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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we discuss the nuances of gender dynamics observed among the mobile pastoral communities in India. We argue that pastoral contexts provide major lessons to refresh the gendered narratives available for policy purposes.

Paper long abstract:

Indian pastoral communities, despite being diverse and distinct, remain less debated in both the academic as well as the policy domains. Very few studies exist that dwell into the pastoral communities of India and these studies are either dedicated to capturing their economic choices and/or mapping the ecological rationality behind their mobile livelihoods. In addition, a crucial dimension rooted in the gendered division of labour and ownership of productive resources within these communities remains unexplored. In our paper, we fill this gap through re-examining gender roles and dynamics using the case of the Gaddis of the northern Himalayan region of India.

The mainstream narrative of gendered exclusions seems to fall short of explaining the nuances involved in the actual praxis of pastoral communities like the Gaddis. Despite the pastoral practices being highly gendered, we have observed that there were instances where women negotiated their way into these seemingly rigid patriarchal social arrangements. We intend to capture this fluidity and the negotiated nature of gender roles among the Gaddis through our ethnographic qualitative case study. We propose here that in contrast to the mainstream communities, the mobile worlds of pastoralists present an intricate weave of practices from where major lessons around gendered praxis may be drawn, thus giving us a chance to refresh the gendered narratives available for policy purposes.