A People’s History of the Farmers’ Movement, 2020-2021

In the annals of India’s history, a monumental uprising unfolded in 2020, echoing the resilience and coming together of large sections of its agrarian base. Instigated by the contentious farm laws of 2020, the Farmers’ Movement burgeoned into a year-long saga of protest and perseverance, ending only in December 2021 after the passing of the Farm Laws Repeal Bill, 2021 by the Indian Parliament. From the initial demand for law repeal to the multifaceted growth of the movement, the book traces the journey of the Farmers’ Movement, as each essay dissects the socio-political dynamics, cultural nuances, and mass solidarity that underpinned the protests, including focused analyses from Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom. This anthology chronicles the ebb and flow of a nation’s spirit, encapsulating the symbiotic relationship between theory and praxis, between change and continuity. It serves as a testament to the power of collective resistance and a roadmap for future struggles, ensuring that the legacy of the Farmers’ Movement endures beyond the pages of history.

This volume is an interdisciplinary project and will be of interest to scholars from diverse fields such as economics, sociology, public policy, political science, history, political geography, gender studies, cultural studies, international studies, architecture, media studies, psychology, and ethnomusicology.

Shamsher Singh teaches Sociology at FLAME University, Pune, India. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Management in Agriculture (CMA), Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has been involved in conducting village studies on agrarian relations and conditions across different agro-ecological regions in India and has worked on rural housing, living standards, and residential segregation. He has written on different aspects of the anti-farm law movement of the 2020-21 and has curated the People’s Archive of Farmers’ Protests in India that documents the mobilisations and protest actions of the farmers’ movement.

Sabah Siddiqui is Assistant Professor at School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences, Krea University, Sricity. She received her doctorate from the University of Manchester, and is currently Honorary Research Fellow there. She has worked on the psychology and sociology of religion through a psychoanalytic and anthropological lens in her monograph Religion and Psychoanalysis in India (2016). Most recently she has co-edited a special issue on Psychoanalytic Perspectives on South Asia (2024) for the Journal of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society.