Farmer Suicides
economy to produce circumstances for
The Burden of Local Narratives
Manish K Thakur
F
or the past few decades, farmer
suicides have come to be lodged in
the public imagination as sympto-
matic of the deepening agrarian distress
haunting the Indian countryside. Scholarly
studies of the phenomenon have revealed
to us the market-induced vulnerabilities
of the farmers, especially the ones grow-
ing cash crops like cotton, groundnut,
soybean, citrus. They have also reminded
us of the policy failures of the state and
the declining public investment in agri-
culture. We have learnt of the reduced
support of a pro-reform state to agricul-
ture and the political marginality of the
peasantry in the new political economy
of the post-1991 Indian state. Others have
pointed out the falling crop productivity
in the wake of rising input costs amidst
globalisation of non-sustainable capita-
listic farming practices. Agroecologists
have underlined the higher susceptibility
of high-yield cash crops to diseases, pest
attacks and moisture-related distress in
the post-green revolution era. At one
stroke, Nilotpal Kumar in Unravelling
Farmer Suicides in India: Egoism and
Masculinity in Peasant Life dismisses such
interrelated arguments as manifestations
of flawed economism and sociologism.
Abstracting Agrarian Crisis
Kumar’s first target is what he calls
Durkheimian positivism characterising
much of literature on the farmer suicides
in India. According to him, scholars
studying farmer suicides invariably rely
on official statistics much like what
Emile Durkheim did in his celebrated
work Suicide (1897). Such reliance creates
the logical fallacy of petitio principii:
“the farmers’ suicides proponents pre-
suppose the veracity of principal or
exclusive farming antecedents which
they then seek to confirm” (p 10). By
contrast, for Kumar, “motive ascription in
24
book reviewS
Unravelling Farmer Suicides in India: Egoism
and Masculinity in Peasant Life by Nilotpal Kumar,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017; pp xv + 309, `995.
a suicide is a socially contingent pro-
cess” (p 10). He is sceptical of the farmer
suicides data as official statistics are known
to be full of taxonomic errors. Sadly,
scholars other than him have overlooked
this. As a result, they have paid scant
attention to non-farming causes and
motives in their analyses. As against such
scholarship, Kumar presents an ethno-
graphic investigation of farmer suicides
based on his fieldwork in a few dryland
villages in the Ananthapuramu district
in southern Andhra Pradesh, where he
demonstrates that a suicide by a farmer
or someone from their household is not
a priori on a farmer’s suicide. A suicide
should be classified as a farmer’s suicide
only when causes belong to the farming
domain, and non-farming non-economic
causes and motives are falsified. Kumar’s
ethnography of the farmer suicides puts
before itself the stellar methodological
challenge of segregating non-farming
antecedents from the farming ones.
Kumar’s second target is the prevailing
economism of the studies of the farmer
suicides in India. This economism not
only accepts the unproblematic nature
of official suicide statistics as objective,
but also brings in issues such as agrarian
distress, the widening rural–urban ine-
qualities, and the effects of liberalisation
and globalisation of the Indian economy
on agriculture. This economism imparts
causal and statistical uniqueness to farmer
suicides, which Kumar resents. To him,
the hitherto existing explanations of the
phenomenon are suffused with strategic
rhetoric to underline its significance.
They are unaware of the fact that social
NOVEMBER 9, 2019
relations may act independently of
suicidal action. Or, Kumar concedes, the
social may interact with the economic in
some contexts.
Moreover, most of the studies of the
farmer suicides are institutionally circum-
scribed as they emanate from institutions
like the media and the academia. As
such, they are external to the immediate
environment of suicide. Questioning the
pervasive grip of their representations,
Kumar’s monograph presents an emic
account as he purposefully foregrounds
local native narratives concerning suicide.
The Emic View
In Kumar’s emic account of the farmer
suicides, indebtedness as a result of
production-related vulnerabilities does
figure. There is also an acknowledge-
ment of the continuing agrarian eco-
nomic crisis as the proximate antecedent
of suicide in some cases. But, his main
focus is on the emotional texture of im-
mediate sociality embodying the changes
in local social relations. Given this pre-
occupation, he repeatedly questions the
dominant understanding of farming
distress being a necessary and sufficient
cause for farmer suicides. He writes,
“there is also a significant proportion
of cases that is difficult to be catalogued
as primarily farm-related, and further,
there are cases that show an exclusive or
principal presence of non-farming related
causes” (p 180).
He does not want to invest his scholarly
energy in such a governmentalised cate-
gory as the farmer suicides and their causal
connections with such variables as higher
incidence of borewell failures, or higher
indebtedness in his field villages. He is
convinced that it is the local cultural ideo-
logy of masculinity—paurusham—which
imparts subjective meaning to key farming
and other social variables and practices to
which suicides relate in Ananthapuramu.
To be sure, he takes note of the problems
of market-oriented commodity production
from a marginal economic and ecological
base, the monocropping of groundnut
over a century and the diminishing im-
portance of livestock farming, and the
vol lIV no 44 EPW Economic & Political Weekly

switch over to citrus as the new cash crop.
But, the key analytic prowess remains
reserved for the androcentric world of
the village which anchors and nourishes
the ideology of paurusham. Other pro-
cesses like competitive aspirations of
upward social and cultural mobility,
frictions between conventional norms
that aligned class consumption style
with one’s hierarchical social and eco-
nomic capital and with high ideals of
austerity, and the new norms decoupling
consumption from birth and its caste–
class rural–urban hierarchies add up to
the subsidiary list of variables having
the potential to produce suicidogenic
circumstances in the villages of the
Ananthapuramu district.
Kumar finds a deep-seated commit-
ment to develop in his field villages. Sure
enough, the transition to a new class with
distinctive tastes necessitates enhancing
agrarian surplus as a first precondition.
But, the competition among peasant
households is not about money alone.
They compete with one another to aesthe-
ticise their lifestyle across different
domains of consumption: food habits,
clothing, personal accessories like mo-
biles and motorbikes, housing, and edu-
cation. They want to be like the urban
middle classes who serve as the referent
for such aestheticisation. They want to
get rid of their rurality. However, the eco-
nomic capacity of a peasant household
to accomplish distinctions through con-
sumption is limited and risky. Given the
larger agrarian political economy of
household reproduction, peasant house-
holds get sucked into endless competi-
tion and end up using their agrarian sur-
pluses to enhance their status through
consumption. In moments of agrarian
crisis, such households feel socially dis-
tanced as a result of being envied for
their wealth and status. The aspirations
to achieve post-peasant identities remain
normatively dubious as well as lack a
sound economic base.
The enhanced preoccupation with
conspicuous consumption calls for cons-
cious changes in social preferences and
kinship practices as well. Young peasants
prefer to stay in nuclear families, which
in turn is associated with the entrench-
ment of egoism in intra-family kin
Economic & Political Weekly EPW NOVEMBER 9, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
relationships. Concomitantly, there is the pressures emanating from the local
decline in the significance of traditional cultural theory of lifestyle distinctions:
constructs of self, individuality and status, classga bathkadam (to live with class).
and their institutional coordinates like This idea of the class informs the emergent
patriarchal joint family, caste, and land. notions of self among peasants. Seen thus,
For Kumar, “the new claims of individuality their production-related decisions too
derive from education and/or mobility get indexed to class–mass distinctions.
and the possession of wider social capital These distinctions, in a way, imbue the
(‘connections’) and class consumption entire local social world around the binary
styles.” Further, “claiming to possess a of rare/refined and vulgar taste. In this
self as an immanent centre of their judg- “indigenous” framework, suicides turn out
ment, action, and esteem, young sons to be essentially linked to the experience
routinely scrutinise, contest, circumvent, of loss of honorofic self (manam) or con-
and sometimes, violently resist a father’s versely to the possession of negative self
centripetal authority in farming, consump- in familial and contiguous social relations
tion, and marriage-related decisions” (avamanam). For the author, three major
(p 269). Under these cultural conditions, factors contribute to the loss of manam:
routine consumption of risk becomes the perceived loss of hierarchical authority
rational to such small dry-land farmers in within the household, the loss of claim
Ananthapuramu who no longer valorise of equal status within the family, and
basic consumption demands or continuous the perceived defeat in competitions of
under-consumption. They would rather honour and status outside family.
take loans and dig borewells despite
repeated failures of the borewells to The Eclectic Narrative
supply water, given the depleting ground- Kumar’s attempt at synthesising diverse
water levels. They would grow citrus and theoretical traditions and conceptual
hope to make a quantum jump to new categories has, however, led to a turgid
patterns of consumption in their quest prose. He ends up privileging the local
for a better lifestyle. ideology of hegemonic masculinity—
Kumar’s attention to this production– paurusham—to an extent where his
consumption relationship of the type explanation tends to be culturological.
where even dry-land farmers are impli- True, he makes no claims to offer an
cated in global/postcolonial cultural explanatory model of farmer suicides.
modernity is appreciable. He takes note of Yet, he gets ensconced in variables at the
ON EPWRF India Time Series
NSI
PA (www.epwrfits.in)
EX
Cost of Cultivation of Principal Crops
Cost of Cultivation and Cost of Production data have been added to the Agricultural
Statistics module of the EPWRF India Time Series (ITS) online database. This
sub-module contains statewise, crop-wise data series as detailed below:
● Depending upon their importance to individual states, cost of cultivation and cost
of production of principal crops of each state are given in terms of different cost
categories classified as A1, A2, etc.
● Items of cost include operational costs such as physical materials (seed, fertiliser,
manure, etc), human labour (family, attached and casual), animal and machine
labour (hired and owned), irrigation charges, interest on working capital and
miscellaneous, and fixed cost such as rental value, land revenue, etc, depreciation
and interest on fixed capital.
● In addition, the following related data are given: value of main product and by-
product (rupees/hectare), implicit rate (rupees/quintal), number of holdings and
tehsils used in the sample study, and derived yield (quintal/hectare).
The data series are available on annual basis from 1970–71.
Agricultural Statistics module constitutes one out of 18 modules of EPWRF ITS covering
a range of macro-economic, financial sector and social sector indicators for India.
For more details, visit www.epwrfits.in or e-mail to: its@epwrf.in
vol lIV no 44 25
BOOK REVIEW
local/regional level to the neglect of wider
forces of economy and state. It is important
to bring out the production of gendered
subjectivities among a section of contem-
porary Indian peasantry as a corrective
to structural–functional explanations.
But, it is altogether a different scholarly
enterprise if one gets hooked to “cultural
schemas, agentive affects, and practices”
(p 20) in a way that the macroeconomic
context of the state and the market
becomes thin. In effect, Kumar’s work
should be read more as an ethnography of
a specific agrarian territory in post-reform
India than an ethnography of farmer
suicides. Ethnographers like Kumar would
26
do well to remember A R Radcliffe-Brown’s
famous remark that social structure was as
real as a seashell. In his ethnographic zeal
of mapping the hyper-masculine social
world of local peasants in Ananthapuramu,
Kumar appears to have downplayed the
tangible effects of social structures on
ideological formations.
This burden of local narratives should
not, however, undermine the scholarly
worth of Kumar’s ethnographic mono-
graph on a South Indian farming commu-
nity in an ecologically fragile zone. In
his work, Kumar skilfully brings together
emerging opportunities, crises, and con-
tradictions in three interrelated domains:
NOVEMBER 9, 2019
intimate familial relations, agricultural
production, and cultural imagination of
self-identity. Likewise, he offers us a peep
into the everyday lives of peasant-farmers,
where their concerns around self and
identity get refracted through the binaries
of development–underdevelopment and
forwardness–backwardness. These bina-
ries constitute the normative framework
of success and failure among peasant-
farmers in a way where at times failure
leads to self-inflicted death.
Manish K Thakur (mt@iimcal.ac.in) teaches
sociology at the Indian Institute of
Management, Calcutta.
vol lIV no 44 EPW Economic & Political Weekly