Tempering Patriarchy and Reinventing Gender: Impact of Male Outfow on Women in Rural Bihar

This paper is based on an ongoing research that intends to understand the interplay of the response of poor women, whose immediate male relatives have migrated, to the patriarchal institutions and gendering—or ‘engendering’, as it is sometimes termed— of development in contemporary rural Bihar. The research started in March 2018 in three villages of Bihar: two in Saharsa (Pahadpur and Habeebpur of Simari Bakhtiyarpur block) and one in Siwan (Sahasrawan of Andar block). The research is in its initial stage and hence the paper is based on my preliminary interactions, observations and review of available literature. This research was done in 2018 started although I had been interacting with poor women of Bihar for over a decade, and especially with Bihar’s rural women since 2014, while working on a research project on the declining female workforce participation in India. The dynamics of rural Bihar had been changing swiftly. Women, despite their constrained mobility and exposure, were outnumbering their male counterparts in local governing bodies and were also actively engaged in implementing government initiatives as Asha, Mamta and Jeevika didis. The interesting aspect was that this change was not an outcome of women’s initiatives but a manifestation of policy interventions by the government. More importantly, this change was occurring in the wake of male out-migration.