Documenting Silences - An Ethnographic Inquiry into Gender-Based Violence among Migrant Agricultural Labours in Maharashtra

The paper is an ethnographic account of women migrant sugarcane cutters and their negotiations for survival in a labour market shaped by neoliberal forms of agriculture and embedded patriarchal structures, as well as of their agency over their bodies. The investigation explores the invisibility of structural violence perpetuated by systems rooted in social inequalities, injustices, and coercion. This violence is legitimized and rendered “natural” through conceptualizations of structural violence (Galtung, 1969; Farmer, 2004). Such an investigation deconstructs the dominant narrative of the neoliberal regime, which is ostensibly equated with a free and competition-driven market. This market, however, thrives not by reducing economic and social inequalities but by managing and furthering them. Drawing on Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony (1971) and Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses (1971), the paper illustrates how dominant discourses and institutions normalize and render this structural violence invisible. The victims of such structural violence are left with very little or no agency over their bodies and minds, as revealed in their silences and denials.