ParkLane

RICE

The control

of girls

From storing seeds to serving dinner,
Rahima Khatun’s

work with rice betrays her inferior status
as a woman.

Shahidul Alam visits her home in rural Bangladesh

The winding track leads to a clearing where four cows and a calf are munching contentedly at their feeding troughs. It is the second week of June, the first month of the rainy season, and the air is sweet and humid with the smell of Jackfruit.

For Rahima Khatun it is a quiet period. The frenzy of work that accompanies harvesting either rice of jute, the two crops the family cultivate, is pleasantly several months away. Yet her work still starts well before sunrise. She has already swept the mud floors and the courtyard, fed the children and the animals, spread out the cow dung to dry and washed up.There is no end to a woman's work,' she smiles, 'We could work all day, even all night and we'd still not finish.'

Source NEW INTERNATIONLIST / NOVEMBER 1991

Shotguns

Pinching plants and growing them in yor own backyard is not new - the British smuggled young rubber trees out of Brazil and cultivated them in Kew Gardens before fruitfully and lucratively to plantations in Malaysia.

And sometimes it wasn’t just the botanists who did the dirty work. As the first US Ambassador to Europe, Thomas Jefferson was naturally keen to hasten his country’s reconstruction after the Revolution. And he was particularly anxious about the ravaged rice fields of the Carolinas, despoilt by the British so that not even seed rice was left.

On a visit to Italy in 1787, Jefferson noted with envy the rich rice fields of Piedmont. Turning a blind eye to Italian law, he made off with a few sacks of grain, breaking the Italian monopoly and revitalizing US agriculture.

If there was an element of arrogance in his behaviour, this is not altogether surprising. In the US, rice cultivation had been built on some of the worst character traits with the use of African slaves as labour.

The philosopher Nietzche’s prejudice led him to suggest there was a link between rice-eating and opium addiction while French gourmet Brillat-Savarin warned that eating rice made people soft and cowardly as he maintained the Indians were.

work that accompanies harvesting either rice of jute, the two crops the family cultivate, is pleasantly several months away. Yet her work still starts well before sunrise. She has already swept the mud floors and the courtyard, fed the children and the animals, spread out the cow dung to dry and washed up.There is no end to a woman's work,' she smiles, 'We could work all day, even all night and we'd still not finish.'

Rahima was married 12 years ago when she was about 15. She and her husband, Yar Hussain, have two sons and a daughter, Shumi, who is five. Rahima is dressed in a plain cotton shari with an ornate border and wears a small nakphaul (literally, a nose flower) and silver earrings. The soles of her green flip-flops are thin with use.

behind her is the bamboo partition which divides the house into two rooms, one for Rahima and her family, the other for her father-in-law, who owns the homestead. The thatched house has mud floors and outer walls made of tin. At the other end of the courtyard is a tube well and a Jackfruit tree laden with hoary fruit. Off to the side is a room used for storing rice - and for steeping it, one of Rahima's own duties.

and

Perhaps because of these prejudices, in the West rice was treated as food for infants and invalids.

Until the late nineteenth century few cookery books carried anything other than dessert recipes for rice.

But other people recognised the value of a food that not only sustains over one and a half billion people today, but also nourishes their sophisticated cultures, The eighteenth century philosopher Montesquieu, for example, noted that rice growing induces hard work and co-operative virtues.

CORN/MAIZE

A song of the strong

BANANAS

Yellow perils

COCOA
A legacy for my (23) children

'Rice has been cultivated since the creation of humanity,' she says. 'Our elders say it used to be easier to grow in the olden days because you didn't need fertilizers and you didn't get sores (from chemicals) if you walked through the wet rice fields. All you had to do was plant the seeds.

'Even though women do not cultivate the rice, 'she goes on, ''there is always a lot to do. Men don't always appreciate the work that women do.

'Sometimes my husband asks me what I do all day. And if he asks me to do something extra, I'll have to do that too. At this time of the year I can sit and talk, but I couldn't if it was harvesting time.' continued

weddings

Certainly wet-rice cultivation requires hard work – the heavy labour of constructing fields, terraces and irrigation systems on the one hand; and on the other bending all day to transplant seedlings and weed in the waterlogged earth, all the time avoiding leeches and snakes.

Culturally too, rice is important in the traditions and thinking of the countries where it has been grown for centuries. Almost universally it represents fecundity, and in some Hindu marriage ceremonies the couple is showered with rice grains – a custom that spread to the West in the form of confetti.

Rice is increasingly popular in the West although it’s often eaten as a breakfast cereal. Puffed Rice burst onto the US market early this century with the slogan ‘Shot from Guns’ – alluding to the way the rice grains had been exploded to make them expand. And at the New York World’s Fair in 1965 a wife-and-husband circus team were shot out of a cannon to give the Puffed Rice publicity a bang.

Sanitarium Puffed Rice