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The Journal of Peasant Studies

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A life wasted making dust: affective histories of dearth, death, debt and farmers' suicides in India
Esha Shah Version of record first published: 01 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Esha Shah (2012): A life wasted making dust: affective histories of dearth, death, debt and farmers' suicides in India, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 39:5, 1159-1179 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.653344

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The Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 39, No. 5, December 2012, 11591179

A life wasted making dust: aective histories of dearth, death, debt and farmers suicides in India
Esha Shah

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A signicant number of farmers committing suicides in various parts of India are routinely attributed to agrarian crisis. The crisis is further related to the structural transformations induced by globalisation and liberalization and the resulting forms of scarcities or shortages, for example, prices, growth, and resources. I contend in this essay that the framework of economic rationality is insucient to explain why a disturbingly high number of middle farmers are taking their lives. This essay is an attempt to provide an alternative explanation of the suicides by undertaking a study of the aective histories of scarcities. It argues that for the suicides whether scarcity actually exists is less relevant than how the idea of scarcity is articulated in aective responses. The aective histories explain the way in which suicides and the wider feelings of rural alienation relate to the fear of pauperization. This fear relates to the bounded imagination of the self and the other, glued by a long history of deeply ingrained ideologies of hierarchy. If farmers suicides point to any crisis, it is the crisis of lack of alternative political and cultural imagination emerging from a rounded critique of all forms of social injustice and violence. Keywords: aective histories; farmers suicides; politics of scarcity; fear of pauperisation

Introduction: farmers suicides and meta-narratives of scarcity Recent incidents of farmers suicides in various parts of India are linked with what is widely called agrarian crisis. A growing body of scholarly literature associates suicides with the political economy of agrarian change since the introduction of green revolution, more intensely so with the introduction of liberalisation.1 A wide
This essay would not have been possible without the support of Professor Sadananda Janekere, Centre for the Studies of Local Culture, Shimoga University and Professor B.V. Veerbhadrappa, Head of Economics Department, Shimoga University. I am very thankful to P. Kavita for her insightful assistance and translation during the eldwork in 2005 and to Renuka for her similarly excellent support during my eld work in 2008. Without their warm hospitality this study would not have been possible. My sincerest thanks to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. 1 There is a sizeable literature in India that links farmers suicides with a shift in agrarian policy since liberalisation in the early 1990s (Vasavi 1999, Iyer and Manick 2000, Mohanty and Shro 2004, Rao and Gopalappa 2004, Sarma 2004, Singh 2004, Gill and Singh 2006, Mohanakumar 2006, Rao and Suri 2006, Sridhar 2006, Suri 2006, Vaidyanathan 2006). These studies variously discuss the role of state, agrarian policy, indebtedness and credit, productive and unproductive use of credit, agri-business, changing rural economy, the market, and globalisation in causing an agrarian crisis, resulting in agrarian distress. Even when the
ISSN 0306-6150 print/ISSN 1743-9361 online 2012 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2011.653344 http://www.tandfonline.com

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range of scholarly literature thus shows that the suicides are a result of social and structural transformation, especially the way in which these transformations contribute to the hegemonic reproduction of ruralurban and agricultureindustry inequality. Ignoring this sizeable literature on structural reasons for suicide, liberal developmental approaches commonly reduce suicides to a variety of shortfalls, such as reduction in prices, and to various forms of water and resource scarcities. In these approaches, farmers suicides are considered a result of shortage or decline of growth, productivity, yield, price and resources all variants of forms of scarcity. The suicides are also routinely blamed on rising rural indebtedness associated with all other forms of scarcities. Suicides are thus incorporated in the meta-narrative of scarcity that has shaped half a century of agrarian development entirely focused on techno-institutional changes.2 Soon after independence, the scarcity of grain was projected in India as the reason for hunger and famine, the basis upon which the massive development projects led by science and technology such as the green revolution3 were justied. The green revolution, introduced in Asia in the 1960s, was entirely driven by the pursuit of higher productivity (Dalrymple 1977, 1985, Friedman 1990, Dhanagare 1995). After half a century of the implementation of the green revolution, newer forms of scarcities are being projected the cause of newer forms of rural vulnerability, such as suicides. Consequently, the dominant developmental response these days to farmer suicide is to make agricultural economics remunerative through a variety of techno-institutional changes. A second green revolution and genetically modied crop biotechnology are widely proposed and justied (cf. Swaminathan 1996, Padmanabhan 2009). One way or the other, the scarcity meta-narrative has become the founding story, legitimising techno-institutions of modernity and the concomitant project of development (Macpherson 1976, Lyotard 1984). This presupposes what Hannah Arendt called utilitarian politics.4 At the core of such scarcity-focused technoinstitutional discourses is the language of means-ends, market transactions, and the
suicides are not directly discussed as related to the agrarian crisis, they are ultimately attributed to the economic reform. For instance, it is argued in a recent report that the large number of cotton farmers committing suicide is a pressing human rights concern (Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice 2011). Even while making suicides a human rights issue, the report ultimately relates farmers suicides to the perils of economic reform, agri-business, reduction in state subsidies, and to food and water scarcities. In addition to a considerable literature discussing farmers suicides, a number of studies on agrarian questions also make reference to the suicides (Prasad 1999, Stone 2002, Gill 2004). Furthermore, there exists a number of reports of government appointed commissions, civil society organisations and citizens committees on farmer suicides (Government of Andhra Pradesh nd, Institute for Development and Communication 1998, Report of the Peoples Tribunal 1998, Government of Karnataka 2002, Report of the fact Finding Team 2002, Tata Institute of Social Sciences 2005, Mishra 2006, Peoples Union of Civil Liberties 2007). This essay has, however, not consulted primary government records on the number and location of farmer suicides. 2 Techno-institutional approaches are here consistent with the Foucauldian notion of technologies of self which include discourses and institutions within which physical artefacts are embedded. 3 The term green revolution came into existence in the late 1960s to mean the new technology that comprised high yielding varieties of cereals like wheat and rice, which had to be cultivated with agro-chemicals like pesticides and fertilizers, and which necessitated new mechanised methods of irrigation and cultivation. 4 As discussed in Scott Lash (2000).

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assumption that a scarcity of means to satisfy given ends is an almost ubiquitous condition of human behaviour (Lionel Robbins 1932, quoted in Xenos 1987, 235). In this way, scarcity is dissociated from the complex processes of social, cultural, and structural transformation and made into a universal factor fundamentally shaping all human choices. Despite the crucial dierences, the political economy and liberal developmental explanations of farmers suicides signicantly converge on the scarcity narrative. The most fundamental human drive will to life is thus predominantly tied down to various forms of economic rationality. If economic deprivation could violate the fundamental human drive to live, then, hypothetically speaking, a large number of women throughout history, a large number of landless labourers, or a signicant population living on the edge of urban slums would also have been susceptible to suicide. While I do not wish to undermine the importance of the impact of globalisation and liberalisation on agriculture and the resultant economic deprivation as a cause for suicide, I think that much still remains to be explained. Why is a particular segment of the rural population taking their lives at this historical juncture? Aective histories Instead of explaining the relationship between suicide and scarcities as predominantly a variant of economic rationality, this essay aims to locate it into the context of historically specic cultural politics. I aim to engage with experiences of scarcities (as a precursor to the suicides) by making a study of what I call aective histories. As William Reddy describes, aect can be understood as a deeply ingrained, overlearned habit (Reddy 2001, 16). The emphasis here is on deeply ingrained and learned habit that goes beyond a Cartesian dualism of reason against feeling. Aect collapses the distinction between thought and feeling, rationality and passion, and reason and sentiment. Aects here correspond to what Kant called aesthetic reexive judgements that take place not through cognitive understanding but through imagination; they manifest not logically but analogically; they connect everyday experiences to supra-logical meanings (Lash 2000). Aective histories, however, are not only about cultural articulations; they are also a problem of location, a locale. As another scholar describes, a problem of aect is a problem of apprehending a heightened moment in which certain locales become exemplary laboratories for sensing and intuiting contemporary life (Berlent 2008, 845). Such a locale could be an event or a literary piece. Focused on a heightened moment, an aective turn in history focuses less on a post-war concern with structures, than on conjectures, emotions, daily life, individual experiences and the collapse of temporal linearity. Farmers suicides form such heightened moment an aective locale in the history of agrarian change. And its from this vantage point that I aim to review the relationship between dearth, death and debt; the way in which this relationship is articulated in everyday forms of cultural politics; and the way it is inscribed on forms of life. I aim to explore deeply ingrained learned habits aects that are expressed in oral narratives and everyday conversations. I aim to explore the way in which aects represent substantive values upon which the aesthetic judgement of good life is based, the way in which they are expressed in symbols, images, and expressions that denote supra-logical, supra-individual meaning to agrarian change and its

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relationship with life experiences. Aects here are not plain emotions or feelings; they are markers of sensing and intuiting contemporary life, and are also an index of the relations of power. Methodologically applying this notion of aective histories, this essay discusses three dierent socio-cultural connotations of scarcity that are articulated in the following question: How and why are farmer suicides related to scarcities? These connotations refer to three levels of social and historical time with respect to agrarian development. Following Braudel, these social times are: time that consists of gradual and rapid change underpinning events in history; time that represents events in history; and a time of long term shifts (Harris 2004). Similar to Braudels objective time, farmers subjective reference to agrarian change refers to episodic events, processes of rapid or gradual transformations, and the long term shifts spanning broad references to the past, present and future. Each of these social times corresponds to dierent extents of temporality, rhythms of change and events of scarcity. The rst socio-cultural connotation of scarcity relates to the political ecology of newer forms of scarcities, these emerging since the introduction of the green revolution. These forms of scarcity refer to, for example, depleting ground water level, the emergence of newer forms of pests and diseases, and the uctuation of input and output prices. Here, the scale of temporality alludes to the last three decades, and the rhythm of change acquires a rapid pace. The second connotation of scarcity emerges in everyday forms of conversation, in which time is distinctively described in technological terms. The new green revolution technology becomes a boundary condition to recall and order social time. Time is described here as before and after the introduction of green revolution technology, and the span of temporality covers two generations. The third connotation refers to episodic memories of the experiences of famine and hunger prior to the introduction of the green revolution. This includes oral narratives centred on the question: Who among farmers faced hunger and famine in the past, and when? What do they remember of these experiences? I have further related the historical memory of famine and food shortage to the secondary historical literature, in order to understand the way in which the individual oral narratives relate to collective memory and with written history. The discussion on the rst two connotations of scarcity are based on the detailed engagements with leaders, members, and supporters of Karnataka Rajya Rayta Sangha (KRRS) (the spokes-organ of the new farmers movement in Karnataka) in ve villages Iguru, Nerlekere, Jodithimbapur, Nagtibelehalli, Tumbikere located in the perimeter of 30 km in the Davangere district. The third connotation is based on six distinct oral narratives from the same villages of past experiences of food scarcity. My interpretations are deduced from a variety of sources: oral narratives of famine and hunger; discussions with KRRS leaders and supporters; my previous and current ethnographic work on agrarian change in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Gujarat; and historical and secondary literature. The eldwork for this study was conducted in the months of April, May and June in 2005 and later in the months of February, March and April in 2008 as part of my ongoing work on farmer suicides in the newly formed Davangere district5 of western Karnataka, India.
The Davangere district was newly formed on 15 August 1997 by bringing together certain parts of the Chitradurga, Shimoga and Bellary districts.
5

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I must clarify here that this essay is not a causal analysis of farmer suicides; it is also not a history of farmer suicides. It does not probe into questions such as how many farmers or who among farmers are committing suicides and why, although it does briey summarise current literature on the subject. To reiterate, from the locale of farmer suicides, this essay engages with the aective histories of scarcities in order to sense and intuit contemporary life, and to develop an alternative explanation of farmer suicides. In making a study of aective histories of scarcities, I do not wish to argue that in one way or the other farmer suicides are entirely a response to scarcities. Aective histories in fact show that farmer suicide is a far more complex issue than what could be explained within a framework of the political economy of structural transformation.

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Politics of agrarian change: locating the study The Davangere district is located in the wet, rainfall assured, and irrigated tract of western Karnataka. Parts of it previously belonged to the Shimoga district, from where emerged the politically expedient new farmers movement. Karnataka Rajya Rayta Sangha (KRRS) is the most prominent organisation of the new farmers movement in Karnataka. For the study, I followed KRRSs constituency for a single, important reason the majority of farmers committing suicide in Karnataka and elsewhere in India belong to this constituency of the new farmers movement. The new farmers movement emerged in the 1980s, after two decades of implementation of the green revolution. It is broadly understood as a populist rural mobilisation, formed across all castes and class divisions, approaching the state with a range of economic demands. This movement is called new to distinguish it from older forms of peasant mobilisation against feudal lords. The new farmers movement in India has played a pivotal role in shaping not only national agricultural policy and but also regional and national politics since the early 1980s. The politics of the new farmers movement is believed to have inuenced governments, especially in the states where the green revolution has taken root (Nadkarni 1987, Assadi 1997, Gupta 1998). Who, among farmers, are taking their lives has generated a considerable amount of debate in India. A detailed discussion of this debate is not intended here, as other scholars have already oered excellent reviews (see Vasavi 2008). What I want to highlight here are certain trends which have been largely agreed upon: (1) Farmer suicides have been mostly reported in ve core green revolution states in India Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, the Punjab, and Maharashtra. They have been comparatively less reported and discussed in the poorest states such as Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, and in highly industrialised states such as Tamilnadu and Gujarat. (2) A majority of farmers taking their lives are small and medium land-holders. The number of large farmers taking their lives is, although signicant, relatively small. Landless labourers have rarely committed suicides (3) In Karnataka, a signicant number of deceased farmers belong to the socioeconomically advantageous and politically dominant Vokkaliga and Lingayat castes, although ownercultivators from Other Backward Castes and Dalits have not been exempt.

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(4) Most importantly, there exists a considerable consensus that irrespective of caste and land-holding, most of the deceased farmers were commercial cultivators. An overwhelming majority of these farmers were cotton growers in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, but also comprised those who cultivated sugarcane, oilseeds, soyabeans, and vegetables (Mohanty 2004, Mohanty and Shro 2005, Tata Institute of Social Sciences 2005, Mishra 2006), rice and wheat growers in the Punjab (Iyer and Manick 2000, Gill and Singh 2006), export oriented plantation owners cultivating banana, pepper, coee and vanilla in Kerala (Mohanakumar 2006), and betel nut, betel leaf, potato, vegetables and sugarcane growers in Karnataka (Vasavi 2008). These farmers belong to the group of owner cultivators who pursue commercial cultivation and who are the principal constituency of the new farmers movement in India.

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At its inception in the early 1980s, the anger of the farmers movement in Karnataka was directed against corrupt bureaucrats and merchants. In the last two decades, this target has shifted from the local administration to the state. Higher output prices and lower input prices are the main and consistent demands of the new farmers movement all over India. Non-payment and waiving of loans has also been a strong issue (Nadkarni 1987, Assadi 1997). Currently, the KRRS has three additional demands: crop insurance; industry status given to agriculture; and control of cropping pattern by what they call scientic planning (personal communication with KRRS leaders in Davangere district, 2008). The most popular and emotionally appealing manifesto of the movement is based on the premise that the states policies, with an urban bias, have failed to deliver the developmental promises to rural farming communities (Gupta 1998); this is projected as the single most important reason for rural vulnerability. The farmers movement insists that the interests of urban, industrial India have systematically undermined the interests of agrarian and rural Bharat. The movements political utopia is to convert rural-Bharat into urban-India. Especially, when a majority of the farmers committing suicides, not just in Karnataka but also elsewhere in India, belong to the constituency of new farmers movement, KRRSs conation of the landed farmers issues with rural vulnerability has now found an emotionally authentic voice. Aective histories of dearth: Avaga, Evaga. In everyday conversation, social and cultural change is usually described in the category of time expressed distinctly in technological terms. New technology forms a boundary condition or a marker to recall and order social time. The time-related expressions such as modale6 (in the beginning), avaga against evaga (those times vs. now) in everyday conversations usually mean the crossing of a paradigmatic boundary of technological change. In everyday representations of time, before is invariably associated with famine and frugality, now with an increase in material assets, if not with suciency. Before, we used to have only one pair of clothes, now even the poorest of poor owns at least two to three pairs this is how an elderly farmer

The dictionary translation of the Kannada word modale into English is: ago, before, earlier, formerly, forth, front, in advance, preceding, prior to.

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described the mundane philosophy of change, denoted here as progress. Farmers perceptions of change not only contrast before and after; the narration of a timeline usually begins with modale. Modale bhala kashta (it was very dicult before/in the beginning) is the most common opening line of any discussion on agrarian and social change irrespective of the class, caste, gender, age, and ethnic background of the respondent. The narrative of scarcity thus assumes a form of mythical importance in farmers representations. These narratives refer to both episodic time and times of gradual transformation, and they cover two generations. Moving on from the mythical past and discussing the green revolution, the notion of scarcity acquires a radically dierent meaning. In the discussions on evaga (now), the scale of temporality alludes to the last three decades, and the rhythm of change acquires a rapid pace. With the shorter temporal span and much faster rhythm of change, the narrative also signicantly moves away from the simple representation of life, which is expressed as before there was scarcity and with new technology it was all alleviated, to a much more complex terrain, with a variety of newer forms of scarcities clouding the explanation. Green revolution technology was ocially introduced in India in the 1960s. But in the study region, it was only in the 1980s that the high yielding, pest and drought resistant, short and long duration varieties of rice was introduced (in the irrigated tracts); high yielding cotton was also introduced in the dry lands (Shah 2003). Cotton was grown until the mid 1990s, when it was stopped due to massive pest attacks until genetically modied Bt cotton was introduced in 2005. Sugarcane was the principal crop between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s, causing a manifold increase in acreage. For instance, in the village of Iguru land under sugarcane grew from 15 acres in 1992 to 800 acres in 1995, along with which proliferated a number of bore wells. The unprotable uctuation of local and global prices, an overproduction of sugarcane beyond the absorption capacity of sugar factories, acute ground water scarcity, and newer pests and diseases all count as reasons for the abandonment of sugarcane in the mid 1990s. Rain-fed maize has emerged as the most important crop since the mid 1990s. Maize is not as protable as cotton or sugarcane. Because of the acreage given over to these crops, Ragi and Navane, the two main staple grains regularly consumed in this region, have not been cultivated, causing a scarcity in availability. Three other crops betel nut, betel leaf, and coconut have been cultivated in the villages where farmers have access to institutional credit to dig tube wells. Fitted with the motorised pumps since the 1980s, the tube wells lifted the restriction that irrigation with open-wells and tanks imposed on the acreage. The manifold increase in the cultivation of betel leaf and betel nut is one of the important reasons for a massive increase in the number of tube wells (including the failed ones) in the study villages. For instance, in the village of Nerlekere cultivation of betel nut has expanded tenfold since the late 1980s. As a result the water table has declined several hundred feet. The cultivation of coconut has also signicantly changed in the last two decades; it is now in decline due to a disease known in the local language as nusi roga. Apart from a number of crops making dramatic entries and exits, the tube wells are another signicant actor on the agrarian stage of evaga. Since they were introduced in the 1970s for drinking water and began to be used for irrigation in the early 1980s, the number of tube wells, and also the number of failed tube wells, has dramatically increased in the study villages. In 3000 acres of land in Iguru, 2000 tube

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wells have been dug since early 2000, out of which only 10% are running. Almost all farmers in the village of Iguru have dug seven to eight tube wells on average ownership of four to ve acres, 90 % of which have failed. One of the farmers who committed suicide in Iguru drilled 20 tube wells in ve years, six in one month, of which 18 failed. In the Nerlekere the story repeats itself. Over 500 acres, roughly 5000 bore wells have been drilled, of which only 1000 are yielding water now. On average, ten bores have been drilled to each single acre of land. Some experts claim that what has been traditionally considered a prosperous and fertile region in the Davangere district has turned into a ground-water desert due to the intensive cultivation of betel nut. There are reports that 5060% of betel nut plantations have dried up due to acute ground water shortage (Ray 2004). These times of rapid agrarian change since the introduction of green revolution imply a conicting understanding of the norms of scarcity, excess, decline, or overproduction. Is ground water unavailability a scarcity or the result of excessive expansion in betel nut farming? Is water which has depleted to 1000 ft scarce? Is the abandonment of sugarcane cultivation a result of the decline in price, or is it an outcome of overproduction? Is an 80% tube well failure the result of a scarcity of ground water, or natures response to the pursuit of abundance? Scarcity and abundance, supposedly contrasting notions, are baingly intertwined here. All normative terms describing material situation (namely, scarcity, excess, intensive, or overproduction) or terms for cognitive sense-making (uncertainty, unpredictability, and risk) are elusive here; they acquire meaning only when explained on a selective timeline of change. The neat ordering of time and the linear construction of past scarcities turning into abundance because of technological change, however, becomes obscure once the discussion leaves the terrain of the past and enters into the present or refers to the future. Farmers narratives develop into two separate, almost parallel strands, without much mutual interaction. In one form, the technological optimism oriented to the linear change that there once was scarcity in the beginning (modale), but that it all changed with the new technology is also extended into the future. The new technology not only ignited farmers aspirations; the speed of innovations also fashioned an unshakeable belief in the power of technology to produce auence. The image of this technology is tied down to the pursuit of good life which is understood as acquiring auence. Technology scripted with the promise of abundance have coded farmers choices, especially resource rich and powerful farmers, who have what Appadurai calls the cultural capacity to aspire (Appadurai 2001). In this strand of farmer narratives, the acceleration of technological innovation has made the future unknowable, and at the same time, pregnant with possibility. The second strand of the future-oriented storylines shows several ssures in the smooth progression of the past into the present and future. These expressions range from everyday forms of dealing with various forms of destabilisation the green revolution has generated, to the most philosophical and dystopian declarations of futureless-ness. We are digesting not food but a small amount of poison everyday said one farmer. The nutritional paucity of green revolution crops and the health impact of chemicals are a topic of everyday conversation on avaga and evaga. Ragi, jowar and white rice are commonly compared, and not in favour of white rice. Farmers have detailed, practical knowledge on how chemical fertilisers impact the

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physiology of plant, and many farmers rmly believe that the newer expressions of diseases are not primarily related to newer viruses but to the shift in plant ecology. A number of farmers attribute their inexplicable health troubles to the exposure to pesticides. One older farmer dismayingly complained that the hundred-year-old water (he called it ve generations old water) stored in the ground had been used up in two decades. In this stream of narrative, talking about food, water, air, and health, the conversation is often concluded with a declaration that modale thumba channagidi (it was very nice in the beginning/before). This oscillation on the character of the modale represents the core conict of the green revolution in everyday forms of articulation. The utilitarian, interest-based pursuit of auence as a foundation of the good life is conicted with the idea of the future or lack of it. In the linear version of the narrative, the link between the past and present is positive, and accordingly any critique of the green revolution is popularly considered as returning to the famine and food shortage and going backward (even among the farmers who themselves never experienced the acute food shortage, as discussed later in the essay). In another parallel narrative such linear links extending the present into the future is partially broken. We are like living dead, we have been stuck here, nothing can possibly be done, or nothing can possibly change are commonly expressed views which denote a sense of futurelessness. Similar utterances are also recorded by other scholars (Mohanty 2005). The only way the present is linked to the future is in the extension of the technological optimism oriented to the narrative of an imagined past when there was scarcity. In these narratives, after government and new technologies only fate and god are imbued with any agency for change. The rural vulnerability experienced on the interface of futureless-ness on the one hand and techno-institutional optimism on the other can barely be explained as an equation of scarcity. The expressions of rural vulnerability suicides being an extreme form of it are precariously hinging on the technological optimism oriented to the past, whose connection with the future is conicted. Rising indebtedness, one of the most important reasons for causing suicides, is an expression of hopelessness emerging out of this conict (Mohanty 2005). One farmer summarised this conict and the attendant hopelessness in the following words: farmers are digging deeper and deeper for money like water as if there is no tomorrow. On the site of technological change, farmers narratives in everyday forms of conversation conate the food and cloth scarcities experienced in the past with the newer forms of scarcities emerged since the introduction of the green revolution. In order to answer the question why and how these two distinctly dierent forms of scarcities are conated in the collective imagination, I decided to ethnographically explore the imagination of the past, to begin with the beginning when there was scarcity. I started with making simple historical inquiries: Who among farmers faced hunger and famine in the past, and when? What do they remember of these experiences? In what way do individual narratives relate to the collective memory? Why the time of scarcity, experienced nearly a century ago, was so intensely held in the collective memory was the question that troubled me the most. In my ethnographic inquiry I strove to understand the past experiences of scarcity in order to nd out why the present was so intimately and intensely oriented towards the past episodes of scarcities; I had little idea that my quest would open up an entirely new way of understanding the role of indebtedness in causing extreme

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emotions. To my surprise, I stumbled upon a powerful historical connection between dearth, debt, and death. Aects of dearth: imagining the past This section discusses six distinct oral narratives of the past experiences of food scarcity. My respondents were between 83- and 95-years-old and belong to a disparate set of socio-economic backgrounds. They were: (1) a Lambani woman, who had worked most of her life as a construction labourer and also depended upon odd bits of agricultural work; (2) a male agricultural labourer from the Adi Karnataka (previously untouchable) caste, who served as bonded agricultural labourer between the age 11 and 30 and later worked as an agricultural labourer; (3) a higher caste, Sadhu-lingayat male farmer, who owned 80 acres of land for most of his life; (4) a higher caste Lingayat male farmer, who owned eight acres of land until a few years ago when he divided it among his children; (5) another Lingayat male farmer who was a member of the Indian National Congress and fought, in his words, for the freedom of this country with Mahatma Gandhi, and who now receives a freedom ghters pension; and (6) an Adi Karnakata woman who worked as unattached (not bonded) agricultural labourer for most of her life. All these people belong to the villages of Iguru, Tumbikere, Kurki, and Ijjakatte, all of these located within a 30 km perimeter of the town of Davangere. Following is a brief summary of the discussion, this centring around the question as to whether any of these people had ever faced food shortage, and whether there were ever times of having nothing to eat. Very early in our discussions, times of acute food shortage were mentioned and named in the local (Kannada) language as Baragala. As suspected, the respondents with disparate socio-economic backgrounds had contrasting experiences of Baragala. The Lingayat man with eight acres had always had enough to eat. He regularly consumed three local millets Ragi, Jowar, and Savane with sucient milk, curd, and butter, a small amount of vegetables and an occasional meal of rice (which was a luxury when he was young). He nevertheless remembered three to four separate incidents of acute food shortage, when a number of people in his and surrounding villages were aected. The real details of these times of acute food shortage came from the freedom ghter. He was in charge of a relief centre (which distributed ganjee millet gruel) established rst by the Congress and later by the British government. In his account, at least twice between the 1920s and the 1940s, the ganjee centre was operational for two years. At one occasion he was appointed as accountant of the special grain storage established by the British government. He was jailed for a few months for illegally distributing much of the stored grain among the needy. He did not see much dierence in the food shortage before and after independence until the introduction of chemical fertiliser. Incidentally, Ragi and Jowar, two main staple grains of the region, have never been hybridised for a high yield; these crops have not been part of the green revolution package. Both the landed farmers saw a radical increase in the food availability after the introduction of the chemical fertilisers in 1965, which happened much before the introduction of the high yielding varieties of the green revolution. Both Lingayat men had distinct memory of times of acute food shortage when they themselves were not aected. The Lingayat man with 80 acres of land, however, had a hard time remembering any such incidents. His narration wandered in the past, which he described as the

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times of Dharma and Satya (truth and moral values). For him the past was a time when people socially cooperated without any expectations of return, when the village was an ideal community of love and mutual aection. He lamented how the current times were devoid of any such virtues. Even when we shared what we had learnt from his co-villagers of the same age about the times of acute food shortage, he declined to remember any such incidents except one the incident of drought (not an acute food shortage), when, he said, a high powered committee held a meeting in Delhi during Lal Bahadur Shastris time as the Prime Minister. He remembered that this was the meeting in which the decision to introduce chemical fertiliser was taken. The narratives of both of the women were heart-wrenching. Their narratives were interspersed with long silences, sudden bouts of tears and exultation, emotional awkwardness and embarrassment. After the initial fragments, my own instinct was to stop the conversation and run away. It was my translator and research assistants admirable sensitivity, empathy and considerable cultural and language skills that helped to create a human understanding that allowed several hours of talking about what could be modestly described as dicult life experiences. The Lambani woman repeated several times that Baragala never came and went away. Baragala was always there. A good deal of her life had been spent going to bed without food and sometimes even without water to drink. All her life, she had seen very little food. She had food only when she found work. Being a bonded agricultural labourer when she was young was actually a boon. Much of her adult life, she worked as un-attached labourer building Bhadra irrigation canal which took almost half a century to be completed.7 During our conversations she repeated several times that her life had been wasted breaking stones and making dust. I must clarify that she actually never used the word wasted, but the tone of her narrative, especially the linguistic uses of phrases related to stones and dust, on the one hand, implied back-breaking hard work, on the other, implied a sense of worthlessness. She spoke in Lambani, a language very close to my own native language Gujarati. Talking to her, I realised how internalised my own use of the language in which a life wasted was described as the one written with stones and sand. I will return to the expressions of breaking stones and making dust and their relationship with the fear of pauperisation later in the essay. Similarly, the Adi Karnataka woman had an experience not unlike to the Lambani woman she never had enough to eat. She said she stopped working ve years ago (her age was constructed with the help of other villagers as 92 years at the time of the interview in March 2008). Both women also suered a great deal of violence and humiliation from the hands of husbands, sons, in-laws, employers, and other villagers. There were things about their lives which they said they didnt want to share with us.

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The Davangere district belonged to the Mysore princely state, but was also administered by the British, especially for creating and managing the irrigation infrastructure. Between 1876 and 1947, the British worked on a number of irrigation projects in the Deccan, including this region. A number of projects were started, then left incomplete as a result of the change in political power. A number of long canals were also built and left unused due to the protective irrigation strategy of the British. Tunga weir, Bhadra dam and Tungbhadra dam in this region were all began at the turn of the century and were completed only after independence. Bhadra canal was nally opened in the 1970s, the construction work having started in the rst quarter of the century (Wallach 1985, Mollinga 1992). Lambani women spent much of their lives building these dams and canals.

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The Adi-Karnataka man worked as a bonded labourer during the prime of his adult life, when he was regularly fed twice a day with the kind of food that three higher caste men described as regularly eating. Even after he ceased to work as bonded labourer, his patrons accepted him as a dependent in the times of Baragala. He spoke highly of his patrons and thanked them for saving him from begging on the streets; nonetheless, he simultaneously remembered having received free food from the ganjee centres. The cultural experience of famine in Karnataka is not particularly a popular topic among historians barring rare exceptions (see Vasavi 1996). The famine historians attention has focused on the presidencies of Madras and Bengal (Sen 1981, Greenough 1982, Arnold 1984), while some subaltern and environmental historians have focused on western and central India (Hardiman 1996). The oral narratives, however, resonate with two prominent meta-narratives in the history of famine in India. The seminal work of Amartya Sen on the great Bengal famine of 1943 lays the groundwork for both moral economy and political economy metanarratives (Sen 1981). Sen critically showed the inadequacy of scarcity as an explanation for famine death. He showed how the food production for the year 1943 was higher than the previous non-famine years and how the famine was caused not because of the shortage of food, but because of the lack of purchasing power among particular groups of people. These people did not have the monetary means to purchase food as the prices rose rapidly due to war in the region. It was the depleting wages, unemployment, rising food prices and poor distribution of food that caused famine. Based on Sens groundwork, both moral economy and political economy meta-narratives have suciently established that the famines were principally caused by the incapacity of specic groups in society, at a specic point in time, to obtain food through legitimate means, i.e., through economic entitlement or through inclusion in a moral economy. It was not grain scarcity but an absolute dispossession that was at the core of famine (Appadurai 1984). These historians have shown that the cultivators and the land-controllers were the groups least aected during even the worst of famines. In my own oral history it became clear that the landholders had never faced any food shortage, not even during the worst famines. Both women labourers had experienced food scarcity all their lives, not only during famines. Those who projected the image of India as a dying and hungry nation in order to justify the introduction of the green revolution were referring to the hunger and food shortage faced by dispossessed people, such as both of the lower caste women I interviewed. These people experienced food shortage for much of their lives not because the food was in short supply. The higher caste men I interviewed in the same age group living in the same region had sucient access to food, even during famine. To reiterate the point already made by several historians, the socio-economic dispossession created famine and hunger, not the shortage of food. The way liberal institutions have related hunger and famine with scarcity of grain and the way this was deployed to justify the introduction of the green revolution is highly problematic. Aects of dearth and death: fear of pauperisation The aective histories of food scarcity and famine, however, point in a dierent direction than the historians of famine do. The experiences of food shortage and

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famine have left an indelible mark on the collective moral psyche. Paul Greenoughs study on the Great Bengal famine is one such rare study that describes how famine broke down the routine structures and moralities of the social fabric. Greenough describes ve stages of famine-related victimisation: impoverishment property sales and economic decline; unemployment exclusion of patronage and income; abandonment exclusion from domestic subsistence; beggary forfeiture of social status; and starvation resulting in physiological decline and illness. What Greenough argues is that those in-charge of the key subsistence decision rulers, landlords, husbands, and family heads when faced with real or threatened shortage of food consciously and knowingly chose to abandon those who depended upon them: subjects, clients, wives, and children. Such personal tragedies of such an immense scale perhaps never happened in Karnataka. Still, the threat of facing such a tragedy always loomed large, especially for the landless. Scarlet Epstein (1973) argues that agricultural workers in Mysore were willing to accept poor wages in kind rather than break o the relationship of dependence with their patrons, because such a break would imply the loss of protection and nurture in times of poor harvest (Epstein 1973). Loss of dignity and social self as a result of the experiences of extreme forms of food scarcity is what Greenough places at the centre of the moral drama of the Great Bengal famine (Greenough 1982). What emerged from my aective histories, especially in the imaginings of the past when there was scarcity was the fact that the colloquial aphorism modale bhala kashta (it was very dicult before/in the beginning) had a connection, on the one hand, with dearth and, on the other, with debt. The combination of the two has for long produced not only morally challenging situations but also strong emotions. The most important among these emotions is the fear of pauperisation. Historically contextual ideologies of social hierarchies and cultural experiences of the loss of social self are at the core of what could be described as the fear of pauperisation. The fear of pauperisation is deeply ingrained in the collective psyche and memory in response to the supra-logical, supra-individual experiences of extreme forms of scarcity hunger and famine. The aective histories, however, show that the moral experience of scarcity implies the loss of social dignity, which has a deeper impact than the impact of food shortage. The threat of facing scarcity is therefore analogically conated in the collective imagination as equivalent to suering social death. In the collective psyche, the loss of social dignity and the experiences of humiliation are therefore remembered and associated with scarcity in such a way that all subsequent agrarian change is measured against these formative experiences. The three landed men from the higher castes imagined that the processes of victimisation, as Greenough described, happened to the lesser people during the times of famine. They were aected only by seeing the surrounding destitution. For the lesser people, i.e., the two women I interviewed, such things happened not only during the extra-ordinary times of acute food shortage; they were inscribed on their daily lives. For much of their precarious lives, these women struggled to transcend the boundaries between the last four of ve stages of victimisation that Greenough describes as only the moral conditions of famine (Greenough 1982). The whole of their lives were diabolical mix of intermittent periods of starvation, beggary and abandonment depending upon whether or not they found employment. There is a signicant dierence, however, between the experiences of both women, which happened within stable structural conditions,

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and the experiences of famine related victimisation narrated by Greenough, which are caused by short term social disruption. The collective memory of the processes of victimisation as a condition of dearth pose a real threat not to the dispossessed, but to those not-dispossessed. It is the threat of transforming their social self into something they are not a pauper. Becoming a pauper would mean loss of social dignity even dogs in my village are better fed, said the 92-year-old Adi-Karnataka woman; it would imply times of violence which both women I interviewed found unspeakable something that spawns a deep sense of embarrassment and awkwardness. Being a pauper is a relative, subjective experience; from whichever side it is imagined, it is an experience of humiliation. These aects of humiliation are in fact an index of social power they imply ideologies of social hierarchies, and have for long been producing strong emotions that could even have an eect on the chances of life and death. In south India, the British administration commonly divided the peasantry into two categories: ryots (landed farmers) and coolies (landless labourers). Whether or not such crude categorisation adequately represented the complex local agrarian system, the relational hierarchy of this division is deeply ingrained in the social psyche. David Arnold explained how during the 18761878 famine in the Madras presidency, when all but the wealthiest were suering, the ryots considered it degrading to take up labouring work on public relief schemes. So strong was the antipathy of the ryots for the coolie work that even at the height of the famine, in the words of the Collector, the ryots would consider it disgraceful to perform earthwork, even to keep alive (Arnold 1984). Vasavi discusses the partial acceptance of famine relief work in north Karnataka during a number of incidents of food scarcity and famine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The stigma in undertaking manual labour was one of the reasons for the refusal of food for work (Vasavi 1996). The Indian cinema has represented this stigma. What is degrading about destitution is its association with manual labour. For instance, Satyajit Rays 1973 lm Ashani Sanket, based on the novel by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, portrays the moral tragedy caused by the great Bengal famine of 1943. When a higher caste Brahmin couple face the real threat of starvation, the wife proposes to earn some rice by working as a paddy-husking labourer along with the lower caste neighbours. The husband refuses to grant permission, saying, they [the lower caste neighbours] hold us in high esteem, you should not lower us in their eyes. Facing starvation was far more acceptable than performing manual labour. The peasantry is now divided into a number of dierent categories, and even now, in everyday expressions in rural Karnataka, the farmers identify themselves as either ryota or coolie. Coolie madtira (I do coolie work) is the common expression by which agricultural labourers describe their profession. To become a coolie from a ryota is the ultimate form of social pauperisation, and could generate a catastrophic degree of distress. Such imagination of lowering of social position when in the past undermined life chances during famine, they now produce suicidal distress. How farmer suicides are triggered by images of dispossession and associated disgrace has been widely discussed. Most powerful among these images, popularly reported by both the media and discussed in academia, is the way creditors bank ocials, middle men or usurers turn up at the door of the indebted farmer, ready to conscate possessions over an unpaid loan; these fears and events trigger strong emotions among farmers, eventually

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resulting in suicide.8 The suicides in a certain sense are the expression of social imaginings of the life of the dispossessed as not worthwhile. The threat of such dispossession to not-so-dispossessed makes life not worth living. It is particularly important to understand the long history of the close relationship between dearth and debt. For peasants during pre-colonial and colonial times, debt and dearth were two sides of the same coin dearth creating the need to borrow, and the high repayment requirements ensuring that dearth was never far away (Hardiman 1996). The peasants were trapped in a cycle of debt and dearth. Interestingly, Hardiman discusses how people in some villages in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra both rich and poor thought that famines were caused by supernatural design, and there was a widespread belief among the peasants that usurers were able to intervene with gods and spirits by means of sorcery, magical diagrams, spells, black arts, and other forms of powerful knowledge so as to prevent rain from falling. Based on a detailed discussion of the sizeable folklore and other historical literature, Hardiman shows that these beliefs were widespread (Hardiman 1996). The historical relationship between dearth and debt takes us beyond the sphere of economy and into the realm of the supernatural, in which usurers have been invested with supremely powerful and god-like agency. On the other side of the supernatural realm of dearth and debt are the equally potent (and violent) experiences of dependence, beggary, hunger and humiliation even suicide. Behind the experiences of agrarian vulnerability are, therefore, not only declining state welfare, scarcity of resources, and the loss of remunerative market. A long history of social imagination of dispossession and violence, irrespective of who was victimised, is inscribed in the collective memory, which produces powerful emotions and aesthetic-reexive judgements about what could be considered a worthwhile social life. Fear of pauperisation and rural alienation In current times, the aect of the fear of pauperisation rooted in the longue duree of ideologies of hierarchy is closely intertwined with the wider issue of rural alienation. What is particularly signicant is the way both of the women I interviewed described their work. The Lambani woman described her life spent breaking stones and making dust, whereas the Adi-Karnataka woman called it sifting mud. Such metaphors are replete in the expression of rural alienation. Not so uncommonly, the practice of agriculture itself is stigmatised as a worthless enterprise, as lowly profession, for lesser people, without respect as pauperisation. In 2006, the news of a village put on sale, in the suicide-prone Vidarbha region, attracted international media. News reporters descended from various parts of Europe and the United States to the otherwise obscure village of Dorli for a story.9 The central protagonist of the story, a young female school teacher and Sarpanch of the village, complained about the states apathy towards agriculture; she also posed an emotional question in front of the voyeuristic international media How long should our lives be tied down with mud? Working with mud is not only lowly; it is not futuristic. Gupta puts it this way, town is not coming to country, as much as the
8 Apart from my own eld notes, a number of studies have pointed this out (Iyer and Manick 2000, Sainath 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, Gill and Singh 2006, Vasavi 2008). 9 For instance: http://www.merinews.com/catFull.jsp?articleID133253.

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country is reaching out to town, leaving behind a host of untidy debris (Gupta 2005). Refusing to work with mud, stones, earth, and dust could even be interpreted as an act of seeking dignity and self-worth. For instance, some landed farmers from the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra cultivate soya or maize because of the acute labour shortage. These landed villagers at the same time complain about how the idle and unemployed youth spend time teasing women and chewing pan,10 and are unwilling to work in agriculture. In the Vidarbha region many young villagers increasingly prefer to work in nearby chemical industries where the working conditions are dangerous and unhealthy. These industry-employed youth not only earn less than what they could otherwise make from agriculture; the wage labour does not produce an assured year-round employment, as someone with a pure concern for economics might suspect. In other parts of India, the previously untouchable castes now not only identify themselves by respected names, e.g., low caste members call themselves Adi-dharmis in Punjab and Adi-Karnataka in Karnataka, they also forge a symbolic deance towards their social superiors by refusing to perform any menial work for them (Gupta 2005). Those at the lowest rung have perhaps moved on to the less muddy pastures; however, this hasnt made a signicant dierence in the agrarian structure. The old positions of labouring castes are now being fast lled by newer sets of marginalised people. Migrant tribal people now replace village-based labouring castes in Vidarbha. They are transported long distances and kept in hazardous living conditions to perform the menial tasks traditionally performed by the labouring castes. Similarly in Gujarat, the migrant, seasonal, child and female labour now is brought from south Rajasthan and kept in shanties far away from villages, to perform the pollination of Bt cotton seeds (Shah 2005, 2008). Yet another side of this quest for dignity is the emergent dominant trend all over rural India to seek non-agricultural work even if it brings danger, lack of health, lthy living conditions, lower income, and uncertainties in urban and periurban areas. Even when the paupers have symbolically moved on and away from mud and stone, the meaning and social ideology of pauperisation survives. These ideologies survive in the form of what is socially imagined, what is deeply ingrained in the collective imagination as lower and lesser. Performing menial tasks in mud, stones and sand has become a symbolic equivalent of pauperisation even when one is a wealthy and landed farmer. In comparison with its urban counterpart, agriculture is now a paupers profession worthless, which inspires scholars like Dipankar Gupta to declare whither the Indian village (Gupta 2005). Conclusion Farmers suicides are widely attributed to agrarian crisis. A burgeoning body of scholarly literature explains farmer suicides as a result of or response to structural transformations induced by globalisation and liberalisation. The liberal developmental approaches on the other hand routinely attribute farmer suicides to various forms of scarcities or shortages, for example, prices, growth, and resources. Despite the vast dierences between the scholarly literature privileging the political economy explanation and liberal developmental approaches focused on scarcities, there exists
10

Pan is a mixture of betel leaf and betel nut. Chewing pan is a habit conventionally associated with the elite and idle classes. These days, chewing pan implies an act of idleness irrespective of the class and caste context of the one who chews.

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a commonality both approaches relate farmer suicides with a malfunctioning economy. A wide variety of techno-institutional changes have been suggested in response. Most notable among these techno-institutional remedies are a second green revolution and genetically modied crop biotechnology. Without ignoring the impact of globalisation and liberalisation, in this essay I want to challenge the predominantly economic explanation of farmers suicides. I contend that the framework of economic rationality is insucient to explain why a disturbingly high number of middle farmers are taking their lives. Such framework not only treats farmers as victims of external forces; it ignores the way in which these external forces interact with history, culture, and agrarian and social relations. This essay is an attempt to provide an alternative explanation of the suicides by undertaking a study of aective histories of scarcities. It considers farmers suicides as a heightened moment an aective locale from where it reviews the agrarian change. It proposes that when suicides are indeed related to scarcities, this relationship is not necessarily shaped by pure economics. My arguments are derived from what I call the aective histories of experiences of scarcities. Aects of scarcities are inscribed on forms of life; they are deeply ingrained as over-learned habits in cultural politics; they are expressed in everydayness; their mode of expression lies in substantive values, imaginings, and symbols, upon which the judgement of a good life is based; they are markers of contemporary life and an index of relations of power between the self and the other. Based on aective histories of the relationships between death, dearth and debt, there are three ways in which this essay provides an alternative explanation of suicide. Firstly, the aective histories of experiences of dearth explain the way in which suicides and the wider feelings of rural alienation relate to the historically bounded imagination of the self and the other, connected by a long history of deeply ingrained ideologies of hierarchy. I have discussed here the cultural imagination of two distinct incidents of scarcity the acute food shortage faced during the last century, and the manifestations of various forms of resource scarcities since the introduction of the green revolution. I argue that even when the newer forms of scarcities related to the pursuit of abundance since the introduction of the green revolution are radically dierent from the food scarcity experienced prior to the introduction of green revolution, the aective responses analogically collate newer forms of scarcities with the past experiences of food shortages through the fear of pauperisation. Even while landed and socially advantageous farmers never actually experienced food shortages, the collective imagination retains memories of famine and acute food shortage, this experienced mainly by the dispossessed section of the peasantry. The cultural meaning of these memories is analogically understood as experiences of impoverishment, humiliation and violence. These memories are translated in the collective imagination as social pauperisation the loss of social self. The suicides in a certain sense are the expression of social imaginings of the life of the dispossessed as not worthwhile. The threat of such dispossession to those not-so-dispossessed makes life not worth living. These cultural imaginings signicantly revolve around the idea of what stands as a real and dignied social self, and what is considered a good life. The hierarchical constructions of the self and the other are deeply ingrained in these imaginations. For the suicides, therefore, whether scarcity actually exists is less relevant than how the idea of scarcity is articulated in aective responses. Thus, the relationship between real scarcity and suicides is not reciprocally straightforward but highly intricate.

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Secondly, those farmers committing suicide belong to the culture of social, political and material inuence and even dominance in the agrarian structure. The farmers who have principally beneted from the green revolution and whose voice has been politically well-represented are at the core of agrarian distress. If I translate into the present the social categories of the six people I interviewed for oral histories of food shortage, the farmers committing suicides would be comparable to the category of the three landed and inuential farmers who have never themselves faced any actual food scarcities; whereas those who belong to the comparable social strata of the two dispossessed women who not only faced food scarcity but experienced humiliation and violence most of their lives are not committing suicide. The collective memory of the processes of victimisation as a condition of dearth poses a real threat not to the dispossessed, but to those not-dispossessed. It is a threat of transforming their social self into something they are not: a pauper someone lesser and lower. Lastly, aects expressed in everyday forms of conversation point out that there are several ssures or disjunctures in the smooth progression of technological change from the past to the present to the future, implying a degree of futureless-ness. When the connection between the past avaga or modale, when there was scarcity and the present is positively evaluated as progress, a similar connection between the present and the future is partially broken. Founded on the philosophy of alleviating scarcity and scripted with the promise of abundance, the green revolution technology has coded farmers choices and aspirations. Although the future in principle is unknowable, in the light of the speed of technological innovations, especially in the lifespan of this generation, the future has become evermore pregnant with possibility. This limitless optimism, however, is conicted with the newer forms of scarcities and various forms of destabilisations including the impact on human and animal health and on plant ecology. This conict is presented in the everyday forms of conversation that oscillate between modale bhala kashta (it was very dicult in the beginning/ before) and modale thumba channagidi (it was very nice in the beginning/before). Limitless technological optimism has not resolved this conict, which is at the heart of the disjuncture in the progression of the past into the present and onto the future. If farmer suicides point out to any crisis, it is the crisis generated by the lack of alternative forms of political and cultural imagination. The emphasis on globalisation and liberalisation and explanations of scarcities embedded in arguments of economic rationality are necessary but not sucient to explain farmer suicides. It is important to understand how the eects of economic reforms translate into aective responses. The aects of experiences of scarcities relate to the way in which ideologies of hierarchy reinvent forms of injustice, discrimination and violence and the way in which the self is viewed against the imaginations of the other. Suicides have to be located in a historically and culturally specic agrarian context. For an eective political agency of transformation to emerge we need a rounded critique of all forms of social injustice and violence.

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Esha Shah is an assistant professor in the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on history and anthropology of science and technology. e.shah@maastrichtuniversity.nl