At home on the fields, despite biases

A woman farm worker masters machines to lead paddy cultivation in Kuttanad

The days are gone when women labourers, armed with sickles and spirited by an ageless array of folk songs, used to swarm the polders of North and Upper Kuttanad during harvest seasons.

Over the years, machines began replacing them as the face of paddy farming across the region. The constraints in adapting to the farming equipment have driven the women further away from these fields, limiting their roles mostly to homestead cultivation.