Suicide Notes under Judicial Scrutiny in India

Daniela Berti
2018 South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal  
While acknowledging the role of legal officers in generating theories of "suicidality" through the investigative and reporting process, Widger has more recently showed how state-generated theories (Widger 2015) on suicide coexist with ordinary villagers and townsfolk-generated narratives. In his work based on an ethnography of suicide in Sri Lanka, he argues that folk and state suicide stories do not exist independently but are to be taken as "mutually generative" in the sense that the
more » ... tations they produce cycle between one another" (Widger 2015:49). Drawing from Widger's argument, I focus in this paper on particular kinds of texts that are sometimes found in court files on suicides and which are commonly known as "suicide notes," that is notes which have supposedly been written by a person who has allegedly committed suicide and who wrote down the reason for their decision to take their own life. Unlike most of the voices that emerge from a court file which, as shown by the works mentioned above, end up being mediated by a legal or judicial instance-the police, the court or the lawyer-suicide notes
doi:10.4000/samaj.4481 fatcat:qfpjrr35sjev5orddtf6fqmk6q