“What can farmers do? We are left with no option but to end our lives. The government is not doing anything for us.” The men of Sarola village, Osmanabad district, Maharashtra.
“Don’t you think suicide is the easy way out? ...You decide to give up even before you fight.” Vidya More, widow of a farmer who committed suicide in the same village.
The agrarian crisis and the resultant farmer suicides rarely make headlines anymore. The reports that do appear focus on the economic aspects of the problem. What about the women who have been widowed, the children left fatherless? Often without any means to support themselves.
Which is why Radheshyam Jadhav’s Harvesting Hope in the Suicide Zone is important because it stays focused on the women. In telling the story of how they put their lives back together, Jadhav also spotlights the gender and caste distinctions that the women are fighting.
The initial sections are profiles: of women who have in some measure been successful in making a living; of those still struggling to pick up the pieces; then the challenges they face and finally the social mores they have to overcome.
In his Introduction, Jadhav calls this a book of ‘empowerment stories’. Empowerment, he says, is “not just about material benefits and infrastructure development.” He defines it as “a constructivist struggle... against oppressive structures to achieve social, spiritual and material development at the individual relational and collective level to gain consciousness, confidence and control over the situation.”
In many cases the women have banded together to form cooperatives and self-help groups; they are fighting entrenched business interests, an unhelpful administration and often disapproving families and neighbours. My only quibble is that, instead of dividing it into sections, the book could have woven the last two sections into the narrative and made it more rounded. While there is much that is gloomy and dismal in these pages, there is an equal amount of optimism. In these increasingly bleak times, reading about Mangal Waghmare who managed to stop her husband from committing suicide or Mahadev Umap who accepts that he was guilty of not questioning unfair traditions seems like there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Harvesting Hope in the Suicide Zone: Women who Challenged Drought, Death and Destiny ; Radheshyam Jadhav, Bloomsbury, ₹399.
