Seva as Radical Friendship: On Foucault, Spirituality, and the Farmers’ Protest

Abstract: The Farmers’ Protest is now recognised as the longest protest movement in history and should concern everyone who eats. In this article, I examine how legal rights failed the farmers and how, to survive the year and a half long protest, they practiced a way of life that performed a relational right to nourishment. Through using concepts from radical Sikhi, namely seva and langar, I show how an ethics of seva produced radical friendship at sites of protest that countered state abandonment and neglect, and created a new way of life practiced by a new subjectivity.

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