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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the making of medical doctors in India amid growing polarisation and rising violence in the healthcare sector. It interrogates the erosion of the historic social/moral contract between medicine and the society.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the making of a doctor in contemporary India, asking what it means to enter and inhabit a profession increasingly split between the promise it once carried and the conditions in which it is now practised. In recent decades, however, hospital spaces have increasingly become sites of tension, marked by rising instances of verbal and physical violence against practitioners. According to the Indian Medical Association (IMA), nearly 75% of doctors have experienced some form of violence during their professional lives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with students and doctors at different stages of their careers in a government teaching hospital in South India, I trace three moments in the making of a doctor: the aspirations that draw students toward medicine, still framed by many as an inheritance of moral authority and social respect; the institutional and affective labour that training demands of them; and the widening gap between the role they are trained into and the conditions they come to practise within. Reading these individual accounts of aspiration and its erosion not only as biography but also as a lens onto the nation's own health ambitions, I argue that the making of the doctor in India offers a way of tracking, at the level of lived experience, how a postcolonial developmental promise is inherited, laboured over, and reworked by those tasked with carrying it forward.