Anja Bohnhof

"The often extremely precarious economic situation of Indian small farmers makes it imperative that the women have to work in agriculture side by side to their husbands: In the livestock production as well as in planting, weeding, threshing, fertilising and harvesting. If the women don’t work on their own soil, they are busy on the fields of the large landowners as peons. The lower their living standards are, the tougher the working- and the living conditions are for the women. Still their majority is not in command of reading and writing. Depending on the region and the shape of patriarchic structures the women even carry the main work load. The correlation between tough physical work under often severe heat and the grace and beauty of the women common at any spot in India seems almost irritating. In well coloured saris and decorated with bangles showing their marital status they submit to their fate, as it is barely imaginable for women in western industrial societies."
Anja Bohnhof