Teaching Dissent and Power in South Asia

In January 2021, in a Toronto winter, as I was getting ready to teach a course on the history of food, environment, and labor in South Asia, my thoughts strayed often to the borders of Delhi, India, several continents away from my desk. Since August 2020, groups of Indian farmers, most from Punjab, had been organizing themselves, coming together to protest new neoliberal farm laws proposed by Narendra Modi's government. These laws were ostensibly intended to free agricultural markets from government regulation but would certainly open them up to the control of large corporate buyers setting prices. Just outside Delhi, along highways linking the capital to surrounding agricultural and industrial districts and the rest of the country, farmer organizations had set up campsites, libraries, performance and oratorial spaces, kitchens, and even small makeshift farms. Thousands of farmers (over the months millions) were there to make their discontent with the new laws palpable, their voices heard, and their labor and solidarity globally visible.As I worked on the syllabus, I very tentatively considered bringing the farmers and their protest into my classroom. My historical training has made me wary of falling into presentism, to make connections between the past and a present that may often be structurally determined differently, though this is one of the easiest ways students relate and respond to historical scholarship. Equally important, I wasn't sure how to maintain a balance between high emotions over an issue that was creating such political waves in India and its diaspora and the kind of careful reading, discussion, and writing that were the aims of the course. As a migrant graduate student in Canada with Indian citizenship, I felt my own vulnerability and that of undergraduate students, who were often migrants too. Hindu nationalist organizations in India and the diaspora have been quick to target events and spaces involving critical discussion of the Modi government, its policies, and the Hindu nationalist movement that it politically represents, denouncing such criticisms as perceived attacks on the nation and religion; critics have been faced with trolling, doxing, other forms of harassment, and in some cases criminal proceedings and jail.1 Despite these misgivings, over two iterations of the course, it became clear that the pedagogical had to be political and that presenting this contemporary people's movement through the course materials was a highly generative pedagogical act. Learning about agricultural history alongside the agricultural present could be a way to make a fractured world of pandemic and climate crisis layered on capitalism and colonialism feel challenging and alive rather than alienating.Over the last century, much of South Asia's wheat has come from Punjab, on either side of a national border between India and Pakistan. Punjabi migration in the early twentieth century was also intimately intertwined with histories of North American settler colonial states, their agricultural development, and immigration regimes. More recent waves of migration and a large South Asian population in the Greater Toronto Area meant that in my online classroom hosted by the University of Toronto, at least some of the students were likely to be South Asian or even Punjabi in origin, and Punjab loomed large in the imagination of South Asia from here. Accordingly, the syllabus included two academic readings that engaged with this history. A book chapter about the establishment of Punjab's canal colonies discussed planned settlements on former scrublands around canals in Punjab, built to further the British colonial government's intention of bringing more land under cultivation and irrigation and improving agriculture in the region.2 Another reading opened up questions around how histories of contested Punjabi arrival could be later subsumed into the settler colonial narrative of good laboring migrants contributing to the aims of the colonial state.3 Lecture materials covered other topics in Punjab's agricultural history, such as the consequences of the partition of Punjab for the control and use of water and the canal system of the region, dam building in postcolonial India, and the impact of the Green Revolution.In the first iteration of the course, I included a journalistic overview by Sharanya Deepak of the farmer protests as something of an afterthought.4 In the second iteration, I added two more: an article by Aniket Aga discussing the protested neoliberal farm laws as the final death toll of the Green Revolution and the inequities it produced, and an ethnography of the protest sites by Sarover Zaidi.5 Both Deepak's and Aga's pieces, though not historical in perspective, briefly discuss the history of agricultural Punjab before the protests; Zaidi allows her readers to step with her into a contingent present. I chose these pieces in the hope that they would allow students to think about change over time and contingencies of history.Given the ongoing pandemic, all discussion happened online in Zoom meetings. I did not always see the faces of my students, but their responses and thoughts lingered powerfully through their participation in discussion and their writing. On the whole, student responses were deeply critical of neoliberal governance and identified sympathetic figures in these narratives around Punjab, historical and contemporary. Thinking about settler colonialism and our entanglements with it in Canada as well as how land itself was reorganized and parceled out to settlers in Punjab's canal colonies brought up profound questions on these systems of agriculture and land use. One student discussed culpability and responsibility in regard to a settler colonial extractive state that they had migrated to in search of a better life. Others were struck by how learning the history of settlement in colonial canal colonies made visible land acquisition processes; for several Punjabi students, this revealed the trajectories of their own ancestors and families, involved in acquisition processes they had not previously probed historically. This kind of self-reflection allowed students to think with sympathy and solidarity about the situation of farmers in a capitalist system that both gives to and exploits them and to ask questions about their own entanglements in capitalist and colonial agricultural systems. Some students with backgrounds in economics wrote analytically about questions of power and economic growth in the agricultural sector, discussing related examples from other non–South Asian contexts and thinking about development and sustainability. The emotional heft of this history and of the protests were however never far from students' analysis; for instance, one student, Harjas Singh, prefaced a discussion of creeping neoliberalism in India's agricultural policies over the last decade with the comment, “As a Punjabi Sikh and someone who has family still living in Punjab, this is an issue that hits close to home. I have friends and family who have protested here in Canada, as well as my family having donated to relief efforts for those protesting back in India.”This engagement with systemic power was coupled with a consideration of what dissent meant in the narratives of Punjabi agriculture and farm labor that we looked at. Most notable was perhaps one tutorial discussion during which some students argued that the state's authoritarian approach was necessary for development; others responded by asking whether the state could ask constituencies to make sacrifices for the common good and in the name of growth and development, who should decide what that growth and development should look like, and which constituencies could be asked to make such sacrifices. This led to a discussion of the place of dissent and opposition within political systems and protest as a means of representation in democracies. I was struck by the enthusiasm students displayed for this political activity by farmers; through their discussion, I could see how examining the issues propelling the farmer protests led many to the idea that people's movements would be increasingly crucial going forward as climate emergency changes many of the rhythms and rules of agriculture. Zaidi's ethnography in particular invited students to imaginatively visit the site of protest and think about its possibilities, and they commented on the immediacy of this reading experience. The discussion questioned the religious and caste politics of farmer organizations too; some students recognized that there was still work to be done for solidarity.In retrospect, this reading and discussion experience could have worked well with invited guests who were engaged with the protests and could speak about them with greater facility than I, the teaching assistants, or any of the students could. But that would have been a very different kind of engagement, with perhaps greater deference and more of a compulsion to take notes than to express ideas. Our more exploratory reading and discussion sessions, in fact, successfully provided a focus for questions and ideas that many students had been dealing with outside of the classroom, as videos and images from the farmer protests flooded Instagram and TikTok feeds and, more generally, we all contended with pandemic-related food supply issues and price rises. On November 19, 2021, when the Modi government announced that the farm laws would be repealed and millions of farmers celebrated the victory of months of sustained protest, I received an email from Mannat Boparai, one of the students in the ongoing course, congratulating me on what she called “our victory.” Attached were three images and a video from one of the major protest sites on Delhi's Tikri border; she had taken these that very morning. In a time of online teaching and engagement, the classroom and the protests were actually very close to each other, and students were taking the history they learned to their own activism.

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