Daughters of the Hills: Gendered Agricultural Production, Modernisation, and Declining Child Sex Ratios in the Indian Central Himalayas

Abstract

In her seminal findings on female neglect in rural North India, based on the census from 1961 and literature studies, the anthropologist Barbara Miller detected a strong correlation between neglect of daughters, agricultural production and the cost of marriage (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981). She also found significant regional and social variations between the South and the North. In examining studies from throughout India, she observed a pattern in which exceedingly high cost of marriages of daughters among upper social groups in the North corresponded with son preference and high female juvenile mortality, whereas the figures for the South indicated much more equal conditions. With agricultural production and the demand for female labour as the motivating factor, she observed a North/South dichotomy, expressed as “masculinism” in the North, with dry-field plough cultivation and a low demand for female labour, and “feminism” in the South where swidden and wet rice cultivation accompanied a high demand for female labour (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981, p. 27 f.). Ester Boserup discovered a similar pattern dividing the subcontinent in female participation in farming, with much higher female participation in the South than in the North (Boserup, Woman’s role in economic development, 1970, p. 59 f.). Miller further found that the Himalayan region of Northern India did not fit the geographical dichotomy between the North and the South. Her study showed that, although geographically belonging to the North, the mountainous region was in some cultural ways more akin to the South, including a high participation of women of cultivator families in agricultural work in the Himalayan area (Miller, The endangered sex: Neglect of female children in rural North India, 1981, p. 108; cf. Agarwal, A field of one’s own: gender and land rights in South Asia, 1994, p. 358).