ABSTRACT
This chapter explores women's involvement in rice cultivation in India, focusing on data from two of the southern states (Kerala and Tamil Nadu) and one state in the east (West Bengal), three of India's main rice regions. It is concerned with variation in the sexual division of labour in agriculture, both at the macro (variation from state to state, and from region to region within each state) and the micro level (variation from village to village, and between different castes and socioeconomic groups within the same village). It is based on data collected from a large-scale study of women and agriculture which the author and Dr K. Saradamoni conducted between 1979 and 1982 in ten villages of Tamil Nadu, ten villages in Kerala and eight villages in West Bengal, as well as intensive field work carried out by the author in these areas between 1958 and the mid-1980s. 1
