Farmers' suicides' have been typically framed through official statistics and they have been explained in terms of agrarian economic distress. This book revises and extends such explanations on the basis of ethnographic work in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh. It describes spatially grounded transformations taking place in the domains of production, consumption, social relationships, and gender identities in south India today. Its focus is on exploring how these interconnected transformations-and their engendered, emotional experiences-set the context for understanding suicidal behavior in a particular location. The understanding that 'farmers' suicides' are objectively, uniformly, and exclusively marked by 'farm-related' factors are thus interrogated. The book concludes by suggesting that 'farmers' suicides' are motivationally related to the wider field of rural suicides. Overall, the book contends that rural suicides relate to emerging mentalities and interactions around status, equality, and honour in contemporary India.

The role of food and hunger in contemporary South African and Indian environmental writing From GMOs to vegetarianism and veganism, questions of what we should (and shouldn’t) eat can be frequent sources of debate and disagreement. In Precarious Eating, Ben Jamieson Stanley asks how recentering global South representations of food might shift understandings of environmental precarity. Precarious Eating follows the lead of writers and thinkers in South Africa and India who are tracing the production and consumption of food, exploring ways to reconnect our narratives about climate change, global capitalism, and social justice. Taking up a diverse range of novels, films, scholar/activist writings, intellectual histories, and cookbooks, Stanley connects the ethics of eating to histories of empire and apartheid, uneven globalization, gender and sexuality, and global South experiences of climate change. They shift the lens of environmental humanities from climate-focused paradigms developed in the global North to food-focused environmental culture and activism in the South, addressing topics that range from foraging and farmer suicides to disordered eating and queer intimacy. By highlighting authors, activists, and environments of the global South, Precarious Eating joins with scholarship from postcolonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and Black studies to underscore how capitalism and empire shape our planetary environmental crisis. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

This book explains farmer suicides in India in the backdrop of rural politics as a determining factor. By bringing in politics as a variable the research presented in the book reveals that there are non-farm factors playing critical role in prompting behavioral change amongst the peasantry but haven’t received much academic attention. The book argues that the changing nature of public spaces has significantly altered the perception of self in the rural society of India. It presents indicators of this rural change and how the state policy and political parties led political mobilization that changed the character of community relations in the rural areas. The book shows that other possible manifestations of the large-scale behavioral change in the rural areas and increasing rural distress, those are equally serious but haven’t received much attention, are rising cases of drug-addiction, agrarian riots, or other forms of collective violence. The increasing number of farmers protests also need to be understood in this context.

This book examines the economic gains and social costs of agrarian transformation in India. The author looks at three phases of agrarian transformation: colonial, post- colonial, and neoliberal. This work combines macro and micro economic data, economic and noneconomic phenomena, and quantitative and qualitative aspects while exploring the context of historical and contemporary changes with special reference to Maharashtra in western India. It discusses regional disparities in agricultural development, issues of modernisation and social inequality, land owning among scheduled castes and tribes, women in agriculture, pattern of labour migration and farmer’s suicides, and documents the experiences and conditions of the rural poor and socially weaker sections to provide a comprehensive understanding of the significant changes in agrarian rural economy of western India. It also discusses contemporary development policy and practices and their consequences. Lucid and topical, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of agrarian studies, rural sociology, social history, agricultural economics, development studies, political economy, political studies, and public policy, as well as planning and policy experts.

This work describes spatially grounded transformations that are unfolding in the domains of production, consumption, social bonds and gender identities in rural India today. These transformations and the engendered emotional experiences that they locally evoke are used as the context to understand 'farmers' suicides'. The book thus challenges the common understanding that 'farmers' suicides' are objectively, uniformly and exclusively marked by 'farm-related' economic causes. It attempts to locate farm related suicides in the wider complex of rural suicides and explores social meanings of suicide.

Thoughtfully invoking wider conversations around gender, culture, and self-perception, Navjotpal Kaur investigates the intricate interplay between masculinities, space, and identity within Indian Punjab’s Jat Sikh community.