Jocelyn Lim Chua’s In Pursuit of The Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India (University of California Press, 2014) is an excellent attempt to map out a “critical anthropology of suicide” (p. 1). In this finely written ethnography, that captures the suicide crisis in the South Indian state of Kerala (also known as the suicide capital since the 1990s), the book primarily looks for answers to the question – “what makes for a livable life?” (p. ix). She argues that suicide offers a critical lens to look at how ordinary life transforms Kerala. This work is one of its kind, a novel departure from the Durkheimian approach to the study of suicide as a social fact. It looks at the ‘reality’ of suicide and acknowledges its presence in the developmental state of Kerala. Rather than looking at suicide as an ‘event’ after it has occurred, it provokes one to think how the possibility of suicide and death is present – “material, psychic and social reality” (p. 14) – in the lives of people and that of the society of Kerala. 

While Durkheim and others following his methodological tradition looked at suicide as a social pathology and as a sign of social adversity, Kerala – which has a story of exceptionalism and developmentalism to tell, with its progressive social indicators – offers a very different site for the study of suicide. Combating the commonsensical understanding and media portrayals of suicide as anti-social, this work takes the reconceptualization of the object of suicide as its first and foremost task, to be looked at as something productive and ‘generative of new ways of living’ (p. 4).

Parting away from the assumption that an ‘investigative’ method is the only way of studying or understanding suicide, she does this primarily through ethnographic methods, banking on the engagement with everyday life that the method allows one to; along with historical analysis and review of media. The author makes it clear that she looks at “suicide as a shifting, historical, multiple object” (p. 16), rather than striving to find out some ‘truth’. She employs ethnography as rooted in subjectivity and as “a form of practice and mode of engagement embedded in human relationships” (ibid.). In this rich ethnography, she looks at the everyday lives of those who wish to end their lives (attempters and survivors), witnesses of suicide, families who have lost a family member due to suicide, the interaction between mental health professionals and patients, and even those who are not directly touched by suicide – to grapple with the questions of when and in what circumstances does one turn to death as an (or the only) option, how one (differently) engages with life.      

The book is divided into two parts, with three chapters in each part. The first section deals with and posits suicide as a problem of aspiration, middle-class aspiration in particular. This issue of aspirations is placed within the context of globalisation and liberalisation that forms the background of the changing landscape of the state of Kerala and its development model. One of the central points that Chua brings out through her cases in this section is that rather than an aberration or obstacle to the path of development, suicide is seen as the very outcome of these changes. Looking at the shifting horizons of aspirations in Kerala, upward mobility in terms of education and employment emerges as pivotal.

The book starts with its venture first, into the construction of suicide in the contemporary landscape of Kerala as a collective failure of the region (Chapter 1 – ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea’). It delves deep into the theme of aspiration and its failure which prove to be fatal. With its second step, it strides into the clinical setting, exploring how mental health professionals comprehend the issue of aspirations and the risk of suicide with their patients (Chapter 2 – ‘Gazing at the Stars, Aiming for the Treetops’). Chapter 3 (‘Tales the Dead Are Made to Tell’) looks at how death and the dead person live in the tales of others, how those living to speak of the dead, remember them and the failures that led to the death. It is concerned with the ‘afterlife’ of the dead.

Since a majority of her participants happen to be from the middle class, those with generational wealth and from the upper caste, these cases also bring out the politics of aspirations and the unease that these individuals exhibit at the new entrants to the ever-expanding category of ‘middle class’. It urges one to think not only in the direction of what is the nature of these changing aspirations but who can aspire, how much can one aspire, realistic and ‘unrealistic’ aspirations, what the quality of life aspired for, and how is good life defined. The answers to these questions are embedded in the identities and materiality of class, caste, gender and community.

The second part of the book lays out how suicide lives as an ever-present possibility in everyday, ordinary life. It looks at how life and death are intimately woven together in their most mundane form – jokes, conversations, acts of care, etc. This part brings to light how one lives with this possibility, with the anticipation of suicide and the kind of interventions that are made.

Shifting to the particularity of the gendered nature of suicide, chapter 4 (‘Care – Full Acts’) grasps how women speak of ‘willful’ death – the jokes and fantasies about it. The next chapter is specifically dedicated to the spatial aspect of how one looks at their own life in terms of (migratory) possibilities and limits, which constitute the larger terrain of suicide – in which one experiences feelings of hope, hopelessness, frustration (Chapter 5 – ‘Anywhere But Here’). Lastly, in Chapter 6 (Fit for the Future), the book takes up the issue of child suicide in the state. It looks at the need to reform middle-class parenting in light of increasing rates of child suicide. These reforms in parenting style and child suicide are placed in the larger context of the change from joint family to nuclear family and the change which is seen at a generational level, which is part of the wider discourse on suicide in Kerala.

The accounts in this section convey the multiple realities and speak the multiple languages in which suicide exists and is part of their life. These realities need not necessarily be the same and indeed that is what gives this work an edge. Chua looks at suicide as something that has differing and multiple realities, instead of an objective truth or fact that exists out there to be studied by an anthropologist.

In this sense, this work marks an important step in diverting away from traditional anthropological, psychological, and sociological approaches to understanding suicide. The author contends that the shadow that suicide casts on Kerala alters the way people live at the most basic level; and that death and life are deeply intermeshed in such a society. The different realities, which each narrative articulates, coexist with each other. These accounts underline how death by suicide is read by the family members and others in the neighbourhood, and in fact how at large people make meaning of the reciprocities of life and death.                    

The book ends with an Afterword and Conclusion, in which Chua notes the changing topography of virtual and ‘actual’ spaces – given the expansion of communication and new media technologies – in which individuals dream, aspire, etc., which in turn alters their ideas of what makes up for a livable life. With the transformed role that the public sphere has come to play in which mediatized forms of suicide become visible, she calls for an anthropology of suicide, that “considers how people experience time and space differently and unevenly from specific vantage points” (p. 289).

There are multiple points at which the book stands out. I think one of the strengths of this book is the way each of the accounts is illustrated. The strength of ethnography and the relationships that Chua built during her fieldwork reflect through. Every single chapter is enriched with in-depth accounts. One of the most crucial things that she does when writing each of these accounts, she pays attention to and notes critical details like – the language(s) used by the interviewee, and the setting of these interviews – that helps the reader get a complete sense of the context in which one speaks of life and death. Given the sensitive nature of topics like suicide and death, keeping in mind these small but important details can help build an overall sketch. Her arguments backed by these accounts produce how suicidal tendencies overwhelm the space of Kerala and it makes one think of suicide in ways that otherwise, most often than not, go unnoticed – hence, breaking away from the commonsensical understanding of suicide. The flow of writing and knitting of accounts with arguments and theoretical, conceptual framework, allows the reader to keep hold of the larger argument and keep up with how chapters proceed.    

The book offers insight into how suicide and suicidal tendencies are weaved in the nitty-gritty of everyday life. This book offers new avenues and routes to explore the possibility and risk of suicide – in terms of job prospects, educational aspirations, failed migration, marriage, etc. – and the performance of ordinary life within the confines of family and household.  It is the household that serves as the starting point, be it in terms of parenting, familial expectations, etc. and it comes back to this same setting, where ways to prevent and manage suicide are employed.    

Chapter 4’s (Care – full Acts) engagement with women’s language and fantasies of life and death stands out in this context and is one of the strongest points of this work. It surfaces the gendered complexities of marriage and family life and in what circumstances women turn to death or ‘joke’ about death. Women speak of choosing death as an ‘act’ of caring for others in the family and to ‘seek’ care, in a context where they otherwise remain neglected and not cared for. The treatment of ‘jokes’ or ‘casual’ mentions of suicide or death by women – as a ‘threat’ by family members, clinicians, etc. is particularly noteworthy. This brings to attention the language one uses to speak of life and death, to envision a life for others after one’s death, further raising questions about what kind of life one aspires for one’s self and others, how life and death co-constitute each other, how death is folded into life.

Keeping in line with the larger aim of this book – that of looking at how suicide does not simply terminate life, but tells a lot more about the living and ways of living – it is the space of household where these (changes in) ways of living are put to work. On the one hand, suicide and its possibility are fabricated in this context, which is then in turn placed in the larger context of globalization, liberalization, as being experienced by Kerala. It asks one to look at how global changes are made meaningful at the local level, what it means to live in these circumstances, and how one lives and makes amends during such anxious times. Chua does a fabulous job of weaving this background within which suicide is then positioned, which helps the reader grasp the grim state of affairs in Kerala, in contrast to the portrayal of Kerala as a model for development for the rest of the country.

This book is certainly a valuable addition to the expanding literature on suicide, particularly in the context of South Asia. While this work locates and investigates suicide and suicide-like acts as peculiarly placed amidst (and as a product of) the transformations and global change that Kerala is undergoing and is limited to the state, it offers a strong starting point for such studies in South Asia. This region-specific study considers regional demography, regional migration, changes in family structure, changes in consumer behaviour, etc. Rather than simply looking at statistics, which indicate the suicide rate in Kerala as three times the national average in the 1990s and early 2000s, it explores the ground reality of lives in Kerala. It invites an inquiry into suicide from several vantage points – education, employment, migration, marriage, family, etc. – and critically associates these with lived realities of caste, class, gender, and community – that form the social, political, and cultural fabric of (any) society. By positioning suicide in history, society, and culture, it counters how suicide and suicidal patients are understood and represented in the literature on psychiatry – as atomized individuals, not taking the larger context into the picture.    

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Jahnvi Jha has completed her MA in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and is currently interning with Doing Sociology.