Beyond bad weather: climates of uncertainty in rural India

Abstract

Drawing on research in central India, this paper argues that emerging climatic risks are inseparable from the systemic risks of capitalist production, particularly in relation to India's ongoing agrarian crisis. Drawing from classic debates in peasant studies around agrarian risk, subsistence, and moral economy, I argue that the intertwined effects of climatic variability and agrarian capitalism have produced a generalized ‘climate of uncertainty’ in rural India. The paper explores how encounters with agrarian risk reproduce social inequalities. It concludes that a deeper reckoning with regional histories of agrarian change is critical to forging just and secure rural futures in the face of the global climate crisis.