Implausible Men: Capitalism, Masculinity and Protest in Modern Punjab

Abstract

In the year 2022 a farmers’ movement, described as the largest protest movement in history, won a stunning but pyrrhic victory against the BJP government, as it defeated attempts to do away with protections for small farmers. The victorious farmers, overwhelmingly Jaat Sikh men, returned to a countryside marked by an acute crisis of social reproduction, directly engendered by India’s neoliberal turn. This is also, I argue, a crisis of masculinity, evident in high rates of suicide among male farmers. Colonial land settlements and India’s post-independence agrarian policies, and high rates of recruitment in the colonial and national armies have entrenched the social dominance of Jaat men and facilitated the fashioning of a hegemonic masculinity that emphasises land ownership and political clout as core markers of caste and gender identity. Today, three decades after the slashing of subsidies and deregulation of agricultural markets, these markers are beyond reach for the vast majority of Jaat men. In this paper based on field work at the protest sites and analysis of speeches and protest songs, I investigate the “stickiness” of these dangerously unsustainable tropes of militarised Jaat Sikh masculinity, and their uneasy deployment by somewhat unlikely agents of change in a movement that successfully mobilised a wide coalition of interests in opposition to a far-right assault on millions of precarious livelihoods.