Where would the modern world be without the peasant? That’s the premise of Maryam Aslany’s latest book, Peasants: Makers of the Modern World. Peasants are at the heart of our societies, and the book delves into their histories — from India’s sugarcane fields to the rice plains of Cambodia, Peru’s cocaine valleys and Ghana’s cocoa belt.
In the chapter ‘Sugarcane: Rebels From The Field’, the Maharashtrian peasant takes center stage. Toiling in the dense thickets of the sugarcane fields, the peasant farmer is part of an industry that has helped define the modern age; we would be nowhere without sugar.
In India, the history of the industry harks back to 1000 BCE, and sugar would grow into the ideal luxury trading commodity for the Chinese, the Persians and the Egyptians. The Sanskrit words sakkara and khanda are still used 2,500 years later; shakkar, of course, being the Hindi word for sugar, and khanda transforming into ‘candy’.
But this romanticized history says little about the farmer’s position today. In the present day, Maharashtra’s sugar economy connects cultivators to mills, labor contractors, markets and consumers. But sugarcane is a thirsty crop, and one that requires processing almost immediately after harvest. These are factors that leave the peasant farmer vulnerable to sugar mills and processors. The hardships congeal further for those from indigenous and oppressed castes, many of whom do not even have an acre of land to call their own. They function essentially as bonded laborers, living in perennial fear of missing a workday.
The consequences are particularly serious for women agriculturists. Multiple women — as many as one in five, according to the figures cited — undergo hysterectomies in their twenties and thirties to avoid period-related inconveniences and illnesses that might lead them to miss work. Those, therefore, most essential to the production of sugar shoulder the heaviest burdens.
These are not peripheral problems belonging to an old-fashioned rural world. They are part of the machinery of modernity itself.
Two tropes dominate most writing about the countryside: either the rural life is tinged with roseate hues, painted as some sort of bucolic paradise away from the clanguor of the city, or it is seen as some sort of regressive state of being that should have been relegated to the pages of history. The word ‘peasant’ itself feels medieval in some way, a leftover from some distant agrarian past.
The world’s lens focuses continually on urban narratives. But by knuckling rural narratives to the margins, we’re eviscerating a crucial part of our civilization. This is what makes the book’s global foci – Maharashtra, Cambodia, Peru and Ghana – so significant. Sugarcane, rice, cocaine and cocoa belong to wildly different geographies and histories, but their growers all share one thing i.e. a position at the beginning of supply chains whose benefits and risks are unevenly distributed. The comparison makes the rural crisis legible as a global problem rather than an isolated failure of Indian agriculture.
The book’s larger historical argument is equally important. Peasants did not merely survive the making of the modern world; agricultural labor helped make states, cities and industrial economies possible. Capitalism itself would collapse without the underpinning of peasantry. The countryside was never outside history. It helped finance and feed the transformations that later appeared to render it obsolete.
Today, during the era of the climate crisis, peasants are also the most dependable custodians of the land, forming a crucial buffer against ecological calamities. Sustainability, explains Aslany, is not “just a nice concept…it is the principle without which peasant life breaks down.”
Peasants doesn’t have simplistic solutions for resolving the contradictions of small-scale agriculture. Its contribution is to change the perspective from which those contradictions are understood. The farmer is not a fragile beneficiary of state development, nor a primitive figure from the past. The farmer is already part of the modern world, sustaining it even when its institutions fail to sustain the farmer.
In Maharashtra’s sugarcane fields, that paradox is especially stark. The crop travels outward, entering factories, markets and everyday consumption. The uncertainties of cultivation remain behind. Aslany’s book asks readers to follow the commodity back to its source — and to recognize that the story of economic progress cannot be complete while the people who make it possible remain unseen.
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