How does one go about creating a deeper understanding of the relationship between the social conditions and the biomedical expression and understandings of health and healthcare. This becomes very much essential in an increasingly specialized world of modern medicine and clinical medicine and such.
Furthermore, the commercialization and commodification of health, healthcare and healthcare technologies aggravates the shifting of health-related knowledge into more transactional, more biomedical and more short-term kind of knowledge flavors rather than the more social, the more psychological and emotional and the more wisdom and practice-based knowledge kind of domains. This is largely the work of humanities domain, which is highly underrepresented within public health epidemiology, clinical medicine and in wider health disciplines. The kind of pedagogy that is needed to achieve this is also very much in the domains of arts and sciences, experiential learning and embodiment-friendly pedagogical approaches rather than through lectures.
So here is an attempt at curating readings, resources, activities, pedagogies and other experiential learning approaches that can help advance this understanding. While the curation is largely for the purposes of providing this understanding to public health professionals, medical and nursing students, it can also be used in various other higher education settings.
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Rakku’s story by Sheila Zurbrigg (read on the Internet Archive): A timeless classic that shows the structural origins of illness, suffering and the need to conceptualise change at the “structural” levels.
Read this review that appeared in Manushi vol. 28 in 1985 extracted below:THIS study of rural ill health is focused on child malnutrition and mortality. It begins with the true story of the struggle of Rakku, a harijan agricultural labourer in a Tamil Nadu village, to save the life of her 11 month old son who is afflicted with diarrhea, caused by chronic malnutrition. Critiquing in detail government, medical establishment and foreign aided development programmes’ approach to the issue of health, Zurbrigg suggests that the only solution is to organise the poor to insist on basic care from the health system, and to make it accountable to them.
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Em and the Big Hoom — Jerry Pinto writes about a son growing up in a cramped Mumbai flat with a mother in the grip of bipolar disorder. Talks about how it is to live with mental illness, the caregiving struggles in this setting, the psychiatric ward visits, the humour that holds a family together.
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My world without Jehan: surviving a brother’s suicide by Liana Mistry (with a note by Jerry Pinto) appears to be a wonderful read to understand healing after self-harm for the family… could be useful to help students understand the differential/diverse impacts of self-harm on families as well and how to help them heal. ==(Does not appear in my Bookshelf as it is still beign processed. Gifted by a friend to me)==
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The Phantom Plague by Vidya Krishnan (2022). Indian investigative journalist traces TB from 19th-century New York slums to contemporary Mumbai at the interface of TB with caste, IP law, pharma monopolies, the politics of who gets cured. Krishnan grew up in Bhopal a decade after the gas disaster, which probably explains her instinct for the gap between solvable problems and political will. ==(Does not appear in my Bookshelf)==
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Breathless: Tuberculosis, Inequality, and Care in Rural India — Andrew McDowell (2024). Ethnographic work from Rajasthan based on 14 months with Dalit farming families living through a TB epidemic. Uses atmospheric metaphors (dust, clouds, mud, forest) to think about how breath and airborne illness tangle with caste and care. Reviewed recently in the National Medical Journal of India.
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Health in India Since Independence by Sunil Amrith (Brooks World Poverty Institute Working Paper, 2009). A concise, freely available academic essay on how post-independence public health policy was shaped by the language of the Indian Constitution, the legacy of colonial neglect, and repeated failures to sustain a coherent vision of social welfare. Read it here. Parts of it have appeared earlier in EPW, which thanks to PARI is available outside paywall here.
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Public Health in British India: A Brief Account of the History of Medical Services and Disease Prevention in Colonial India Mushtaq (link), at the time a final year medical student from Pakistan writes in the Indian J of Community Medicine (perhaps he is now this person in University of Kansas). Covers the colonial response to plague, cholera, malaria and leprosy and how institutions built to protect the British Raj shaped the entire architecture of Indian public health that followed independence. Useful background for students who haven’t read colonial history. Read it here.
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Madhukar Pai’s selection of global health books to read includes some excellent ones beyond those listed here and makes for themes beyond health and humanities to also include decolonisation, the paradoxes in global health and such. See here
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The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010). Delhi-born oncologist writes a biography of cancer. Pulitzer Prize, and somehow also hugely readable. Useful for students who are science-trained and sceptical of humanities…it shows how narrative and history can be legitimate tools for understanding a disease. Ken Burns made it into a PBS documentary but will need VPN for non-US access. Also available on Netflix I think.
Hindi film songs: illness, poverty and the social body
Hindi cinema from the 1950s to 1970s is an archive of health experience. Many of the era’s songs were written by poets deeply influenced by the Progressive Writers’ Movement, and they named hunger, disease, exhaustion and structural injustice directly, in language that reached millions. In a context where formal public health writing remained the domain of elites, these songs recorded what people were actually living through. Lyricists Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra, Kaifi Azmi came from backgrounds shaped by poverty and colonial dispossession. Their lyrics treat illness not as personal tragedy but as social condition. Used alongside texts like Rakku’s story or Breathless, they offer a different kind of evidence. See for instance this course from Ambedkar University Delhi on Revisiting All India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA) and Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), 1930s & 40s which had its impcts on the few decades of post-independence India right up to 60s & a bit later.
A few that work particularly well (song inputs largely from Tanya Seshadri whose deep knowledge of old Hindi songs and eloquent contextualisation to current day allowed me to curate easily)
“Woh Subah Kabhi To Aayegi” from Phir Subah Hogi (1958) Watch on YouTube Singers: Mukesh & Asha Bhosle | Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi | Music: Khayyam The anchor song for this theme. The lyrics speak directly of bhookhi pyaasi roohon — hungry, thirsty souls framing chronic deprivation as a structural condition, not individual fate. The film is set in the Bombay slums and adapts Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, transplanting European poverty literature into post-independence India. Sahir’s commentary on Nehruvian India’s broken promises runs through every verse.
“Chhoti Si Yeh Zindagani” — Aah (1953) Watch on YouTube Singer: Mukesh | Lyrics: Shailendra | Music: Shankar-Jaikishan One of Hindi cinema’s most direct engagements with tuberculosis. The film’s protagonist is diagnosed with TB and conceals it from his beloved — a portrayal of the stigma and shame that shaped how patients experienced and hid illness. The song’s title translates roughly as “this life is so brief.” The film preceded India’s national TB control programme by decades and captures lay experience of the disease.
“Jinhe Naaz Hai Hind Par Wo Kahan Hain” — Pyaasa (1957) Watch on YouTube Singer: Mohammed Rafi | Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi | Music: S.D. Burman Asks somewhat in anger-frustration, where India’s self-proclaimed nationalists are while the poor, the widowed, the sick and the dispossessed are abandoned. A direct indictment of the gap between the promise of independence and its health and welfare outcomes. Perhaps the most politically explicit illness song in Indian cinema. From the comments on Youtube one can see how the lyrics remain timeless >70 years past independnce!
Aa Ja Ri Aa Nindiya Tu Aa” — Do Bigha Zameen (1953) Watch on YouTube Music: Salil Chaudhary | Singers: Manna De, Lata Mangeshkar The film traces a peasant family loses their land and migrates to Calcutta, tracing how rural landlessness, poverty and forced urban migration destroy health and family. The lullaby sung to a hungry child is particularly striking. The film as a whole is a teaching text on the social determinants of health before that framework had a name.
For students unfamiliar with this period of cinema, the Medium essay “Representation of the Working Class in Bollywood Songs of the 1950s–60s” by Alvia Syed (dated Aug 2020) is a readable introduction to how and why this generation of artists particularly Guru Dutt, Sahir, Kaifi Azmi, Shailendra, made social critique central to mainstream film music. Available free online.
pedagogy and teaching
Teaching Health Humanities: Challenges and Insights Sathyaraj Venkatesan has shared some rflections on teaching health humanities here on Indian Writing in English Online by Uni of Hyderabad. The essay shares his full module structure (physical illness, mental illness, disability, pandemics, media), reading list, and the specific challenge of building an Indian syllabus that doesn’t just defer to Western canonical texts.
Research and Humanities in Medical Education (RHIME). An Indian open-access medical humanities journal, started in 2014 and appears to be continuing. Seems to run on PKP/OJS. Publishes personal illness narratives, poems, reflections, and artwork, in English or Indian vernacular languages with translations. No publication fees. An underused resource…good for finding short texts to use in a single teaching session without having to justify a Western-origin reading list. See poems by the editor Upreet Dhaliwal rviwed in IJME here
Humanities-based study module at UCMS Delhi Researchers at a New Delhi medical college tested whether adding an arts-and-humanities module where students used poetry, storytelling, and sketching to reflect on their patients’ lives could help bridge that gap. The module was well-received: nearly all students who tried it completed the full six months, and the majority said it made them more empathetic and more motivated to learn.
To be reviewed
- Arundhati Roy “The Pandemic is a Portal” a short essay, widely used as a teaching text.
- The Polyphony is a medical humanities blog that has been publishing pieces on Indian contexts, including a recent piece on Jerry Pinto’s work.
- Aravind Adiga’s short story “The Sultan’s Battery” on STI/HIV used in Venkatesan’s course as a contemporary Indian illness narrative
- The book Do We Care. See review in NMJI
- Kavery Nambisan’s A Luxury Called Health. A doctor’s journey through the art, the science and the trickery of medicine reviewed in [NMJI here](A Luxury Called Health. A doctor’s journey through the art, the science and the trickery of medicine.)
- Chronicles From Central India: An Atlas of Rural Health by JSS, Chhattisgarh is part of my Bookshelf & yet to be reviewed
- Charan Mahananda, IPH colleague has written a lovely essay in IJME Rediscovering the simple yet profound joy of breathing without pain: My experience with childhood tuberculosis
- Abhay Xaxa’s I am not your data
Last updated: 2026-03-26 12:57