Cinematic Healthscapes: Technology, Media, Bodies, and the Negotiation of Biomedical and Traditional Knowledge in Contemporary Indian Cinema

Abstract

This paper argues that contemporary Indian cinema does not simply represent illness and healthcare but actively constructs "healthscapes": mediated assemblages in which bodies, medical technologies, therapeutic practices, media, family, culture, institutions, and space interact to produce competing accounts of what counts as health, illness, and healing. Adapting Arjun Appadurai's "scapes" vocabulary and the healthscape concept developed within medical sociology, the paper reads five contemporary Hindi-language films — Margarita with a Straw (2014), Taare Zameen Par (2007), Dear Zindagi (2016), The Sky Is Pink (2019), and Piku (2015) -as a single corpus organised around a shared analytical question: how does Indian cinema negotiate biomedical authority against Ayurvedic, familial, spiritual, and digital modes of understanding the body?

Using a combined method of textual, visual, spatial, and discourse analysis, the paper develops a twelve-category coding framework spanning body, illness, technology, media, space, institution, family, culture, traditional knowledge, agency, ethics, and inequality. The analysis finds that Indian cinematic healthscapes are characterized by medical pluralism rather than a single dominant medical logic: biomedical technology, domestic remedy, familial authority, and digital self-diagnosis routinely coexist, compete, and hybridise within the same narrative. The paper's central theoretical contribution is the proposition that cinema occupies a double position within this healthscape- it represents medical technology while simultaneously functioning as a technology of health knowledge in its own right, one that visualizes, mediates, contests, and circulates ideas about the body for a mass audience.