In her article, “Recalling the Suicide: Affective Storytelling and the Ethics of ‘Good’ Womanhood,” Anjali Krishan examines how middle-class married women in Delhi narrate the suicides of women in their neighborhoods. Krishan shows that, in retelling these deaths from the lens of the living, narratives become ethical commentaries on the meanings of “good” womanhood, particularly “good” Hindu womanhood. Krishan’s article raises broader questions about what makes a life worth living, whose suffering becomes recognizable, who gets to tell the stories of death, and how death acquires meaning for those who remain. In this author interview, Krishan reflects on the meanings that death and dying assume for the living, the narrative forms through which stories of suicide are told, and the possibilities of thinking with refusal as both an ethnographic and an analytical orientation. The conversation also considers what attending closely to storytelling, silence, and refusal can reveal about ethical life and gendered suffering in contemporary India.

Shahana Munazir (SM): You open with the striking demographic fact that “more than a third of women who die by suicide globally are Indian” (428), the majority of whom are married, and then immediately pivot away from epidemiology toward storytelling of these suicides as your object of analysis. What do you think narrative form brings to fore when speaking of what death means within cultural anthropology? In other words, what does treating “suicide stories” as ethnographic data, rather than the suicides themselves, allow you to see that a more conventional study of, let’s say, suicide causes would foreclose?

Anjali Krishan (AK): At a very basic level, both types of research are about context: Demographic facts are one sort of context; stories around suicide are another, one that centers on how people live with the suicide. A causal account of suicide fixes the death at the moment it happened. It asks what produced this outcome and treats the answer as a fact. A narrated account doesn't fix the death—every telling selects and emphasizes particular emotions, facts, and events, shaped by the storyteller's priorities at that specific moment.

Examining suicide stories thus gave me access to the context of gender roles, everyday ethical prioritizing, and the recognition of, or failure to recognize, gendered suffering. Treating these stories as ethnographic data therefore shifts the question from, “Why did she die?” to, “What does her death mean, or not mean, for those who remain?” Moreover, it changes the object of analysis from the dead woman to what the living woman telling the story considers to be a life worth living. That shift makes visible forms of social and ethical life that a focus on the causes of the suicide is not concerned with.

SM: This is such a beautiful ethnographic article with so many layers of intimacy and affect that weave into each other. Each of your three narrators occupies a different position on what you might call a spectrum of narrative intimacy with the dead woman/neighbor. In the first story, Kanchan gives us a reluctant, fact-bound retelling; Shruti embodies a rasa-bhava performance; Anita gives a forensic insistence on murder rather than suicide. You frame these as distinct ethical grammars. Could you say more about why you resist reading these differences psychologically—as a matter of who is more or less empathetic, more or less defensive—and insist instead on reading them as ethical and political positions? What is at stake in that interpretive choice using ethics, for anthropologists interested in understanding deaths and suicides?

AK: A psychological read would risk individualizing the suicide story to the woman who was telling it. It also, again, risks oversimplifying storytelling choices as different forms of “coping” or “resilience” and risks pathologizing dissent as something that is borne out of women’s personalities. 

Reading the narratives as ethical and political commentaries, however, recognizes that each woman is taking a political position on the death when she describes what and why it happened. The suicide story then becomes a vehicle through which women can ethically engage with and critique their world. This approach is rooted in the anthropology of emotions, where emotions are understood as culturally shaped ways of signaling what matters and a legitimate form of social knowledge, instead of internal individualized psychological states. How a narrator understands responsibility, injustice and suffering is therefore a comment on the social and ethical worlds in which the death is being remembered. 

SM: Most scholarship on caste and suicide in India centers cases where caste is loud and named, typically Dalit or lower-caste deaths made legible through caste violence. Your three narrators invert this: caste-privileged women narrating other women’s deaths, where caste surfaces only obliquely. Caste is, by your own account, “elusive” (429) in these stories, yet it also forms the structural background of the stories. For example, Kanchan mentions that she and her husband belonged to the “same community” (432). In Shruti’s story, we see that she blames the dead neighbor’s older, poorer, lower-caste mother-in-law imposing outdated patriarchal norms on the younger, educated, high-caste daughter-in-law. You argue that caste forms “a crucial backdrop” precisely because Hindutva’s casteless meritocratic ideal demands its disavowal. I am fascinated by this because it raises a methodological puzzle: How does an ethnographer write convincingly about a structuring absence, about something operating through not being said? What textual or interpretive moves let you argue for caste’s causal weight in suicide stories without putting words, or categories, into your narrators’ mouths that they themselves withheld?

AK: In the field I felt that the women I interacted with, even though they did not know each other, were talking to each other. They would often pick up on the same narratives and share their opinion of it. However, when most of the women avoided, or only obliquely mentioned certain issues, it puzzled me. Borrowing from Veena Das, I understand what’s left unsaid is not irrelevant. To make sense of what was absent, I first contextualized the stories I was hearing in the storyteller’s lives, then juxtaposed those stories against each other’s narratives and finally placed them against broader cultural narratives, such as Hindutva. By layering these overlapping contexts the ideas that resonated, were disputed, or were all but absent became more apparent. 

Caste was one idea that almost everyone, apart from Shruti, seemed to be skirting around. Looking across my interactions, I realized I wasn’t seeing caste because I was expecting to hear it being spoken about loudly and explicitly. Instead, it came up subtly and unevenly. Kanchan, for instance, understood caste in terms of community, belonging and shared social norms. Shruti, on the other hand, saw caste as being about social hierarchies, exclusion and power. Meanwhile, Anita avoided caste in her stories altogether. Read against Hindutva’s insistence on a casteless meritocratic present, her silence can be interpreted as disavowal of caste as a category. Yet, for Anita specifically, this silence may not be ideological and instead relates to her inter-caste marriage and her forging an upper-caste family that crosses caste lines. As an ethnographer I cannot quite arrive at why she is silent, but I don’t think this uncertainty is a flaw. Instead, it is one more example of women’s different ways of speaking, avoiding, or reframing caste and what it reveals about the social worlds in which they are making sense of these deaths. What matters to me is therefore not that caste can be shown to have caused any particular suicide, but that it forms part of the social and ethical backdrop against which these deaths are narrated and understood.

SM: Shruti’s critique of samskaar in your article is so nicely put. You argue that she does not reject the idea that families should cultivate values, but she “calls for a new social ethics around how families conduct themselves, one that explicitly recognizes women as equals and worthy of care” (438). Yet you also note that her embrace of merit reproduces caste and class hierarchy even as it unsettles patriarchal ones. In showcasing these contradictions, you point to a form of middle-class Hindu womanhood with a sense of a neoliberal feminist ethics. In your opinion, can this feminist ethics built on meritocratic worth ever fully escape the hierarchies of meritocracy or is it not meant to escape at all?

AK: Shruti’s ethics doesn't really try to escape meritocracy. Instead, she uses meritocracy to relocate the terms on which women become worthy of recognition and care. She rejects the idea that women should silently endure suffering for the sake of their families, by arguing that women, through education, work and other forms of achievement, have other ways to demonstrate their worth. But in doing so, she effectively implies that worth is conditional on whether a woman has done enough to deserve recognition. 

Her use of merit, thus, provides an alternative view of value through which to challenge patriarchal expectations. However, it simultaneously makes unequal outcomes appear legitimate when they can be understood as earned. It also distorts the role that structural privileges such as caste and class play in shaping who is able to achieve, and whose achievements are recognized. The question, then, is not whether this feminist ethics is meant to escape meritocracy, but what becomes possible, and what becomes invisible, when women’s equality is articulated through merit. In Shruti’s case, it opens up a space for women to be recognized as autonomous and worthy of care, while simultaneously reproducing the inequalities that determine who is most readily recognized as worthy.

SM: Your epistemological honesty about not knowing runs through the piece, for example, Kanchan’s “I didn’t want to know” (434), your own refusal to consult court records for ethical purposes, the methodological humility about freezing something “perpetually evolving” (430) onto the page. Rather than treating these refusals as limitations to be apologized for, you seem to treat not knowing itself as ethnographic opening. I am curious whether you’d frame refusal here as a method, a theory, or both. Could you talk about refusal across these three registers: the dead woman’s unknowability, the narrator’s refusal to elaborate, and your own ethical refusal to not know or write?

AK: In this ethnography, refusal was closely entangled with uncertainty. Suicide stories are, at their heart, about wrestling with the unknowability of a dead woman’s decision to die. This was uncomfortable for both the women who told me these stories and for me, because we were left with the question: What makes a life so unlivable that refusing it appears to be a legitimate choice? Often, the answer boiled down to “I don’t know.”

I do not consider the dead woman’s unknowability a form of refusal, as that implies that she intended to be unknowable. Instead, refusal emerges in how the living respond to her unknowability. By saying “I don’t want to know,” Kanchan’s refusal to know goes beyond withholding information to disrupting the expectation that a suicide story should produce an explanation. In writing this ethnography, I also refused to pursue certain forms of knowledge, for a variety of reasons, including avoiding compromising anonymity, violating ethical boundaries, or giving the appearance of certainty where things are more nebulous. Such refusals allowed me to challenge assumptions about what a complete ethnography looks like.

As a method, refusal means writing an ethnography in a way which refuses to treat the dead woman’s unknowability as a problem that has to be solved. As a theory, refusal, for me, means recognizing that not-knowing is sustained and negotiated collectively, between the living woman who narrates the suicide story of an unknowable dead woman, and the ethnographer who decides what to do with what she has been told. These refusals alter what counts as a story, undercutting the assumption that knowing more, explaining more, or resolving uncertainty is necessarily what makes an account better. Instead, the collective, cumulative not-knowing keeps the dead woman available to be re-engaged with, rather than turning her death into a story that can be told once and then put away.

SM: The anthropology of death has long asked how societies classify death into “good” and “bad” deaths, and what ritual or moral work is required to make a death mournable at all. I see that your article sits squarely in that territory since you draw on Andriolo’s framing of gendered good and bad suicides, and on Butler’s point that a dehumanized death makes no claim on the living to mourn it. Interestingly, I noticed that explicit religious idiom is largely absent from the actual death-talk in your stories. Your interlocutors do not mention funeral rites, there is no language of the soul’s fate, no invocation of karma or divine will to explain why their married neighbor died. Even samskaar, the one religious-inflected term that recurs, is deployed around marriage, not death itself. Was that absence something you noticed too in your fieldwork? Is there a religious vocabulary of death and dying that these women avoided or displaced, and if so, would you say its absence does some ideological work, making these deaths harder to talk about (like Kanchan’s case) and harder to grieve?

AK: For me, the lack of religiously-inflected death talk is linked to the gendered nature of my fieldwork. Access to formal Hindu rituals around death is limited for women who are not immediate relatives, and the women I spoke with rarely had access to the dead woman’s funeral rituals. They therefore could not draw on these events in telling their stories. Moreover, the fact that they told these stories to me, a woman they perceived as younger, also played a role. Ideas about the pollution of death vary immensely across regional, caste and class contexts, but the act of telling a suicide story to a younger woman risks crossing religious boundaries around who can be brought into a space of mourning and into proximity with that pollution. It is not surprising, therefore, that religious language around death did not feature prominently in these accounts.

When I pressed women on concepts such as karma or reincarnation, most rejected them as explanations, pointing out that they did not know what happened after death or why things happened the way they did. There was a particular antipathy towards the idea that the woman’s death might have been deserved because of her karma. However, I would be hesitant to say that the absence of this language made the deaths harder to talk about or grieve. Instead, their responses suggested that these concepts did not provide the women I spoke with a particularly useful way of making sense of these deaths.

What had greater purchase were religious and ethical concepts concerned with how one lives, such as dharma and samskaar, which were more commonly invoked when women narrated suicide stories. These concepts gave them a language for thinking about women’s roles, relationships and responsibilities, and for evaluating how a woman had been treated during her life. The moral work of these stories therefore happens less through explaining her death and more through asking what her life, and the lives of the women around her, ought to have been.

In terms of grievability, this means that what makes a death legible as a loss is not simply whether a woman has died, but what kind of life she had lived and whether that life could be recognized as valuable. In that sense, these stories suggest that grievability is not something that death automatically produces but is created through the ethical frames available to those who remain.