Concealed illnesses and visible secrecy: three medical novels from India

This paper proposes a working definition of the medical novel as a genre that is invested in the individual experience of mortal time and its intersection with health, illness and therapeutic intervention. This is a neglected genre within medical humanities scholarship and necessitates cross-cultural and transcultural studies to identify its use in various regions and time periods. Here, I use this category to study three postindependence novels from India—U R Ananthamurthy’s Samskara (1978), Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Mysterious Ailment of Rupi Baskey (2014) and Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman (2013) to argue that they present illness experience as a crisis in biosocial and biocultural personhood. Such a framework interprets Indian medical novels’ depiction of unnamed malaise or untreatable chronic ailments and their social and cultural environments as mutually constitutive. I argue that the crisis in biosocial and biocultural personhood is presented as differential vulnerabilities to illness and access to care, knowledge about which is regulated through processes of secrecy or a kind of systemic misrecognition, within groups whose sense of identity rests on shared biological and cultural traits. Further, individuals in these novels resolve such crises by intervening in processes of secrecy thereby transforming that which is concealed/misrecognised as well as the range and scope of biosocial personhood. This mode of inquiry permits a rethinking of connections drawn by current medical humanities scholarship between selfhood, autonomy and states of health and illness which are influenced by Western contexts, the role of biomedicine and non-fiction genres.