Socio-cultural Processes and Livelihood Patterns at Tirurangadi - CDS

women, it is possible to argue that household labor is not considered for calculation of
work at all, but it should be pointed out that household labor can come into thee
calculations when the entire human labor in the area realizes its potential as socially
necessary labor, otherwise it becomes dead labor, an agency for consumption.
History indicated several problems and possibilities for the utilization of human labor.
The census figures from 1871 have shown that there were a substantial number of
unproductive or unutilized laborers then also, particularly women. But the figures clearly
looked upon family as the basic unit, a practice that continues even today in the
calculation of the households. The entire non-working people who are not employed in
the public spaces were treated as ‘dependents’. This concept of dependents indicated that
the labor of the individual or individuals constituted family labor and the other persons
were dependent on the labor. It should be noted that the same concept prevails among the
people even today, The successive partitions of the earlier families resulted in the growth
of patriarchal households, and the labor of women became labor to sustain the household
(and hence,’ household’ labor). However, it should be remembered that most of the
laboring families were also production units, particularly that of agricultural laborers, and
some of them were female headed households. For agricultural laborers, their labor was
not simply a means of additional labor by the members of the household for subsistence,
but they were doing specialized labor as in paddy cultivation and coir manufacture. For
those doing paramba cultivation and household industry also this concept of the
household as a production unit did seem to have existed. But traders and large and
medium cultivators never used household labor and for them household became a
consumption unit. Patriarchal ideology which also was given a communitarian sanction
was used to legitimize this conception of a household.
The small holder’s economy that came into existence after the land reforms might have
survived if the household had become a production unit, but such a transformation never