In India, pain medicine is an emergent specialisation shaping new practices around pain, its medical and social constitutions. Across Indian cities, through efforts of individual physicians, an attempt is being made to establish and stabilise this field of practice as a distinct medical form. Each centre reveals a unique iteration of pain, tied to local worlds. At the Institute of Pain Management in Kolkata, one of the most important sites in this emergent field, medical work proceeds in a milieu of state supported health care, extractive industrial labour, chronic suffering, and dwindling industry. Through long term ethnographic research at this centre, studying its diagnostic, therapeutic and epistemic efforts, this paper explores how pain is recognised, communicated and addressed. It attempts to understand pain’s sociality, i.e., how the challenges pain poses to language and social connection are overcome, and to record the unique ways by which biomedical work proceeds amidst acute resource poverty and precarity. By dwelling on everyday encounters between members of the medical regime and persons living in chronic pain at this centre, this talk will demonstrate the ethical stakes in everyday practices around pain management, how pain is excavated from phenomenological experiences into a biomedical object, revealing a rigorous empathetic practice.
About the Speaker
Dr Shagufta K Bhangu is a Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She joined King’s in 2020 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Wellcome-funded project, ‘Grid Oncology : Remaking Cancer Care in India’. She continues to be a member of this project team. She is also a part of the Culture, Medicine and Power (CMP) research group, the Anti-Racism and Decolonising Steering Committee and the Politics of Cancer Network.
Dr. Bhangu’s research explores the emergence of new medical fields and imaginaries in South Asia. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, her doctoral research explored the medicalisation of pain, medical epistemics and practices in a milieu of dwindling state-supported healthcare, industrial labour and chronic illness in Kolkata, India. Her current project continues her ethnographic focus on medical care and patient worlds in a cancer hospital in Assam. In this frontier space, she is studying imaginations and practices of care, community, blame and responsibility, and nationhood.
