One evening during my fieldwork, in a daily market in Gossaigaon, Kokrajhar district, Bodoland, I saw rows of women sitting with their baskets full of vegetables, local herbs, dried fish, hand-woven clothes, jewelry, etc. This pleasant sight—the women’s contribution to the household and community economies—is most visible in the vibrant markets across Bodoland.
These spaces thrive on community-based exchanges, small-scale transactions, and a trust network, unlike the commercial markets dominated by large-scale traders. Women from various communities—Bodos, Adivasis, Rajbongshis, Bengalis, Muslims, and others—sat together and sold goods.
BTR has 26 communities living together for decades, with their interactions often turning violent. But these women sit together in the market, forgetting their differences and consciously or unconsciously paving the way for reconciliation.
These women exchange not just goods but knowledge, power, and agency. They are guardians of culture and economy, contributing meaningfully to households and communities by selling their products.
Their active participation challenges patriarchal models, as they confidently negotiate, manage transactions, and assert visibility. This confidence extends into social and political spaces, subtly reshaping gender boundaries and challenging stereotypes around gendered roles.
These markets are also an archive of indigenous knowledge. Women carry generational ecological, culinary, and medicinal wisdom, which they share through their trade and which is embedded in oral traditions and everyday practices. They know which herb cures stomach aches, which roots strengthen immunity, and which seasonal vegetables balance the diet.
This knowledge, rarely found in books, is passed on through everyday interactions between the women sellers and buyers, and between generations of women. Women know when particular herbs are abundant, which vegetables grow best after a flood, or which fish thrive in certain rivers during the monsoons.
These ecological insights, integral to community survival, are sustained, adapted, and made relevant in the contemporary period through these markets.
By participating actively in the markets, women are provided with more agency in decision-making, negotiation, and financial management. They decide the price, interact with customers, and compete with male traders. It changes the traditional understanding of public space as male-dominated, leading to a significant shift in gender dynamics.
Women gain visibility and confidence to assert themselves beyond household boundaries, acquire financial literacy and autonomy by handling money directly, and enhance their bargaining power within their families.
Some even reinvest their earnings in small enterprises like weaving, poultry rearing, or rice beer brewing, thereby expanding their role as entrepreneurs. The market thus redefines their social identity, from “wives” and “mothers” in the private sphere to being recognised as independent economic actors and community leaders.
Economic independence also paves the way for socio-political empowerment. In BTR, political struggle over land, autonomy, and identity remains central, though women’s voices are gradually becoming more influential.
They may not always occupy leadership positions in political organisations, yet their opinions carry weight in discussions and community-level decision-making. It creates an environment for other women too to have their evening tea in the stalls nearby and discuss different socio-political and economic issues. The visibility, economic independence, and identity of fellow women vendors in the market encourage others to come out and acquire spaces.
Yet, the empowerment visible in the markets hardly erases the burden at home. Women, returning after hours of hard work in the market, still have to engage in household chores—from cooking and cleaning to child-rearing, caring for the elderly, managing livestock, and other unpaid labour.
Men often return and rest at home, spending leisure time with friends and family. This double burden reveals the inherent contradictions of empowerment: public visibility constrained by gendered norms in private. The gendered nature of domestic labour restricts women’s possibilities to grow further by limiting their time and energy.
That is why working in the market is not just about economic independence; it is an identity, a space for self-expression where they find their own time, separate from the constant household demands. After managing homes, they sit at their stalls, chat, negotiate, or simply observe the market’s happenings.
It gives them a sense of freedom. Hence, the market is the site of selfhood for women, where they aspire to an identity separate from their roles as mothers, wives, or caregivers. They are recognised as traders, entrepreneurs, and cultural bearers. This identity reinforces their self-confidence and enables them to navigate the complexities of public and private lives.
Women’s participation in the markets also has broader implications for cultural and economic resistance beyond gender dynamics. In most markets, outside commercial goods control business. Rural markets are also under the radar of big business chains, which threaten local producers by undercutting prices and displacing traditional products.
This is a serious concern in Assam, whose agricultural economy is being gradually controlled by outsiders. The shift of the local population to government jobs and non-agricultural enterprises has created opportunities for outsiders to dominate crucial sectors like agriculture and market trade. In contrast, women in Bodoland play a decisive role in retaining control over local markets and protecting them from external intrusion.
Historically, Assam’s women’s active engagement in paddy cultivation served as a barrier against the alienation of agricultural land and produce, ensuring community economic independence. But gradually, women’s disengagement in agriculture opened the path for outsiders to enter both cultivation and the market.
In Bodoland, women continue to assert their presence in the markets, demonstrating how gendered labour intersects with community sovereignty. By prioritising locally grown vegetables, handmade textiles, poultry, and other products, women help preserve indigenous economies from external domination. It is thus a political act to sell local products in the market.
It resists the homogenising tendencies of globalisation, asserts cultural distinctiveness, and sustains economic autonomy. This is how women stand at the frontline defending community resilience and ensuring that local economies do not succumb to monopolies.
Women’s experiences in the local markets illustrate the layered and complex nature of empowerment. Their participation transmits indigenous knowledge, sustains the household economy, provides visibility and confidence, enables them to occupy public space, engage in political discussion, and shape community resilience against outsiders.
Yet women continue to bear disproportionate responsibilities of household labour and face embedded patriarchal norms. The market thus emerges as a paradox: on the one hand, it provides agency, voice, and freedom; on the other, structural inequalities remain unresolved.
In the end, the story of women in the market is a story of resilience, adaptation, and negotiation. It depicts how women continue to balance tradition and modernity, private burdens and public opportunities, cultural continuity and economic survival.
Their presence in the market reminds us that empowerment is never absolute but always situated, dynamic, and contested. By navigating both opportunities and constraints, women demonstrate how they can reshape socio-economic landscapes while remaining deeply attached to their culture and traditions.
Views expressed are personal. The author works as a Research Associate at North Eastern Social Research Centre, Guwahati. She is also the Co-founder of The Bridge: Editors and Translators.
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