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Women in Kashmir play an essential role during the autumn season, working alongside men in paddy fields, apple orchards, and saffron fields. Their work goes beyond household chores to farming, business, education, and community leadership. Women ensure that rice is sown and harvested; apples are picked and sorted; and saffron threads are traced and collected during the autumn bounty. Women’s skills, patience, and labour are essential to sustaining family welfare and the local economy.
In villages throughout the valley, women wake up before dawn to report for duty alongside their male counterparts in the fields. In autumn, when every minute of daylight is precious, their contribution becomes increasingly essential. While men will plough or carry heavy loads, women do the fine work of threshing, winnowing, and keeping the grain clean and of high quality.
The same pattern applies in the maize fields. Women husk the corn, put the cobs in long garlands, and hang the garlands outside to dry. As these golden strands swing in the fresh autumn air, they are more than food; they reflect a living tradition, a practice handed down through generations, reflecting continuity and the care that goes into the work. Husking corn requires time and teamwork, and usually women will sing and engage in quiet conversations while they work, adding cultural richness to the labour.
Autumn is also the season of apples, and Kashmir is one of the largest apple-producing regions in India. Their gentle fingers pick fruit of the right size and colour, carefully setting each apple in baskets to prevent bruising. Women grade the apples by quality and pack them into wooden crates filled with straw after they are picked. At busy fruit mandis and markets, women are becoming increasingly visible not just assisting with quality checking and packaging but also in accounting and negotiating with traders. Their presence indicates that they are not casual seasonal labourers but active contributors to the fruit economy, influencing trade that spreads across India and even in foreign countries.
Apart from apples and rice, Kashmir in the autumn season reveals the harvest of walnuts, almonds, and saffron, all of which require skill and patience. Women are also at the center of these industries. In most households, they spend endless nights breaking walnuts, extracting kernels, and getting them ready for traders. This labour that appears to be slow turns into hard-earned money that caters to school fees, purchasing winter clothes, and all other household expenses. The painstaking cracking of every shell, the tender removal of the golden kernel, and the tidy packaging all require devotion.
Some of the most exquisite and fragile autumn toil is in the saffron fields. At dawn, women will quietly walk between rows of purple flowers, their fingers quick as they pick the delicate flowers. Afterwards, they sort out the small red stigmas, threads of great worth from each flower. One misstep can ruin an entire bloom. This job takes not just dexterity but also the sort of patience that comes from generations of effort. By this tedious process, women contribute to saving one of Kashmir’s most prized heritage crops, connecting the present to centuries past and commerce.
While agriculture remains central to women’s contribution, self-help groups run shops, handicrafts and bake breads and kulchas and operate cottage industries with products from woollen shawls to other goods. These businesses do well in the fall months due to increased tourist traffic and busier markets. The wages provide them with independence and pride. They can demonstrate their labour is not just limited to specified spans of time that is planting and harvesting time.
In political and grassroots leadership, Kashmiri women have begun to exert influence both historically and contemporarily. Women are present on village councils, where they advocate for better irrigation systems, fair pricing for agricultural produce, and improved rural road access. Whether or not these women participate in village councils, they guarantee that choices take into consideration the realities of those who till the land. When women advocate for changes in agriculture and rural development, women farmers’ and labourers’ voices emerge in various discussions that impact policy development as well as ensure their contributions are considered and their needs are addressed.
However, despite all their contributions, Kashmiri women still have numerous issues. Their work is undervalued and often goes unrecorded. Men are often reported as farmers in official statistics, even when women do most of the actual cultivation. Women’s earnings are also lower, and their access to land rights, credit, and new farming tools is very limited. Besides economic challenges, most women carry a dual burden struggling through challenging fieldwork while caring for children, grandparents, and household chores. Some get educated or engage in external work in addition to these, juggling roles with extraordinary resilience. Their resilience cannot be questioned, yet their contributions deserve much greater appreciation and support.
They are the quiet heroes who grow crops, keep businesses running, feed families, and build communities. To state that women work “hand in hand” with men is more than a metaphor, it is an experience seen in every village and orchard, on every mountaintop and bottomland. Their collaboration in agriculture, commerce, politics, and the often-unnoticed work of sustaining social cohesion strengthens and makes society more resilient.
The Kashmiri woman is not just a worker of today; she is also the grower of hope, prosperity, and, ultimately, the peace of tomorrow. The story of her life is written in the rustle of saffron flowering in the sunlight of the growing day, in the light of the golden variety of maize being wreathed in harvest, in the smell of the flowers of plucked apples, and in the aesthetic simplicity of fields getting ready for the winter. Autumn in Kashmir is something, it is all beauty, as a season, but it is only Autumn when we think of the women whose work provides the bounty of the season a life, and becomes part of the tradition and long-lasting promise of what is to come.
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