'Against Suicide': The poetic sociology of a democracy in crisis

By Ravi Ranjan* 

Raghuvir Sahay’s poem "Against Suicide" (Ātmahatyā ke viruddha) resists easy categorization. It is not merely a political protest, nor simply an existential cry. It is, more precisely, a work of poetic sociology—an attempt to read the hidden human textures of Indian democracy through the compressed, sensuous language of poetry. Where sociology dissects institutions, poetry restores the feeling of what it means to live inside them. Sahay does both. He examines the academy, the hospital, the newspaper, the university, and the political platform not as abstract structures, but as living mechanisms that slowly erase the very citizens they claim to serve.

The poem opens with a sentence that has gone hollow: “The time has come, the editorial keeps saying / though every ten years I have already said that the time has come.” This refrain exposes the moral bankruptcy of public language. Editorials, leaders, and institutions recycle crisis rhetoric until it becomes white noise, always announcing urgency while deferring real change. The poet notes that he felt this rupture long before the newspapers proclaimed it—a reminder that lived experience often outpaces institutional recognition. Against this dead language, Sahay sets the scattered, intimate imagery of ordinary life: poverty, fog, a wife, a harmonium, “canned noise.” The incoherence is deliberate. It mirrors the sensory disorder of a modernity in which objects, emotions, and media have become entangled, and in which All India Radio “sings, throttling the throat”—a voice present, but strangled.

The institutions of democracy appear throughout the poem, yet they function as instruments of alienation. The academy’s “grand council” meets endlessly only to settle “the level of boredom.” The municipal corporation celebrates festivals while ministers climb “upon the people’s chest.” The hospital ceases to be a place of healing and becomes an administrative maze where “the doctor said that is not my job / that is Musaddi’s.” Musaddilal—an everyman bureaucrat who recurs in different guises—embodies the mediocrity of power. He is not a villain but a functionary, and in that ordinariness lies the poem’s sharpest insight: history is made not only by great leaders but by the petty administrators who make injustice feel routine.

At the center of this institutional critique is the body of the ordinary citizen. Sahay returns repeatedly to faces the public sphere has already forgotten: Ramlal dragging his crushed foot, laborers carrying chairs after political sessions, a despairing boy whose death becomes a footnote. These figures are not objects of pity; they are the true protagonists of democratic life. The poet asks of the dead boy not what ideology killed him, but whether he had sisters, what dishes he liked, what word he was searching for. Modern media records death as information; Sahay restores it as memory, insisting that to understand a human being is not to know the cause of his death but to understand the manner of his life.

This attention to the marginal is also an act of resistance against what the poem reveals as a deeper crisis: the dehumanization built into everyday social relations. “The pain of living a rank below the human every day” is not only economic exploitation but a steady erosion of dignity. The citizen becomes a voter, the student a subordinate, the patient a file, the worker a statistic. In one devastating image, the poet sees a dejected face in a crowd and reaches out, but “his back / was too smooth” to touch. Smoothness here is a metaphor for distance. Proximity no longer guarantees intimacy; people are so close they have ceased to see one another.

Against this condition, the poem locates its ethics not in external revolution but in internal rupture. “Whether the spell of power breaks or not,” Sahay writes, “a coward inside me will break.” The title "Against Suicide"  thus acquires its true meaning. The enemy is not death but the system that steadily erodes a person’s sensibility, language, and capacity for resistance. To stand against suicide is first to accept the death of fear, compromise, and inertia within oneself. This breaking is not self-destruction; it is self-purification, the necessary precondition for moral reawakening.

The poem also stages a quiet recovery of language through intimacy. A little girl named Chhutki asks, “Can one write twice that one misses someone?”—and the poet answers, “Of course you can, my girl.” Where political discourse has become a machinery of falsehood, the child’s language remains anchored in trust. Similarly, the poet insists on touching his child’s real face, “not the cheek as printed in the advertisement,” refusing the market’s commodification of human presence. These small, domestic moments construct an alternative public sphere—one built not on declarations but on the repetition of love, on the recognition of the other as a full human being.

Sahay’s craft reinforces his argument. The poem is a collage of fragments—editorials, soliloquies, satire, news snippets, private dialogue—because the society it describes is itself fragmented. There is no linear narrative because modern life offers no coherent story to its ordinary subjects. Yet within this fragmentation, the poem insists on wholeness. It refuses to let the despairing boy remain a statistic, the laborer remain invisible, or the child become merely an image.

Ultimately, "Against Suicide" asks what it means for a democracy to remain human. It shows that elections, parliaments, and constitutions are empty forms if the ordinary citizen cannot find his experience reflected in public language, his pain acknowledged by institutions, or his memory preserved after death. The poem does not offer an ideology; it offers a method of seeing. It demands that we look at the crowd and find the face, read the news and hear the silence, and recognize that the deepest crisis of modern society is not the absence of power but the disappearance of the person within it.

To be against suicide, in Sahay’s rendering, is therefore a social and moral stance. It is to resist the conditions—bureaucratic, linguistic, cultural, and psychological—that convince a human being his life is meaningful to no one. The poem does not promise victory. But it insists that the first act of resistance is to refuse to forget, and to remain, against all erosion, morally awake.

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Professor and former Head (Retd.), Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper