Cultivating distress: Cotton, caste, and farmer suicides in India.

Nearly 4,00,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 1995 and
2018. This translates into approximately 48 suicides every day. The
majority of suicides were those from ‘backwarded’ castes including Dalit
farmers. This ethnographic study on cotton farmer suicide reports narratives of surviving Dalit families. The results reveal that financial and
moral debt when accrued within a web of family and caste-related
relationships result in patterns of personal and familial humiliation,
producing a profound sense of hopelessness in the Self. This loss of
hope and pervasive humiliation is ‘cultivated’ by a cascade of decisions
taken by others with little or no responsibility to the farmers and the
land they hope to cultivate as they follow different cultural and financial
logic. Suicide resolves the farmers’ humiliation and is a logical conclusion to the farmer’s distress, which results from a reconfiguration of
agricultural spaces into socially toxic places, in turn framing a local
panopticon. The current corona virus pandemic is likely to impact
adversely on peoples who are culturally distanced.