On a mid-May afternoon in 2018, as the usual scorching heat greeted us during our visit to a village in Wardha district, we witnessed a disturbing event. A tractor was dragging a dead bullock along the stretch of an allweather road bisecting farmlands en route to the village. As we wondered how the tragic visuals symbolized the essence of agrarian change and continuity—tractors replacing bullocks and human labour increasingly giving way to machines—we spotted a group of villagers consoling the visibly distressed farmer who had just lost an important asset and an animal he had shared a bond with. After all, bullocks and oxen have been valuable assets for Vidarbha cultivators, and are an integral part of their cultural identity, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 5.

What struck us at this instance, however, was that each farmer had a theory about the cause of the young bullock's sudden demise. The competing theories of the bullock's death notwithstanding, the farmer's misfortune was aggravated by the fact that he had lost one of his pair of bullocks right before the commencement of land preparation for the major agricultural season (kharif). Before tragedy struck, we were told he had hoped of repaying his debts, and marrying off his daughter with the income that he would earn from cultivating cotton on his two acres of land. To make matters worse, vagaries of monsoon, risk of pest infestation, and uncertainties of the market loomed large on the horizon. We could not help but wonder if, at the end of the cotton-picking season, he would manage to get the money he had hoped for. During a follow-up visit that year, we found out that though he could recover from the loss at the start of the agricultural season by managing agricultural operations with a rented pair of bullocks, he ran out of luck months later when a drought-like situation prevailed. His cotton yields were low, and it was only with the financial support of his kith and kin that he could wade through the year. Without recourse to any earning from rabi cultivation due to poor retained moisture on his plot, he waited for the next season hoping it would bring better outcomes and help him finance his daughter's wedding. He was unable to repay the loans he had borrowed.