The recent debate on the contentious farm laws and the ensuing protests by farmers has primarily focused on economic and political aspects....
The recent debate on the contentious farm laws and the ensuing protests by farmers has primarily focused on economic and political aspects. It has analysed and examined the costs and benefits of these agricultural reforms, and the impact they will have on farmers. Political commentators have highlighted how these protests pose a major challenge to the government, with some arguing that it could represent a possible “Anna moment”.
What is absent from the debate though, is a nuanced appreciation of the cultural underpinnings and motivations of the protest and its protestors. By reducing these protests to a set of “misplaced” fears and anxieties of farmers from Punjab and Haryana regarding the dismantling of APMC mandis or the abolition of the MSP, most experts have failed to gauge the cultural dimension of these protests and what they mean for our democracy.
Drawing on the work of the Punjab novelist and Jnanapith award winner Gurdial Singh, we try to creatively use the cultural concepts of anakh and unhoye found in his fiction to understand these protests.
Being and nothingness
While deeply rooted in the culture, society and ecology of the Malwa region of Punjab, Gurdial Singh’s fiction speaks deeply to the predicament of the marginalised or those facing dispossession even today. He...
