Abstract
Located in the southernmost part of Punjab, the Malwa region was once the cradle of the Green Revolution. It is now witnessing what the author Ranjana Padhi describes as the ‘most acute’ impact of the agrarian crisis, in the form of peasant suicides. While peasant suicides represent the extreme manifestation of the crisis, and the most debated, there is barely any discussion of its impact on those who continue to live and cope with the crisis. The book is an intervention in this direction. It focuses on the impact of peasant suicides on women in the Malwa region of Punjab. It is on ‘those who did not die’, mainly wives and mothers who continue to live and cope with familial and societal responsibilities that encumbered the victims and drove them to committing suicides. Based on structured questionnaires, interviews, meetings with spouses and mothers of peasant suicide victims, Padhi attempts to comprehend the agrarian crisis through what she terms as ‘the subjective reality of dispossession’ (p. xvii).
The book clearly emerges from the larger politics within which the author is located. Padhi’s closeness and reliance on the peasant unions in identifying and conducting the research is deliberate and part of her politics. By engaging union members in the research, the stated intention is of initiating a dialogue on the crisis across differences of caste, class and gender, and exploring the possibility of organising women as part of the union to address common concerns over the crisis. Through micro narratives of women from victim families, Padhi demonstrates how the agrarian crisis reconfigures capitalism, patriarchy and gender as structures of domination and discrimination.
The book has six chapters. All the chapters seek to illustrate what ‘women’s subordination in an agrarian milieu represents’ (p. xxvi). Chapter 1 outlines the key features of the crisis and its repercussion on agrarian society. As is known, the boost given to agricultural production through Green Revolution technology brought about fundamental changes in the nature of agrarian society. The initial prosperity soon gave way to indebtedness among medium and small farmers, who could not cope with the increased costs of production, and with many selling land to pay off debts. Particularly significant in her analysis is the assertion that while it may seem that the crisis has affected the medium to small farmers in the region, its impact can be felt across all sections of the community. Although about 70 per cent of the suicides are among the Jat Sikhs or the main landowning community, the Scheduled Caste groups or Majhabi Sikhs and the Ramdasia account for 14.7 per cent and 7.4 per cent of the suicides in the region respectively.
The disquieting effect of the Green Revolution has been on the social and moral fabric of the agrarian society. Disposable incomes, particularly among rich farmers, brought with it changes in lifestyles that eventually reinforced patriarchal norms and practices across all communities. One of the most obvious changes, discussed in detail by Padhi in chapter 2, is the devaluation of women’s work and labour, decline in ownership and control over land and the withdrawal of women from agricultural labour, particularly among the cultivating castes such as the Jat Sikhs. The only women visibly involved in daily wage labour are dalit women. Padhi observes how growing landlessness among Jat Sikhs in victim families has worsened the situation for women. She describes how the fear of social ostracism has further reduced the limited options available for women seeking work within and outside agriculture. One of the major reasons for indebtedness and the immediate cause for peasant suicides are social expenses incurred to bear the costs of weddings and paying dowry. Dowry has emerged in the post Green Revolution era as an important status symbol even among the non-propertied classes, the implications of which are more far reaching than just ‘social’. In chapter 3, Padhi elaborates the complex ways in which dowry has devalued women and emasculated the already impoverished classes into a trap of indebtedness and suicides.
In chapter 4, Padhi attributes various health ailments such as cancer, psychosomatic disorders, acute anxiety, drug addiction and alcoholism to the agrarian crisis. In fact, a train from Bhatinda to the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Treatment and Research Centre in Rajasthan has been named as the ‘Cancer Express’, as hundreds of people commute daily from the region for regular check-ups and treatment. Commercialisation of health care has aggravated the crisis. Indebtedness has increased and so has ill health. The vicious cycle sustains the deadlock. Chapter 5 discusses the impact of the agrarian crisis on the family as an institution. As the site that has borne the brunt of the crisis—economic, social and psychological—Padhi illustrates how women cope with families that clearly appear to be fragmented, demoralised and divided.
Chapter 6 describes the specific challenges facing women of victim families. Ostensibly these challenges emerge from a lack of support from family members and denial of agency that women experience in decision making. However, read differently, they appear according to Padhi as voices seeking support and making demands of the family, neighbours, the state and the peasant unions, as a part of a liberation project seeking social transformation. The conclusion refers to the increasing participation of women in the ongoing protests by peasant organisations in the region against the withdrawal of state subsidies and land acquisition for a large development project. In this she alludes to a consciousness among women regarding the relationship between the crisis and their plight. Thus, even as the book presents women as victims of a crisis not of their making, it ends on the hope that women will shape their future through resistance.
However, the author does not elaborate upon the nature of the relationship between women, particularly of victim families, and peasant unions despite her close association with both during her research. She does not explore the interplay of patriarchy and caste within the politics of resistance, as the same is as critical if not more in the radical politics that she envisions. This notwithstanding, the strength of the book is the clarity and the political conviction with which it is written. The book is a significant contribution to the field of development and agrarian studies. It can serve as an important text for students in comprehending the impact of the agrarian crisis with all its complexities.