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Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India
Why has rural, agrarian India turned into killing fields?
Why are agriculturists resorting to suicide?
What is the social and political significance of such deaths?
These are the key questions that this book seeks to answer as a way to understand the spate of suicides, since 1997, by agriculturists. Going beyond the predominant economic reason of indebtedness, this study contextualises the suicides within the configurations of the larger political economy, rural social structures, changing agrarian practices, and the growing individualisation of agriculturists.
A.R. Vasavi represents these agrarian suicides as situational acts which are the result of the vulnerable positions of marginalised agricultural households, caught in a web of risks and whose distress remains unrecognized and unresolved by an uncaring political regime.
Locating the suicides as a window to understanding post 1991 rural India, the study provides a succinct summary of the complexities and involutions which mark rurality and the lives of rural citizens. The denouement and significance of the suicides are commentaries on the state of the nation as a whole.
Why are agriculturists resorting to suicide?
What is the social and political significance of such deaths?
These are the key questions that this book seeks to answer as a way to understand the spate of suicides, since 1997, by agriculturists. Going beyond the predominant economic reason of indebtedness, this study contextualises the suicides within the configurations of the larger political economy, rural social structures, changing agrarian practices, and the growing individualisation of agriculturists.
A.R. Vasavi represents these agrarian suicides as situational acts which are the result of the vulnerable positions of marginalised agricultural households, caught in a web of risks and whose distress remains unrecognized and unresolved by an uncaring political regime.
Locating the suicides as a window to understanding post 1991 rural India, the study provides a succinct summary of the complexities and involutions which mark rurality and the lives of rural citizens. The denouement and significance of the suicides are commentaries on the state of the nation as a whole.
268 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2012
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July 6, 2025
Slightly dated book on the post-91 push for urban accumulation by rural dispossession and the people it kills. As of the 2020s, nearly 45% of India’s workforce remains in agriculture, with the average monthly income of an agricultural households around Rs. 10,000. Farmer suicides are still big in many of the 'suicide hotpots' written about in the book. Indebtedness, economic harassment, an un-remunerative sector, along with socially prescribed consumption, caste-and-gender based individualisation of economic life have together compounded rural imaginings of self-worth. Hanging is the most common method of suicides in India, followed by pesticides poisoning, medicine overdose, and self-immolation. They're banning Highly Hazardous Pesticides now, but clearly this wont be enough.
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