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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
To my brother belong your green fields
O father, while I am banished afar.
Always you said
Your brother and you are the same
O Father. But today you betray me …
My doli leaves your house, O father
My doli leaves your house.
These dowry jewels are not jewels
but wounds round my neck, O father.
My doli leaves …
Rural women in northwest India, married among strangers miles away from their natal villages, use folksongs to decry their estrangement from the green pastures of their childhood homes - homes to which their brothers, who customarily inherit the ancestral land, have automatic access. In Maharashtra (west India), women divorced or deserted by their husbands can be found working as agricultural labourers on the farms of their brothers who are substantial landowners (Omvedt 1981). Elsewhere in India and in Bangladesh there are similar cases of widows who, deprived of their rightful shares by prosperous brothers or brothers-in-law, have been left destitute and forced to seek wage work or even beg for survival. Many poor rural women from Rajasthan and Bihar told me: we must get some land to take care of our children … even a little land.
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