The farmer suicides which have taken place in India since 1995 constitute the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. Neoliberal reforms and the opening of agriculture to global markets have resulted in rising costs of production and falling prices for produce. As a consequence, small farmers have been trapped in cycles of debt, which has been cited as the main cause of the farmer suicides. By engaging with the case of farmer suicides, this paper examines the different functions of death in postcolonial biopolitics. In liberal biopolitics, death is the limit of power. Suicide, then, is a way to evade biopower’s hold over life. The farmer suicides, too, have been discussed as a particular mode of resistance to neoliberal development. Yet, the paper argues that the farmer suicides have rather functioned as a way of disposing of a population that has become surplus while also further legitimating biopolitical calls to educate those who remain on how to cope, manage risk and embrace a neoliberal entrepreneurial mentality. Revisiting Heidegger’s notion of being-toward-death through the work of his postcolonial critics, the paper finally argues that death is not an individualising factor for colonised peoples. As far as death is constitutive of the reality of colonised subjects, decolonialisation does not arise out of one’s encounter with the singularity of one’s death but from a desire to evade death, not only one’s own but also that of others.
