Gate-Cane: (Un)tying the knots between climate, cane, and early marriage in rural India

Abstract

In this article, I examine the multiple tensions and interactions between social reproduction and the trajectories of accumulation amidst climate change in India’s historically drought-prone Marathwada region. By linking everyday experiences to broader socioecological transformations, I draw on the local practice of Gate-Cane weddings in Marathwada, and situate it within the context of climate change, capitalist agriculture, and gendered labour relations. Specifically, I document the ways in which cyclical drought and peculiar labour arrangements in the sugarcane industry have multiplied the drivers and compounded the problem of early marriage in the region. I combine a feminist political ecology framework with social reproduction and girlhood theories to make a twofold argument: first, recurring dry spells, loss of local livelihoods and the urgency to migrate and survive, are aggravating the drivers of early marriage in Marathwada. Second, by absorbing the marital unit into the labour unit–marked by territorial dislocation, patriarchal control, and devaluation of young women’s and girls’ work–the sugar industry sustains and reproduces early marriage. The article is based on a multi-sited feminist ethnography, including intergenerational family conversations, group discussions, stakeholder interviews, and thick field notes documented in village households and cane fields between October 2020 and August 2021.