Labors of Division

How did the peasant become dominant in Panjab?

In 2020–21, a massive protest successfully rescinded three laws designed to deregulate India’s agrarian economy. The epicentre was Panjab—a region long considered the subcontinent’s breadbasket and home to a stalwart peasantry. In the public imagination, the Panjabi peasant is self-evident and timeless—a figure who has endured centuries of upheavals to arrive virtually unchanged into the present. This grand narrative assumes that peasantries have always existed everywhere in the world. Such claims conceal the modern transformation of agriculture and farmers.

Navyug Gill tells the story of how seemingly fixed categories of landowning peasants and landless laborers were produced, legitimized and challenged in colonial Panjab. The notion of a singular, caste-based and hereditary peasant emerged through a series of conceptual, racial, legal and monetary divisions. British officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted existing forms of identity and activity to generate a new agrarian order, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Labors of Division unsettles conventional histories to create possibilities for emancipatory futures.

Navyug Gill is Associate Professor of History at William Paterson University.