Nikhil Pandhi

NIHKIL PANDHI, then a graduate student at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, received a grant to aid research on “Dying of Caste: How Public Health, Caste and Chronicity Collide in Contemporary India,” supervised by Dr. Joao Biehl. The researcher carried out fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in northern India between January 2022 – February 2023 to anthropologically investigate how structural casteism functions as an everyday assemblage of systemic risk, debility, humiliation, wounding and pain for Dalit-Bahujan doctors, healthcare workers and patients battling unclassified ‘pain disorders’ linked to chronic opioid and substance use. By ethnographically following the trajectories and community health outreach of Dalit doctors in Delhi, western Uttar Pradesh and the borders of Haryana/Punjab — often in conjunction with female ASHA workers, local health activists and patient families — the researcher investigated how ordinary anti-caste knowledges are produced and proliferated at the intersections of Dalit, queer and feminist encounters with biomedicine and public health technoscience. Importantly, the researcher also conducted allied ethnographic research with the Dalit Lekhak Sangha (Dalit Writers Association) in Delhi to examine how creative accounts of caste in Hindi Dalit literature open-up radical avenues for assessing health, vitality and liveliness in contemporary India.