Millet in Our Own Voices: A Culturally-Centred Articulation of Alternative Development by DDS Women Farmers’ Sanghams

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic academic-community collaboration grounded in the key tenets of the culture-centred approach, this article outlines the discursive processes, practices, and resources utilised by DDS Sangham members, an organised collective of women farmers in Telangana, India to promote millets, a marginalised crop. The story of millets voiced by the women farmers is also a story of alternative rationalities to large-scale corporatisation of Indian agriculture; instead resisting the academic-industry-policy nexus by connecting local interpretations of food value to broader logics of development, nutrition, and hunger. The women come together in interpreting food as culture, rooted in local cultural understandings of health and nutrition. The processes of collective organisation rooted in this depiction of food value and health within local cultural logics draw upon identity formation, solidarity and collaboration with a variety of local, national and global actors.