Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality and Health in South India by Cecilia Coale Van Hollen (review)

Abstract

C and the Kali Yuga begins with an apology. While interviewing a 14-year-old Dalit girl in a village in northeastern Tamil Nadu about her experiences of living with the loss of her mother who has recently died of breast cancer, the author has to apologize to her interlocutor who is overcome by emotion due to the pain of the recall. It is no mere apology issued in the face of an acute ethnographic rupture. The pain of losing a mother to breast cancer, the author shares, is known to her intimately too. That moment – and the tensions it encompasses – almost makes the “obvious differences of time and place” (x) between a white American researcher of privilege and her poor “lower-caste” interlocutors appear attenuated. Yet, as the anthropologist acknowledges all along, her field is marked by insurmountable inequities of power, class, caste, religion, and a host of other complex asymmetries. The text has a careful method of accounting for some of these unbridgeable chasms — turning to the stories of young and old Dalit girls and women and letting them narrate the vicissitudes of their diseased (and hopeful) lives replete with the vitality of emic concepts, affects, histories and futurities. The author adds to this rich scaffolding of womanist reckonings and resilience her deft engagement with critical medical anthropology, gender and sexuality studies and a range of insights from subaltern studies rooted in Tamil culture. The result is a powerful, meaningful and highly readable chronicle of brown women’s precarious lives, whose “triple marginalization” at the hands of caste, gender and cancer makes their stories of disease causality and risk, their journeys of navigating cancer diagnosis, treatment and care, and their