Explorations in the Cultural History of AIDS

AIDS, Alterity and Images of Suffering: Moments in the Discursive History of a Crisis in India

Kavita Misra

Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS

Yale University

The material landscape of urban India is among the many sites where one might look for the appearance of images and texts for public consumption. The sides of buses, billboards, the whitewashed walls running along bridges and sewers, are spaces that boldly declare transition. In the years particularly after 1992, this aspect of urban landscape became gradually and noticeably occupied by messages from the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), the government established and run institutional body responsible for the control of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India, and later from state level AIDS control bodies. The print media had, since the late eighties and early nineties, run stories on the AIDS epidemic in the global context as well as the national scenario. Radio and television networks began to air different kinds of programming, public interest commercials, messages from celebrities, documentaries and talk shows on AIDS. As AIDS became a culturally significant phenomenon, people attempted to make sense of it, to use the emotional and intellectual resources that they had available, to grasp the implications of what the state, the non-governmental and the private sectors were asserting, but what was still experientially distant to many, to all those who had not encountered the illness in its physical reality.

The narrative progression of the AIDS epidemic in the media and in other forms of public discourse has been punctuated by silence and denial. Further, it has been marked by discursive and representational strategies that concern themselves with delineating the boundaries of an Indian self. AIDS, like other threats to national health and wellbeing signifies a crisis of identification, drawing on deep-rooted moral anxieties around the loss of culture and the disappearance of the cultural self. This paper concerns itself with moments in a particular history of the AIDS epidemic in India – that history which is constructed through its life and circulation in the public imagination by way of media and images. The significance of such a history of representational forms is not limited to questions of knowing and to the construction of identity and the self. Its history also parallels that of practices of the state and of communities and thus has ramifications for the very experience of illness as well as consequences for the manner in which AIDS moves in and affects the body population. It must be noted that the discursive progression of AIDS in India is not dissimilar from the trajectory of representation in other locations. In fact, conceptions and experiences of alterity and moral marginality circulate globally while taking on particular local historical and cultural forms.

Abstracts

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