Understanding Philosophy of Indebtedness through Indigenous Insights

This paper attempts to define and discuss the folk economic ideas associated with ‘debt’. First, the contemporary life is marked by the all-round dominance of ‘debt’. Second, one of the issues over which class conflicts in their numerous hues find an easy expression is ‘debt’. In the Indian context, the farmers’ suicides, their hunger strikes to get loan waiver and heated debates over such loan waivers and moreover, loan waiver as a passport to political power can be quoted while emphasizing on the relevance of this paper in the contemporary times. While so doing, the attempt is made to bring to fore the ‘debtor-creditor’ relationship or what has been called “…genealogy of the economic and subjective production of the indebted man” (Lazzarato 9)