Chronicles of Deaths Foretold?: Farmers' Suicides in Chhattisgarh, India

AARTI SETHI, then a graduate student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received funding in October 2013 to aid research on 'Chronicles of Deaths Foretold?: Farmers' Suicides in Chhattisgarh, India,' supervised by Dr. Rosalind Morris. Over a quarter of a million farmers have committed suicide across India since 1995. Scholarly accounts link farmers' suicides to an economy of peasant indebtedness, coterminous with the industrialization of agriculture. Funding supported eighteen months of fieldwork on peasant suicides in the cotton-growing region of Vidarbha. Research consisted of ethnographic participant observation, as well as archival work in the district collectorate. Broadly, this project engages debt relations as the means of understanding social and ethical obligation, and their breakdown, in the wake of late-capitalist transformations of the agrarian landscape. It shows that as debt becomes an inseparable component of the productive process, debt is viewed not as a hindrance to, but the grounds of, ethical obligation. Usurious interest rates become the grounds for negotiation of social and familial proximity, and monetary debt the language through which other exchanges (honor, gifts) receive their sense. The project revisits anthropological investments in debtor-creditor relations as the condition of sociality, and recent critiques of the governance of 'debt' in late-capitalism as the conversion of public wealth into private liability.