C Shambu Prasad reviews A.R. Vasavi’s book Shadow Spaces: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India in EPW.
Why is it that India, which has arguably the largest number of farmers in the world, spends little time discussing its worst agrarian crisis? Why are farmer suicides not considered “newsworthy”? What makes us treat them as “distant strangers”? How do we find ourselves as academics, citizens, policymakers, agricultural researchers as part of this silence and “political economy of uncaring”?
Shadow Spaces by social anthropologist A R Vasavi is not a study focused primarily on farmer suicides but a reflection on this political economy of uncaring, an attempt to see suicides as a window to understand conditions and trends in rural India. The book is a much-needed, even overdue, addition to the existing literature on agrarian studies and farmer distress in India. The book makes important departures from existing works in three ways. First, unlike most studies on farmer suicides that are state- or region-specific, Shadow Spaces offers a narrative that is pan-Indian and thus a frame that allows for greater explanatory power and insights on the ongoing agrarian crisis that actually extends beyond the “suicide hotspots”.