In 2020–21, a massive protest successfully rescinded three laws designed to deregulate India’s agrarian economy. The epicentre was Panjab—a region long considered the subcontinent’s breadbasket and home to a stalwart peasantry. In the public imagination, the Panjabi peasant is self-evident and timeless—a figure who has endured centuries of upheavals to arrive virtually unchanged into the present. This grand narrative assumes that peasantries have always existed everywhere in the world. Such claims conceal the modern transformation of agriculture and farmers.