This year being year of the girl child in Haryana it was an ideal time to look at this situation more closely. The plight of farm women of Haryana (here leisure time constraint) was researched through AICRP project which was initiated in 1980 in nine State Agricultural University’s of home science colleges, it provides a useful insight into work of farming women. Through the use of ‘time use’ pattern it obtained an accurate picture of what farmwomen do on and off the farm. The task was to focus on the work profile of rural farmwomen. An important part of this was to find out the drudgery involved in rural farmwomen’s work, and especially the work done by rural farmwomen. In was found from the research that many activities which women do are not regarded as work - yet they are vital in running the farm families.
It is stunning to note that as per sample of the study near about 70 percent of farmwomen of Haryana belongs to the landless and small land holding category, work for 13-18 hours a day, the bulk of which for majority of them is on subsistence activities and housework. Besides their most of the work in the home, farm and animal husbandry domain is drudgery prone (Annual Report of AICRP, 1987). Consistent results were obtained from other states with the AICRP project. When we disaggregate women's activities in home, we find that the largest and most invariant category relates to food preparation. In all cases women spend at least two hours a day preparing food for themselves and their families. At farm, farmwomen see weeding as their hardest and most time-consuming task, it was found most tiring and tedious job because it required, bending and concentration in order to do the job properly and thus caused backache. Again weeding took up more days in the field, then any other farm operation. Minimum estimate of the days spent weeding were 60, this figure increased as much as120 because of the areas of two cropping seasons. For some crops weeding was found as never-ending task, in cotton, particularly, one might have to go through the fields as many as four times (Annual Report of AICRP, 2001).In animal husbandry domain bringing fodder was found their hardest job. Farmwomen have to walk a considerable distance to collect weeds/grass for fodder from the fields, which steals their lot of time and energy. While “concept of ‘distance traveled’ have little meaning for farmwomen, who tend to think in terms of ‘time spent’ on activities as having more relevance to their daily lives.
While working conditions for women may have improved with provision of electric gadgets like churner, flourmill, electric chaff cutter, etc. there is a lack of appreciation for the notion that work for most women doesn't end at the door of a factory or office. As mechanical power replaces human power and increases the returns to labour, the responsibility for many agricultural activities has devolved to men, as despite a significant increase in the use of farm machines farming become mechanized and benefited farm men more then farmwomen (especially farmwomen of small land holdings). While women still shoulder several gendered farm work like weeding, cotton picking, harvesting in small land holdings, fodder collecting, bringing and collection of fuel contained drudgery. As mentioned above farmwomen work 13-18 hours a day, while eight hours are necessary for every human being for biological needs (sleeping, eating, personal necessities etc.). It means not any free/leisure time for recreation and entertainment which is a necessary spice of good life.
The research result (Annual Report of AICRP, 1997-2000) discovered the truth as per the objectives. But what is the value of a soulless truth? I personally feel that work profile of farmwomen through the life cycle remains, to a substantial degree; “women’s work”, “the work without leisure” “and that woman bear significant adverse costs on their health for doing it. The question is….”So what? Why would one want to study a sick child except to make him well? Who is supposed to do anything about the situation? What can reasonably be done?”
*Research Associate, 1008, Housing Board Colony, Sector-15A, Hisar-125001,Haryana.
THE STUDY OF FARMWOMEN’S LEISURE:
Specifically, it sought to: characterize the rural farmwomen in terms of personal, socio-economic, and socio-cultural factors; determine their involvement in leisure, and identify the factors that affect their involvement in it.
Besides working in the AICRP project, we were interested in exploring problems related to farmwomen. Our personal intention to find out leisure among the farm women of Haryana made us to further the participation observation on their leisure activities. This paper is based on the results of the project, participation observation and the content analysis from the literatures. Myself and Mamta Dilbagi, a female colleague, during our visit to rural areas, for a long period interacted and discussed with farmwomen for the topic of leisure.
Leisure Activities among Farmwomen in Haryana
Context of the Study, Its scope and Methods
The study was conducted within the context of the broader AICRP in Home Science project funded by ICAR, which is working for rural farm women in nine State Agricultural Universities namely: Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Himachal Pardesh, Uttrancha, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Karnataka, Maharastra from the third five year plan period. While this paper reports on the leisure experience among farmwomen of rural farm families of Haryana only. The survey work was conducted in all the three geographical areas of the Haryana state. We aimed to evaluate the leisure time activities of farm women (actively engaged in farm activities) over the past 12 months to account for seasonal variations in activities. Percentage of performers, time spent for each leisure activity, number of days spent performing the activities were required for each activity reported. Nine hundred farmwomen from rural areas of Haryana were drawn proportionately from the landless, small (0-2.5 acres), medium (2.5-5 acres) and large (more then 10 acres) landholdings representing all the three geographical zones were asked to provide us with full details about their leisure activities.
In this paper we seek to explore the leisure among farmwomen. Leisure being a necessary part of life in every human being- as it provides 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. 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 farmwomen in Haryana is virtually an unexplored field of study. Our aim in this paper is to present some empirical findings on 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 majority 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.
Being my concern with rural Haryana 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 and store cow-dung cakes) and khet (farm).
Women have developed the skill to carve out pleasure from their meetings during everyday work, chatting with friends and relatives during their social visits and festivals, visit to market after sale of crops, their food preparation and their handicrafts. Farmwomen do several leisure activities: Embroidery, knitting, sewing, crocheting, kitchen gardening, marketing, spinning, weaving, which again are productive activities, where they use their skill, while chatting with friends and relatives and marketing are their non productive activities (in this study only those leisure activities are considered which were performed by 60 percent of the farmwomen, others like watching TV, reading, weaving, spinning etc. were not considered) seeTable: 1. Consistent results were obtained from the other states involved in the AICRP project (AICRP’s Annual Reports of Punjab, Assam, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh of the year 1998-2000).
The Features of Recreation and Leisure: This study also found that farmwomen are "invisible" workers, toiling from dawn till dark without recognition of the economic value of their labor. When asked about leisure they define it in their own ways. The following are examples of typical responses by farmwomen 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. Free time ? No . . . I am always busy (but) when I go to well to fetch water, fodder and fuel wood, I meet neighbors and talk with sahelis (friends).” No doubt they had favorable perception on why they need leisure. They believe that they are entitled to it because leisure takes away the boredom for work; it is good for one’s health.
When asked by a farmwoman (in spite of having three daughters and one daughter-in-law in her house) going for gossiping with women in other factions of the village; she comments, “I feel relaxed and amused by gossiping with my friends instead of my family members.” Farm women feel good by talking with their friends; their all leisure activities listed above are great tranquillizers for them.
As noted, farm-women did not show any particular interest in formal leisure institutions (e.g., cinema or theater) and did not express any significant sense of deprivation. Women generally consider these institutions as "places of man's recreation". They 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.
The sense of joy or satisfaction they experience from family care activities or from meeting friends also give women 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. In addition to the moments of leisure carved out of necessary labor such as fuel wood gathering and farm work, farm-women pursued leisure by engaging themselves in productive activities like handicrafts, and in social visits, chatting with friends and relatives, marketing and preparing special food items (Table:1).
Farm women, from the neighborhood meet together while collecting fuel (leaves, barks, shrubs, twigs), fodder, and wild-food like cholaai, kondra, teent, peal (wild fruit), from the nearby waste lands and, fields and during bringing water (there is provision of water supply in their houses or in nearby streets in Haryana, but due to taste they bring water from drinking from locally available sources of water). On these occasions, women meet together and discuss personal, family, and village affairs as they go about the work of fuel collection or fetching water. During such discussions, women share their ideas with one another which not only create opportunities for self-expression (they also discuss misbehaviors conducted to them by older member of their families), but also symbolize some degree of group solidarity (Kerkvliet, 1990 and, Sparkes, 1995). Women, especially housewives, almost universally cherish the experience of visiting houses of close kin. For a young, newly married housewife, for example, the greatest recreation can be a piihar-a short, periodic visit to her parents from her husband'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.
The majority of women in the study area were engaged in some form of handicraft, especially embroidery, sewing, and knitting, work. Although handicraft is mainly an economic activity performed for the financial welfare of the family, observations revealed that such activity also provided farm-women with an opportunity for recreation, relaxation, and some degree of freedom to test their ideas and innovations. They seem to enjoy the work, and, on an average, they spend about two hours engaged in handicraft work daily (Table: 1). It was also observed that women admired each other's work. Preparations of special food even in the face of harder work schedule, the farm-women have a capacity to enjoy themselves within their limited means. The most common forms of recreations is preparing, gond/khoya laddu, or panjiri, especially in the winter season.
As described earlier in this paper leisure activities are extracted from the broader study of farm-women activity profile, the study was not for analysis of leisure experiences of farm-women in Haryana. The popular concept of leisure as "free time" or "freely chosen activity" is not readily applicable to farm-women in this study, and this poses the first problem in trying to conceptualize woman's leisure in this particular context. Roberts (1970, p. 6) 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 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 where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Second, they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within the homestead. Mies (1986), Nachmias, & Nachmias (1992) and Jackson (1995) rightly noted that "it must be understood that for most women the `social context' for leisure is the home." Third, owing to a host of constraints women's choice of so-called free activity is also very limited. Approaching work and leisure as a dichotomy (see Parker, 1971, Cernea,1991) tends to obscure the value of the subtle pleasure, recreations, gratifications, and awards women 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 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, domesticated, and invisible nature of woman'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.
This paper has attempted to show that women of the farm families of Haryana, enjoy recreation and leisure in their own unique way. It is significant to note that they 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.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Observing the overburdened lifestyle of farm-women of Haryana, this paper was developed to promote understanding of the leisure opportunities of them in their rural settings. It was observed that the leisure the farm-women practice does not fall within the strict definition of the leisure, but without leisure/recreational facilities available to them, farm-women can indulged in community recreation and leisure activities based upon their personal interests and desires, as they fully aware with the necessity of leisure to release their stress and to make them healthy.
Results showed that farm-women extract their leisure and recreation through performing some activities termed as leisure activities in this paper. It was observed through the study that farm-women of small landholding category were not at par with the farmwomen of other categories for their percentage of involvement, time spent on the leisure activities, and number of days spent in a year for the leisure activities. However the results of this study specified no statistical significant differences between the categories of land holding for their involvement in different leisure activities.
Again no significant differences were found between time spent on the leisure activities and between the numbers of days in a year the activities were performed by the farm-women of different landholding categories. These findings are consistent with research by AICRP in Punjab, Rajasthan, Assam, Uttranchal and Himachal Pradesh.
As described above what is the use to end the research study with some suggestions, implications, policy advocacies and so on……..and…….?
Why would one want to study a sick child except to make him well?
