“Something is terribly wrong in the countryside.” Two days before hanging himself to death on 24 March 2008, fifty-year-old farmer Shrik...
“Something is terribly wrong in the countryside.”
Two days before hanging himself to death on 24 March 2008, fifty-year-old farmer Shrikrishna Kalamb penned his own eulogy – all of six lines – and put it in his shirt’s pocket.
In chaste Varhadi, a dialect of Marathi spoken in the western Vidarbha region that the British called Berar, it begins thus:
Me aagala vegala, mahi nyarich jindagani;
mahye maran bhi aahe, jase avakali paani.I am unique; my life an uncommon odyssey;
My death will also be like untimely rain.
Kalamb, a 5-acre, atypical, dry-land farmer from Vidarbha, a region in the news since 1995 for farmers’ suicides, wrote that his cotton was precious to him, like his poems. He likened its roots to the sweetness of sugarcane. In the poem, he built an image of his body hanging from a door – he had made up his mind to commit suicide.
Symbolism and emotion mark Kalamb’s poignant poems; he ended his life at his sister’s home in Murtijapur town, 30 kilometres from his native village Babhulgaon (Jahangir) in Akola. It is one of the six districts in Maharashtra – all in western Vidarbha – with high incidence of farmer suicides. He left behind five daughters and a bereaved wife.
Like most farmers, he had unpaid debts...
