Bio

I currently practice as a doctor and a medical anthropologist. I completed my MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, India. My experience as a medical practitioner strengthened my conviction that there was much that contemporary medical pedagogy did not teach its students about health, care, and healing. I spent the next few years as a student of the humanities. I obtained a Master's in Liberal Studies from Ashoka University, Sonipat, India, where I studied the relationship between the linguistic and ethical dimensions of medical eponyms named after perpetrators of the Holocaust. At Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, I completed an MA in Philosophy. My final project at Simon Fraser developed a framework to recognise oppression experienced by patients as they attempted to partake in knowledge production during their encounter with biomedical systems.

Contact

Projects

  • Personality and personality disorders in India: A break from the past, Stanford University

    The anthropological study of the personality has taken a back seat since the culture and personality strand of enquiry dwindled in the late 20th century. However, ideas concerning “the personality” continue to animate modern India. Indian biomedical practitioners are identifying personality disorders more frequently and are associating them with comorbidities like completed suicide, eating disorders, addictions, and mood disorders. An emerging practice that attempts to blend an indigenous Indian medicine, Ayurveda, with biomedical psychiatry is also deploying the personality and its disorders as a diagnostic tool. Political commentators seem to be doubling down on their conviction that the personality is a useful analytic to study the rise of Hindu nationalism in Modi’s India. Indian newspapers regularly churn out articles that associate personality types with figures of power like the Indian patriarch, the corrupt government official, and the resilient CEO of Indian origin.

    My dissertation will be organised around the following central questions – (1) What is a personality in the Indian context? (2) What is a disordered personality? I will examine these questions by studying (a) how ideas about the personality and personality disorders circulate in and out of biomedical and non-biomedical spaces, and (b) how the contemporaneous configuration of the personality in India breaks from Euro-American anthropological and biomedical canons, and Indian nationalist practices which were heavily invested in its foundations.

    Location

    Karnataka and Kerala