1. Contemporary Agrarian Questions—An Introduction

‘Peasant’ has been a favourite, if not romantic, topic of academic explorations. The boundaries that peasantry shared with others in society were stark and amenable to dichotomous treatments of deprivation and exploitation. Closely intertwined, nature and peasant were both exploited by landlords and industries. Surging economies distanced themselves from the primary sector in favour of propelling further growth while inflicting considerable social and ecological externalities on nature and the peasant alike. The accumulation of these conflicts in production landscapes created vast inequalities in outcomes, agency and voice, that often resulted in violent unrests. Thus, questions of justice, equality, dignity and human rights have been the subject of agrarian literature for a long time. As ‘peasant’ in its pure old-world imagery began to fade away, a more complex entity started emerging—the smallholder family farm. While other rural occupations like weaving, carpentry, leather and metalworks, backyard poultry, folk art, etc., disappeared almost entirely from the rural livelihood basket due to falling demand and competition from mass producing industries, crop cultivation and dairying survived as the last bastions of small-scale household production, coexisting with new non-farm activities.