Room 119, Institute of Development Studies
Library Road, Falmer
BN1 9RE, UK

Speakers:

• Divya Sharma (Research Fellow, SPRU)
• Saurabh Arora (Senior Lecturer, SPRU)

Since the 1960s, the dominant narratives of the Green Revolution (GR) in India have focussed on state-led agricultural intensification through groundwater extraction, hybrid varieties of rice, synthetic agrochemicals and mechanisation. These narratives have also centred on mapping impact in terms of yield productivity, incomes, or inequalities across regions, class and caste. Historically marginalised and oppressed Dalit cultivators and workers enter these narratives as beneficiaries of the rising demand for labour, an increase in wages, and availability of work in the expanding non-farm economy. In critical narratives of the GR, they are victims of pesticide poisoning, de-skilling, and caste-based discrimination.

We offer an alternative set of narratives, based on life histories of two Dalit women in Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu. Employing intersectionality, we explore how gender, class and caste together shape non-linear trajectories of poverty and well-being. The ways in which the women articulate memories of critical events show how they actively shaped agrarian and rural transformations, and how they relate to changing ecologies, including depleting groundwater, variable rainfall patterns and eroding village commons.

These intersectional narratives, absent from dominant and critical histories of the GR, foreground everyday politics around socio-material practices of farm work and care. Challenging the dominant techno-centric narratives, they draw our attention to marginal cultivation and food practices, changing relations with land, negotiation of labouring arrangements, as well as changing conceptions of risk. We argue that such narratives are crucial for moving beyond policies and politics of engaging with the ongoing agrarian crisis in India, which remain centred on landowning farmers.

This research is part of the ESRC-DFID project Relational Pathways: Mapping Agency and Poverty Dynamics through Green Revolutions that aims to understand the pathways in and out of poverty for farmers and workers in Kenya and India constituted by changing technologies, natural resources and social worlds.