Paper short abstract:

Litigation before the Indian Supreme Court construes the exalted Jain ritual fast to death as criminal suicide. This paper examines the fast as a socially imitative phenomenon of voluntary death, but also its legal and moral distinctions from pathologies of suicide or the category of social evil.

Paper long abstract:

In Indian judicial rulings on personal law and cases involving legislative attempts to regulate social life, religious ethical discourses have often intersected with state discourses and concerns about what practices are considered constitutionally “protected” versus socially “pathological” for citizens and communities. Since 2015, Jain communities have defended the voluntary ritual fast until death known as sallekhanā, practiced mostly by elderly laywomen, against claims formalized in Public Interest Litigation that voluntarily fasting to death constitutes suicide, even under conditions of terminal illness, and that glorification of the fast as an ideal or exemplary death constitutes its abetment. Suicide and its abetment remain crimes under the Indian Penal Code, though the law has moved away from punitive measures and toward a therapeutic approach with the Indian Mental Healthcare Act of 2017. However, the presumption of social pressure frames the fast as a social evil disproportionately affecting vulnerable women that follows a pattern of contagion, like sati or widow immolation. Jains vehemently deny that sallekhanā is suicide, and the number of sallekhanā fasts has seen a sharp uptick since the case was filed in 2006, from estimates of 200 annually to 500 or more. This paper explores the uses and limitations of Durkheim’s terms, anthropologically examining how sallekhanā has been pathologized as harboring a risk of suicide contagion amid competing reformist logics of the state and psychiatric discourses. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I further consider how that risk of contagion remains implicitly gendered because of women’s assumed suggestibility.