Loud and Clear: Farmer Voices and Resistance in Bundelkhand, India

Rahul Rastogi, Purdue University

Abstract

This study essays the experiences of farmers of Eastern Bundelkhand region of India as they struggle and survive under conditions of extreme agrarian distress. Informed by neoliberal globalization, developmental initiatives undertaken by the Indian State have created acute challenges for farmers’ wellbeing, unfortunately reflected in the rising incidence of farmer suicides. Ironically, farmer voices are consistently erased from mainstream discourse on agrarian distress in India. This study highlights the ramifications of this fundamental erasure and engages with farmer voices to construct an understanding of agrarian distress in the context of Eastern Bundelkhand. The Culture Centered Approach provides the theoretical lens and methodological tools for this study. Through emphasizing listening and researcher reflexivity this methodology allows voices from traditionally silenced communities to emerge. For this field-study, I conducted 50 face-to-face interviews and 17 focus groups over a period of 8 months, along with writing reflexive journal entries and field notes. Farmer narratives squarely challenge the rhetoric of neoliberal globalization and mainstream developmental discourses. Farmer participants frame their suffering as systemic marginalization as a result of cultural and institutional barriers. Here, farmers invert the logic of mainstream developmental discourse that continually imputes the blame of failure on individual farmers and suggests individual-level behavior changes as solutions. Further, I document the multifarious nature of farmer resistance as it manifests across the research space. Inspired by indigenous epistemologies and cultural logics of solidarity, subaltern farmers challenge the meanings imposed onto them by the mainstream discourse and organize to counteract their institutionalized marginalization. Such organizing, under logics of cultural solidarity, disputes the dominant understanding of organizing as a strategic goal-oriented function. Subaltern resistance presents itself formally as well as inconspicuously, in coordinated and isolated enactments, and on material and symbolic dimensions. I therefore move beyond the popular notions of agenda-centric, party-political acts of resistance to informal gatherings, sharing of stories, and cultural epistemologies to unpack resistive logics in subaltern agency that continually disrupts systematic silences. Culture centric engagement with farmer voices renders impure the rhetoric of neoliberal globalization, post-colonial developmental discourse of the Indian State, and mainstream ideas of understanding organizing and agency.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dutta, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Asian Studies|Social research|Communication|South Asian Studies

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