“All our woe, with loss of Eden”: Reading Kalpish Ratna’s A Crown of Thorns as a planetary health narrative

Planetary health humanities sprang up as an urgent response to the entangled ecological and biomedical crisis of our times. Just as the past witnessed a critical and radical turn, the present moment is marked by a narrative and material turn – shifts catalysing interdisciplinary inquiries such as health humanities, critical medical humanities, environmental humanities and the like. Planetary health humanities, an amalgamation of health humanities and environmental studies, belongs to this milieu. Building on Härting and Meek’s conceptualisation of the planetary health narrative in their book Planetary Health Humanities and Pandemics (2024), this paper attempts to read Kalpish Ratna’s A Crown of Thorns: The Coronavirus and Us as a planetary health narrative. The paper organises Härting and Meek’s characterisation around three orientations: the narrative, the critical, and the ethical. Using these three orientations as a functional lens, the paper then analyses the selected text to mark it as a planetary health narrative. By doing so, the paper explores the role such narratives play amid global health crises, positioning planetary health humanities as both a necessary intervention in the present moment and a forward-looking framework for re-storying – and thereby restoring – planetary health.