Farmers’ suicides and the state in India: Conceptual and ethnographic notes from Wayanad, Kerala

Abstract

This article reflects on the challenge of making ‘farmers’ suicides’ an object of ethnographic enquiry. This challenge is not just a matter of methods, ethics and access but also a matter of categorical choices involved in studying this over-determined and politicised category of self-killing. Drawing on fieldwork in the Wayanad district of Kerala, the article argues that ‘farmers’ suicides’ are not self-evident types of rural death, but become reified and visible through the state’s enumerative practices. This state-defined category, conveyed and scandalised by the media, rests on a connection between suicide and—–an equally reified—‘agrarian crisis’. The ethnographic endeavour of ‘chasing’ the elusive object of farmers’ suicides may destabilise this seemingly self-evident link. Despite this, farmers’ suicides have taken on a political life of their own. They have become a constructed yet real interface for the reworking of the relationship between state and rural citizens in liberalising India. The Indian state has launched unprecedented relief and rehabilitation measures in response to the suicide crisis. This article makes a strong case for grounding the study of farmers’ suicides in ethnographies of agrarian practice and the local developmental state.