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Contribution short abstract:

Set against the backdrop of cyclical drought and industrialised sugarcane cropping, I examine the complex ways in which early marriage is used as an institutional means to produce and sustain a particular workforce of young wife-workers in the epicentre of India's agrarian crisis, Marathwada region.

Contribution long abstract:

Set against the backdrop of cyclical drought and industrialised sugarcane cropping, this paper seeks to make visible the labour and experiences of young women and adolescent girls in the context of a climate crisis. I use a multi-sited feminist ethnography to examine the complex ways in which early marriage is used as an institutional means to produce and sustain a particular workforce of young wife-workers in the historically drought-prone and caste-ridden Marathwada region in India. Here, on account of truant rainfall and plummeting water tables on the one hand, and unbridled sugarcane cultivation in the neighbouring districts on the other, nearly a million Dalit, Banjara and Vanjari families have turned into migrant sugarcane harvesters. Recruitments take place in pairs, mainly as married couples. Intense and more frequent droughts have led to an alarming rise in the number of commercially mediated marriages, including underaged couples, to form labour units. In this paper, I document the differentiated role and experiences of the young wives/workers; their gendered subjectivities and everyday labouring realities as they navigate their parched households and extractive sugar fields; the new kinship formations and market nexuses that have emerged, and how such transitions are shaped by and help shape the political economy of drought-induced migration. By demystifying the structural hierarchies and complex processes underlying these marriage/labour exchanges, the paper offers new political possibilities for studying the conjoined and compounding crises of environment, accumulation, and social reproduction.