S hankuben Rabari insists she is 40 years old. She has grey hair, a deeply wrinkled face and arms dotted with the green tattoos distinctiv...
Shankuben Rabari insists she is 40 years old.
She has grey hair, a deeply wrinkled face and arms dotted with the green tattoos distinctive to elderly women in her community. But Shankuben snaps at anyone who suggests she must be at least 60.
“I look older only because my teeth fell out,” she said, as younger women from the neighbourhood suppressed their laughter. “And because I work hard on the farm all day.”
Shankuben may be mistaken about her age, but she is not wrong about her workload.
Shankuben’s family comprises her, her husband Ramabhai, his aged parents and her two sons. They own six cows and cultivate five bighas of land – a bigha is roughly equal to a third of an acre – in Vadnagar, a village in Gujarat’s Patan district. It is a portion of the ancestral land that her husband’s grandfather used to own.
In the Maldhari or pastoral community to which they belong, the man takes the family’s cattle out for grazing. The woman does almost everything else.
“My husband is out with the cows all day. My sons have milk delivery jobs. And I do all the housework and farm work,” she said.
In recent years, Shankuben has become keenly aware of how disproportionate...
