Movement as Theater

Abstract

Part Two revolves around protests and campaigns that have formed Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan's battles with the Indian state, its development apparatus, and the intimate and violent hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and gender within and against which SKMS saathis live and fight every day. It describes SKMS's struggles to bring water to a dry irrigation channel and to win unemployment compensation under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). Significantly, these stories are simultaneously about articulating a vision of solidarity through the continuous work of evolving complex relationships and political analyses among SKMS saathis, including a Savarna writer, such as the author herself, who is not a kisan or mazdoor and who earns her living as a university professor in the USA.