Voices of Farmer-Widows Amid the Agrarian Crisis in India

Abstract

This article centers the voices of the widows of farmers from Yavatmal, Maharashtra, who give meaning to the patriarchal structures that unfold amid neoliberal agriculture in India. The theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach presented in the article works in solidarity with transnational feminist scholarship to interrupt the dominant discourse of development that reproduces the disempowerment experienced by these widows. Based on in-depth interviews conducted across villages, this article foregrounds the meanings and explanations of India’s agrarian crisis through the voices of widows of farmers. Their narratives position the suicides of their husbands amid the high-investment Bt cotton farming that incurred debts from which it became impossible to recover. By deploying voices of the gendered subaltern to interrogate the agrarian crisis, the article highlights the multiple structures that make widows’ lives precarious. Their reflective journeys address the communicative erasures faced by the widows within households and the larger discourse of neoliberal development of agriculture.