Abstract
This article theorises toil as the embodied, temporally extended labour through which soil is made durable, compromised and sometimes abandoned in the Western Himalaya. Responding to crisis framings that universalise soil degradation without engaging questions of embodiment or labour we ask: when, and for whom, does care become worth the toil of making and repairing degraded soils? How are these valuations negotiated across bodies organised according to gender, caste and shifting livelihoods? The analysis rests on multi-sited ethnography undertaken in Himachal Pradesh (2018–2023), including participant observation with apple growers, agrochemical resellers, activists and bureaucrats, and seventy-six semistructured interviews. Conceptually, we draw together ideas from feminist STS and postcolonial anthropology, extending debates on maintenance and care by specifying the “toiling self” as a coconstitutive object of care alongside soils themselves. Thus, we argue, bodies, affects and capacities must all be maintained for care to endure. We develop three associated claims. First, toil names a constitutive tension between virtue and fate: it can affirm dignity and belonging while exhausting bodies and foreclosing futures. Second, toil is a battle with “nature” both terrestrial and corporeal, as cultivable soils are continually made via struggles against forest regrowth, feral animals and bodily breakdown. This means that care must be understood as always-already partial, selective and contested. Third, indifference can be thought of as an ethical-political valuation required in such contexts: some soils and practices are let go as households recalibrate time, money, compost, irrigation and wage labour. Empirically, we bring these threads together to show how jowari (collective labour) and changing markets contribute toward reorganising the costs of maintaining soil, and how women's and men's roles are reworked as manure scarcity and changing aspirations impact on agricultural futures.
Introduction
“You should put your hands in the soil every day,” Anu said one of the evenings Shoaib had joined her and her family for dinner at their home in Himachal Pradesh, northern India. Anu relished her work with the soil, and she urged Shoaib to make a small garden while he was there on fieldwork. It was among the things in life she utterly held dear. After living through years of domestic violence, she felt that soil was the final substrate of belonging; when working the soils in the garden she described herself as being with the earth, even when her work in the garden exhausted her. She often complained of backache. Anu told Shoaib that working the soil was the way to stay grounded, the only relationship that mattered when everything else might fall apart. Soil care offered the possibility for renewal – for both the land and herself. She found it virtuous and creative, even on occasions when her harvest was lost to sudden turns of weather or feral cattle. She found satisfaction in animating the soil, nurturing its qualities so a variety of her selections could eventually grow and prosper. Something more than use value or material prosperity was cultivated in Anu's garden. To Anu, there was something inexpressible and irreducible about soils, a sort of ontological attraction, for which she sometimes used the English word “energy”. Working the soil with her hands, she felt rewarded and recharged. On the other hand, working the familial bonds she had once held high hopes for now felt relatively unrewarding and disheartening. Working the soil had become important for her in unanticipated ways.
Born in the mid-80s, Anu grew up witnessing widespread social and ecological change. Across the Himalayan state, small apple orchards were emerging, girls began attending public schools and college, small-town markets expanded, newspapers and media proliferated – all accompanied by irreversible changes in food, vegetation, climate, social relations, and responsibilities. Not only were the relations to soil changing, but so were the relationalities of family, gender, caste, villages, and small towns. Agricultural intensification happened alongside diversification of non-farm livelihoods. Both the work of nature and the nature of work (Gidwani, 2000) experienced irreversible and uncertain change. Analytically, “toil” pries open a tension between the virtues of hard work, weariness and hoped-for reward. Toil is a critical aspect of the nature of work acceptable to, or expected of, different social groups. Toil nests work in specific cultural, political and ecological contexts. Grounded in the soil relations of Western Himalaya, this article investigates the relation between human toil and the ability to care.
What does it mean to care for others (including nonhuman others) in a world where sedimented habits and old ways of knowing and responding no longer offer a reliable means to renewal (Brown, 2024; Ghosh, 2018; Tsing, 2015)? In a climate of uncertainty, when does something become worth caring for? What makes it worth the toil? The conversation about the sustainability of soils generally emphasises the work of nature – enlisting the qualities of certain biota or ecological processes to make soils work. There has been relatively less attention to the nature of work – the hopes and fates of human bodies tasked to care. In this article we draw on conceptual and analytical tools developed at the intersection of feminist science and technology studies (STS) and postcolonial anthropology to examine the work – we term this toil – that goes into caring. Specifically, we examine the toil that goes into making and maintaining soil in high mountain agriculture on the steep slopes of the western Himalaya in India. By reframing agricultural care labour through toil, the article highlights how the costs of maintenance are negotiated unevenly across gender, caste and livelihood, including the ways in which male farmers and fertilizer companies salvage economic value from women's toil.
Maintenance and care are useful concepts because they focus attention on things which are neither completely functional nor completely broken but hang in place through tenuous working arrangements (Denis and Pontille, 2019). Globalised narratives of crises and breakdown tend to obscure attention from the arrangements through which things keep working (Salazar et al., 2020). Such arrangements are important sites for intervention and constructive engagement (Krzywoszynska et al., 2020). The article juxtaposes the global narrative of soil crisis with multiple breakdowns in the ambit of Himalayan life, and roots toil in the struggle for hopeful futures on multiple fronts, including the continuity of soils.
About two billion hectares of soil, which is some fifteen percent of the planet's terrestrial area, has been degraded (Crawford, 2012). Soils are a critical zone for all terrestrial life; the care and renewal of soil worlds is critical to the ongoingness of terrestrial life (Salazar et al., 2020). The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's 2015 Status of World's Soil Resources highlighted the poor, deteriorating condition of world's topsoils, and the 16th UN General Assembly declared 2015 as the International Year of Soils (ITPS, 2015). There is widespread frustration that despite global efforts of soil rejuvenation, global knowledge about soil fertility decline is not translating into action (Koch et al., 2013). Many calls to care fall short in enlisting practical responses and enduring action. More recent scholarship in political ecology and STS points out that the global soil maps produced through satellite imagery, while important, are ontologically different than the specific soils made (or lost) in agricultural work and thus do not take us far enough (King and Granjou, 2020; Krzywoszynska and Marchesi, 2020). In framing soils as a site of crisis, the spectre of loss often hides the underlying work of making and maintaining soils. In this article we follow in the footsteps of decades of political ecology scholarship. Early on, political ecologists showed that soil sciences framed soils in ways that failed to recognise human-soil relations in practice (Blaikie, 1985; Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Engel-Di Mauro, 2014). They also showed that soil degradation was less about poor farmers lacking knowledge than it was about the movement of capital and resources in agriculture. This article's focus on toil provides tools to understand the limits and possibilities of soil care practices. Specifically, we see how toil ties together the hopes, aspirations, and rewards of care with struggles, failures, and fate of care-work. Toil intertwines the fates of care-takers and Himalayan soils. Attention to toil reveals bodily breakdown as one key reason why certain forms of soil care endure, and why others do not. In this way, we look to the enduring costs and possibilities of care.
The rest of this article is structured in seven sections. The next two sections review the existing work on care and outline why we think toil is a useful concept to understand forms of durable, painful, hopeful work. After describing the methods and fieldwork on which the article is based, further sections account for the creation of soil, the importance of gender, the breakdown of bodies and soils, and how the value accorded to forms of toil are changing. A conclusion outlines how toil might be considered in other contexts.
Care for things
Among the key achievements of STS scholarship is the demolition of the modernist separation between science as an understanding of nature and the humanities as understanding society. STS demonstrates instead how both society and science are shaped through contingent deliberation with things (Latour, 1999). Scholarship on care developed through the 1990s and has become a prominent methodological and analytical arena over the last two decades. The conceptual impetus on care in STS owes itself to Susan Leigh Star's (1990) critique that STS and ANT scholars should pay more attention to those who failed to close the doors on science, whose efforts were unsuccessful, and the relentless work of maintenance and care that got ever invisibilised in the background. Star's critique provided a foundation for a gradual impetus for studying the vast and variegated workings of care in the production of knowledge, stability and durability of things (Denis and Pontille, 2019). Care became loosely defined as the drawing of things together in relations that sustain more-than-social arrangements. Care thus bypasses the divide which places physical and biotic things with fixed properties on one side (weather, nuclear fission, SUVs, soil, phosphorus, pigeons), and uncertain human actions on the other. Undoing this divide transposes care into the potential for life dependent on how things are mediated – a generative commitment to the agency of all kinds of more-than-human kin, from microbes and maintenance workers to nuclear reactors and Frankensteins (Latour, 1999, 2011).
In this vein, Puig de la Bellacasa's (2010) widely cited review of the early trajectory of care work in soils is illuminating. This review stressed care politics as: focusing on relations that are ignored, taken for granted, or devalued in the heteronormative order of things; distancing from a fundamentalist politics of things; advancing not just abstract but embodied concerns centring the body as a critical node of vital, material, and ethical doing. It gave momentum to further examine the ways in which care shapes the qualities and stability of worlds we experience every day, including environments, technologies, and infrastructures (Graham and Thrift, 2007; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010; Laet and Mol, 2000; Rubio et al., 2025; Star, 2016). The subsequent evolution of this scholarship has shown care to be far more important, and far more troubled, than “a shared desire for comfort and protection” (Duclos and Criado, 2019: 153), or a “taken-for-granted-good” (Lindén and Lydahl, 2021: 4). Care can simultaneously be oppressive and alienating entrenched in historical or contemporary circuits of power, capital, and exclusion (Varfolomeeva, 2021). This scholarship thus has also opened fresh enquiries into the “darker sides” of care (Martin et al., 2015: 627), examining the tension between “conservative and generative sides of care” alongside “the unhappy effects of staying in the trouble” (Duclos and Criado, 2019: 154). As scholars have long emphasised, care must be critically appraised to avoid romanticised interpretations (see Cancian and Oliker, 1999; Galvin, 2004; Williams, 2001).
Seen this way care is a ubiquitous part of life, of object ontologies, of assembling possibilities, novel transductions, and stewardship of futures. But if care is so commonplace, if anything and everything can count as care, does it not empty care of ethical or political substance? Our response is that care is a quality of many relations but is never the only quality of any relation. Care entangles aspects of time, culture, power and place. The path forward to earthing an ethical-political heart of care is not to succumb to limiting prefigurations of what ought to count as care and what should not. The more important task is to build practical and insightful vocabularies for the different qualities of relations that qualify as care.
This is a pivotal undertaking, and likely a reason why care has resurfaced in the twenty-first century (Ackermann et al., 2021; Chazdon, 2020; Jacobs and Wiens, 2023; Li and Nassauer, 2020). For instance, scholars differentiate between the continual and repetitive work of maintenance and repair after a breakdown (Denis and Pontille, 2023a). Differences are also found between tinkering (Mol et al., 2010), the prolongation of life in making things last as against planned obsolescence (Denis and Pontille, 2023b, 2025), or that of making time (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015). To this arena of relations that count as care we propose to add a longstanding concept from postcolonial anthropology and development studies – toil. In the following sections, we examine the toiling body within practices of soil care. Bodily toil is ubiquitous to many forms of care, just as caring for something is central to most kinds of toil.
The toiling self
Toil is laborious, arduous and exhausting. Toil also has association with virtue, including building a better world for oneself or community, or the task of changing or accepting one's circumstances in an ethical way. On the one hand, toil has been at the heart of popular modernist discourse: articulations of progress, development, autonomy, individualism, and shaping one's destiny. However scholarship on toil has been more attentive to entanglements beyond material prosperity and individual autonomy, placing toil amidst its corporeal, emotional, and historical aspects. We find the concept useful to ask: when does care become rewarding enough, worth the toil? This case relates toil to the work with soils; toil embodies bodily suffering, breakage, and pain, as well as anticipation, hope, and joy.
Toil has been a versatile part of popular as well as critical references to modernisation and development in the Global South, signaling one's ability to shape one's social and terrestrial condition. The ability, and more often the inability, to change one's condition drives everyday work, fatigue, regional politics, and social and material relations. Toil carries strong moral undertones. Notable popular references from South Asia, films such as Naya Daur (1957)
Crooked Stalks brings its readers to the site of failed plantation programs in South India: “An operation on the land and an operation on the self, as a struggle with the imagined ‘nature’ of the heart as well as the material nature of the soil” (Pandian, 2009: 20). The failures were often blamed on the moral shortcomings of employees and the rural peasantry, and “degenerate qualities of tropical environments” (Pandian, 2009: 20). Agricultural development in the uplands emerged as a linchpin of colonial government, “promising yields of both revenue and moral virtue” (Pandian, 2009: 20). Pandian's account of agrarian toil opens with a plantation manager's suicide, and culminates with Pekkhati Mayandi Thevar, a habitual toiler who had to be chained to his bed given his frail ailing body to ensure that he didn’t run out to the fields with a spade and loincloth. In the empirical accounts of this article we also witness toil taking shape as struggle with the nature of the self and the terrestrial forces at play. This aspect of toil, as a tension and a struggle, we propose is very useful for further exposing the analytical place of breakdown in STS, (Denis and Pontille, 2019, 2023a; Graham and Thrift, 2007) by including the toiling body as site of struggle and breakdown.
In the sections that follow, we will show how certain qualities of the toiling body are integral to the cultivable soils of western Himalaya. Our aim is not to arbitrate whether toil is bad or good, but to highlight three tensions. First, the tension between toil as virtue and toil as a form of suffering to get past, a tension between toil as a “grim necessity and hopeful possibility,” and “an understanding of toil as virtue with another sense of toil as fate” (Pandian, 2009: 141…145). Toil can be exploitative and toil can affirm the right to the fruits of one's labor, dignity and diligence (Chari, 2004). Popular South Asian songs on toil resonate with these themes. Songs such as Hum mehnatkash is duniya se jab apna hissa maangenge 1 (Kamal and Burman, 1983), or Saathi haath badhaana (Ludhianvi and Nayyar, 1957), or Jaao Dhal Jaao 2 (Ray and Nath, 2012) echo the deeply aspirational, yet fraught relation between toil and its rewards. This tension is alive and thriving in the ethnographic sections of this article. We observe this tension as a pervasive aspect of care relations, and social negotiation on what makes agricultural soils worth caring for. Public programmes and technical interventions can creatively participate in this tension to make works of care more enduring and just.
Second, toil as a battle against nature – self and terrestrial. Care demands a selective enactment of certain qualities, never all qualities (Martin et al., 2015). Care is almost never holistic, but ever partial, and entails selective attention and appreciation of qualities of things that are cared for. Caring also often requires constant work towards enacting and maintaining a selection of conditions that matter (Denis and Pontille, 2025). In this article, not only do our research participants toil to maintain their soils in select ways, but so do the Chir pine (Pinus roxburghii) and Deodar (Cedrus deodara) trees, and so do sheep and goats by browsing and dispersing their favourite grass seeds. The qualities they seek to enact and maintain are not the same and they can be at odds, which returns us to Latour's point in Pandora's Hope (1999) that cultivable soils are made, not found. However, beyond the attention to the work of maintenance and care of conditions that matter, we call for a similar and critical attention to the toiling self – bodily, emotional, and ethical qualities that are integral to the very upkeep of human toil. Scholarship on toil shows that the cultivation of the toiling self is as fraught as the cultivation and maintenance of soils that matter. It requires figuring ethical and physical postures that work, and provide time and space for recuperation and joy, recovery from injury and exhaustion, and are equitable.
Third, is a tension between care and indifference. On one hand care is often seen as a normative good, with a general call to care as a good thing. Care scholars have shown that care is not always a good thing, it can also be rooted in exclusionary and oppressive social relations. We show that many times care may not be worth the toil, and indifference may be a good thing. Not all soils ought to be social. We juxtapose the ontological status of soils as made, with the ontological status of soils as ‘lost’. This leads us to a question – what makes soil care worth the toil?
In developing our argument we aspire to renew existing postcolonial scholarship on toil by imbuing it with insights from the care scholarship. While the scholarship on toil gives its due to history alongside colonial and postcolonial projects of development, characterised by a Foucauldian emphasis on self and subjectivity, the scholarship does not cast similar critical attention to the ephemeral or enduring relationships between people and things which also exist separately from these large histories. This ends up subsuming toil either under a rug of the past, or a projective horizon of development. For instance, the human relationship to compost is described by many composters as one of love, cast in the very moment of contact, fomented in the at-hand sensuality of smell and touch. Recall Anu, who we met at the beginning of this article, for whom the relationship to soil endures despite her broken back and loss of the worldviews she once held dear. For those more seasoned at caring have also learned how to care for themselves through the very worlds of toil. Subsuming toil under the rug of history or projective horizons of development can sometimes lead to analytical errors. Perhaps Pekkhati Thevar (in Pandian, 2009: 159) did not run out with a spade out of the compulsion of being a habitual toiler ever vying to escape the thievish crookedness cast upon Kallar men, but felt a greater degree of love and satisfaction in his work with the spade, than his world indoors with his children. A case several of our research participants also make in this article. Perhaps Pekkhati saw greater satisfaction in dying with the spade in his hand than he did lying on a deathbed.
Methodology
Our empirical focus in this article is on high mountain agriculture in the western Himalaya of India and the practices of care and toil that have gone into making and maintaining its soil. The article emerges from the more than ten years of ethnographic work by Shoaib Ali in the Himalaya since 2011. The fieldwork on which this article is based was carried out at multiple sites in the Indian Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh between 2018–2023. Naomi Millner and Franklin Ginn were conducting overlapping research from 2019–21 as part of a funded project, Glacial Flour Power, on which Shoaib also worked for a short time as a researcher. This wider project investigated the potential of glacial flour as a novel fertilizer in Himalayan agriculture. During the fieldwork Shoaib spent time with apple growers, farmers, activists, agrochemical resellers, local bureaucrats, and attended training at demonstration programmes at agricultural universities, and rural camps. Ethnographic work was supplemented with seventy-six semi-structured interviews with individuals from across these diverse groups. All interviewees have been pseudonymised. Together we reflected, analysed the material and wrote this piece.
Ethnographic practice aims to be sensitive to not only the methods of data collection but also its presentation. As a method, ethnography is as much about analysis and presentation of data as it is about its collection. This article primarily builds on the time Shoaib spent with apple growers in two places – Kullu Saraj (also known as Tirthan Valley) and Parvati Valley. After the ethnographic sections we then weave a synthesis of care and toil with regard to the three tensions highlighted above. The ethnographic sections are not meant as mere extension of the theoretical thesis, but autonomous parts which invite further thinking and reflection as we attempt to present relatable people rather than research findings. They are thus inspired by a certain stylistic excess which goes beyond the theoretical cordons established above. They contain descriptions of places and events, seasonal rosters of different soil-care activities, juxtaposition of differing viewpoints, aspirations and experiences enmeshed in original quotes (translated). While such excess may make the article vulnerable to “reinterpretation and rethinking”, it is simultaneously a desirable trait of good ethnography to achieve a “text that invites rethinking and reanalysis” (Gupta, 1998: 30).
In what follows, we use the pronoun “I” when Shoaib is actively positioned in first person observing or recounting conversations. The article proceeds in four further sections which analyse: the personal investment in making soil; the gendered nature of toil; what happens when body and soil break down; how values governing the relative worth of toil are changing. The concluding part reviews the three tensions at play and sets out the ethical-political relation between human toil, care and breakdown, offering ways in which toil may inform other studies of how people invest their care.
The toil for soil
Shantaram's acre-sized orchard is split across two distant plots, separated by the highway that connects Parvati Valley to the rest of the district. Shantaram's distant orchard patches are a result of trades his father made. “The Malhotras are clever. They knew where the future was heading. My father did not, and he traded cultivated patches of our then land close to the road, for this forest patch uphill, farther from the road”, Shantaram complained. When his father made those trades, fodder, timber, and flocks of sheep and goats were greater markers of wealth than cultivable land. Shantaram's father held distributed patches of land with oak trees (valued as fodder for sheep and goats, timber and fuel) deodar cedar, and grasslands. But markers of wealth changed with the transition to orchards and to horticulture. This also had clear implications for soil and maintenance of stall-fed cattle, stockpiles of fodder, manure and weeding. Bureaucrats and state planners too saw pastoral practices as lazy; they saw agriculture as the moral and physical horizon of rural development (Singh, 2009). What was once a chore, akin to a timepass for the young – herding cattle and flocks of sheep to local mountain slopes and grasslands – eventually turned into an arduous toil of harvesting fodder and stall-feeding modern, more voracious hybrids of Jersey and HF cows. Eventually, apple trees proliferated across the landscape and agricultural markets emerged.
During the fieldwork, when I asked farmers what soil meant to them, I was surprised at their notion of time. In their narratives, the soil had a familiar beginning. This beginning was relatively accessible in narratives of generational labor in making fields – turning mountainous slopes into cultivable lands. Until the late nineteenth century societies in the western Himalaya were largely dependent on a mix of transhumant pastoralism, trade and a little agriculture (Singh, 2009). It was not a primarily agricultural society. The agrarian turn is relatively recent. It originated in the late nineteenth century, and intensified in the second half of the twentieth century, converting rangelands, private, or village forests into cultivable land – a massively laborious undertaking on mountainous slopes (Singh, 2009). Cultivable soils in the region were not lost or degraded by the turn towards agricultural intensification, but rather were produced by it. This turn was even more significant for the people of Saraj, where the relatively narrower valleys and steeper terrains enforced constraints on available cultivable land. Growing apple trees on steep uncultivated slopes seemed to be a better option than the grains of the day – wheat, corn, barley, or foxtail millets. Many orchards were developed in the 1980s after the Nautor land grants. The Nautor grants involved allocating state and forest land outside protected forest areas for purposes of agriculture and horticulture to marginal landowners and landless households (Tucker, 1997). The grants were meant to partly address the steep social divisions, where those landless, particularly members of the oppressed castes performed servile agricultural labour for the landed upper caste households. For many households, these land grants made possible their first orchards.
Rather than speak of geology, physical conditions, or modern agrochemicals in framing the gain and loss of good quality soil, farmers in our study highlighted laziness – a withdrawal from cultures of toil. The notion of toil was visible in the way farmers gradually extended their orchard by claiming bits of common and forest land every year. To them, the soil was a thing rendered through cultivation. To many, making and maintaining were almost synonymous. Growing in a forest patch requires arduous and constant toil. “Nothing grows in the beginning. And then in two to three years, you have badhiya mitti (good soil)”, said Taussu. Taussu showed examples of his toil over the years, including a new patch he had just started extending. Shantaram, his neighbour, saw Taussu as a seasoned toiler. In retrospect, Shantaram lamented his own lack at toil, while admiring the ways in which Taussu constantly expanded his family's prospects. To my surprise, Taussu belonged to one of the oppressed castes, while Shantaram, a Brahmin (an upper caste). Gidwani (2000) made similar observations on how the “nature of work” varied among different caste groups; the members from historically privileged caste groups (such as Patels, in his case study of Western India) were not willing to toil their lands or experiment with new possibilities, compared to those from less privileged groups (Koli). Driving hopeful possibilities in their small farm was more important for Taussu's family than for Shantaram's. Taussu was cultivating not just material prosperity, but also his identity as a toiler, capable of stewarding his social and terrestrial condition.
Shantaram and Taussu cultivate adjacent orchards. Shantaram retired as a government employee and felt that his government job, and service at the Shimla High Court, made him and his family lazier (Figure 1). In Shantaram's orchards, soil was “being lost” to invasive and unwanted grass species, as well as some forest regeneration. Both Shantaram and Taussu felt it was a loss. “We don’t toil anymore”, Shantaram lamented. Then he pointed to Taussu's orchard and said, “but look here, this is good soil”. Both of their patches were forest at some point. Shantaram's still has large pine (Cedrus deodara) trees, and some smaller shrubs that have taken hold. The trees render the soil acidic. Manuring makes the soil alkaline and cultivable for many crops including apple, plum, and persimmon trees. At times Taussu's wife crossed over into Shantaram's orchard to harvest grass for her livestock. Shantaram appreciated her trespassing, for it at least counted towards some dekh-bhaal (care) – it cleaned up the orchard, weeded unwanted growth, and provided a lookout against monkeys and feral cattle. He was more worried about his patch to the north of the highway, where the family which used to harvest grass did not this year. “I think I will have to do it myself one of these days,” he worried upon a walk one morning. We see that the continuity of cultivable soils is connected to the cultural and political question of performing certain nature of work. In the next section we shift our gaze to how toil is engendered in Himalayan lives, its implications on soil-care and the lives of its caretakers.
Shantaram's orchard, plum and persimmon in picture, June 2021. Photograph by Shoaib.
Gendered toil: joy, hope, and fate
Ila is in her mid-forties. She heads a family of four – her husband Golu, son Virat, and daughter Shobha. Golu runs their vegetable shop in the town market. “Here [in the mountains] is an agriculture that's possible because of gobar [cowdung]”, said Golu, Virat's father. “Here, you can’t use fertilisers without gobar. There is no question about it”, said Sanjay. Sanjay was one of Golu's acquaintances, who over the years had developed a reputation as a local expert. I did not meet any apple growers over the course of my fieldwork who solely relied on agrochemical fertilisers. Yet, many of them struggled with keeping up with FYM (gobar) requirements in their orchard. “The soils deteriorate when you don’t apply cow manure to the soil. It also deteriorates when you keep taking from it without replenishing it back through fertilisers”, Golu said, gesturing towards additional grain and vegetable crops he grew in the orchard besides apple trees. “Chemical fertilisers damage the soil. We use fertilisers for the crops we grow. But if you apply gobar, then you would not complain. Else the fertiliser helps with one crop and then makes the soil khushk (dry) for the next. Gobar makes the soil soft and moist.” Golu pointed me to the pile of cow-dung manure piled in a corner of the orchard. “The earthworms gather and grow in, on their own”, he said. Then between two and five months later, the manure has formed. “You can’t think about orchards here in the Himalayas without gobar”, said Bob, one of Golu's friends. “Within five years the orchard, and its soil, will all be lost.” “You can have orchards without fertilisers, but you can’t have orchards without gobar. There is no question in that.” This is a commonly practiced belief among apple growers.
Most orchards in Kullu Himalayas are rain-fed. Absorption of fertilisers requires water. This makes compost-driven recuperation and maintenance of soil-structure all the more critical because the structure shapes soil's ability to retain water, hence also the plant's ability to absorb fertilisers. At the orchard, men administered fertilisers and manure. The farmyard manure (FYM) primarily consists of decomposed gobar, mixed with some agricultural or forest foliage. Urea, NPK (12:32:16), calcium nitrate, potassium, and boron are commonly applied to orchards. Soil-care includes the right set of fertiliser and manuring practices spread across seasons and climate, vigilant to tree phenology and aesthetics. In farmers’ ontology of soil, there was no soil without active manuring.
Since he finished college, Virat helps his mother, Ila. Virat's presence makes her day livelier. “Else the work becomes an overwhelming lot. Virat helps, he learns, tries new things. He wants to try his hand in horticulture. He hopes to be a farmer”, Ila claimed. “For it is all very satisfying to me,” Virat said; but it is not socially respectable for men to aspire to everyday maintenance work. Virat loved to work a range of agricultural chores from harvesting fodder to caring for livestock, being out with his mother. But he may have to leave, for his father wanted him to try to find a job in the city. “This is what interests me, but my father wants me to leave, find a job. I do not want to leave home, as long as I can come out and be here. While I am out here, I do not feel like going anywhere else. I really like it out here in the fields, and orchard. I love to work here.” He looked towards his mother, and said, “as for my mother [Ila], she is born to this.” He laughed. “She loves being out here more than staying at home. She works from morning to night. She also asks us to work”. “Whenever I sit idle at home, she screams, ‘Virat, Virat do some work, don’t sit idle!’.” Both Ila and Virat have a hearty laugh about it. “She doesn’t sit idle.” Neither did Virat enjoy spending his days indoors; he doubted if he could enjoy working an office desk. Working on a desk indoors seemed more arduous to Virat than working the fields with his mother.
Ila is thin, agile, her skin sun-burnt. The mornings I met Ila, she was energetic, smiled, spoke with an often-riveting sense of humour and excitement towards chores that lay ahead of her. I always saw her in salwaar kameez. It was summer of 2021. At around ten o’clock in the morning she made way to the orchard alongside two cows. This routine usually starts in springtime, as vegetative growth resurges post-winter, and continues until autumn. Her mornings however started around five o’clock a.m. caring for the cattle – washing, milking, feeding. Care was a timely bond she shared with her livestock, land, and water. It wasn’t a choice that she could unmake the next day (Figure 2). Caring puts her body into attentive and relentless toil.
Ila, sickle in hand, and kilta on the back, June 2021. Photo by Shoaib
Ila's choices to pursue agriculture and livestock bound her body to the many things she had to care for – cattle, fences, grass. They were her choices. She had consciously made them despite agitation from her family members that she had been overworking herself. The toil brought her joy, and an affirmation of herself. She felt satisfied with her work, at least when it went well. She felt deeply attached to her animals, to the point that she couldn’t live without them. It all “exhausts her, at times her body breaks down”, said Virat. “But we can’t persuade her to relax, or even take a break. There was this one time we forcibly left her at her parents home, that she ought to rest for a few days. We would take care of the cattle, and the orchard. Somehow she agreed. But she was restless. She called every hour, unsure if we were indeed carrying out the chores we were meant to. And instead of taking that week out, or ten days, she took a bus the very next day and came back home.” Virat laughed, “then she made excuses – we didn’t do this or that right”.
“I become anxious about them – the livestock”, laughed Ila. “I cannot sit idle … What is there to sit idle for? Life is mast [enjoyable] and vyast [when busy in something valuable].” For her, it is mast when she is vyast outdoors. Ila preferred having Virat's company rather than being alone through all her chores. Ila did not actively involve her daughter, Shobha, in soil-care. Shobha expected to finish college in 2022. It was not that Ila prevented her daughter from soil-work, but she allowed Shobha to choose. And Shobha made that choice. “It's not that she doesn’t help out, she does – with food, with the livestock, and everything else in the house. But when it comes to the livestock, she certainly doesn’t enjoy it.” At that point, Ila and Virat burst out into laughter as they mimicked Shobha's estranged bent-away posture when she worked livestock. “She is the opposite of Virat. She loves taking a trip to the market, buying new clothes, and to scream out if she sees an insect”, Ila and Virat continued laughing. “I often warn her against marrying in a house with dangaron ke kaam [livestock responsibilities]. She’ll be completely lost therein”, Ila said.
Virat planted tomatoes that summer. He took his father's suggestion and guidance. By July, when he began the harvest, the prices for tomatoes plummeted to ₹5 a kilogram. “We will barely recover the costs, aur kuch apna khaane ko ho jaayega (and leave some for everyday grocery), nothing more”, he lamented in utter disappointment as he carried kilta (basket) of tomato uphill to their family shop. His toil did not fruit the way he yearned for it to. “Why not feed this tomato to the cows”, he agitated. Their shop could directly sell some of the harvest, a very small portion of it. The rest will sell at ₹5/kg. Virat still loved working the fields, but by this point he stood defeated in the face of his father's insistence that he man up, leave these agricultural chores behind and find a job. Virat wanted more time to learn, figure out more profitable pathways. “Perhaps tomato wasn’t the right choice”, he mused.
From Ila's account, we see that toil helps cultivate a sense of self as well as cultivating productive soils through gobar. For Ila, toil could be seen as a form of both virtue and fate, even as it takes a bodily toll. We can also begin, through Virat and Shobha, to see how the value attached to toil begins to change over time, as what was once worth caring about begins to recede – gladly for Shobha, regrettably for Virat. Shifting aspirations reshape what counts as care. At the same time, the accounts in this section reveal how changing valuations of gobar, orchards, and agricultural futures make some forms of toil worth sustaining while others fade into indifference, underscoring the politics of what makes care endure – or not.
Breakdown: self and soil
By September, the monsoon recedes into Fall. Through November, while the men were busy picking and transporting the apple harvests and stocking fuelwood for upcoming winter, the women stock fodder harvests. Previously, rural women, as well as some men, partook in jowari [collective labour], joining together to make grass stocks for all their households, one household after another. But as livelihood opportunities and choices spread out, the tradition now involves multiple options, including hired local or Nepali labor. “It's a tradition in decline”, said Anu. “Not everyone participates anymore. Scarcely people do.”
During the fall of 2021, Bholi, Taussu's wife, was busy attending village festivals and participating in jowari. When it was her household's turn to receive the collective labor, her days started early at around four o’clock in the morning. She ensured food for everyone. Jowari not only involved securing stocks of fodder, but also celebrating and eating traditional foods. She made bhaturu each morning. It was strenuous, but she also relished the work and the gathering. In addition to food and labor, they sing local songs, sit out together and engage in conversations. 3 Someone brought a portable speaker to play music. “When you’re out working with everyone, it's nice. Else, it becomes boring, lonely”, said Bholi.
Ila did not participate in jowari that year. Ila had to hire wage labor for a few days during the season. She had an acute backache and cervical pain over the last few weeks. She was in acute pain, perhaps all the more so because of Virat's absence. Over the past few months, they got accustomed to working together. Now Ila was out all alone. Virat had to pursue his father's demand that he move to Dharamshala, study for competitive exams, find a job. Struggling with pain, Ila continually tried to adjust her body movement while harvesting corn grass to find a form which didn’t hurt. She was frustrated at her body not keeping up with her.
Bodily toil is among the reasons many women choose not to maintain livestock and look towards other work opportunities. Exhausted by the work of caring for livestock, Anu had stopped rearing her cow in 2014. “I don’t know what the future of orchards is, as increasingly fewer people rear livestock, while they want to grow more than they used to … I too would like to rear a cow. It was great when we used to. We had milk and butter in abundance. No scarcity of gobar,” said Anu. “But it's a lot of work, and I cannot handle it myself.” Instead, Anu's family exchanged grass stocks, grazing land, or sometimes cash for gobar from their neighbours. In 2014 Anu suffered a slipped disc. She had to rest for a few months. “It haunted me. My body broke down (toot gayi). I crumbled. What to do about it. I became hopeless. But then I realised, I ought to make time for myself. Earlier, I used to laugh when people did yoga. But then I realised, it's a beautiful thing to take care of oneself and let go of the things we aren’t able to do. Among the primary reasons for why we fail is [that] we forget to take care of ourselves, and our body.” Among my early memories of Anu are those from 2011 (Figure 3). I often saw her up a tree, or another as she lopped off leaf fodder, or carried kilte of ghaas, with a sickle in her hand.
Anu, gathering fodder, July 2011. Photo by Shoaib.
Bodily breakdowns are surely an inherent condition of the gendered toil in Himalayan orchards. Kel's mother could not bend her knees anymore. “The problem is, Shoaib, that people here do not consult doctors or physiotherapists when they are in pain”, said Anu. She continued: “No one listens to a woman, nor does the woman listen to herself. If a woman asks, she is laughed at. I laughed too. I worked like a mule. People continue to work, they ignore their body altogether, until they break down. I broke and was in bed for three months. It taught me to care for my body, and to listen to it. Now I wake up at four each morning and have two hours completely to myself. That is my time.”
Women narrated making time for themselves almost as if making time for something else. Their bodies were, in some sense, outside their control such that breakdown could come as an undesirable surprise. They made time for it, or felt the need to make time for it, to care, but were not entirely sure how – or what were the better ways of doing so. The struggle with weariness of the body took its toll, even as the distinctive affinity for soil and toil remained. Being out in the orchards and grasslands made Ila happy, but finding a rhythm her body allowed took a constant assessment of pain and possibility. The toil for soil exhausts bodies; maintaining care cannot continue indefinitely. Meanwhile, the dilution of the communal jowari for gathering fodder with wage labor also points as to the changing values attached to toil, to which we turn in the final section.
Negotiating the values of toil
Julay, an apple grower in his fifties said, “You look at what is happening in orchards here. Gobar is scarce. Cows are stray, abandoned, and pillage people's farms and orchards. Why do you think is happening? This is all because women want to contest elections, go attend meetings, party, instead of doing their work, caring for their responsibilities”. Such gendered contestations are rife within families and across generations. While men accrue incomes from family orchards, they expect women to render manure for the trees. They expect women to participate in the continuity of soil through livestock care, weeding and harvesting grass. While male farmers did not complain of any loss of soil quality, they pervasively complained about the increasing scarcity of manure. So did the fertiliser distributors and retailers. Without a good soil-structure to retain moisture, farmers can neither apply fertilisers nor can fertiliser corporations sell any. The scarcity of gobar loomed as an urgent concern for soil structure, the ability to use fertilisers, and maintain good orchards. For these reasons, both farmers and resellers were vocal in their demands for irrigation: “With irrigation you can apply fertilisers, even without manure. Eventually, though, it will lead to loss of soil”, Golu said.
Both male farmers and fertiliser corporations salvage economic value from women's toil. With the increasing importance of money in everyday life, women often want to participate in activities that are remunerative. When rearing livestock, women often now take all the income accrued from sales of milk or butter. Anu's family now buys milk from a family that continues to rear cows. A man from the family drops a can of milk at Anu's kitchen each morning. “I respect him. He is a good man”, said Anu. “I asked him, and he told me that he gave all the income from his sale of milk to his wife. He doesn’t take any of it.” She continued, “He is punctual and respectful. And he doesn’t take the income that belongs to his wife. This is how men should be”. Such contestations continue to reconfigure gender roles and aspirations within the diversifying livelihood portfolio available to households. While those like Shantaram's withdrew from their agricultural foothold, Taussu's tried to maximise the resources available to them. For both, the calculations of time and toil play an important role.
Reconfigurations of toil are visible in public life. For instance, in the face of a social withdrawal from rural collective labor that once maintained local infrastructures and went unpaid (for example, jowari, as discussed in the previous section, or the maintenance of communal rain-fed irrigation systems), schemes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) will instead pay rural inhabitants for their labor (Fischer, 2016). The household and livestock retain access to water, so soils can be maintained in the face of monsoons, making orchards worth keeping. That men and women get paid under MGNREGS for their labor towards building water-tanks, baawdi (springs), or retention walls in their fields, or the fields of their neighbors, makes these structures worth making and maintaining. They contribute to the calculations about whether caring for soils is worth the toil. Older traditions of collective labor have withered away in favor of waged work.
The toil required for effective care is demanding and potentially oppressive, as well as potentially liberating – relational entanglements through which people come to arrangements for survival and flourishing. Policy interventions that encourage women to participate in politics, infrastructures, and development lend voice to demands for more equitable arrangements. The future thus is not one that entails a story of progress or loss, but contingent on the enactments of maintenance and care. Certain kinds of care may be lost, while new forms of care emerge. All forms of care will demand a certain toil – physical, emotional, and moral labor on the part of those who care. The question of what happens to the human body is a critical aspect of why interventions fail or succeed. The way in which interventions enable and enchant toilers’ social and sensorial sense of value will decidedly shape what's worth caring for. A promising avenue for scholarship is to ask what makes care worth the toil? And what support structures may prolong or strengthen the care of things, and change unequal and oppressive relations?
Care and toil: three tensions at play
Scholarship on care has drawn attention to the many practices through which agricultural soils are enacted and maintained. Human geographers have highlighted the need “to examine the reality of soils not as preceding the mundane practices in which humans interact with it, but rather as shaped within these very practices … to ask both what kind of normativities are already embedded in human–soil relations and what possibilities there are for doing things otherwise” (Krzywoszynska, 2019: 663). Toil is an indexical quality of care-work, like “attentiveness” (Krzywoszynska, 2019), and “improvisation” (Denis and Pontille, 2025). Projections of hope or recursive fate are integral aspects of toil. Toil attends to the emotional, ethical, physical aspects of struggle, diligence, and subjectivity in the relations of care. We saw that soil animates its caretakers in ways that affirm the value of their toil, and sense of the self, but also that may break them down, return them physically weary, in need of recuperation and healing. In conclusion, we return to the three tensions we introduced earlier.
Tension 1: toil as virtue and toil as fate
The first is a tension between toil as a grim necessity, exploitation, or fate against toil as hopeful possibility, virtue, dignity, and the right to the fruits of one's labor. Consider gobar as a necessity for cultivable soils in the Himalaya. As a daughter-in-law, before her breakdown, Anu was expected to care for the cattle. It was not up for negotiation until the point that her body broke down. Ironically, it was only after her back broke that she could stand up for herself and re-negotiate – with both herself and others – what was worth toiling for. Yet soil continues to be a site of possibility for Anu. Almost the only toil (apart from her caring for her daughters) that she dwells upon. However, she can’t care for soil to the extent she would like to care for it. Furthermore, there is a wider gendered reconfiguration underway on who claims the fruits of labor – rights to income from livestock work – and relatively more autonomy for some women on the question of what's worth caring for. The expansion of gender roles to include modern schooling and a range of non-farm responsibilities and opportunities have reduced the state of toil as a ‘grim necessity’ and inescapable fate to enable more hopeful possibilities.
Tension 2: battle against nature – self and terrestrial
Agrarian toil requires relentless maintenance and repair to keep alive certain terrestrial conditions. For all the generational toil that went into making cultivable soils, without the steady and repetitive work of weeding and fencing it stands vulnerable to encroaching pine trees and feral cattle. Much like Taussu, the trees are relentless in their advance. Just as Taussu's family keeps on expanding their orchards by manuring, the pine trees too mulch the soils around to their advantage, turn it acidic, and prevent competing vegetation. Feral cattle and wild boars must constantly be warded off. People rely on other cultivators to that end. Every few seasons the weeds must be cleared, the fences mended, and the soils manured. Forgo any of these tasks and there waits the relentless advance of the forest. Ila's selection of nature inside the orchard enraptures her; it is where she wants to spend most of her day. She has chosen her allies for now. But the terrestrial forces outside are not the only vanguard she must hold. She also battles her weary body, her ailing joints, and her own desire to toil. It is as if she must reconcile with her body as much as she has to reconcile with the terrestrial forces at play. Caring is not easy. Solutions aren’t apparent. Whether self or terrestrial, workable relations must be worked out attentively. We observed that public schemes such as MGNREGS keep alive a sense of sociality when traditional patterns of collective work seem to have broken away (Fischer and Ali, 2019). Allies to work with are important.
Scholarship in STS has highlighted the importance of breakdowns in the politics of repair, care and duration of things. When things cease to work, infrastructures no longer function as they are supposed to, technologies turn feral, and the world can no longer be cared for in ways that it once was – things have to be repaired, and new, more amenable relations of care have to be worked out. A social negotiation of values unfolds. Our focus on toil shows that it is not only terrestrial nature and infrastructures that require maintenance and care, but also the bodies and emotions of the toilers that require constant maintenance and care. Care entails not just selecting qualities of terrestrial nature, but also the toiling self and body; care re-works not only the fragility of things, but also the toiling body.
Tension 3: care and indifference
While large herds and flocks were the reason for once-abundant stores of gobar, it was the very turn to agriculture and a certain indifference to the demands of pastoral transhumance which left little time to tend to large herds and flocks. Eventually, that kind of toil was no longer worth the time. Just as breakdowns are political events, indifference also entails its own politics (also see Davé, 2023). Certain toils which were once a part of life, tradition, or a grim necessity may seem unjust, oppressive, or unworthy at another point in time. Caring for certain ontological things often requires an indifference to other things; enacting certain qualities requires neglecting certain other qualities. Virat for instance could have continued caring for his fields by being indifferent to his father's emotions and demands, or what society thought of his everyday work in the orchard.
Certain kinds of care may be lost, while new forms of care emerge. All forms of care will demand a certain toil – physical, emotional, and moral labor on the part of those who care. The more constructive question for thinking with care, whether as critical scholars, civil society actors, or policy makers is – when does care become worth the toil? In what conditions does toil become something worth celebrating, or living for? What support structures may prolong or strengthen the care of things, and reconcile unequal and oppressive relations of toil? Indifference in this sense is an important value to consider in the democratic valuations that go into relations that count as care.
Breakdown, care, and repair: the toil to keep things going
By centering toil, this article has foregrounded a new set of relations between breakdown, repair, and the labor required to sustain life amidst uncertainty. Toil furthers the emerging scholarship on the politics of repair, as something distinct from politics of care. This is because repairs are often formalised responses to failures that are large enough to qualify as breakdowns. Care is something that happens in the background and typically doesn’t register as an event. Scholarship in maintenance studies has brought attention to the care of things which are neither completely functional nor completely broken, but hang in tandem through ongoing, provisional arrangements of care. In this article we brought attention to some of the fragile social arrangements which keep the cultivability of soils in place in the Himalayas.
With societies and landscapes witnessing uncertain social and ecological changes, it is no surprise that mechanisms of care which used to work in the past are no longer sufficient; repairs also demand reconfigurations of everyday care in order to ensure that breakdowns do not happen again. It is in the moments of breakdown and repair that the need for care becomes visible, and stops being the invisible taken-for-granted activity that just happened in the background. This is an important insight for human-soil relations, given widespread reports of global soil loss and the call to action to rejuvenate and preserve soil worlds. Such reports of course do not automatically spawn the needed levels of care. Toil helps explain the nature of work that goes into caring, and the critical question of when might care become rewarding enough for its many toilers. The rewards of toil are more than material and economic – as we have seen they can be emotional, cultural and sympoietic.
With this analytical import of the relationship between breakdown and care, we also sought to renew the postcolonial anthropology of toil (Chari, 2004; Pandian, 2009) as a certain nature of work (Gidwani, 2000) integral to what was often seen as the work of nature, in this case soils. Toil is an insightful analytical lens to examine the politics and ethics of arduous work conditions, which embody certain ethos of diligence, ecological responsibility, and stewardship. While Anand Pandian's and Vinay Gidwani's work has been widely cited, here we have developed their insights on toil with much greater specificity towards the earth. We have reframed toil beyond a site of class struggle and self-making, as also a site of environmental politics. The relation between toil, its rewards, breakdowns and resignation to fate is socially contested, but also ecologically fraught, mediated through a range of tools, techniques, commitments of time and figuring postures which endure.
Our analysis of breakdown sought to dispel the dualism between those who are supposed to care, and the state of things which cease to be cared for. This move juxtaposed the embodied fragility of things that are cared for with the fragility of the bodies that are tasked to care. Fragility thus is not exclusive to the ontological things which are cared for. Enacting certain qualities of soils may also erode certain qualities and dexterities of the toiling bodies performing the work of maintenance and care. In hindsight, finding ways to preserve the integrity and hopes of toiling bodies may be integral to the durability and quality of cultivable soils.
Highlights
Conceptual: Toil is arduous, embodied, and temporally extended labour integral to care and maintenance. “Toiling self” as co-constitutive of soils.
Analytical: Distills three tensions—virtue vs fate, battles with terrestrial and corporeal “nature,” and the ethical-political role of indifference in valuations of care.
Empirical: From multi-sited ethnography in Himachal Pradesh (2018–2023), demonstrates gendered organisation of soil work, juxtaposes the increasing scarcity of manure, the decline/reworking of jowari, and how markets and input regimes help salvage value from women's toil.
Implications: Fragility and breakdown are not limited to objects which cease to be cared for, but are also the condition of those tasked with care and maintenance. The physical and emotional integrity of the toiling bodies is integral to the care of Himalayan soils.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are deeply grateful to the research participants who made time to participate in this research, shared their insights, and workspaces. This article also owes gratitude to Shaina Sehgal and Ian Fitzpatrick for assistance during the fieldwork.
Data availability statement
Open for the data collected under the GCRF grant.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Part of fieldwork was funded by a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Investment Grant, “Glacial Flour Power: A transdisciplinary investigation of the potential of glacial flour in supporting crop yields and promoting soil care in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH)”, 2019–21.