In a new exhibition, photographer Gauri Gill brings the highway into the gallery

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In 2020, the Union government introduced three farm laws which were perceived by millions of farmers around the country as being biased towards big business and detrimental to their own interests.

Soon, protests began to be staged all around, even during the pandemic, with a special intensity in the National Capital Region, where farmers from Punjab held a sit-down until the laws were repealed in 2021. Photographer Gauri Gill spent all of 2021 documenting this showdown by the Punjab farmers on the highways leading into Delhi.

Unheeding of the elements, changing seasons, outbreak of disease and, of course, the iron hand of the state bent on suppressing dissent, hundreds of men, women and children of all ages pitched camp outdoors for over a year. This unique language of rebellion, charged with an unwavering spirit of community feeling, set a benchmark for civil opposition in modern India.

Using tractors, tarpaulin sheets, and makeshift bits and bobs, the farmers built what architect Prasad Shetty describes as a “full-fledged proto-settlement" in an essay accompanying Gill’s exhibition, The Village on the Highway, currently on display at Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi. Taken with a large analogue camera, these photographs capture the material reality of the protests, with green and yellow sheets of plastic forming provisional shelters, homes built out of stationary trucks, with pieces of tin, wood, thatch and other fragments coming together to literally create “a village on the highway," as the title puts it.