Feminist Studies

546 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care Usha is the eldest daughter of a high-caste, Rajput family from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh in north India.1 She married into a family that owns three bighas (approximately 1.8 acres) of land. But no one in her marital family has tilled it for the last three generations . Usha’s husband and her husband’s younger brother have opted to tread a path that is increasingly commonplace for men of their generation and younger: they have chosen to migrate to a city. The land is cultivated by lower-caste sharecroppers. But it has not been sold. Even as the city’s gravitational pull deepens, land retains its affective value. It is more than property. It is the guarantor of patriliny. It is an asset that gives, forms, anchors a sense of personhood in place. It is also a sentiment and a promise. And one that travels with the thousands of rural migrants who flock to India’s cities every day, every month, every year. Usha, daughter of a communist party comrade who roamed nearby villages trying to organize agricultural laborers for the revolution that never came, has capitalized on the art of land to firm her foothold in the city. But more on this later. Usha’s past still tugs. 1. All names are pseudonyms. Usha’s family read and commented on this essay, and it is with their permission that we share it. We recognize gender identities and expressions do not necessarily align with those assigned at birth or presumed. The people we talked with identify and express themselves as cisgendered. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani 547 Her communist father used to work in a munitions factory in Kolkata before he was summarily dismissed for trying to organize a union. He came home to their village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, severed from his factory wage and land poor, still flush with red zeal and still a Rajput, unable to stoop to agricultural wage labor to support his household. That task fell to Usha’s mother, who lent out money—the provident fund her husband had earned as a migrant worker in the gun factory—to cultivators in the village and was paid interest in grain to feed her family of nine, two adults and seven children. A formidable woman, Usha’s mother was beaten up several times by their Rajput neighbors, for talking out against these dominant agrarian upper caste men. Usha was eighteen when she married Dinesh Singh, who was a year older. Her father sold one bigha of land for the wedding. That Usha’s marriage was arranged to a man, whom she had never seen, from a Rajput family in a village about twenty miles from hers, is not unusual.2 She entered her new joint family of eight and was quickly overpowered by a complex grammar—violence—that was to tattoo itself, painfully and indelibly, on Usha’s being. As we will hear, her body, her memories, her conduct, her comportment all still bear the marks of her torment in the early years of marriage. Her mother-in-law, Usha says, was sharp-tongued (tez)3 and demanding. There was no room for empathy for a young girl of eighteen, wrenched from her natal home. The housework was punishing, and Usha was expected to do it all. After the wedding, her husband soon departed for Delhi, leaving Usha behind with her in-laws. This, too, is not unusual for the Hindi belt from which Usha hails.4 2. Caste is reproduced through kinship in India. In this part of the country, north India, in addition to caste endogamy—marrying within the same caste—the norm is village exogamy, that is, marrying into a village other than your own since a girls’ village brethren are considered her kin. Patrilocality , patrilineality, and a corporate organization of households with several generations residing in the same household space characterize and solidify regional patriarchy. In translocal households, generations are split across village and city, with older generations, daughters...