A STUDY FROM HARYANA RURAL AREAS
OVERWORKED FARMWOMEN OF HARYANA----THEIR LEISURE AND RECREATION
Work or toil is necessary to sustain life and leisure provides a person with a chance to relax and recover from the stress and fatigue of everyday life. It also provides a creative outlet and an important opportunity to establish and maintain social networks. Despite the utter necessities of leisure in everybody’s life it was observed in a broader study of farmwomen’s life in Haryana that for women and girl children in rural farm families in Haryana, life means work. They toil long hours in the fields, tend domestic livestock, gather fuel wood, haul water, prepare and cook food, take care of children and manage the house. Farmwomen typically work longer hours than farm men: an average of 10 hours more each week during peak crop season in Haryana (AICRP Report: 1997).yet women’s work is not included in national income accounts. If women’s work in and around the house were monetized, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons their collective contribution to the world economy would easily top $4 trillion a year.
An intensive survey of 900 households in rural Haryana (AICRP Report.1985) found that when both subsistence production and market production were considered, women, despite having two-thirds less cash income then men, still contributed 15 per cent amore money to the monthly household budget. In general, men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages of the monthly household budget; they spend on their leisure activities, while farmwomen seldom spend on their own wants and needs.
It is my personal experience that leisure experience for Haryana rural farmwomen is gendered and culturally situated. Reason behind it is that women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Again they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their ghar (home), nohra (cattle shed), bada (a place to make cow-dung cakes) and khet (farm). It was noted that in rural farm families men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages on relative luxuries, including tobacco, liquor and leisure activities. While women restrict themselves to spend on their own leisure, may be by nature or by inherited norms.
INTRODUCTION
The study is part of the broader AICRP in home science scheme which is working for rural farmwomen in nine states of India including Haryana. At the initial stage of the project, the prescriptive approach was used which dealt with exploring information of the Farm Families Resource Management Patterns. Gradually the project thrust shifted towards integrated and participatory approaches for working with rural farmwomen in they’re own context. It is this time the leisure component in the lives of rural women is traced out.
This paper reports on the leisure experience among farmwomen of rural families of Haryana. Although there have been a considerable number of studies on rural women in Haryana, especially on women in agriculture, research on these women's leisure experience has been remarkably absent. Leisure among rural women in Haryana is virtually an unexplored field of study. My aim in this paper is to document the leisure experience of women in selected rural farm households with the hope of instigating future research on this topic. An understanding of these women's experience of leisure will enhance our understanding of leisure in general, and gender and leisure specifically.
I argue that despite the scarce means, hard work, and everyday struggle involved in a subsistence-oriented life style for most of them, rural farmwomen of Haryana have their own ways of enjoying leisure and recreation. They have an amazing capacity to turn some of their routine work into avenues of recreation, and thereby, transform some of the most mundane and dry work into rewarding leisure experience. This finding does not necessarily mean that there is no reason for concern about the constraints with which women live. However, what could or should be done is a topic beyond the scope of this article.
METHODOLOGY
The survey was conducted under All India Coordinated Research Project of Home –Science Discipline and financed by ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and was carried out by the research team of the Department of Family Resource Management of Home Science College, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana. The research protocol was provided by the committee for Home science in Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR).
Time use survey pattern included in the protocol does not have any social-cultural bias as the information collected refers only to how individuals, spend their time since the information is collected for all the twenty four hours and no activities is likely to be missed out, that is why we are able to extract the leisure component of rural farmwomen.
The survey has been conducted every year since 1997, and the 2000 survey was the third. Survey was carried from three geographical zones viz. zone 1 arid- zone, zone II sem- arid, and zone III dry sub-humid. Villages Shah pur and Kirtan from Hisar District (zone I) Villages Deoban and Devigarh were selected from Kaithal District (zone II); villages Mahobbatpur and Pinjokhara were selected from Ambala District (zone III). In all 900 households were selected representing the five landholding farm families (landless, small, medium and large) proportionately. For all farmwomen in the age group of 20-40 years, were selected to assess their work profile. Their leisure time activities recorded were, chatting with friends, preparation of special food items, stitching, knitting and crocheting, embroidery, dari making marketing, and kitchen gardening (activities performed by 60 percent of farm women were taken and rest of the activities such as reading, watching TV and many others were excluded due to generalization constraints), all these were listed in home activities in the protocol.
The data were collected as part of a broader research scheme and this paper uses only a small portion and the unstructured questions were documented in this paper. Hence, the findings presented in this paper, though rooted in the empirical situation of the field, do not necessarily allow generalizations.
The Forms and Nature of Recreation and Leisure: This study found that farmwomen are "invisible" workers, toiling from dawn till dark without recognition of the economic value of their labor. Their work or labor-inputs are basically of three broad categories: household chores, farm work and animal husbandry work. Most of their work is not included in national accounts. If woman’s work in and around the house were monetized, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons their collective contribution to the world economy would easily top $4 trillion a year. Their task has become more and more difficult with increasing irrigation facilities, pattern of growing two or three crops in a year. Where mechanizations of agriculture benefited the farm men a lot, certain gendered activities like weeding, cotton picking, fodder collection are still exclusively carried by farmwomen manually.
Farmwomen in the study-area, as in other parts of rural Haryana, work hard and are confined to spaces mostly around the homestead, farm and cattle -sheds. They are not provided with any formal leisure or recreational facilities at their village premises they seldom visit city/town for recreation. Put differently, the senses and values farmwomen in the study area attach to leisure may not necessarily conform to the mainstream interpretation of leisure. They feel leisured with chatting with their friends, by preparing special food items for their families, weaving daris, doing kitchen gardening, marketing and by making handicraft items (consistent results were observed by the other states provided with AICRP scheme in their FRM, Depatt’s of H.Sc. Colleges) .The following are examples of typical responses by a respondent when asked to explain what they meant by leisure and recreation:
“Leisure is .... Joy-a (sense of) happiness you feel deep down your heart by doing something or by making someone happy. I make daris with the help of my daughters buy clothes from the market for them . . . I feel good to see them smiling. Freetime? No . . . I am always busy (but) when I go to well to fetch water, I meet neighbors and talk with sahelis (friends)”.
Farmwomen have a capacity to enjoy themselves within their limited means they weave daries as a functional object with creative expression, they found it to be a relaxing activity, one often practiced alone or in the company of others, and one that connects women to family and friends.they artistically transforms some of the rags, plastic fertilizer and seed bags into yarns and weave cots, chairs, piidhaas , in a sense they make things out of waste, and it will ease out their stress of the day’s toil. Preparations of special food even in the face of harder work schedule satisfy them and attach them with the bonds of love with their family members. The most common forms of recreations are preparing, gond/khoya laddu, or panjiri, especially in the winter season.
It was observed despite any opportunity to visit formal leisure institutions (e.g. cnema or theater in town or city) the farmwomen did not express any significant sense of deprivation.They do, however, create their own symbolic worlds of recreation by modifying and conditioning some of their routine work. When engaged in this work, they experience the key elements of leisure-the "feelings of relaxation, enjoyment, and rejuvenation. Recent research has presented interesting insights when analyzing varied meanings and ramifications of leisure experiences. In the study area, farmwomen do not enjoy substantial freedom of choice of activities because their work patterns are determined by the prevailing social and cultural structures related to gender. Farm women do, however, have some power of manipulation and adjustment. For example, one respondent reported:
If I want to spend a bit longer time for chatting to (friends) by going to fetch water from the well ( in spite of facility of water in their home rural women used to fetch a pitcher of water from the well for drinking purpose) I normally try to complete my (routine) goal (cow-shed cleaning) and ghar kaa kam (household chore) earlier or work some extra time at night. Sometimes I arrange with my daughter to do some work for me while I meet the friends or other women who come from neighboring villages (neighbours sister). Though the concept of leisure is wholly free of obligation or work totally without discretion. Farmwomen's work in the villages is not free, but observations of and conversations with the farmwomen indicated that they can negotiate some flexibility through various adjustments and therefore there is some degree of self determination in their lives. The sense of joy or satisfaction they experience from family care activities or from meeting friends also give farmwomen the gratifying and comforting feelings that they have really “achieved something,” their work is “of worth and use to the family,” and that there are “other persons who share their ideas” of good and bad.
Farmwomen, specially in the productive age group (20-40 for this study) meet together while collecting fuel (leaves, barks, shrubs, twigs), fodder (grass; weeds of different types from the crop fields, waste land and along the riversides and along the fen sing around the fields), from the fields. Other opportunities for such meetings appear when farmwomen go to fetch water from one of the village or nearby farm well with sweet water for drinking. There is always a mith that water from the particular well is good to drink as compared with the supplied community water. On these occasions, women meet together and discuss personal, family, and village affairs as they go about the work of fuel or fodder collection and fetching water.
Farmwomen, especially housewives, almost universally cherish the experience of visiting houses of close kin. They visit their parents house at the time of birth of their brother’s child, to help their sister-in –low in care of her infant and to take rest in jaapa (one month after delivery period) period .In case of the birth of the male child they were provided with lots of clothing and jewellery, when they return to their in-law’s home. Farmwomen perform their work enthusiastically and feel happy during their stay at their parents’ home. For a young, newly married housewife, for example, the greatest recreation can be a Pihar-a short, periodic visit to her parents from her in-law’s home. During such visits, women generally take a break from the burden of daily work and pass the time by meeting kin and friends. However, these visits are not mere holidays or pastimes. Women value these social connections and rejuvenate these links through such visits which help them in case of crises and exigencies. If there is a major crisis in her family life, for example, a woman can ask for assistance and protection from her kin. She can also get counsel and financial assistance from the kin during these visits. In fact, such visits and attendance of festive occasions are a part of women's attempt in building up a network of connections and support which is, their “social capital” against crises.
Socio-religious festivities also provide opportunities for recreation and leisure especially for farmwomen of landless categories. During the Holi, Diwali, Tij, Makar Sakranti and other festivals for example, schedule caste women visit the local large land holders to receive some dole or charity. To a large extent these visits are socially scheduled and culturally determined. For example, there are specific social and cultural norms and standards regarding the time of such a visit and the expected behavior from the guest and the host. Such visits are especially observed among the share-cropping families. A farmwoman from these families, generally the sharecropper's wife or sister, visit the house of the landlord, who is often a local, largelandholder of uppercaste. She participates in various household chores in the patron's house, passes some time in friendly talks, and receives some gifts from the patron's family at the time of departure. Such visits are seen by farmwomen as a welcome change from the monotony of their daily work and an opportunity for some extra income. These visits also reinforce the patron-client ties in the village community.
The majority of farmwomen in the study area were engaged in some form of handicraft, especially knitting, crochetting, sewing, embroidery, and dari making weaving (as described above). Although some time for farmwomen with the skills in these handicraft is mainly an economic activity performed for the financial welfare of the family, observations revealed that such activity also provided women with an opportunity for recreation, relaxation, and some degree of freedom to test their ideas and innovations. They enjoy performing these handicraft activities and on an average, they spend about one and half hours engeged in handicraft work daily. On many occasions they were seen to help and teach youngsters the techniques of handicraft. If someone made something new, for example inventing a new design for embroidered shirt or odhni or applied a new technique in sewing, she was found to be excitedly talking about it or demonstrating the skill.
The limits of a Conventional Leisure Perspective in the Analysis of Poor Rural Farmwomen's Leisure Experience in Haryana: The popular concept of leisure as “free time” or “freely chosen activity” is not readily applicable to women in this study, and this poses the first problem in trying to conceptualize women's leisure in this particular context. Roberts (1970) offered a typical definition of leisure:
Leisure time can be defined as time that is not obligated, and leisure activities can be defined as activities that are non-obligatory .... When . . . obligations (towards work and family) is met, a man (woman?) has “free time” in which his behaviour is dictated by his own will and preferences, and it is here that leisure is found.
Many of the recreational activities of the poor rural farmwomen in rural areas of Haryana do not fall within the strict meaning of the above definition. Observations indicated that leisure experience is gendered and culturally situated. First, women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs. Second, they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their working areas. Third, owing to a host of constraints farmwomen's choice of so-called free activity is also very limited. Approaching work and leisure as a dichotomy (see Parker, 1971) tends to obscure the value of the subtle pleasure, recreations, gratifications, and awards farmwomen do achieve from some apparently obligatory household chores and other routine activities, as well as the extent work or obligation permeates their lives.
Thus, the emphasis of analysis, especially in the case of rural Haryana farmwomen's leisure experience, needs to be on the rather reclusive interaction of recreation and pleasure with daily routine rather than on the visible and quantitative dimensions of leisure such as time, activity, or space. One obvious reason is that the unpaid, overlapping, domesticized, and invisible nature of farmwomen's work in rural Haryana makes it difficult to make clear distinctions between free time activity and obligatory activity or between leisure and work. This is, however, certainly not to undermine the importance and usefulness of focusing on time and activity in some situations. However, by narrowing the definition of leisure to free time or activity, we run the risk of failing to see the deeper manifestations of leisure and recreation among the poor farming families which are not always so easily recognizable.
For example, as noted previously in the study area, farmwomen most often meet together, chat, and exchange varied experience during the time of collecting fuel from the neighboring fields. Although the obligatory work of collecting fuel is one of the most tiring jobs, the pleasure and recreation women gain from these meetings are greatly rewarding for them. If we analyze the task of fuel collection on the basis of its visible appearance alone, observations most probably would be limited to the obvious hard manual labour involved in this obligatory activity. What would be missed are the pleasurable rewards and gratifications farmwomen achieve from these informal gatherings. Thereby, we could end up with a superficial and inaccurate understanding of the situation. In other words, caught up in the dogma of rigid work-leisure distinctions, one may fail to see the leisure farmwomen can carve out of even such a cumbersome activity.
The rigid distinction between obligatory activity and time and free activity and time may not be helpful in explaining the rural Haryana situation because, as noted before, farmwomen's work is generally obligatory, unpaid, and occurs beyond the formal framework of market and money-exchange. Therefore, one helpful approach in analysis may be to examine farmwomen's lives with the concept of “elasticity” as a framework which can help us see the “pleasurable rewards” women achieve from their “activities.” Indeed, leisure may be seen as the “pleasurable rewards” which women skillfully manage to exploit from their day-to-day survival strategies and activities.
In this paper actual position of leisure among farmwomen in rural areas of Haryana was explored, yet farmwomen’s experience of constraints in the study area is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, only a broad, preliminary picture of farmwomen’s leisure experiences is presented.
Women, as discussed, do not have access to institutional or more conventional sources of leisure. However, they, at least to some extent, negotiate around these constraints. The negotiation, as illustrated in the previously discussed examples, is mainly in the form of modifying their routine work pattern and carving out pleasure from it. As they inherited the work pattern from their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers they willingly fallow them, and therefore, they do not appear to mentally suffer from any significant sense of discontent or deprivation over these particular constraints. Again despite constraints on leisure opportunities, rural farmwomen were quick to point out the many advantages of a rural lifestyle. Isolation can lead to loneliness, for example, but the sense of space and freedom it brings can also be very rejuvenating. One farmwoman said, “If I’ve had a hard day I go to my fields and the stress goes away, I get back on track. If I had to live in an apartment in the city I would find that very difficult, I need that space.”
This paper has attempted to show that women of the farming families, one of the poorest of the rural communities in Haryana, enjoy recreation and leisure in their own unique way. Virtually no research has been conducted on the leisure experience of these women. It is difficult to analyze their leisure and recreational behavior through the conventional approach to leisure studies which view leisure as free or nonobligatory time and/or activity. It is not helpful, and probably not possible, to rigidly demarcate the boundaries of free time and work or compulsory and non-obligatory work. People are never fully or truly free. These farmwomen are no exception. What is more significant is to note that they seem to have found some ways of stealing away from the mental sense of obligation and pressure generated by their cumbersome daily work performed in a largely hostile and disadvantageous environment, and of creating their own mental worlds of joy within their daily struggle.
Leisure and recreation among the farmwomen seem to be an integral part of their day-to-day strategies for survival. Women have developed the skill to carve out pleasure from the everyday forms of struggle which surround their life and living. This interesting area of study calls for further research, as at present, our ignorance is profound.
OVERWORKED FARMWOMEN OF HARYANA----THEIR LEISURE AND RECREATION
Work or toil is necessary to sustain life and leisure provides a person with a chance to relax and recover from the stress and fatigue of everyday life. It also provides a creative outlet and an important opportunity to establish and maintain social networks. Despite the utter necessities of leisure in everybody’s life it was observed in a broader study of farmwomen’s life in Haryana that for women and girl children in rural farm families in Haryana, life means work. They toil long hours in the fields, tend domestic livestock, gather fuel wood, haul water, prepare and cook food, take care of children and manage the house. Farmwomen typically work longer hours than farm men: an average of 10 hours more each week during peak crop season in Haryana (AICRP Report: 1997).yet women’s work is not included in national income accounts. If women’s work in and around the house were monetized, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons their collective contribution to the world economy would easily top $4 trillion a year.
An intensive survey of 900 households in rural Haryana (AICRP Report.1985) found that when both subsistence production and market production were considered, women, despite having two-thirds less cash income then men, still contributed 15 per cent amore money to the monthly household budget. In general, men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages of the monthly household budget; they spend on their leisure activities, while farmwomen seldom spend on their own wants and needs.
It is my personal experience that leisure experience for Haryana rural farmwomen is gendered and culturally situated. Reason behind it is that women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Again they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their ghar (home), nohra (cattle shed), bada (a place to make cow-dung cakes) and khet (farm). It was noted that in rural farm families men spent a disproportionate amount of income from cash crops or wages on relative luxuries, including tobacco, liquor and leisure activities. While women restrict themselves to spend on their own leisure, may be by nature or by inherited norms.
INTRODUCTION
The study is part of the broader AICRP in home science scheme which is working for rural farmwomen in nine states of India including Haryana. At the initial stage of the project, the prescriptive approach was used which dealt with exploring information of the Farm Families Resource Management Patterns. Gradually the project thrust shifted towards integrated and participatory approaches for working with rural farmwomen in they’re own context. It is this time the leisure component in the lives of rural women is traced out.
This paper reports on the leisure experience among farmwomen of rural families of Haryana. Although there have been a considerable number of studies on rural women in Haryana, especially on women in agriculture, research on these women's leisure experience has been remarkably absent. Leisure among rural women in Haryana is virtually an unexplored field of study. My aim in this paper is to document the leisure experience of women in selected rural farm households with the hope of instigating future research on this topic. An understanding of these women's experience of leisure will enhance our understanding of leisure in general, and gender and leisure specifically.
I argue that despite the scarce means, hard work, and everyday struggle involved in a subsistence-oriented life style for most of them, rural farmwomen of Haryana have their own ways of enjoying leisure and recreation. They have an amazing capacity to turn some of their routine work into avenues of recreation, and thereby, transform some of the most mundane and dry work into rewarding leisure experience. This finding does not necessarily mean that there is no reason for concern about the constraints with which women live. However, what could or should be done is a topic beyond the scope of this article.
METHODOLOGY
The survey was conducted under All India Coordinated Research Project of Home –Science Discipline and financed by ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and was carried out by the research team of the Department of Family Resource Management of Home Science College, CCS HAU, Hisar, Haryana. The research protocol was provided by the committee for Home science in Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR).
Time use survey pattern included in the protocol does not have any social-cultural bias as the information collected refers only to how individuals, spend their time since the information is collected for all the twenty four hours and no activities is likely to be missed out, that is why we are able to extract the leisure component of rural farmwomen.
The survey has been conducted every year since 1997, and the 2000 survey was the third. Survey was carried from three geographical zones viz. zone 1 arid- zone, zone II sem- arid, and zone III dry sub-humid. Villages Shah pur and Kirtan from Hisar District (zone I) Villages Deoban and Devigarh were selected from Kaithal District (zone II); villages Mahobbatpur and Pinjokhara were selected from Ambala District (zone III). In all 900 households were selected representing the five landholding farm families (landless, small, medium and large) proportionately. For all farmwomen in the age group of 20-40 years, were selected to assess their work profile. Their leisure time activities recorded were, chatting with friends, preparation of special food items, stitching, knitting and crocheting, embroidery, dari making marketing, and kitchen gardening (activities performed by 60 percent of farm women were taken and rest of the activities such as reading, watching TV and many others were excluded due to generalization constraints), all these were listed in home activities in the protocol.
The data were collected as part of a broader research scheme and this paper uses only a small portion and the unstructured questions were documented in this paper. Hence, the findings presented in this paper, though rooted in the empirical situation of the field, do not necessarily allow generalizations.
The Forms and Nature of Recreation and Leisure: This study found that farmwomen are "invisible" workers, toiling from dawn till dark without recognition of the economic value of their labor. Their work or labor-inputs are basically of three broad categories: household chores, farm work and animal husbandry work. Most of their work is not included in national accounts. If woman’s work in and around the house were monetized, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reckons their collective contribution to the world economy would easily top $4 trillion a year. Their task has become more and more difficult with increasing irrigation facilities, pattern of growing two or three crops in a year. Where mechanizations of agriculture benefited the farm men a lot, certain gendered activities like weeding, cotton picking, fodder collection are still exclusively carried by farmwomen manually.
Farmwomen in the study-area, as in other parts of rural Haryana, work hard and are confined to spaces mostly around the homestead, farm and cattle -sheds. They are not provided with any formal leisure or recreational facilities at their village premises they seldom visit city/town for recreation. Put differently, the senses and values farmwomen in the study area attach to leisure may not necessarily conform to the mainstream interpretation of leisure. They feel leisured with chatting with their friends, by preparing special food items for their families, weaving daris, doing kitchen gardening, marketing and by making handicraft items (consistent results were observed by the other states provided with AICRP scheme in their FRM, Depatt’s of H.Sc. Colleges) .The following are examples of typical responses by a respondent when asked to explain what they meant by leisure and recreation:
“Leisure is .... Joy-a (sense of) happiness you feel deep down your heart by doing something or by making someone happy. I make daris with the help of my daughters buy clothes from the market for them . . . I feel good to see them smiling. Freetime? No . . . I am always busy (but) when I go to well to fetch water, I meet neighbors and talk with sahelis (friends)”.
Farmwomen have a capacity to enjoy themselves within their limited means they weave daries as a functional object with creative expression, they found it to be a relaxing activity, one often practiced alone or in the company of others, and one that connects women to family and friends.they artistically transforms some of the rags, plastic fertilizer and seed bags into yarns and weave cots, chairs, piidhaas , in a sense they make things out of waste, and it will ease out their stress of the day’s toil. Preparations of special food even in the face of harder work schedule satisfy them and attach them with the bonds of love with their family members. The most common forms of recreations are preparing, gond/khoya laddu, or panjiri, especially in the winter season.
It was observed despite any opportunity to visit formal leisure institutions (e.g. cnema or theater in town or city) the farmwomen did not express any significant sense of deprivation.They do, however, create their own symbolic worlds of recreation by modifying and conditioning some of their routine work. When engaged in this work, they experience the key elements of leisure-the "feelings of relaxation, enjoyment, and rejuvenation. Recent research has presented interesting insights when analyzing varied meanings and ramifications of leisure experiences. In the study area, farmwomen do not enjoy substantial freedom of choice of activities because their work patterns are determined by the prevailing social and cultural structures related to gender. Farm women do, however, have some power of manipulation and adjustment. For example, one respondent reported:
If I want to spend a bit longer time for chatting to (friends) by going to fetch water from the well ( in spite of facility of water in their home rural women used to fetch a pitcher of water from the well for drinking purpose) I normally try to complete my (routine) goal (cow-shed cleaning) and ghar kaa kam (household chore) earlier or work some extra time at night. Sometimes I arrange with my daughter to do some work for me while I meet the friends or other women who come from neighboring villages (neighbours sister). Though the concept of leisure is wholly free of obligation or work totally without discretion. Farmwomen's work in the villages is not free, but observations of and conversations with the farmwomen indicated that they can negotiate some flexibility through various adjustments and therefore there is some degree of self determination in their lives. The sense of joy or satisfaction they experience from family care activities or from meeting friends also give farmwomen the gratifying and comforting feelings that they have really “achieved something,” their work is “of worth and use to the family,” and that there are “other persons who share their ideas” of good and bad.
Farmwomen, specially in the productive age group (20-40 for this study) meet together while collecting fuel (leaves, barks, shrubs, twigs), fodder (grass; weeds of different types from the crop fields, waste land and along the riversides and along the fen sing around the fields), from the fields. Other opportunities for such meetings appear when farmwomen go to fetch water from one of the village or nearby farm well with sweet water for drinking. There is always a mith that water from the particular well is good to drink as compared with the supplied community water. On these occasions, women meet together and discuss personal, family, and village affairs as they go about the work of fuel or fodder collection and fetching water.
Farmwomen, especially housewives, almost universally cherish the experience of visiting houses of close kin. They visit their parents house at the time of birth of their brother’s child, to help their sister-in –low in care of her infant and to take rest in jaapa (one month after delivery period) period .In case of the birth of the male child they were provided with lots of clothing and jewellery, when they return to their in-law’s home. Farmwomen perform their work enthusiastically and feel happy during their stay at their parents’ home. For a young, newly married housewife, for example, the greatest recreation can be a Pihar-a short, periodic visit to her parents from her in-law’s home. During such visits, women generally take a break from the burden of daily work and pass the time by meeting kin and friends. However, these visits are not mere holidays or pastimes. Women value these social connections and rejuvenate these links through such visits which help them in case of crises and exigencies. If there is a major crisis in her family life, for example, a woman can ask for assistance and protection from her kin. She can also get counsel and financial assistance from the kin during these visits. In fact, such visits and attendance of festive occasions are a part of women's attempt in building up a network of connections and support which is, their “social capital” against crises.
Socio-religious festivities also provide opportunities for recreation and leisure especially for farmwomen of landless categories. During the Holi, Diwali, Tij, Makar Sakranti and other festivals for example, schedule caste women visit the local large land holders to receive some dole or charity. To a large extent these visits are socially scheduled and culturally determined. For example, there are specific social and cultural norms and standards regarding the time of such a visit and the expected behavior from the guest and the host. Such visits are especially observed among the share-cropping families. A farmwoman from these families, generally the sharecropper's wife or sister, visit the house of the landlord, who is often a local, largelandholder of uppercaste. She participates in various household chores in the patron's house, passes some time in friendly talks, and receives some gifts from the patron's family at the time of departure. Such visits are seen by farmwomen as a welcome change from the monotony of their daily work and an opportunity for some extra income. These visits also reinforce the patron-client ties in the village community.
The majority of farmwomen in the study area were engaged in some form of handicraft, especially knitting, crochetting, sewing, embroidery, and dari making weaving (as described above). Although some time for farmwomen with the skills in these handicraft is mainly an economic activity performed for the financial welfare of the family, observations revealed that such activity also provided women with an opportunity for recreation, relaxation, and some degree of freedom to test their ideas and innovations. They enjoy performing these handicraft activities and on an average, they spend about one and half hours engeged in handicraft work daily. On many occasions they were seen to help and teach youngsters the techniques of handicraft. If someone made something new, for example inventing a new design for embroidered shirt or odhni or applied a new technique in sewing, she was found to be excitedly talking about it or demonstrating the skill.
The limits of a Conventional Leisure Perspective in the Analysis of Poor Rural Farmwomen's Leisure Experience in Haryana: The popular concept of leisure as “free time” or “freely chosen activity” is not readily applicable to women in this study, and this poses the first problem in trying to conceptualize women's leisure in this particular context. Roberts (1970) offered a typical definition of leisure:
Leisure time can be defined as time that is not obligated, and leisure activities can be defined as activities that are non-obligatory .... When . . . obligations (towards work and family) is met, a man (woman?) has “free time” in which his behaviour is dictated by his own will and preferences, and it is here that leisure is found.
Many of the recreational activities of the poor rural farmwomen in rural areas of Haryana do not fall within the strict meaning of the above definition. Observations indicated that leisure experience is gendered and culturally situated. First, women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs. Second, they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their working areas. Third, owing to a host of constraints farmwomen's choice of so-called free activity is also very limited. Approaching work and leisure as a dichotomy (see Parker, 1971) tends to obscure the value of the subtle pleasure, recreations, gratifications, and awards farmwomen do achieve from some apparently obligatory household chores and other routine activities, as well as the extent work or obligation permeates their lives.
Thus, the emphasis of analysis, especially in the case of rural Haryana farmwomen's leisure experience, needs to be on the rather reclusive interaction of recreation and pleasure with daily routine rather than on the visible and quantitative dimensions of leisure such as time, activity, or space. One obvious reason is that the unpaid, overlapping, domesticized, and invisible nature of farmwomen's work in rural Haryana makes it difficult to make clear distinctions between free time activity and obligatory activity or between leisure and work. This is, however, certainly not to undermine the importance and usefulness of focusing on time and activity in some situations. However, by narrowing the definition of leisure to free time or activity, we run the risk of failing to see the deeper manifestations of leisure and recreation among the poor farming families which are not always so easily recognizable.
For example, as noted previously in the study area, farmwomen most often meet together, chat, and exchange varied experience during the time of collecting fuel from the neighboring fields. Although the obligatory work of collecting fuel is one of the most tiring jobs, the pleasure and recreation women gain from these meetings are greatly rewarding for them. If we analyze the task of fuel collection on the basis of its visible appearance alone, observations most probably would be limited to the obvious hard manual labour involved in this obligatory activity. What would be missed are the pleasurable rewards and gratifications farmwomen achieve from these informal gatherings. Thereby, we could end up with a superficial and inaccurate understanding of the situation. In other words, caught up in the dogma of rigid work-leisure distinctions, one may fail to see the leisure farmwomen can carve out of even such a cumbersome activity.
The rigid distinction between obligatory activity and time and free activity and time may not be helpful in explaining the rural Haryana situation because, as noted before, farmwomen's work is generally obligatory, unpaid, and occurs beyond the formal framework of market and money-exchange. Therefore, one helpful approach in analysis may be to examine farmwomen's lives with the concept of “elasticity” as a framework which can help us see the “pleasurable rewards” women achieve from their “activities.” Indeed, leisure may be seen as the “pleasurable rewards” which women skillfully manage to exploit from their day-to-day survival strategies and activities.
In this paper actual position of leisure among farmwomen in rural areas of Haryana was explored, yet farmwomen’s experience of constraints in the study area is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, only a broad, preliminary picture of farmwomen’s leisure experiences is presented.
Women, as discussed, do not have access to institutional or more conventional sources of leisure. However, they, at least to some extent, negotiate around these constraints. The negotiation, as illustrated in the previously discussed examples, is mainly in the form of modifying their routine work pattern and carving out pleasure from it. As they inherited the work pattern from their mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers they willingly fallow them, and therefore, they do not appear to mentally suffer from any significant sense of discontent or deprivation over these particular constraints. Again despite constraints on leisure opportunities, rural farmwomen were quick to point out the many advantages of a rural lifestyle. Isolation can lead to loneliness, for example, but the sense of space and freedom it brings can also be very rejuvenating. One farmwoman said, “If I’ve had a hard day I go to my fields and the stress goes away, I get back on track. If I had to live in an apartment in the city I would find that very difficult, I need that space.”
This paper has attempted to show that women of the farming families, one of the poorest of the rural communities in Haryana, enjoy recreation and leisure in their own unique way. Virtually no research has been conducted on the leisure experience of these women. It is difficult to analyze their leisure and recreational behavior through the conventional approach to leisure studies which view leisure as free or nonobligatory time and/or activity. It is not helpful, and probably not possible, to rigidly demarcate the boundaries of free time and work or compulsory and non-obligatory work. People are never fully or truly free. These farmwomen are no exception. What is more significant is to note that they seem to have found some ways of stealing away from the mental sense of obligation and pressure generated by their cumbersome daily work performed in a largely hostile and disadvantageous environment, and of creating their own mental worlds of joy within their daily struggle.
Leisure and recreation among the farmwomen seem to be an integral part of their day-to-day strategies for survival. Women have developed the skill to carve out pleasure from the everyday forms of struggle which surround their life and living. This interesting area of study calls for further research, as at present, our ignorance is profound.
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