Priya believes a permanent solution to her loneliness is to migrate to the city with her husband. In her view, the city means relaxation from all the rules she is subjected to as a married Bhumihar woman: ‘In the city, we have freedom and personal space, which is absent in the village.’ She perceives the village and the city as two distinct socio-spatial entities. Before marriage, she lived in the village but perceived her natal conjugal villages differently. She said, ‘The village as such is not an issue. The problem is bandhan (restrictions). Here [at her sasural], I feel ghutan (suffocated); it is like a jail.’

In her imagination, the city is a space of intimacy (with her husband) and freedom, while the village is suffocating and restrictive. The image of the distant place her husband has migrated to gives Priya hope for freedom from all restrictions. Unfortunately, with so many household complications and insufficient earnings, that escape is not possible at the moment.

City as a Destroyer of Dreams

Kajal, a thirty-two-year-old housewife and mother of two (aged five and two), whose husband is an outmigrant, lives with her parents-in-law, grandmother-in-law and two children. After a few months of the marriage, Kajal, too, had migrated with her husband and lived in the city of Bhagalpur for nearly a year. She returned to the village with her husband when he resigned from his job and decided to start his own business. After three years of business failures and financial difficulties in the village, her husband migrated to Patna and joined a salesman’s job in an electronic shop. Kajal stayed back in the village with her kids. She maintains a cordial relationship with her mother-in-law. Her parents-in-law are caring for her kids and they support her financially. Being the mother of two sons and seven years of marriage behind, Kajal has gained negotiating power within the household and in her conjugal relationship.

Of all my respondents, Kajal was the only one who had written down a part of her life events and emotions in a personal diary. She generously shared the diary with me as a reference to understand her life after her marriage.⁶ Kajal’s personal diary notes the experiences of her husband’s outmigration and her own experience in the city in the initial years of her marriage and captures her imagination of the city space. Regular entries for a short period, from January 2015 to November 2016, note many events of her life, emotional ups and downs, desires, self-reflections, and meaning-making of her world. The very first entry in the diary is on the day her marriage was fixed, and the last entry is during her first pregnancy. Her entries in the diary reflect some of the important phases of her life, such as her transformation from unmarried to married life, her initial experience at the sasural, her short-term migration to the city and her conjugal relationship. Busy with her kids and household responsibilities, Kajal has been unable to resume her diary writing, although she wishes to.

Kajal began her diary writing from her school days to express her feelings and thoughts, which she could not communicate to anyone else for fear of being judged. Of all the diaries she wrote, only this one remained with her. The rest were lost when Kajal moved from her natal house. She preferred to write in Hinglish; only a few pages are in Hindi. She uses English words in many places, such as lover, husband, feeling, happy and sad, and also writes short sentences in English, such as: ‘Today I am very happy’; ‘Please god help me.’ Several events and emotions noted in the diary were discussed during my conversations with Kajal. In the initial few months after marriage, she lived with her in-laws in the village. Her husband, who was working in a town in Bihar, left for work eight days after the marriage. Her entry on that day in the diary notes her feelings. She expressed her despair: ‘Today, my husband returned to work. No one bothered to ask how I felt. It is so painful’ (9 May 2015).

As with other left-behind women, she went through a double separation: one from her natal home and another from her husband. Kajal had a pre-marriage telephonic conversation with her husband for about two months but it had not given her a clear sense about her husband’s nature. Based on her telephonic conversation, she wrote about her doubts and observations about her husband’s nature, wondering ‘whether he is progressive or conservative’. She waited for her marriage and in-person conversations to get a concrete idea about his nature. But before Kajal got to know him, her husband returned to the town for work. She notes,

Kajal’s diary bursts with emotions of desolation, anxiety, agony, hesitation and fear, mainly reflecting the changes in her life after the marriage. Her jottings indicate she had many plans for her new, married life, which she wanted to share with her husband. On another occasion, she described her dream of an ideal and happy domesticity with mutual transparency and sharing. But she felt that was impossible in the village, within the joint family set-up. In her imagination, as noted in the diary, she perceived the city as a place for this possibility. Like Priya’s account, Kajal’s narrative explicates the differences between village and city.

The culture of intimacy and privacy is by and large absent from villages. Intimacy between husband and wife is supposedly only for reproduction. Although this practice has changed over the years, even today, men are criticised if they spend time in the day with their wives. As we have seen, Kamala would taunt her son for spending time in the company of his wife. Kajal was aware of the norms governing a married couple’s intimacy in the village. That is why she desired to start her domesticity in the town, to overcome the hurdles to intimacy and other restrictions imposed on upper caste young women. She thought the married life she desired was possible only in the urban area without the joint family’s restrictions and surveillance.

With all these dreams and desires, she finally went to live with her husband. Here, at least, she had freedom of movement inside the house. She had relaxation of parda, dress, food and even the ritualised routine of everyday life which she had to do at the village. Technically, her mobility outside the house was more plausible. However, being new in the town and embodying (caste and gender) normativity, she relied on her husband’s company and his permission to go out. Fifteen days after she arrived in the city, she made the first entry in the diary, which consists mainly of her reflections on her life in the city with her husband. The dominant emotion is disappointment, as most things from the imaginary world of her domesticity were missing:

Kajal came to the city with a bundle of expectations. She thought she would get the time and attention of her husband for a fulfilling partnership, and her much-cherished dream of her husband helping her to prepare for a job would be realised. In contrast to the village, where women had limited scope, many responsibilities and caste-related restrictions, the city seemed to her to be full of opportunities. Kajal often initiated conversations about this and other things with her husband but invariably received a cold response. Her diary notes,

Kajal reflects on her imagination, perceptions and experiences of the urban space. She had migrated with her husband to the town, hoping to build an ideal conjugal relationship far from the village and its regulations. Kajal thought she would transcend the conjugal (power) relation. However, contrary to her imagination, she experienced unequal reciprocity from her husband. The major disappointment for Kajal was her husband’s disinterest in mundane activities of everyday life that engage her. On another occasion, she notes,

Generally, intimate emotional behaviour is socially regulated to preserve the gendered division and is mediated by power, division of labour, family composition, caste, community, sexuality, and place (Geetha 2007, Jackson 2012). Kajal had perceived the city as emancipatory, supposedly without orthodox rules and constant supervision. In many places in her diary, she had written, ‘I want my husband to be my lover.’ I asked Kajal how she differentiates between husband and lover. She explained that a husband is always tied to familial duties and tries to bend and shape his wife according to family rules. However, a lover’s concern is mainly with his partner’s happiness without much thought of family rules and other people. Unfortunately, her desires remained unfulfilled.

Kajal’s husband did not play the role she wished for; on the contrary, he tried to shape her into a good bahu (daughter-in-law) who always prioritised the family before her own desires. Her experience of coupledom was asymmetrical in emotional response despite the shift in location. She kept questioning her experiences in both spaces, often concluding there was no difference between the two in terms of conjugality. Her experience of conjugal relationship is personal yet can be generalised for many young married women in the village. Losing hope in her conjugal relationship, Kajal prioritised her kids and their upbringing; they are now the fulcrum of her domesticity. Disappointed with the city and because of the insufficient income of her husband, Kajal chose to stay back in the village and negotiate the gendered norms of her caste in her everyday life.

Conclusion

In engaging with the two main themes of the essay – a) how do left-behind women imagine the distant city space; and b) how do their caste, class, and age shape their imagination, experiences, and aspirations of migration – I have attempted to move beyond the ‘impact analysis framework’. I have pursued a slightly different line by highlighting the women’s subjectivities and meaning-making to understand a significant slice of their lives—migration. Laying the context of the study, I have presented a broader picture of the lives of left-behind Bhumihar women concerning migration. The lives of left-behind Bhumihar women are not radically different from those of Bhumihar women whose husbands stay in the village. However, this paper has underscored that the husband’s absence adds to their misery and often gives them hope and aspirations for the world that the husband occupies.

Two different narratives of Bhumihar women are then discussed to argue that the regime of caste values, economic condition, and age shape the experiences of these women. Priya is keen to experience city life to gain more freedom and ‘personal space’, but her spouse’s insufficient earnings lead to despair. Kajal, like Priya, initially imagines the city as an emancipatory space. However, her dream of building an ideal conjugal relationship with her husband in the city remains unfulfilled.

Hence, the essay indicates how different left-behind Bhumihar women, whose lives are embedded in the social structure and power relations within the household and outside it, imagine the city space differently and how caste, class, and age add their own layers to their meaning-making of the husband’s migration. These instances are not peculiar to the Bhumihar women in this village and can be used to understand the life of ‘upper-caste’ women in contemporary rural Bihar in particular and rural India in general.

Notes

1. Traditionally, land is considered a significant source of livelihood and the most desirable form of possession. Bhumihars define themselves literally: Bhumi (land) + ahar (food)= livelihood from land. Although the Bhumihar caste associates itself with land, its caste morality prohibits the adherents from doing the actual labour in the field. During the ‘Brahmin status movement’, Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, one of the prominent Bhumihars and famous as a peasant leader in Bihar, clearly distinguished Bhumihars from other land-owning castes. He argued that Kshatriya (an ‘upper’ caste) could work in the objection or un-objection period (aapattee aur un-aapattee kaal), but Bhumihar should not work in the field in the un-objection period. It is considered a sin equal to killing a thousand animals (see ‘Brahmarshi Vansh Vistar’ 1916 in Sharma 2010). In a certain sense, this belief and morality still govern most of the Bhumihars. Bhumihar women are not allowed to venture into the agricultural fields even during the objection period. During fieldwork, I observed that even poor Bhumihar women do not work in the field. They clearly stated that even if they died of starvation, they still would not go to the field for work.

2.  This statement is based on the descriptions provided by their neighbours and my observation of the structure and size of the locked-up houses.

3.  The Anganwadi program is part of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) of the Indian government, which focuses on providing food supplements to young children, adolescent girls, and lactating women. ASHA is an all-India female- cadre of community health workers constituted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare under the National Rural Health Mission in 2006. They are responsible for promoting universal immunisation, referral, and escort services for reproduction and child health (RCH) and other healthcare programs. Shiksha Mitra, the para-teachers, are recruited in government schools as part of a low-cost education strategy adopted by Bihar state in the 2000s. The power of recruiting Shiksha Mitra lies with the village Panchayat. These para or Panchayat teachers are given lower lump-sum payments for the same workload without governmental benefits.

4.  Duwar is the empty open space in front of one’s house. One example of duwar ka kaam is the works related to cattle such as feeding and milking them and cleaning duwar

5.  The fieldwork was conducted between May 2019 and May 2021.

6.  Translations of the excerpts, where necessary, are by me.

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