Abstract
This chapter examines written and cinematic narratives of AIDS in India, many of which were linked to pedagogic projects. It brings out the diverse ways in which HIV/AIDS was understood as a medical, social, ethical and juridical problem in popular discourse. Many of these narratives focus on the subjective experience of disease as illness, thus engaging the disease/illness polarity to show how it can either perpetuate the idea of disease as personal devastation or resist it through collective biosocial formations like the PLWHA movement.
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Notes
- 1.
The estimated number of HIV-positive cases in 1990 was 0.2 million, which by 2000 had increased to 3.86 million, that is, by about 20 times (NACO 2004, p. 16).
- 2.
The critique of biomedical practice in Kleinman and Helman is influenced by insights that they draw from ethnography, which privileges subjective accounts over impersonal facts. Cecil Helman was a practitioner of family medicine as well as trained anthropologist and held academic positions in both disciplines. Arthur Kleinman is both a psychiatrist and professor of medical anthropology.
- 3.
The term “chronotope” was introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, to refer to the way narratives represent the intersection of time and space: “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope” (Bakhtin 1981, pp. 84–85).
- 4.
The importance of the visual in European epistemology can be traced to the seventeenth century, with developments in empirical science, theories of perspective in art and the emergence of visual technologies. In Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology, Rene Descartes claimed: “All the management of our lives depends upon the senses, and since that of sight is the most comprehensive and noblest of these, there is no doubt that the inventions which serve to augment its power are among the most useful that there can be” (Descartes 1965, p. 65). Similarly, in his treatise on the circulation of blood, William Harvey claimed in the preface to Dr. Argent, President of the London College of Physicians, that his account was based not on “the tenets of Philosophers” but on scientific facts “for more than nine years confirmed … in your presence by numerous ocular demonstrations” (Harvey 1963, pp. 4–7, italics added). Vision, write Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “is understood as a primary avenue to knowledge and sight takes precedence over other senses as a primary tool in the analysis and ordering of living things” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, p. 299). According to Foucault, modern clinical practice was premised on the superiority of observation as a source of knowledge: “the privileges of a pure gaze, prior to all intervention and faithful to the immediate, which it took up without modifying it, and those of a gaze equipped with a whole logical armature, which exorcised from the outset the naïvety of an unprepared empiricism” (Foucault 1973, pp. 107).
- 5.
I take this term from David Arnold’s The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze, where he uses it to show how it was used by medical travelogues to pathogenically inflect a land already marked by its existence in the tropics. Deathscapes “reinforced this spatial sense of a mortality inscribed on the landscape” (Arnold 2005, p. 42).
- 6.
Jackson’s intention, however, was to elicit sympathy not so much for the patients as for the missionaries who risked infection to dedicate themselves to this very “Christian” work. He mentions specially Mary Reed, a missionary at the Chandag Heights asylum who herself contracted leprosy: “Many Missionaries (as this volume bears witness) are doing devoted work among these diseased outcasts, but to Mary Reed alone among English-speaking missionaries has been accorded the distinction of ministering as a leper to the lepers” (Jackson 1901, p. 142).
- 7.
Thus, in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault writes: “Sexuality exists at the point where body and population meet. And so it is a matter for discipline, but also a matter for regularization” (Foucault 2003, pp. 251–52).
- 8.
A notable exception is the haemophiliac or thalassemic, who, as we have seen in Chap. 2, was incorporated into the media discourse as “innocent victim”. This is because transmission of HIV through blood or blood products is currently rare. According to National AIDS Control Organization estimate, the percentage of HIV-infected blood decreased significantly from 1.2% in 2007 to less than 0.2% in 2014–2015 in NACO-supported blood banks. In 1996 the Supreme Court mandated banning of professional donation and the creation of a National Blood Transfusion Council (NBTC), the apex body for policymaking and monitoring of transfusion services. The Government of India adopted the National Blood Policy in April 2002 to ensure adequate supply of safe blood and blood products in the country. Though there are no studies of HIV transmission in haemophiliacs and thalassemics, there has possibly been a decline in transmission rates due to better services (NACO 2016).
- 9.
In hijra terminology, the term kothi refers to those who prefer to be penetrated and panthi to those who penetrate; and double deckers are those who do both. Some kothis, as Kesavan notes, imagine themselves as women and may undergo castration or nirvana, but this is not mandatory to hijra identity (Kesavan 2008, p. 185).
- 10.
White’s argument about “literary sensibility” is directed at a positivist historiography that treats historical “facts” as objective records of the past, with a meaning that is assumed to inhere in them instead of being an effect of the way they are represented. In his view, a literary approach reveals how these “facts” are discursively constituted – “fictions” in that sense – in accordance with ideological positions that underwrite the historical representations. Literature’s attentiveness to discourse and meaning makes possible an ideological critique that positivist historiography cannot undertake. For a related view, see Dominic La Capra’s distinction between the “documentary” and “work-like” approaches to historical representation: “The documentary situates the text in terms of factual or literal dimensions involving reference to empirical reality and conveying information about it. The ‘worklike’ supplements empirical reality by adding to it and subtracting from it. It thereby involves dimensions of the text not reducible to the documentary, prominently including the roles of commitment, interpretation, and imagination” (La Capra 1983, p. 30).
- 11.
In explaining mimesis1, Ricoeur refers to Geertz’s theory of culture as the symbolic universe within which human activity acquires a significance that is shared by those who belong to that universe. Explanatory paradigms belong to the symbolic field where acts and meanings intersect: their persuasive force derives from the collective acceptance of the symbolism.
- 12.
“The concept of vulnerability is derived from the Latin for ‘wound’. Although vulnus refers to real wounds in the human body, it is in many respects a metaphor for frailty. Wounds are open and they open us to life; the wound is a metaphor of the human condition” (Turner 2008, p. 244).
- 13.
There are close similarities between Nidaan and Alice Hoffman’s At Risk (1988), which makes Pastore’s point relevant to the film. In both the protagonist is a teenage girl in a middle-class family who acquires infection through blood transfusion, and both stories are presented as family melodrama.
- 14.
The plot of Phir Milenge closely resembles that of Philadelphia (1993), a Hollywood film that recounts the story of a young gay lawyer sacked by his boss when he is diagnosed with HIV disease. In both films, the protagonist’s counsel is young and inexperienced but presents his case passionately, the only difference being that Andrew Beckett’s lawyer in Philadelphia is black and therefore subject to discrimination himself. In both, again, victory in court is juxtaposed with death and loss – in Philadelphia the death of Andrew himself. If Phir Milenge is a remake of Philadelphia, however, it is nowhere acknowledged in the film’s credits or publicity.
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Das, D.K. (2019). Incipient Pedagogy (II): AIDS Narratives. In: Teaching AIDS. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6120-3_4
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