Providing care is political. It is as much a space of social critique as a site for naming and treating pain. Dwaipayan Banerjee's Enduring Cancer and Saiba Varma's The Occupied Clinic both capture the contextual complexity of distress, where illness experiences pervade social, political, and kin fields. Through evocative narratives and engagements with media and poetry, these ethnographies intervene in anthropological debates concerning the temporality, ethics, and politics of care and illness in South Asia. While Banerjee focuses on cancer diagnosis in Delhi, Varma concentrates on psychiatric and humanitarian mental health interventions in Indian-occupied Kashmir. Together, these texts offer fresh analytic perspectives on the ways that care interventions intertwine with personal histories, collective vulnerabilities, and violence.

Banerjee's Enduring Cancer is a sensitive and insightful exploration of the fraught relational worlds within which cancer appears. Banerjee moves away from conventional anthropological framings of cancer as an experience of crisis and ruptured life trajectories. By examining how cancer pain folds into already fragile lives, Banerjee demonstrates how the illness comes to be “diffused through an existing social field,” in continuity with prior vulnerabilities (p. 80). Cancer may be an epidemic, but it is also endemic. Through moving narrative accounts, Banerjee demonstrates how it is a matter of slow violence, where preexisting conditions of poverty, familial violence, and infrastructural failure reverberate into a person's present and future. When treatments are delayed and intimate hostilities come to underpin caregiving, patients and their kin are left to endure the illness as ethical actors in the present, without the promise of recovery. Counter to experts and policymakers, who frame cancer as a disease of a Westernized Indian middle class, Banerjee shows how the urban poor and lower middle class endure the duress of diagnosis amid systemic infrastructural lack.

To examine how living with cancer intersects with its aesthetic representations, Banerjee weaves together multiple methodologies. The first three chapters focus on fieldwork at the palliative care unit in Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Science, and through Cansupport home visits, Delhi's largest cancer support NGO. In both sites, Banerjee witnesses care dynamics unfolding slowly. By not relying on preformulated questions, Banerjee gains access to the “work of improvisation around cancer as specific to families and patients” and the structural conditions within which these experiences are embedded (p. 28). In chapters 4 and 5, Banerjee analyzes cancer representations in Hindi films and memoirs. By juxtaposing these spaces, he demonstrates how the fragmented and unresolved reality of cancer care conflicts with the “neat resolutions” and tropes of survivorship often offered in aesthetic approaches (p. 80). This dual focus allows the text to successfully speak to medical anthropology, South Asian studies, and science and technology studies.

By richly detailing the motivations and implications surrounding diagnosis nondisclosure, Banerjee de-emphasizes the role of cultural beliefs as determinants of stigma. Instead, “familial dynamics, personal biographies, and situated vulnerabilities shape the distributions of speech about cancer” (p. 49). By speaking of cancer indirectly or not at all, patients and kin forge an “as-if” mood, orienting their condition toward possible desired outcomes. Rather than engage with public health typologies around cultural misunderstandings of cancer, which are said to contribute to stigma, Banerjee calls for anthropologists to look more relationally. It is in this context that patients and kin live within “shifting tensilities of social relations,” where older cracks and gendered fault lines influence the force and impact of diagnosis (p. 3). Embedded in long-standing failures in Indian medical care, gender and caste hierarchies, and previous betrayals in marriages, cancer patients must endure a pervasive doubt about the viability of living.

Banerjee demonstrates how the pain clinic becomes “the space of hope for dying well,” in compassionate response to those denied timely and effective treatment (p. 118). Here, doctors improvise empathy in a space that demands recognition of the tenacity of pain and the inevitability of death. Banerjee highlights how the research initiatives of palliative workers appeal to narratives of transcendence to “look past the dispiriting conditions of everyday failures and toward the resilient capacities of a mind strengthened by the development of its spiritual capacities” (p. 119). Yet, at the same time, these interventions are constrained by conditions of infrastructural pressure, where transcending pain is not always possible. Working long hours and caring for patients who have received piecemeal and provisional treatments, practitioners struggle to address the broader structural inequalities guiding the social distribution of cancer pain.

Bridging ethnographic and aesthetic examinations, Banerjee concludes by situating the project within critiques of a “disciplinary obsession” in anthropology: suffering has been deemed the “fundamental substrate of all human experience, erasing the proper subject of anthropological inquiry—cultural difference” (p. 172). In response, Banerjee problematizes binaries between an anthropology attentive to suffering and one focused on well-being and ethical flourishing. By juxtaposing hopeful aesthetic representations of cancer with its lived ethical dilemmas, Banerjee offers the analytic of endurance, showing how his interlocutors are responsive to the durability of pain, the intensity of social vulnerabilities, and the slow violence of incomplete medical care.

Whereas Banerjee focuses on the ethical stakes of living with cancer, Varma's The Occupied Clinic offers an incisive portrayal of the “epidemic of trauma” in Kashmir, where indefinite emergency-like conditions seep into civilians’ lives (p. 8). With attention to state-supported and humanitarian interventions, Varma demonstrates how medicine is an “exemplary site to witness the tentacular reach of militarism, rather than its counterpoint” (p. 15). Whether in the psychiatric clinic, the de-addiction ward, or psychosocial counseling sessions, suffering and harm are folded into processes of care. Moving beyond conventional modes of anthropological categorization, where military presence and violence are backgrounds to clinic and humanitarian spaces, Varma demonstrates how militarism and care intersect. When drug access is limited because of curfews and strikes, when hospitals are attacked, and when corruption arises from unfettered emergency powers, spaces and logics of care are affected by militarism. This temporality of disturbance, Varma argues, is a habitus, “a way of being in your body, occupying a particular spatiotemporal order” (p. 73). Weaving together ethnographic narratives with poetry, the book offers a compelling analysis that at once contributes to conversations in medical anthropology, feminist studies of care, and the anthropology of humanitarianism and violence.

To examine how military and medical infrastructures overlap in Kashmir, Varma offers a relational approach to care. This does more than show how caregiving can have unintended, harmful effects. Building on feminist and decolonial framings, Varma demonstrates how humanitarian, medical, and psychological technologies may also become instruments of warcraft, reinterpreting and transforming “the ontological instabilities produced by violence” (p. 15). Hence, the ethnography takes up these questions: “What does it mean for trauma and mental health to emerge as ‘matters of care’ in this moment and within this colonial genealogy? Why would a militarized state assume responsibility for restoring the health of a weary population, and what does this commitment mean for medicine's assumed neutrality?” (p. 25)

Each of the five chapters attends to a critical juncture through which military-counterinsurgency practices and discourses infiltrate the clinic and everyday life. In the first two chapters, Varma examines how Kashmiris’ experiences of loss and clinical care are linked to colonial and neocolonial geopolitics. While psychiatric and humanitarian interventions localize distress and post-traumatic stress disorder in individual bodies or specific events, Kashmiris express it as a “nebulous, constant disturbance” that spreads throughout the social (p. 29). Patients’ complaints of kamzorī—a loss of vitality—are linked to a “biomoral” body that has material, spiritual, moral, and political dimensions. Varma argues that Kashmiris’ illness symptoms, rendered invisible in the clinic, are more than just “cultural signifiers” through which people grapple with existential, social, and political experiences. Narratives of moral kamzorī may also form a counterdiscourse, to critique unfettered militarism and to aspire to new orders and ways of being.

By examining an array of medical settings, Varma problematizes distinctions in psychiatry and anthropology between abandonment and care. To this end, Varma's analysis of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in chapter 3 stands out. Moving between military and humanitarian spaces, Varma shows how and why Kashmiris are reluctant to receive this treatment, even though, according to a community-based care model, it may inaugurate a more ethical psychiatry by shortening hospitalizations. By finding and feeling resonances between ECT and a prior technology of state torture, designed to “shock” victims toward political compliance, Kashmiris comment on occupation as an “assemblage of both military and humanitarian presences” (p. 116). For instance, when a young woman, Mauna, is discharged after ECT treatment, her suffering persists—a fact omitted from psychiatrists’ records. Abandoned by the state, her parents are left to deal with the consequences, their social worlds severed. These circumstances not only reveal the contradictions inherent in community-based care models, but also highlight how, as with prison torture, the “shock” of ECT care may bring harm and abandonment.

A key argument of the book is that processes of knowledge gathering and withholding are central to the work of humanitarian and militarized care. In chapter 4, Varma examines NGOs that provide psychosocial care to victims through counseling. Varma's examination of impact assessment tools reveals that even if knowledge gathering is deemed “scientific,” it can produce uncertain outcomes and misrecognize or marginalize aid recipients. Moving beyond other anthropological analyses of humanitarian encounters, Varma demonstrates how these tools are “more significant modes of recognition for aid workers than recipients” (p. 155). As a counterpoint to this site of miscommunication, chapter 5 outlines how Kashmiris meaningfully acknowledge loss and relatedness through everyday care, beyond categorizations of victimhood.

While Varma is critical of India's occupation of Kashmir, her methodological ethics are not immediately transparent. In September 2021, an anonymous group of Kashmiri scholars raised a concern: the text does not disclose the fact that her father worked for India's external intelligence agency in Kashmir during the 1990s. Varma's public response unpacks her approaches to informed consent, research design, and positionality.Footnote ¹ It is critical to read Varma's ethnography alongside these words, to consider and evaluate how her ethical commitments inform her methodology.

Banerjee and Varma both provide rich portrayals of care and its contradictions in South Asia. These books successfully speak to a diverse readership and could be equally used in undergraduate courses in global health, South Asian studies, and medical anthropology. They would be most effective for upper-year courses, along with explications of their social-historical contexts. Readers of these books will be reminded that despite optimistic media portrayals of biomedical and humanitarian interventions, caregiving is a fraught and incomplete practice, where possibilities of violence and harm are ever-present.