well over seven billion Homo sapiens alive today
are denied equal access to political power, made
to work harder, and compensated less—because
they have two X chromosomes.
“Don’t get me started,” says Priyanka Borpu-
jari, an independent reporter who joins the walk
through the scenic Chambal River watershed in
Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. “I’m the token
‘brown women’s issues’ writer at many jour-
nalism conferences. Can’t I be something else?
An economics writer? A political analyst? A
foreign correspondent?”
Before reaching the pink sandstone of the
Chambal hills, we pause at a rice farm. It’s man-
aged exclusively by women. In testosterone-
sodden India, this is interesting.
“We run things here. It is a necessity,” says
Saroj Devi Yadav, the flinty, 62-year-old matri-
arch. “All the men are away working in the city.”
Yadav’s husband delivers restaurant food in
distant Jaipur. Yadav and her two teenage grand-
daughters stay home to water the fields. They cut
fodder. They herd the cows and buffalo. They
organize shipments of milk to the city in tin cans
slung across motorbikes. It is much the same at
nearby farms. As the sun drops over her tiny
green domain, Yadav shares her tea and curry.
“I got married at 13,” she says, flicking away
the memory with her hand. “Things were dif-
ferent then. Nobody asked us girls. Today the
girls get many more choices. They marry later.”
It is an old story: the disruption of urbaniza-
tion. The collision of diverse peoples in booming
megacities cracks open age-old gender barriers. Yet
in India, where up to two-thirds of the agricultural
workforce are women, barely 13 percent of Indian
women actually own land. Women carry the
countryside’s water. But India’s natural resources
remain cupped firmly in the hands of men.
The Chambal flows clean. It forms a sanctu-
ary for gharials, the long-snouted crocodilians
of India. The river’s craggy headwaters once
sheltered India’s most famous woman bandit,
Phoolan Devi, a Robin Hood figure who is said to
have killed some 20 rival gunmen in a shootout.
“Hey!” Borpujari shouts.
It’s a fat man steering an expensive SUV along
a hot ribbon of blacktop. He brakes in front of us.
He blocks our way. He films us out his window
with a phone: two people among millions wan-
dering the parched roadsides of India. Borpujari
raises a hand.
“Did you ask our permission?” she demands.
“I didn’t know”—the man huffs—“that I
needed permission.”
Borpujari plants herself at his window. She
assumes a combative stance that—she later
admits—she hates. She tells him levelly, “You
need permission.”The Betwa: Sand miners
I WALK EAST FOR MONTHS. I move through the
long golden core of Indian afternoons.
My GPS track unspools across the lean cow
belt, through Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh,
threading hamlets so forsaken by time they likely
haven’t seen a foreigner since independence in- (“Are you an Englishman?” people ask.) I
sleep on plank tables at roadside eateries called
dhabas, or in rope beds in farmers’ homes, or
at mosques and Hindu temples. Without even
knowing it—India’s wrinkled river plains are
smoothed by millennia of plowing—I inch from
WATER EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE 89