An irritable state: the contingent politics of science and suffering in anti-cancer campaigns in South India (1940–1960)

Abstract

This article traces the making of anti-cancer campaigns in South India. Set at the cusp of decolonization, it explores how provincial physicians and women activists framed cancer care in the 1940s and 1950s. It offers insights into the argumentative, contingent ways in which public health concerns were framed and mobilized in Indian cities between a middle class public, medical experts and state agency. These cancer campaigns and local health debates have been neglected because historians have tended to focus on national level, political visions of health, on debates regarding international aid, transfer of medical technology, and targeted disease control programs. This has also shaped and limited how we have understood the complex, changing meanings and expectations of health and development in newly decolonized societies such as India. Analyzing the activist campaigns and writings of Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi an influential physician, renowned Women’s Indian Association leader, and legislator, and tracing the making of urban, anti-cancer networks, I argue that cancer care campaigns both invoked and challenged nationalist and developmental priorities, and questioned assumptions about what were termed as ‘normative’ diseases and health risks in India. Even though they spoke of the curative, technoscientific and specialized aspects of cancer treatment and urged its provision in local hospitals, they also encouraged the state and philanthropists to assume moral responsibilities for care and chronic suffering. They built on contemporary social and political metaphors, especially Tamil cultural representations of women. These ideas created emerging spaces for debates through multiple discursive ambits that emerged while trying to articulate and balance ‘needs’ that were seen as dichotomous and competing between managing population wide, curable diseases and the needs of a vocal, minority of advocates supporting cancer care. These debate were no doubt also limited by the visions of middle-class women, urban philanthropy, and engagements with male political leaders, and health officials.