About the book

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen's critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women's narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Related Articles and Book Chapters

2024 A Call for an Intersectional Gendered Approach for Cervical Cancer Interventions. Massachusetts General Hospital Global OB-GYN Newsletter.

2023 Morality Tales of Reproductive Cancer Screening Camps in South India. In Linda Bennett, Lenore Manderson, and Belinda Spagnoletti, eds. Cancer and the Politics of Care: Inequalities and Interventions in Global Perspective. London: University College London Press: 83-108.

2019 May the Vital Force Be with You: An Indian homeopathic doctor’s approach to the gendered ills of our time. In Arima Mishra, ed. Local Health Traditions: Pluralism and Marginality in South Asia. Delhi: Orient Blackswan: 291-310. 

2019 (with Krishnan, Shweta and Rathnam, Shibani) “It’s Partly in Our Hands; It’s Partly in the Hands of the Goddess”: Cancer patients’ quest for well-being in India. Special Issue on South Asian Hospitals. Purushartha: Sciences sociales en Asie du Sud (Social Science in South Asia). Journal of L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Volume 36:179-206. 

2018 (with Caduff, Carlo, Mac Skelton, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Darja Djordevic, Marissa Mika, Lucas Mueller, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan) An Analysis of social science research into cancer care in low- and middle-income countries: improving global cancer control through greater interdisciplinary research. Journal of Global Oncology. 18.00045, published online June 15, 2018: 1-9.  

2018 Handle with Care: Rethinking the rights vs. culture dichotomy in cancer disclosure in India. Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Vol. 32(1): 59-84 

More Reviews

“The book provides several prescient insights and has the potential to inform nuanced and sensitive policies for public health interventions and awareness campaigns, while exposing the underlying assumptions and inadequacies of the ones that exist.”

—Sre Ratha, Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka, India

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Reviews

“This groundbreaking ethnography of how low-income and Dalit women navigate cancer in contemporary India overturns global health portrayals of the underprivileged as ignorant of cancer’s etiologies and in need of didactic uplift. Carefully attuned to her interlocutors’ voices, Van Hollen reveals an incisive critique of the disease’s disproportionate impact on the already disempowered. Essential reading for anyone interested in cancer and global health in the 21st century.”

— Dwaipayan Banerjee, MIT

“In this powerful and evocative book, Van Hollen writes of the experiences of Dalit women in South India. Here, breast and cervical cancers highlight the capriciousness of disease, the suffering of individuals and families, and the contingencies of inequality and marginality that test women's resilience and creativity. Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a compelling and disturbing portrait of cancer's uneven impacts.” 

— Lenore Manderson, University of the Witwatersrand

“This intimate and powerful ethnography draws our attention to rural Dalit women in South India whose insightful, angry, and resilient reflections on cancer demand we take seriously the ways marginalized women at once understand the body as holding the injustices of the world and turn that reckoning into critical summons for change.”

 — Sarah Pinto, Tufts University

“This path-breaking feminist ethnography brings out the hitherto marginalized South Indian Dalit women’s critique of caste, class and religion and offers refreshingly new insights into the gendered experiences of illness and health.

 — S. Anandhi, Co-editor, Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India

“Both metaphor and parable for our times plagued by climate change and a global pandemic, Van Hollen's magnificent ethnography of the everyday theodicies of Dalit women and their valiant battle with demonic cancer is at once a moving account, an expert diagnosis and a moral compass offering navigational steer to our collective struggles.”

— Aditya Bharadwaj, The Graduate Institute, Geneva

“an exemplary ethnography that examines the lives of cancer patients, predominantly women belonging to lower class and caste in the state of Tamil Nadu. By capturing the deeper economic, political and sociocultural dimensions of their lives and their inhabited social worlds, her ethnography holds immense relevance to future public health planning. … extremely significant in the realm of medical anthropology”

—S. Sreeparvathy, IIT-Delhi

“…powerful, meaningful and highly readable…Cancer and the Kali Yuga is a timely and revelatory text that vividly represents the possibilities of public health focused ethnographic research carried out in the contexts of structural casteism in contemporary south India. It is a meaningful resource not only for global health researchers but equally for students of gender studies, critical medical anthropology, health equity studies and feminist studies of wellbeing and care in the Global South.”

—Nikhil Pandhi, Princeton University