People
Nikhil Ravipati
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Nikhil Ravipati is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology. His research is set in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, where his interests span agrarian social movements, neoliberalism, and the politics of caste, class, and gender in rural life. He is particularly interested in how landless agricultural workers and poor peasants build broad-based coalitions to challenge dispossession and authoritarian populism. Nikhil is a 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Fellow.
The rise of farmers’ and landless agricultural workers’ movements since the mid-2010s have rekindled popular interest in agrarian questions. What is more, they seem to have done so on a broader and more inclusive basis than before: on the one hand, there is growing awareness that farmers and peasants are fighting a battle in which the survival of ‘all of us’ is at stake; on the other, the cadre and constituencies of these movements are becoming more broad-based and inclusive. My research project approaches the unravelling of this new conjuncture in the history of agrarian movements from the vantage of the Malwa region in the Indian State of Punjab, which is not only home to the largest farmers’ union in the country but also the locus of unprecedented movements for land reforms.
Through my preliminary field visits over the summer, I had the opportunity to meet many scholar-activists and social movement leaders in the Malwa region. Through conversations, I learned about the rich history of social movements in the region, and how they have addressed various aspects of the agrarian crisis over the years. For instance, I learnt that it is impossible to understand today’s agrarian movements without attending to the strong history of social movements in the region. However, the most important thing that I learnt concerned the fact that there were forms of solidarity between the landed and landless castes – peasants and workers – which are unthinkable in other parts of India where these relations are unable to overcome structural differences to the same extent. This experience directly feeds into one of the central research questions that this project begins with. It asks what movements in Malwa can teach us about how multi-class and caste social coalitions navigate structural differences and reach out across them – in other words, how are mass movements built and sustained?
