Mutuality and competition: Female landless labour and wage rates in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

The factors determining rural wage rates have remained problematic in writings on agrarian structure in rural India. First, a striking segmentation of the rural labour market has been widely noted so that different wage rates exist even for contiguous villages. Secondly, it has been argued that the ‘stickiness downwards’ of wage rates, particularly the rigidity downwards of daily money wages, is very marked and is not susceptible to explanation in terms of conventional economic theories. A useful approach by Rudra to these two problems is examined here and it is suggested that the striking contrasts that emerge between his model (based on Bengali data) and the Tamil model presented here show that it is essential to incorporate a micro‐level anthropological approach in order to understand rural wage rate determinants. There can be no pan‐Indian model: only through micro‐level approaches can researchers understand the importance of complex socio‐cultural contexts to the ways in which wage rates are formed and changed.