Ever since I was an undergraduate student of Political Science the differences between access to basic amenities like clean drinking water, clean living spaces, health etc concerned me. I decided to work in the development sector to understand the reason better and to spend my life working in service of achieving dignity and equality for at least people in my country. Even today, more than 40% of India’s population is involved in agriculture and its allied services. This makes the development of the agrarian center a central focus for the country’s growth and well-being.
I was lucky enough to get opportunity to work in rural India through an NGO working on creating and improving livelihoods of rural population. I started working in the area since 2012 and the more I got involved the more I realized the structural roots on the inequalities and some related to the social fabric of the country like caste relations.
Over the years, my questions evolved and as I lived with and befriended people from the agrarian communities over the country. I realized their interaction with the environment is so direct and most of their understanding and perception comes from this interaction, the experience of which is also embodied. Farm communities’ wellbeing is complex and intertwined with the well-being of the environment. I decided to explore this embodied experience and its influence in farmers life and their decision-making practices for my PhD at the University of Iowa. Most agrarian change in India is discussed in either economic or discursive ways. I material body that interacts with the environment and their felt experience is large ignored to understand agrarian changes and practices.
My project in digital humanities is related to this work. I am visualizing the sensory perception of agrarian change and how it changes across social differences of caste, class, gender, and location. This is important to gain a qualitative perspective of the spaces which is often depicted only in terms of type of area and crops grown. It will give an understanding of the involved experience of those terrains and how it shapes practices of agriculture for the community. This will highlight the kind of intervention required to ease farmers agrarian practices and value. My hope is by focusing the emotions of farmers and their embodied experience of agrarian change we can envision and develop equitable and sustainable agrarian future.