Abstract
This work by Ranjana Padhi is an ‘attempt to bring to the fore the subjectivities of the survivors of “suicide families”, as they are called in Punjab’ (p. xxii). In a detailed study of agrarian crisis in Punjab that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives of despairing farmers, Padhi breaks the dispassionate statistics down to reveal daily life filled with stories of horror and courage. She does this by foregrounding the narratives of women alongside tabulating data such as instances of insomnia and acute anxiety amongst women, giving us a glimpse of what ‘...mitigates against the assumed normalcy of such a phenomena’ (p. xxiii).
The book begins with an introduction in which Padhi meticulously lays down the methodology of her research and shows how the research questions get transformed and acquire a depth as she delves into the hard and heart-breaking life of a people, all the while wondering if there is any method or tool ‘...to capture the emotional turmoil of entire communities’ (p. xxix). She speaks candidly of her position as a researcher, its travails and rewards. The unswerving humour, ‘subversive and engaging’ and a ‘curious mix of religious, social and political’ are all intense moments that open up not only her research questions but are a transformative experience for the researcher as well.
The first chapter opens with a verse of the iconic poet Ahmed Faraz that demands an explanation, accountability if you will, for the state of such dismal affairs. Padhi comprehensively outlines the contours and extent of the agrarian crisis and the failure of an unresponsive state. The relationship between landlessness and being Dalit emerges clearly, as does the clearly intensifying trend of small, semi-medium and medium farmers being pushed into landlessness, especially post-suicide. Indebtedness, harassment by recovery agents, crop failure and lack of any viable support or solution pushes more and more farmers into committing suicides, ingesting the very same high-cost pesticide that was a ‘gift of the Green Revolution’ (p. 18).
It is at this point that Padhi makes an important intervention in the mainstream analysis of the agrarian crisis by breaking open the common assumption of the peasant being a male and points that ‘...the peasantry comprises every member of a peasant family or village; the participation of everyone in agriculture and reliance on it for sustenance...despite the graded inequalities within’ (p. xxvi). This is a significant intervention precisely because it allows Padhi to foreground the lives of multitude of women, children and the others who are allocated unrelenting labouring roles to sustain this harsh capitalist political economy but who remain invisible both in the account of the crisis and in strategies of resistance. It is their daily experience of oppressive lives that intricately informs the complex texture of agrarian crisis so richly archived in this rigorous study.
Even as Padhi takes peasant unions and their insights and profoundly continuing work in the face of severe hopelessness and state repression into account, there are indications of the ongoing separation of the public from the private realm in the political practice of the unions. The enmeshing of labour rendered by different actors on the land and at home is not in the centre of such analysis or practice. Therefore, the question of continuing practice of dowry or the heavy burden placed by deeply entrenched patriarchal norms of the man providing for his family remains outside the concerns of any tactics. Padhi also shares her findings with women’s groups and as she gets closer to the lives and struggles of the peasantry, it makes her ‘...question some dearly held assumptions and practices of feminist politics’ (p. xxiv).
The section on women’s labour intriguingly opens with the verse of the poet of the subcontinent, the poet of labouring and struggling masses, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. It is not a share or even a half of the whole that the toiling hands demand. It is a claim on the entire world, to dream and the promise of freedom. It is with this note that Padhi begins to foreground women’s narratives of their daily life, 20-hour work day, hopes and despair to bring to life the dynamic face of the peasantry in crisis and its continuing battle to survive. Uma Chakravarti points in the foreword that Padhi, significantly, keeps her attention focused on the ‘...actual work women do within a farming economy; and...cycle of economic transactions that hold up the ideology and material basis of marriage’ (p. x), an institution that tragically remains the destiny for women despite being a highly insecure option in a fragile economy. Therefore, dowry remains a central issue in her examination of agrarian crisis in Punjab.
In a scholarly work, Sangari (1993: 4–5) uses Guillamin’s framework which suggests that ‘...patriarchies build personal relationships into exploitation, operate inside the sphere of relationships of love, nurture and sexuality, are indeed inseparable from them’. It is the crushing weight of expectations and demands placed on women, men and children who, even as they love and die for their families, leave intact and perhaps reinforce the very patriarchies that circumscribes their already non-existent choices and chokes them to death. Even as families fragment, with old parents left alone for fear of giving debts as a legacy to their children and with young boys and girls taking their lives to spare their parents from arranging for dowry or school fee, such issues remain relegated to the private realm and do not inform the concerns of political practice.
Abandonment of women who are sick, suffering from acute depression, insomnia, headaches and a constant pressure plagues women’s lives. Even as women rush the male members who have attempted suicides to hospitals, in mostly a failed bid to pull them back from death, they incur even heavier debts to pay for the hospital stay, medicines and a treatment that can offer no cure for any of their dis-ease.
Women, performing a multitude of tasks of both production and social reproduction, narrate their lives; their roles as emotional support systems or as decision makers in a situation of being the sole adult of the family. They occupy a very fragile subject position. Yet they are those who did not die. They are survivors and continue to struggle to hold their own and their family’s life together. Even as the state seems ‘...no longer keen on the reproduction of a section of its labour force as it vanquishes entire communities of the peasantry and the working class’ (p. 29), women take on this burden with untold repercussions. It is their strength and pain that writes itself centrally into an analysis of agrarian crisis and into the political practice of change.