It is May, the wedding season in Garhwal, and the mountains reverberate with the sounds of drums and Scottish pipes. Colourful wedding parties can be seen winding their way through mule tracks. The wheat crop has just been harvested, and is now being threshed. Celebration is in the air. Against this backdrop, 72-year-old Bachni Devi has been asked to recollect her own wedding. What was it like coming, as a young child bride, to the village of Jardhargaon? She is both surprised and amused by the question. "My wedding? Oh, it was so long ago," she says. "I was only 13. Now I am 72."
After a pause, Bachni Devi continues: "In the beginning, I used to miss my parents a lot. There was so much work here. Sometimes I fell asleep while working! First thing in the morning, pound the grain, fetch water from the spring, clean the cowshed. There were 11 cows and oxen to take care of. After cleaning the cowshed, I had to take head-loads of dung and spread it in the fields. Even the fields were levelled by us. Then, we had to go to the jungle to get grass. By the time we got back, it was dark. At home, my in-laws had a large family, and they all had to be fed before I could eat. Then wash the dishes, and so it went. We got only two hours of sleep before another day started with the same routine. Sometimes we did not get enough to eat! We used to manage with whatever was available – rice, millet. Then, back to the fields…"
This may sound like the diary of a prisoner or a slave, but Bachni Devi's account is no different from that of many other women of the mid-Himalayan region of Garhwal. In fact, the labour of women was a crucial element in the interdependent agro-pastoral system that was prevalent here until sometime during the 1970s. Material sustenance came from natural resources: domesticated animals converted grasses into milk, draught power and soil nutrients; the forests provided timber for house construction, fodder, firewood and water. But it was human labour that made all of this into a working system: levelling the terraced fields, sowing, tending to standing crops, cutting and threshing, fetching fodder and firewood, channelling water for irrigation, and caring for domesticated animals. Each of these activities was backbreaking in a difficult and hostile terrain. Gender roles complemented the production cycle. The men led a semi-nomadic life – grazing cattle on the lower slopes in the winter, moving up to the higher mountains in the monsoon, and helping with the ploughing, harvesting and maintenance of kools (small irrigation channels) in between. The women, meanwhile, were responsible for all of the other farming and household activities as well as the crucial task of seed preservation and propagation. Keeping the diverse stock of seeds resilient and robust is an essential feature of subsistence farming.
Despite the hard work, it was still a hand-to-mouth existence, with no surplus wealth. Yet unless there were successive years of drought, nobody ever went hungry. This food security was achieved by growing a highly diverse range of crops, with planting and harvests staggered around the year, and over a range of altitudes and ecosystems. This minimised the risk, as one or two crop failures – from among a dozen small ones each year – did not significantly affect the overall production. Furthermore, farmers in Garhwal practiced baranaaja (literally, 'twelve grains'), a unique version of poly-cropping, or growing a number of crops mixed randomly on the same field, that optimally tapped the soil and solar energy, and also worked as a defence against pests.