“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)?
The toil for soil: Earthing agricultural care in the Western Himalaya
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 …
First published online April 1, 2026 The toil for soil: Earthing agricultural care in the Western Himalaya Syed Shoaib Ali https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1013-071X shoaib@theappletree.blog, Franklin Ginn, and Naomi Millner
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