Paper short abstract:

This paper situates the political action of Dalit-Bahujan patient activists living with sickle cell disease to ask if caste can be understood in a mode of repair rather than as pathologised presence in solidarity projects, thus offering a conceptual re-thinking of caste(ist) livingness in India.

Paper long abstract:

How are health politics and caste politics related in contemporary India? In this contribution, I speculate if political action led by patient activists from Dalit-Bahujan communities can be read as extending, contesting and reconfiguring decades of caste struggle to perform reparative futures for the self and community. Historically etched as a ‘Black’ ‘Caribbean’ and ‘tribal’ disease, sickle cell anemia and its biopolitical regimes of control bring together racialised histories of human differentiation as well as (shared) genetic histories of migration and colonisation. Through my ethnographic engagement with sickle cell patients and activists in the state of Maharashtra, I argue that attending to the cultural, medical and civic repertoire they invoke in their political action to works against the grain of predominantly White, Western scholarship on biosociality. Given the contested yet undeniable relation between caste, genetics and health in India, I situate Dalit-Bahujan patients’ navigation of unwell worlds by building on solidarity relations of caste and overturning its pathologisation in biopolitical regimes. Taking inspiration from McKrittick (2020) on how black life comes to be known through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems, I speculate if attending to sickle cell science and activism can be a way of knowing Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi lives in India, quite apart from overdetermined narratives of social structure.