Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

2
Women in Pastoralist and Shifting Cultivation Communities 41
Whose Rights? Women in Pastoralist and
Shifting Cultivation Communities
A Continuing Struggle for Recognition
and Rights to Livelihood Resources
Sagari R. Ramdas and Nitya S. Ghotge
Swidden or shifting cultivation (podu, jhum, bewar, kumri) and pastoralism,
seemingly unrelated livelihood choices and lifestyles, emerged
similarly thousands of years ago in extremely harsh ecological niches,
where settled plough agriculture was difficult to practise: pastoralism in
arid and semi-arid areas and shifting cultivation in hilly, forested terrains.
Both systems have a relationship to land that is not centred on private
ownership. Both forms of land use depend upon mobility, flexibility and
vary across space and time. They also share a common vulnerability, as
they are threatened primarily by contradictions between and conflicts
with the policies of the state.
Despite 200 years of the state’s attempts to squash these livelihoods
and its refusal to recognise them as legitimate systems of land use, the
reality on an all-India basis is that the land area and numbers of families
engaged in both pastoralism and shifting cultivation have increased
(Satapathy et al. 2003). As we argue in this chapter, the pre- and postcolonial
state has consistently attacked and interpreted pastoralism and
shifting cultivation as being ecologically destructive, economically inefficient
and ill-suited to ‘modernity’. In the context of this ongoing struggle
between the state and the communities, it is women, the backbone of
pastoral and shifting cultivation households, who are most vulnerable in
a situation where these communities continue to have no assured legal