Farmers in India are Fighting For Their Lives
Nearly half a year into one of the largest mass protests in history, Mathangi Subramanian asks what Biden s administration can do to support democracy in India Design by Ingrid Frahm
Last fall, when India’s farmers gathered on the outskirts of Delhi to object to the passage of three farm bills championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and passed without input from a single agricultural worker, I searched the crowd for faces I knew. During the six years that I lived in India as an anthropologist and educator, I met politically active farming families from all over the country. In Andhra Pradesh, I spoke with Dalit women who struggled against cyclones that wiped out entire fields of rice, or droughts that made vegetables impossible to grow. In rural Tamil Nadu, I saw rivers lined with bulldozers scooping jawfuls of sand from local rivers that, deprived of their shorelines, quickly ran dry. In Delhi, I joined a nationwide protest of e
Design by Ingrid Frahm
The summer I turned 11, we moved from Wisconsin to Maryland and my father found religion.
Back in the Midwest, my father was a whiskey-drinking atheist and an unapologetic Anglophile. Our bookshelves burst with Wordsworth and Shakespeare; our CD player permanently rotated every album the Beatles ever made. If not for the framed kalamkari prints in our living room, a stranger alone in our house would never know we were Indian, let alone Hindu.
But on the East Coast, everything changed. My father reconnected with his friend from medical school, a fellow Tamil Brahmin who was religious so religious, in fact, that he was a founding funder of the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, now one of the largest Hindu temples in the country. I don’t know if it was the joyful shock of finding an Indian community, or some other inciting incident, but after years of treating Hinduism with condescension, my father suddenly became deeply and profoundly interested in God. And if m