“We are like the living dead”

The chapter reinterprets Durkheim’s theory of suicide and extended it to India to analyse the recent wave of farmer suicides in the context of neoliberalism. Findings presented here about farmer suicides in Amravati and Yavatmal districts, Maharashtra, which attributes such acts to a historically specific combination of social and economic causes. Lower and middle caste peasant smallholders found themselves trapped between enhanced aspirations generated by land reform and other post-1947 measures, and the reality of neoliberalism (rising debt, declining income). Suicides among large and medium farmers belonging to the higher castes in Maharashtra were occasioned by failures in business, trade, and politics. Such cases are consistent with the argument put forward by Durkheim that suicide is an effect of individualisation, a process of socio-economic estrangement” from agrarian communities experienced by rural producers in the context of rapid economic growth.