Meenal Tatpati wrote this article because she was riveted by the fact that all the villages she travelled to in Uttarakhand had one particular thing in common. There were no men! There were only women of all ages, as they worked at home and on farms, tended cattle and looked after the family.
The summer of 2010 was an especially exciting time for me when as a part of a course organized by the Centre of Science and Environment, Delhi we were taken to Tehri-Garhwal, Uttarakhand to visit villages which transformed the way the world looks at environmental activism and conservation. Names like Uttarkashi, Birahi, Srinagar, Makku, and Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary keep appearing on the pages of my field diary when I flip through it. It was here that I truly started collecting experience, inspiration and stories related to my educational field.
I feel like I’ve been re-visiting Uttarakhand off and on through Ramachandra Guha’s thesis, “Unquiet Woods”. I had read it earlier this year for my Master’s thesis, and I couldn’t wait to read it again since the Garhwal I experienced last year was exactly like it has been described by him in 1992. Well, figuratively at least, excluding the major dam sites that seem to interrupt the picturesque themes at every corner and the huge stone quarries that raise their ugly heads at every second turn along the highways and also not to metion the general mayhem such projects tend to leave in their wake. But it still has the same sereneness, same people and the same money-order economies. All the villages I travelled to in Uttarakhand have one particular thing that I noticed right away. There are no men! You see women of all ages, they work at home and on farms, they tend cattle, look after the family. I was so riveted by this that I eventually wrote my entire article on the women there.
This story is from the April - September 2017 edition of Eternal Bhoomi.
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This story is from the April - September 2017 edition of Eternal Bhoomi.
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