Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs The Year in India

Two cancer memoirs from Bollywood heroines were published in 2019: Manisha Koirala's Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Life and Lisa Ray's Close to the Bone. Koirala's text begins with her diagnosis, and concludes with her healing and subsequent attempts to establish a new lifestyle. Ray's text arrives at "cancer time"—Nancy Miller's term, defined as the time spent in "diagnosis, staging, prognosis, protocol," where the "only future fixed chronology is that of treatment sessions" (217)—almost two-thirds into the narrative, with the bulk of her book focused on her childhood and career. Ray's work lists "with Neelam Kumar" under the authorname, though the extent of authorial collaboration and contribution is unclear.

Celebrity culture in India is constituted, primarily, by film stars and their lives. Sports stars are famous, but it is film personalities that take up maximum space on page three of major newspapers, with reams of glossy tabloid paper devoted to "uncovering" their private lives. Bollywood stars remain the cornerstone of India's celebrity culture in terms of their affective impact: their lifestyles are the subject of reportage, their appearances and fashion the subject of imitation, and their controversies the stuff of the rumor mills. Scandals, as in any celebrity culture, are important events in Bollywood lives as well: their extramarital affairs, divorces, legal crises, substance abuse, and squabbles feature in magazines such as Filmfare. The stars' philanthropic work and activism are also highly visible and the subject of public debates (Nayar, "Brand Bollywood"). Deaths in their families, or of the stars themselves, such as Sridevi's drowning in a bathtub in 2018, also receive intensive coverage.

In the recent past, revelations about stars' unhappy childhoods or depression have also made the news, most notably the case of top-ranked star Deepika Padukone, who was the face of depression in a nationwide campaign about mental health. That she went public about her history of depression was often touted as playing a pivotal role in drawing attention to a national crisis. It is in this context of the high visibility of their lives as stars that memoirs of their diseases are consumed. These disease memoirs may be termed "celebrity somatography," extending the original meaning of the term "somatography"—body visualization, but also employed by G. Thomas Couser to speak of memoirs by people with disabilities (Signifying Bodies 2)—from a focus on the star-body to the biosocial network engendered by the disease and its treatment processes.

From the Cosmetic to the Pathologized Body

The most notable feature of the celebrity somatography is the careful account of the body and the ontological instability that appears with the disease, mapping a shift from the cosmetic to the pathologized body. Both Ray and Koirala, as film stars, present their glamorous, highly visible lives and bodies. They discuss their roles on screen, the progress of their careers, and their social networks within the film industry. Their books are interleaved with images and stills from their careers.¹

Ray speaks of her stage performances (116–17), her modelling (120–22), and the parties where she is constantly on show as a glamorous, doll-like public figure. She records, self-reflexively, the sense of being on display, of role-playing: "A large chunk of my early life had been about looking like someone else" (190). But she is also intensely aware of her ontological and corporeal identity: "It was a vital shock of oxygen, this idea, that it was my individuality that was sacred, not fitting into an arbitrary standard of beauty" (190–91).

Like Ray, Koirala also records how her public image began to slowly generate an emotion different from triumph or happiness: "I became a robot—instantly donning another persona at the snap of 'Lights, Camera, Action'" (78). The focus on appearance and the public consumption of a star's good looks foregrounds the "cosmetic body." "Cosmetic body" is my shorthand term for the star's body that foregrounds the looks, style, and fashion of the star over anything else. That is, the "cosmetic body" is the star-body fashioned out of raw material. In Richard Dyer's justifiably famous formulation from Heavenly Bodies:

First, the person is a body, a psychology, a set of skills that have to be mined and worked up into a star image. This work, of fashioning the star out of the raw material of the person, varies in the degree to which it respects what artists sometimes refer to as the inherent qualities of the material; make-up, coiffure, clothing, dieting and body-building. …

(5)

The celebrity somatography shifts from the made-up, fashioned body of the star to the "raw material," which in this case is a pathologized corporeality.

In speaking of the disease within, the celebrity somatography foregrounds the ontologically real by contrasting it with the stars' on-screen role-playing and public personae prior to the disease's appearance. The ontologically real is the pathologized body that is in sharp contrast to the cosmetic one. In Ray, the awareness of the pathologized body begins, tellingly, with the changed nature of her appearance: "I was very pale, my complexion grey and sickly, and very tired. I shrugged it off as normal …" (224).

In its focus on the pathologized body, the celebrity somatography develops an autobiology narrative. Anna Harris et al. write:

Autobiology—the study of, and story about, one's own organism—is a term we use to capture narratives told at the molecular level, stories which concern genetic markers, alleles and ribonucleic acids, interweaving family histories of illness into wayfaring … narratives. They are also autobiological narratives in the ways in which they document a sense of self-making through forms of biological practice and scientific experimentation, practices which exhibit a form of playfulness, while simultaneously being bound up with consumerist concerns.

(62)

The autobiology narrative is a component of the autobiography. Couser has argued with regard to genetic testing and personal genomics that the "awareness that one is predisposed to a medical condition can induce intense, even excruciating self-consciousness," which serves as a "stimulant" to "self-monitoring," and by extension composing in genres such as the diary (Vulnerable Subjects 175). Intensely aware of the cancer cells inside their bodies, Ray and Koirala begin to map their bodily changes from the disease and also from the treatment.

The monitoring of bodily conditions, from the minutest to the macro-level, is characteristic of celebrity somatography. Ray and Koirala record the processes and stages in their medical treatment, the changes in their bodies as a result of the treatment (chemotherapy, notably), and their bodies' responses. After diagnosis, the autobiology narrative lapses into the military language of an invasion:

The treacherous enemy had stealthily invaded my body and reproduced its tribe until it was swelling and ready to break free of its confines. A takeover plan was about to be executed in the dimness within. The shadowy enemy was scheming about how and when to obliterate the host—me.

(Ray 41)

Ray lists her medications (294), and tells us how she experienced "an intense buzzing through my whole body, like a surge of electricity starting" (299). She records the changed shape of her face (301) and her craving for all sorts of foods (301–302). Koirala begins by speaking of the weight she was putting on in some parts of her body before the diagnosis and the loss of weight from other places (6). During chemo, she tells us, she watched for the side effects, which she had read up on, and which thankfully did not occur (99–101). She records her hair loss and fatigue (124).

The Connected Self and the Biosocial Network

The pathologized self is one that is located amid a host of connections: the family first, but also their contacts, friends from the film community and a network of advisors, well-wishers, healers, and therapists. When, toward the end of their accounts, both Ray and Koirala claim to have found a new appreciation for life, or a new self, it may be interpreted as a reorganization of corporeal identity and self-fashioning itself. They move from cosmetic to pathologized bodies, but conclude with a new self—what Lisa Ray terms Lisa 2.0 (374)—that recognizes its vulnerability and a new chance at life.

The pathologized body, discovered through disease and its treatment, enables the recognition that the self is a connected self. Ray and Koirala admit their lives were dependent on machines, doctors, attendants, the chemicals being pumped into them, friends, and family. Koirala acknowledges the clinical and medical apparatuses that saved her. "My equation with my family changed permanently through the course of my treatment," she writes (113). Koirala notes the number of tubes and apparatuses that "wire" her body (83). The medical staff at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and other clinics, she says, were helpful, particularly when they discovered she was a film star (82). She offers sustained praise for Dr. Chi's positive outlook throughout the narrative. She "learnt the art of picking up each moment carefully … filled with a deep appreciation for every little bit that life generously handed to me" (87). Dr. Galal, a myeloma specialist, tells Ray, "we will kick this disease's ass" (291), a statement from which she draws considerable courage. Ray also describes in detail her discovery of yoga, Buddhism, and healing in India, all from varied sources, each one offering her an insight into life. As she puts it, she was moved by "the sudden emergence of all these people around the world offering themselves in kindness" (321). Ray's and Koirala's emphasis on the process of healing as determined not just by biomedical modes, but through other processes as well, promotes the idea of holistic practices, lifestyle changes, and a social self. That they were aided in their recovery by more than just physicians—and their constant attribution of this recovery to the goodwill, wishes, and blessings of fans, friends, and family—highlights the connected and embedded nature of the self.

Writing about his heart transplant in L'Intrus, Jean-Luc Nancy asserts that life does not reside in any one organ, but a host of organs, including foreign ones. Nancy goes on to say that life is polymorphic, embedded and enmeshed in networks:

there comes a certain continuity of intrusion, its permanent regime: added to the more-than-daily doses of medication, and being monitored in the hospital … the general feeling of no longer being dissociable from a network of measurements, observations, and of chemical, institutional, and symbolic connections, which do not allow themselves to be ignored, as can be those of which ordinary life is always woven. … I become indissociable from a polymorphous dissociation.

(12)

While Nancy is focused on the non-dissociable apparatuses that sustain his life, the larger point about the dependency of life on external elements is, I think, clear. The sense of such a connectedness in the process of treatment and healing is, therefore, a recognition of a different order, or nature, of the individual self.

In Healed and Close to the Bone, one more dimension to this discovery of the connected self is the urge in both Koirala and Ray to generate a biosociality that extends beyond the immediate settings of their lives. The term "biosociality" was coined by Paul Rabinow in 1996 to describe social identities and sociality founded on genomic diagnosis, but it may be extended to include social relationships based on a sharing of knowledge about shared disorders, syndromes, and conditions. According to Carlos Novas and Nicholas Rose, the new biosociality is defined by individuals for whom medical results, treatments, and monitoring from diagnosis to healing construct life courses, lifestyles, and identities. Nova and Rose also argue that such biosociality represents ethical and responsible conduct on behalf of individual patients and survivors. As I have argued elsewhere, "biological states of being constitute emergent identity practices … biological and pathological conditions become cultural markers of identity through these sites" in what may be termed a "biosociality of vulnerability" ("New Biosociality" 3).

It is then possible to see blogging, storytelling (Koirala's term), and narrative appurtenances, such as the list of recommended books in Koirala, as attempts to reach out to a world of (similar) sufferers—to offer life lessons from their case histories. Ray begins blogging about her illness, and thereby takes biosociality into the online world. She begins her blog, she says, in a "fit of steroid-induced mania in the middle of the night … the steroids also fortified me; they let me be fearless about speaking out" (305). Koirala writes in her preface: "while going through that phase of my life I kept fragmented notes in my diary, hoping to spin them into a book later … bits of this book were written in my head during my chemo days" (ix). Then she states her ambition: "To become a true storyteller for the readers' sake as well as my own" (ix).

After an account of her cancer treatment and pain, Koirala writes, "Now that I am healed, I wish to help others. I am curious to learn how I was cured so that I can pass on my learning to you. I was afflicted by stage-IV cancer that had metastasized. I know many such patients who did not survive. Somewhere, I feel the survivor's guilt" (173). Further along in the narrative, she tells of her life as a social worker:

So has cancer changed me? Yes …

I share precious life lessons at various schools, hospitals and organizations. … I feel expanded in heart, generous in spirit. It is my time under the sun now. I am burning with the desire to give back to society.

(206–207)

Koirala concludes her book with a list of "Books and Resources," subtitled "My Portable Magic," consisting of books and blogs that supposedly helped her (217–19). Ray speaks of cancer patients and survivors "who had turned their private experience of illness into public good." One such man, she says, "nudged me into philanthropy by teasingly reawakening my competitive side. … I ended up raising $25,000 CAD for him by leading a team walk for multiple myeloma awareness and finding a cure" (319).

The two Bollywood stars align on a plane of disease, recovery, and the social responsibility of survivors, and in the process advance a biosociality. The ethical response of reaching out to the world after their cancer experiences and healing is also an instantiation of a retrieved agency for the self. For Ole Andreas Brekke and Thorvald Sirnes, biosociality enables patients and sufferers to contribute to medical science and social awareness. Examining campaigns like "Portraits of Hope,"² they argue that patients actively contribute to the discourse of science-as-hope:

However, also in these cases, the effect of the story is not easily contained, especially since the portraits are constitutive of a larger discourse of action/inaction, where medical-scientific action is the only hope. Again, they serve as general "vectors" in the construction of biosubjectivities, thereby also influencing the interpretation of less definite cases.

(354)

Brekke and Sirnes argue this makes such patients agents. While Ray and Koirala do not explicitly advocate research or biomedical solutions, they both offer other resources and thereby suggest alternatives to being just patients. The cultivation of hope suggested by the two memoirs is, in the arguments outlined above, an act of ethical advocacy that is also the assertion of an individual's agency.

I have one final point (perhaps more of a speculative leap) to make about the biosociality reflected in Healed and Close to the Bone. When Koirala and Ray narrate their experience with cancer, much of what they say is imprinted with the consciousness of being public figures—of being recognizable and adored. But in the process of recounting illness and recovery, they also highlight the publicness of their biomedical conditions: building on film stars' attention-drawing and affective power, which has been evident in the Indian context for decades. In 1982, when Amitabh Bachchan suffered a life-threatening injury during a shoot, almost the entire nation—pre-internet—followed the daily updates on his condition and held mass prayers for his recovery.

References to fans and followers are scattered throughout Ray's and Koirala's memoirs. That is, their cancer time is imprinted with the celebrity-time of their careers. Once they are healed and in remission, their biosociality and narratives thereof suggest that this present and the future are imprinted with their (past) cancer time. Victoria Pitts-Taylor argues about the "body's time":

A developmental, plastic, epigenetic, situated view of the biological body sees it as entangled with the environment, including culture, over time. An understanding of the body as becoming over time can render a material dimension to socialization and can address how social inequalities can get under the skin, or how intersectional identities are materially embodied.

(487–88)

The advocacy and biosociality, the portrait of the emergent/new self (as an example, perhaps?), the discourse of alternative lifestyle, and the message of hope and courage implicitly and explicitly employed by Koirala and Ray are all imprinted with their cancer time. That is, their biosociality is grounded in the "material dimension" of possessing bodies imprinted with cancer. This does not mean they remain cancer bodies, but both Ray and Koirala conclude by underscoring that they once had cancer inside them. Their future actions and present biosociality are both undergirded by the irreducible material reality that cancer left on their bodies: a past that shaped their bodies of today.

Star memoirs about disease, hospitalization, and recovery are integral to Indian celebrity culture, just as their marriages and financial or legal crises are. They render more transparent the star's vulnerability and generate an affective economy beyond star-charisma. Images of Koirala with a shorn head (from chemotherapy) made headlines in Indian newspapers, and the deglamorized star commanded no less an affective pull than from her filmic appearances as a glam-girl.