Everyday and Organized Resistance as Ecosocial Justice Praxes: Struggles for Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation in Namita Waikar’s The Long March

Agrarian struggles in the global South tend to count as environmental politics only when they take the form of visible protest. The article reads Namita Waikar’s The Long March (2018), set amid the agrarian crisis and farmer suicides of Vidarbha, Maharashtra (India), to extend the “environmentalism of the poor” to survival practices that never declare themselves as environmental or even resistant. Defining resistance by practice rather than intention, it shows how the novel’s Dalit and smallholder farmers resist through everyday acts–reclaiming land, digging for water, farming agroecologically, storytelling, earth-centered spirituality–and through organized action that is both spontaneous and slowly built. Tracing the linear, reverse, and oscillation dynamics between everyday and organized resistance, it argues that the everyday functions as a reservoir of resistance rather than a mere prelude to mobilization. Read through Nancy Fraser’s framework, these resistances articulate claims for redistribution, recognition, and representation that are inseparable from the ecological conditions of agrarian reproduction, making ecological justice indistinguishable from social justice. The article concludes that realist fiction corrects the event-centered focus of resistance scholarship by holding dispersed and organized resistance within a single frame.