Some of India’s best-known writers have come together in a unique anthology — Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India — of writing which tells the human stories behind HIV/Aids in the country. From BBC:
Salman Rushdie with one of his subjects (Photo: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation/Prashant Panjiar)
They include Booker Prize-winners Sir Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai; Vikram Seth, the celebrated author of A Suitable Boy; and internationally-acclaimed writer and historian William Dalrymple. Other contributors include novelist Amit Chaudhuri, leading Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, historian-writer Mukul Kesavan and popular novelist Shobhaa De.
[...] Sir Salman, for example, spends a day with eunuchs in the western city of Mumbai (Bombay) to write up a piece called The Half-Woman God.
“India has always understood androgyny, the man in the woman’s body, the woman in the man’s. Yet… the third gender of India still need our understanding, and our help,” he says.
Kiran Desai travelled to the southern coastal state of Andhra Pradesh to meet its sex workers. The state has one of the highest rates of infection in India.
“What I had seen, really seen, were lives lived with the intensity of art; rife with metaphor, raw, distilled,” Desai writes.
“The emotions of love and friendship, you’d assume would be missing or rotten, in these communities – existing even more so for their being sought amidst illegality, fragmentation and betrayal.
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HIV/AIDS and the ethics of responsibility in India
An extract from Amartya Sen’s foreword to “Aids Sutra: Untold Stories from India.” From The Telegraph:
The ethics of responsibility has been a big subject in analysing the social aspects of AIDS. The point has been made, with considerable influence, that since HIV infection is primarily contracted through voluntary acts, such as unsafe sex, it is the individual rather than the society that should take responsibility for avoiding the disease and accepting the consequences of irresponsible actions. This way of seeing the social ethics of AIDS would have vast implications for what an afflicted person can or cannot expect the state to do for the ill…..
The idea that somehow the afflicted person bears the responsibility for his or her own unfortunate condition, since the infection could have been avoided through changing personal behaviour, is indeed quite prevalent – not just in advanced countries like the United States of America, but also in India. There is certainly an element of narrow plausibility in this general outlook. Many of the actions that may lead to the infection are certainly within the person’s own control, and the role of personal responsibility is indeed an important connection to bear in mind in planning strategies for prevention, through greater availability and use of information and more social education and advocacy. And yet to see this as an ‘open and shut’ case of just personal responsibility also misses the nine-tenth of the iceberg that lies below the water, hidden from view.
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