Gender, innovation, and the polycrisis: intergenerational differences in rural Rajasthan

Abstract

Grounded in extensive ethnographic research in rural Rajasthan, India, this paper explores the critical role older women play in navigating and responding to overlapping crises, or what is now described as polycrisis. Contrary to prevailing portrayals in the literature that cast older women as the gatekeepers of tradition and cultural continuity, this paper examines their dynamic engagement in innovation and problem-solving in their everyday life which is inevitably filled with social, economic, and environmental challenges. During crises—whether driven by resource scarcity, shifting household dynamics, reproductive shortcomings, or social sanctions faced by inter-caste families—it is often the older women who creatively adjust to emergent challenges because younger rural women are frequently burdened by high workloads and rigid expectations associated with their positions as new daughters-in-law. It is often older women who develop innovative strategies to ensure household survival, reproductive success, and more secure futures while social limitations often prevent younger women from engaging in innovative practices. In such contexts, it is often innovations, then, that are taught and passed down to younger women as traditions. Such perspective challenges discussions on tradition and modernity as binary opposites and, instead, examines both practices and structural conditions making agentive capacities for innovations possible.