Gender-based Violence in the Post-truth Era: Narratives of Farm Widows and Agricultural Labourers

With the advent of post-truth phenomenon, the discourse on gender-based violence unfolds a new chapter; in addition to experiencing the trauma of the inflicted violence, the victims are furthermore forced to witness their realities being strategically narrativized and misrepresented. Such targeted and politically motivated narratives define the current Indian agrarian crisis where misrepresentation distorts agrarian narratives and ground realities of the crisis. Such fabrication of narratives is questioned in the literary works of Kota Neelima, Sonora Jha and Anita Agnihotri which are centralised on agrarian realities. These literary narratives challenge the dominant powers that reduce a marginalised community voiceless. This paper aims to explore this rhizomatic intrusion of misrepresentation and its tentacled control on narratives of gender-based violence in the era of post-truth through select works of these writers. This paper unravels how the narratives of farm widows and agricultural labourers counter argue misrepresented agrarian crisis that the state establishes to prove its governing efficiency. With reference to Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics,” (1967) and Jacqueline Rose’s “Feminism and the Abomination of Violence: Gender Thought and Unthought,” (2021) this paper deciphers the intricate dynamics between ‘visibility’ and misrepresentation in the context of agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicide data.

politics. This paper attempts to explore these literary works as subjective narratives of widowed farmers who are considered insignificant both in their families and society at large, even though their contributions hold the families together.

Keywords*:* Post-Truth, Farm Widows, Data Misrepresentation, Farmers’ Suicides, Data Politics.