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The notion of care, perhaps one that demands more anthropological elaboration, retains its importance outside the medico-historical questions of health, disease, sickness, and healing to which it has often been limited. Important political considerations and implications are mobilised by our understanding of what care is. What, really, do we know about it? If we accept cynical theorists dogmatically, does it emerge that all care is a residue of power? Is it nothing but disciplinary force? Must we agree with this notion, or can care be seen to exceed or escape the apparatuses of discipline? Can one respond with care to a Being which is not (or not yet) a discursive subject? I seek to ask how else we may conceive of care: is it a form of discipline itself, or an honest counter to disciplinary power? In what follows, I offer some coordinates for orienting a response.
Scholars have pointed out that film serves as a useful subject matter for philosophy, since it carries the ability to “return the mind to the living body” (Cavell 127) in showing us how words and ideas are not abstractly defined, but enacted and inhabited by people in everyday life. The need to avoid abstruse theoretical answers is rendered all the more important when exploring questions as intimate as those of care, love, and affection. In its effort to link cinema not only with theory but with life itself, this essay explores the questions posed above through the 1969 Waheeda Rahman and Rajesh Khanna classic Khamoshi. In this film, Rahman plays Radha, a nurse at a psychiatric institution, tasked with discharging a new form of therapeutic care to patient Arun (played by Khanna). Her responsibility, we are initially led to believe, is to discharge the force of the institution to which she belongs in order to discipline Arun’s life into its usual rhythms. But this relationship between nurse and patient is soon marked by an excess that, I will argue below, ruptures language and the limits of discipline itself, providing a new perspective to our conception of care and its relation to disciplinary power.
I supplement this analysis of cinema with my ethnographic fieldwork with Delhi’s healer pahalwans. The pahalwans, also called jarrahs (barber-surgeons), are purveyors of traditional and ‘alternative’ forms of medical treatment in Old Delhi. The therapeutic relationships between these healers and their patients, like that of Radha and Arun, point towards complex ideas of care, love, and intimacy.
Before laying out these coordinates, it would be helpful to establish a plane on which we might place them. Before care tests the “limits of discipline,” what can we say about discipline itself? The specific form of discipline that forms the backdrop of Khamoshi — due to its setting in a mental asylum — is psychiatric power: power over mental illness. Crucially, an analysis of this form of power is not the same as a study of psychiatry, a discipline that epistemologically claims itself to be a form of knowledge. Instead, analyses of psychiatric power aim to demonstrate what psychiatry does, i.e. how it came to discharge its power through the people and institutions associated with it.
The foremost theorist of these issues was Michel Foucault, and necessary here is a discussion of his (1973-1974) lectures on psychiatry. Per Foucault, power does not reside in an individual but in an apparatus. This apparatus is composed of institutions, techniques, and forms of knowledge in a web of interrelations. Such a view is fundamentally dispersed and relational — what exists is not so much power, but relations of power:
Power does not belong to anyone or even to a group; there is only power because there is dispersion, relays, networks, reciprocal supports, differences of potential, discrepancies, etcetera (Foucault 4).
According to Foucault, these relations of power are evident from our everyday life, particularly through our interactions with political, scientific, and medical institutions. One such institution is the psychiatric hospital, and psychiatric power is for Foucault a disciplinary form of power. Disciplinary power is marked by features that render it the complete opposite of a more ancient form of power Foucault calls “sovereign power,” the patrimony of erstwhile European kings. First, discipline does not revolve around an asymmetrical relationship with a momentary and fragmented hold on the subject: instead, it is a “total hold” over “body, actions, time, and behaviour” (Foucault 46). Second, due to this complete hold, it has done away with discontinuous rituals that reaffirm/renew its authority and instead revolves around continuous control: it has no use for an original Right of power, since it looks not back into the past but towards the future, at an optimum or final state that must be achieved through habit and exercise. Disciplinary power does not intervene periodically, it seeks to intervene even before an act, through “supervision, rewards, punishments, and pressure” (Foucault 51). This gives it a Panoptic character. Third, it is an anonymous, faceless power that does not apply heterotopically. It is isotopic in its continuity, and applies equally throughout the gamut of its apparatus, relying not on sovereign Decision but disciplinary regulation: its elements all have well-defined places, with subordinate and superordinate elements. Each of these features of power will become evident in our analysis later in this essay.
For now, we note that Foucault is effectively claiming that the formation of the contemporary individual is necessarily disciplinary. “Disciplinary power … fabricates subjected bodies …. [W]hat we call the individual is the effect produced on the somatic singularity … by the techniques of political power” (Foucault 55-56). Individuals are formed by subjecting human bodies. These forms of subjectification are in turn forms of power, replete with institutions, techniques, and forms of knowledge. A corollary of this is that the individual is not a pre-existing object belatedly affected by power. Instead, Foucault is arguing that there are no individuals outside of relations of power (56). This implies, if we tie it to our original question, that even relations as deeply and personally felt as love are never singular, but fully reducible to a disciplining apparatus — always subordinate, that is, to relations of power. And yet, I demonstrate below, Radha’s story, while faithfully portraying the adjacency of care and love, hints at tactics that allow us to escape such stifling conceptions of intimacy.
Radha and Arun’s romance first appeared in the form of a short story by Ashutosh Mukhopadhyay titled Nurse Mitra. Asit Sen then developed Mukhopadhyay’s story into the acclaimed Bengali film Deep Jwele Jai (“To Light a Lamp”), and later remade it in Hindi as Khamoshi. We should thus expect the arc of the story to have been twice-distilled. At first glance, Khamoshi seems to corroborate Foucault’s portrayal of disciplinary institutions. Radha is a nurse at the “National Psycho Analytical Clinic” and is tasked by her boss, the Colonel, to administer a new form of therapy for acute mania: one in which establishing a “correct” or “perfect” relationship between doctor and patient is expected to “become his cure” (Sen 7:25). This therapy had already worked for Dev, a patient who improved, left the asylum, and soon married. His treatment had entailed the unintended (and as yet unknown to anyone else) consequence that Radha had fallen in love with her patient.
Enter Arun Chaudhary, who is spurned by his lover Sulekha, causing a loss of trust in interpersonal relationships. Sulekha’s decision to leave Arun, ostensibly due to the fact that Arun had left his moneyed family estate behind to pursue a life of poetry, forces Arun to confront the possibility that he was never loved for who he really was. His “acute mania” is actually a profound displacement of subjectivity and identity: both of others’ (because he sees Sulekha in and behind every woman in his life) and his own.
Initially, it appears that nothing about Arun’s treatment at the Clinic escapes the constraints of a disciplinary institution. First, we see a “total hold” on “body, actions, time, and behaviour” (Foucault 46) via nurses who appear little different from bureaucrats, constantly, referring to files, papers, notes, case histories, and patient numbers. Second, therapeutic activity is directed towards the future, through continuous “supervision, rewards, punishments, and pressure” in the form of daily regimen, writing practices, etc. (Foucault 51). Third, we are shown how doctors, nurses, and patients are each in turn disciplining or being disciplined by subordinate or superordinate components of the apparatus. The nurses and doctors all act and look identical, discharging not the force of their individual selves but the anonymous and nebulous force of the institution of psychiatry.
However, this psychiatric asylum inadvertently gives rise to a form of care that “power” fails to adequately capture. This form of care is not sovereignty, and not discipline: in classical anthropological fashion, it appears to have features of both and neither. Something about Radha’s participation in Arun’s therapeutic life fractures the separation between these forms of power and allows a third valence of relationships to emerge.
Care at the Clinic is dispersed in fundamentally gendered ways. The doctors exist to administer “medicine”: appearing on the scene to bark orders, interrogate patients, or (notably) to constrain them against their will for electroconvulsive therapy (Sen 1:17:26). Nurse Radha, on the other hand, is meant to be warm and affectionate. Her task is “therapy,” but one that is to be actualised through becoming both “maa” and “mehbooba” — both mother and lover — by establishing a “rapport” (Sen 24:10). This gendered task of care does not reduce Radha from psychiatric practitioner to doe-eyed inamorata — we see that Radha begins by administering therapy not naïvely but clinically. Nothing else explains her painstaking attention to detail, and her effort at complete self-transformation. Nothing underlines her clinical discipline more than her deployment of the pre-eminent psychological tools: questioning the patient and their family, gathering evidence, and establishing a historical narrative that can function as “data” for the disciplinary apparatus. She does not later fall in love with Arun because she was bad at what she did, but because she was exceedingly good at it. She was never asked to act: “No! No! This is not acting,” the Colonel had scolded her, “this is treatment for an illness” (Sen 19:46). Not acting, but therapy. And we can establish in intricate detail how this regimented form of care (therapy) that began as disciplining power eventually gives rise to an entirely different form of affect between Arun and Radha.
First, we note that though discipline exerts itself continuously, the idea of care as mobilised by the Foucauldian notion of disciplinary power is still supposed to be spatially bounded. While a doctor’s (in this case a nurse’s) disciplinary knowledge is supposed to influence the patient’s behaviour at all times, the doctor’s care is only supposed to extend to those within the clinic — it would be unusual (and certainly discomfiting) for a doctor to continue to care affectionately for a patient as they step outside of the medical sphere. Radha’s affection for Arun, on the other hand, slowly begins to exceed the bounds of the clinic in exactly this way. It gradually extends both inwards to her memories (as she dreams about him), and outwards in the form of public, romantic rendezvous (as portrayed in the song sequence Woh Shaam Kuch Ajeeb Thi [Sen 1:30:55]).
Second, discipline rests on the imagination of a future and its invocation through practice, habit, and exercise: it thus has a distinct temporality. This temporality rests on a time that is supposed to arrive: “a final or optimum state” (Foucault 47). Instead of imagining a care restricted simply to the time of treatment, Radha begins to imagine an eternal future for herself with Arun. This is the “forever” time not just of care but of love, a time that has no final state since it is wished never to cease. In other words, Radha’s temporality of care shifts from an end that is desired (care that will end when cure is achieved) to one that is never supposed to arrive (care that persists as love and will never end).
Third, care as mobilised by discipline comes with obligations and transactions. This form of care is never truly free-floating, but contractual. As Foucault explains, the patient presents symptoms so that the therapist can formulate them as illness and in doing so anoint themself a therapist — this co-constitutive transaction consists of a patient presenting “symptoms” and a doctor providing “cure” (Foucault 276). In a commodity exchange, a return of value leads to the closure of a transaction. However, the gift-like nature of romantic love and desire means that when one receives love and recognition from the other, this does not exhaust the relationship of love, but strengthens and fuels it. Love as non-reciprocal is fundamentally never concluded. Radha’s love for Arun, too, exceeds a contractual obligation. In fact, she refuses to take up his case when pushed by a sense of obligation to her Colonel or Matron. Later, she requests to take on his case precisely when she is least obliged to. She shows a love for him that does not particularly seem to care whether he is ill or healthy, recovering or deteriorating.
As popularly conceived in art and cinema, authentic romantic love is imagined to take the form of a gift: it is non-reciprocal, a complete offering of the self to the other. Radha presented precisely such a gift to Dev, and now does the same to Arun — the care she discharges renders her utterly vulnerable, and she is powerless to demand a response, rendering her “khamosh,” silent. I argue that this silence emerges from her complete romantic devotion to her patient, a devotion that due to its very nature cannot straightforwardly ask to be reciprocated.
Fourth, love is a bond of uniqueness, not of generality or replaceability. The bond Radha and Arun share takes the shape of exactly such a singularity. One might disagree with this claim based on the argument that, until quite close to the end of the movie, Radha seems to be falling in love with Arun while still reminiscing about Dev. In a classic Freudian slip, she once utters Dev’s name while embracing Arun (Sen 1:35:39). However, we must distinguish this from a disciplinary mode of functioning. For the Colonel, for example, Arun and Dev are completely interchangeable. One patient with acute mania is as good as another — they are both bodies with illnesses before they are people with the force of life. On the other hand, what Radha experiences is transference, a reminiscence of a past relationship in a present one. The fact that she is shocked by this transference goes to show how different her situation is from one of disciplinary isotopy. Unlike the Colonel, for whom patients are interchangeable, Radha is horrified when she finds herself mentally interchanging them. The encounter of the other in the traces of a past relationship (Radha) is thus distinct from the complete interchangeability of two relations (Colonel).
Finally, love is popularly imagined as an intimately private — not public — bond. Love demands a secluded time and space, necessarily hidden from the general view. Love, like therapy, can never simply be acting for a public. This intimacy is crucial. I assert this is exactly the khamoshi to which the title of the film refers. For her love to exist Radha must keep it a secret. It must escape not just institutional power but the publicity of language itself by being kept silent, hidden, intimate. Heeding calls to examine Hindi-Urdu cinema as not just a visual but a lyric tradition (Singh), we would be remiss not to mention that Gulzar seems to be making the same argument through the film’s most popular song, “Humne Dekhi Hai,” which deserves quoting at length:
I have seen, in those eyes, a wafting fragrance,
Don’t, by touching it, accuse it of bearing relationships,
It is a feeling, meant to be felt with the soul,
Let love be love, don’t give it a name,
We have seen…
Love is not words, love is not voice,
It is a silence that hears and that speaks…
(Sen 1:06:40-1:10:10, emphasis added)
To feel with the body and not words, to refuse to label a relationship of individuals, to help love survive by failing to name it, are all positions to be aspired to. Love is not of words or in them: it must thus be a human response beyond a discursive one. Radha’s khamoshi exists because to put her love into language (“nurse-patient,” “therapist-maniac,” “lover-lover,” etc.) would allow it once more to be captured by a capillary form of power (Foucault 56). The love between Arun and Radha prospers right when it starts to lose all meaning in terms of prevalent discursive apparatuses. It is when the power relations of patient and nurse start to become mangled and unnameable that the true force of love and care is unleashed. Discipline tries to enter the minutiae of intimacy in order to turn them into a relay of power, yet these minutiae in turn fray the disciplinary apparatus, staging an escape.
Unfortunately, the force of this power comes back to haunt Radha. Torn between her responsibilities as a nurse and her feelings for Arun, who has finally forgotten Sulekha and made a recovery, the tension proves to be too much for Radha to bear. Radha declares to Arun that she did not really love him — that she was merely acting — and asks the Colonel to ensure they do not see each other again. Her declaration is belied when Arun finally finds her, discovering to his shock that it is now Radha — literally madly in love — who has begun to suffer from acute mania. In the closing scenes of the film, we see Radha confined inside the same ward from which Arun had emerged. Arun sidesteps his attendants and runs to her door, declaring proudly that he will wait for Radha until his dying breath.
In this way, Khamoshi’s portrayal of care is not functional and therapeutic but deeply intimate and affective; it escapes the bind of sovereign and disciplinary power. Radha’s love is a continuous, gift-like, unconditional care which imagines an eternal temporality and an omnipresent spatiality. What it does not do is create individuals out of subjected, discursive bodies. In one sense, it does not matter at all whether Radha utters the words “Dev” or “Arun” — her innermost tumult has surpassed all names that tie it down, and has become a truly singular form of love.
How and where else might we see such care discharged between somatic forms? Through vignettes from fieldwork amongst healers in Delhi, I suggest that they too may provide such a site of care. We may be taught to discharge care by the apparatuses of power, but one can still exploit the chinks in its armor and escape the apparatus: responding with love to a Being with which we can form singular human connections.
Old Delhi abounds in jarrahs, in English sometimes called ‘bonesetters’, or more often simply termed “quacks.” They specialise in the treatment of a variety of injuries and ailments such as broken or bent bones, twisted or dislocated joints, sprains, and chronic pain. The term jarrah itself harkens back to Islamic subcontinental traditions of barber-surgery, but the usage of the self-identifying term should not lead us to view all jarrah practitioners as belonging to an identifiably common lineage (Lambert 112). Most jarrahs I have met in Delhi — Hindus — brandish vague Ayurvedic credentials. They denigrate their Muslim counterparts for lacking comparable medico-theological knowledge, in seeming ignorance of the provenance of the term jarrahi itself. But even their own credentials are suspect, since very few bonesetters can explain what their Ayurvedic knowledge is, how it is derived, or even what scriptures one must consult, if one consults texts at all (and most of them do not, since many I met cannot read). Jarrahi therefore labels a loose allegiance, and not an institutional form. This is reflected in the fragmentation of jarrahs’ techniques and forms of knowledge — there is no generalised or unifying basis for the practices of each bonesetter. Power, in this setting, is irrevocably fractured in a way that one capillary of it usually does not correspond to another. Jarrahi fails to tie its world together into a cohesive web of interrelations. It comes in all shapes and sizes. In this fundamentally messy and confused world, discipline is hard to find.
I first met Hari Pahalwan¹ — real name Satish Kumar — on a sweltering afternoon near Chandni Chowk. Pahalwan ji is more than 60 years old, and on that day looked morose: like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. He worked out of a rented shop on Diwan Hall road, turned not into a surgery but into an alcove that opened out to the street. There was no strict separation between the inside and outside of his clinic except a flimsy brown curtain — no imposing gates or symbols announced that one was entering a space of medical knowledge.
When I arrived, Hari had just started talking to an obese, middle-aged man who had come to seek help, accompanied by his wife and son. He complained of chronic pain and an inability to fully mobilise his right arm from the shoulder down. Having the preconceptions that I did — that many in Delhi do — I expected Hari to provide a cure by snapping and stretching the man’s arm, or at the very least by massaging it vigorously. I remember being surprised, then, at the sheer delicateness with which Hari touched his arm. He gently and patiently applied salve to the affected limb, and began to methodically wrap the arm in cotton gauze from the shoulder down. The enfolding and sewing together of this cotton splint seemed to take forever. The pahalwan’s needle was often right next to the sufferer’s skin, who would flinch in apprehension. Contrary to my own experiences with allopathic doctors, who in such a situation would either scold patients or grab their limbs firmly, our pahalwan met this patient on his own terms: Hari moved smoothly and matched each movement of the man’s body. Fifteen minutes later, the bandaging was complete, and the family turned to leave. Just by feeling the contours of the sufferer’s shoulder, however, Hari had sensed an intimate secret: “you’ve gone to another pahalwan before me, haven’t you?” he asked pointedly as they rose. The man was flustered: “Yes, uh, you see, actually, someone from the extended family had asked me to go to Jaggu, in Shahdara, so I did. He only made my situation worse though, so I came to you. Really, I wouldn’t have gone had I known about you before.” The man sheepishly took his leave.
Jaggu² Pahalwan is monetarily by far the most successful bonesetter in Delhi. His bustling practice in Shahdara boasts of a permanent milling crowd of patients. I was told he met upwards of two hundred patients a day, and the number of people I saw hovering around him led me to believe that this was certainly not an exaggeration. He was said to be earning more than two lakh rupees daily, and employed half a dozen apprentices who ran circles around him bandaging patients and writing them biomedical prescriptions. Jaggu’s form of treatment, therefore, clearly suffered from a lack of personalism. When he was looking at so many injured bodies every hour, how could he really form affective bonds with any single one? Compared to Hari’s comments, which reeked almost of a lover’s jealousy, would Jaggu ever even notice if his patients had been to other jarrahs before? Hari spoke with great resignation of how streams of wailing patients would show up to his house in Krishna Nagar on days where Hari’s own illnesses prevented him from coming to work. He would speak of his inability to turn them away, and his efforts to treat them all the while nursing himself. Would Jaggu ever share such sorrows?
One of the main features of non-institutional therapies like jarrahi is that there is no deferral of responsibility. Hari Pahalwan, despite his vague protestations, does not really have techniques and forms of knowledge that would identically also be found in the practice of others of his ilk. There is therefore no codified disciplinary orthodoxy to rely on. The success or failure of treatment ultimately resides in Hari himself, not even in texts (which he cannot read, being mostly illiterate), and he knows this. Jaggu, however, defers or transfers his tasks to his apprentices, rendering them interchangeable like cogs in a machine. He would not himself massage or bandage any patients. Treatment success or failure in this setting was plugged into a large matrix of helpers, apprentices, pills, tablets, and biomedical ointments that hovered around Jaggu. If what delineates “faith” healing from allopathic medicine is that one must place complete trust in another human body, and not in the apparatus that that body appears to be a node of, Jaggu was not a faith healer at all. Hari’s patients, on the other hand, were trusting the human in front of them, rather than the apparatus behind them.
Crucially, this difference was evident in how these pahalwans conceptualised their vocation. While Jaggu labelled himself a jarrah, Hari hesitated with the label. “Mujhe jarrah kehte hain” he said — “I am called a jarrah [by others].” But jarrahi is not the core of his activities: “Kaiyon ke dukh sawaarein hain maine. Bigade nahi, sawaarei. Bade bade dukhi aadmi ke dukh sawaarein hain.” What he had done for four decades, according to him, was not putting bones in their place. It was the act of adorning himself with the sorrows of his supplicants, what he called dukh sawaarna. This deep intimacy was made possible by the devotion and concomitant vulnerability that constituted his daily interactions with sufferers and their suffering.
In this dukh sawaarna, we also see resonances of asrat. Literally meaning “effect” or “difficulty,” the term asrat has been used to describe mental illnesses which, “rather than being located solely in an individual body or brain … [are] conceived as transferrable across bodies, most often a household or kinship group” (Singh and Sharan 2). And is asrat not precisely what describes the circulation of illness among Radha, Dev, and Arun? This circulation of sorrow and illness is a marker of care. Radha’s ultimate insanity, the fact that she took on Arun’s burdens, becomes irrevocable proof of the truth of her love. The flow of affect described above can stem only from an intimate form of care that fails to be captured by discipline: otherwise one could diffuse and dissipate the responsibility of sorrow among other nodes of a power apparatus. Where Hari and Radha shoulder others’ suffering personally, Jaggu’s failure is medicine’s; the Colonel’s failure is that of psychiatry. Jaggu and the Colonel cannot participate in exercises of dukh sawaarna — they are too caught up in exerting power to be vulnerable enough to share the burdens of a loved other.
Through the vignettes outlined above, this essay has tried to pay attention to scenes of care alongside scenes of violence and confrontation. In doing so, it has shown how institutions or proto-institutions (like psychiatry or jarrahi) can allow a form of care to flourish that escapes apparatuses of power by escaping language, names, and discursive labels. Such an analysis opens up the possibility of acknowledging individuals outside relations of power, through relations of care which are not always reducible to a prevalent dispositif — relations which then may be said to have exceeded care and become love. Love has valences that the language of discipline cannot express. Love then emerges as powerlessness and vulnerability exalted to the point of virtue — a faith in the other alongside a refusal to submit deep human connections to manipulation by networks of power.
In response to Khamoshi, Foucault might have contended that love, healing, and control are nodes of one and the same power apparatus: that “Love was abolished / in the name of health / now health will be abolished” (Agamben). Such a view takes love to be something self-evidently disciplining and manipulative. Using ideas developed over the course of this essay, however, we may pose a more fundamental counter-question: “Pyaar kya hota hai? Kya kisi ko bhi pyaar karne se… pyaar ho jata hai?” [What is love? Does love arise simply by loving another?] (Sen 25:03).
Endnotes
¹ The community claims that the origin of this form of healing emerges from martial akharas which used to be sponsored by kings in the medieval period. since akharas are organised around wrestling, there would inevitably be many injuries, and slowly but surely a set of resident pahalwans began to specialise in the treatment of injuries caused by combat.
² Name has been changed to maintain anonymity.
Agamben, Giorgio. “Si è abolito l’amore.” Quodlibet, 6 November 2020, https://www.quodlibet.it/giorgio-agamben-si-bolito-l-amore.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1979.
Foucault, Michel. Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973-1974. Edited by Jacques Lagrange, translated by Graham Burchell, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Lambert, Helen. “Wrestling With Tradition: Towards a subaltern therapeutics of bonesetting and vessel treatment in north India.” Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics, edited by David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji, Routledge, 2012, pp. 109-125.
Mukhopadhyay, Sarvani. “বাবা দিয়েই গেল পেল না কিছু.” আনন্দবাজার পত্রিকা, 11 January 2014, https://archives.anandabazar.com/archive/1140111/11smaran.html.
Sen, Asit, director. Khamoshi. Gitanjali, 1969.
Singh, Bhrigupati. “Ethnographic Portraiture: Adjusting to Light and Dark.” Fieldsights, 2021, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ethnographic-portraiture-adjusting-to-light-and-dark.
Singh, Bhrigupati, and Pratap Sharan. “The contagion of mental illness: Insights from a Sufi shrine.” Transcultural Psychiatry, vol. 60, no. 3, 2023, pp. 1-19. DOI: 10.1177/13634615221078131.
