In the 24th episode, I speak to Dwai Banerjee, Associate Professor, MIT, on his recent book Enduring Cancer: Life, Death, and Diagnosis in Delhi published by Duke University Press in 2020. The book is an ethnography of cancer in urban India. It focuses on the efforts of individuals in Delhi who negotiate and manage the disease, battling inept health systems and fragile kinship and community ties. The conversation begins by asking why the book focuses on cancer and whether it began as a study on cancer or public health in post colonial India. Then, we cover why cancer is ‘endured’ in India and not survived or persisted before moving to the importance of how the broader social worlds of individuals contribute to the enduring of cancer. A key part of how individuals navigate a cancer diagnosis in such fraught conditions is concealment, by not revealing their condition from family and others in their community. Banerjee explains why concealment appears to be a compelling strategy for cancer patients in deeply fragile public health systems. Then, Banerjee reveals how cancer intersects with conjugality or how households and spouses are affected by cancer. Finally, Banerjee explains why he chose to analyse Indian cancer memoirs and films, how they complement the ethnographic chapters and what they add to his book. The conversation ends by asking whether ‘endurance’ could help us understand and deal with a crisis like COVID-19 that has laid bare challenges endemic within India’s public health system.
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