‘Women farmers are the rule’
The author talks about her book on the difficult life of a woman farmer that would appeal to both children and adults
1
No Nonsense Nandhini revolves around Chandra Subramanian, a single mother who grows and sells sampangi flowers in Sivagangai, Tamil Nadu. What was the best part of writing a children’s book about someone you know?
You get to know them better! My respect and admiration for Chandra – and women farmers like her – grew as I fleshed out her story. It was Chandra who taught me the meaning of the word ‘resilience’, much of what I know about farming, and everything that is wrong with the agrarian world. Once, she asked me: where are the chairs for people who grow your food? What grit it must take, to wake up when the world’s asleep, pluck tens of kilos of flowers and take it to the collection point, and then back and… get started with the housework! Every single day. I was thrilled and grateful I got a chance to share my thoughts with children. Hopefully, it will get them thinking.
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What are you hoping for readers to take back from this story?
I truly hope people see how impossibly hard it is to make a living as a farmer. Everything is a struggle – and there’s so little they have control over. The price of every input – be it seeds or fertiliser or pesticide – is determined by others; so is the final price for their produce. What bargaining power does a small farmer have against a multinational corporation? Where is agency, where is choice? And yet, every day, cultivators are asked to absorb shocks that would bring corporates to their knees.
3
How did you weave in issues like child marriage, rural indebtedness, and gender inequality without being preachy?
I’m so glad you think that those issues came through without sounding preachy. I had to include them because they are so central to her life – and to so many women like her – and they spend hours and weeks and years doing unpaid work, with little recognition for their effort. The hard fact is that rural women do about 70% of the agricultural work, and they own 13% of the farmland.
Yet, in our minds, a farmer is usually a man in a dhoti, driving a tractor or with a plough in his hand. Women? Oh, they do the transplanting. They sing songs. Then they sit under the trees and chat a little bit. That is the perception. In reality, they do much of the still unmechanised and backbreaking work. Like weeding, which is important but poorly paid. Because it is done by women.
But that same woman cannot get a loan. Because the land is not in her name, and even the language we speak does not recognise her as a farmer. To correct it, we need to change the language, and talk more about farmers who happen to be women. Maybe we should drop the gender prefix because women farmers are not an exception; they are the rule.