Description

This paper discusses suicide in the central Indian steel town of Bhilai, the incidence of which has increased dramatically over the past two decades. This urban data is set against the backdrop of the epidemic of ‘farmer suicides’ that has also recently swept through several Indian states, that is widely attributed to rural indebtedness caused by the commercialization of agriculture and the liberalization of the economy, and that has attracted enormous media attention. Though the Chhattisgarh state government angrily disputes the facts, recent press reports have suggested that its rate of ‘farmer suicide’ is the highest in the country. The apoplectic denials of the state government are, of course, politically motivated; but the claims of those who have sought to highlight the problem are not politically innocent either. One of their effects is to divert attention from the urban situation where the problem – which remains largely unrecognised – is almost certainly greater. That’s my first empirical claim. The second is that, at least in the context of Bhilai, the incidence of suicide is significantly higher amongst the aristocracy of public sector labour than in other ‘fractions’ of ‘the working class’; and I attempt to explain why. The third claim is that the official suicide rate, and the motives attributed to suicide victims in the national statistics, are in significant measure an artefact of the law that surrounds suicide and the fear of police harassment. The paper concludes with some critical reflections on Durkheim’s theory of suicide.

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JONATHAN PARRY is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has done field research in various parts of north and central India on various different topics. His publications include Caste and Kinship in Kangra (Routledge 1979), Death in Banaras (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Death and the Regeneration of Life (ed,with M. Bloch, Cambridge University Press, 1982), Money and the Morality of Exchange (ed. With M. Bloch, Cambridge University Press, 1989), The Worlds of Indian Industrial Labour (ed, with J. Breman and K. Kapadia, Sage Publications, 1999), Institutions and Inequalities (ed, with R. Guha, Oxford University Press, 1999), Questions of Anthropology (ed, with R. Astuti and C. Stafford, Berg, 2007) and Industrial Work and Life: An Anthropological Reader (ed, with G. De Neve and M. Mollona. London: Berg, 2009).