Widows of Agrarian Collapse: Gendered Grief and State Failure in Kota Neelima’s Rural Narratives

Shanmugapriya R; Ritu Shepherd

Widows of Agrarian Collapse: Gendered Grief and State Failure in Kota Neelima’s Rural Narratives

Author(s)	Ms. Shanmugapriya R, Dr Ritu Shepherd
Country	India
Abstract	This paper interrogates the intersections of gender, grief, and governance in Kota Neelima’s Widows of Vidarbha: Making of Shadows (2018) and related works, situating them within India’s ongoing agrarian crisis. Through a feminist lens informed by intersectionality and postcolonial theory, the study examines how Neelima’s narrative strategies render visible the silenced experiences of widows of farmers who have taken their own lives due to systemic neglect and debt. By juxtaposing literary representation with ethnographic realities, the paper explores the “politics of invisibility” that govern rural women’s lives — a condition produced by patriarchal structures, neoliberal economic policies, and bureaucratic indifference. Neelima’s text is read as both testimonial and resistance narrative, wherein widowhood becomes a site of feminist agency, moral witness, and socio-political critique. Drawing on feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Gayatri Spivak, the analysis highlights how mourning functions as a political act that contests erasure and reclaims subjectivity. The paper also investigates how Neelima’s documentary realism complicates boundaries between journalism and literature, creating an alternative feminist archive of agrarian suffering. Ultimately, this study argues that Neelima’s portrayal of widows transforms private loss into public resistance, exposing the ethical failures of the state and reimagining the rural woman not as a passive victim but as an agent of transformative justice.
Keywords	Kota Neelima, feminism, agrarian crisis, widowhood, intersectionality, invisibility, postcolonial studies
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-14

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Widows of Agrarian Collapse: Gendered Grief and State Failure in Kota Neelima’s Rural Narratives

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