What do you think?
Rate this book
AIDS Sutra: Untold Stories from India
In this groundbreaking anthology, sixteen renowned writers tell the hidden story of the AIDS crisis, illuminating the complex nature of one of the major problems facing the developing world. India is home to almost 3 million HIV cases, but AIDS is still stigmatized and shrouded in denial. Discrimination against HIV-affected individuals in hospitals, schools, and even among families is common, just as discussion about HIV and participation in prevention or treatment programs are not. In this riveting book, sixteen of India's most well-known writers go on the road to uncover the reality of AIDS in India and tell the human stories behind the epidemic.Kiran Desai travels to the coast of Andhra Pradesh, where the sex workers are considered the most desirable; Salman Rushdie meets members of Mumbai's transgender community; William Dalrymple encounters the devadasis, women who have been “married” to a temple goddess and thus are deemed acceptable for transactional sex. Eye-opening, hard-hitting, and moving, AIDS Sutra presents a side of India rarely seen before.
355 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 14, 2008
1 person is currently reading
41 people want to read
About the author
Amartya Sen
197 books1,460 followersAmartya Kumar Sen is an Indian economist who was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory, and for his interest in the problems of society’s poorest members.
Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.
Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world".
Sen was best known for his work on the causes of famine, which led to the development of practical solutions for preventing or limiting the effects of real or perceived shortages of food. He is currently the Thomas W. Lamont University Professor and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he previously served as Master from the years 1998 to 2004. He is the first Asian and the first Indian academic to head an Oxbridge college.
Amartya Sen's books have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security. In 2006, Time magazine listed him under "60 years of Asian Heroes" and in 2010 included him in their "100 most influential persons in the world".
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
February 4, 2019
On holiday in Udaipur, we found the hotel lobby littered with a few books and decided to spend the evenings there. Discarding the ubiquitous Chetan Bhagat, I picked up AIDS Sutra. This is an anthology by different writers who wrote on the subject of sex, AIDS, prostitution, LGBT, medical assistance for HIV positive people, and other connected matters.
The book fell open on the chapter by Shobha De, and I thought it would be pretentious nonsense of the type she is so wont to write. I was rather surprised to find she had written a touching narrative of her servant who died of AIDS. So of course, I thought if Shobha De could write decent stuff, others would be definitely worth reading. They mostly were.
The stories followed a wide variety of people who were HIV positive. They were set mostly in the 90s when AIDS was booming but medicines were just becoming available. Many of the stories concentrated on sex workers, both male and female, who are probably the most high at risk among the population. But there were also stories about rape and medical negligence and malpractices. A couple of the stories also touched on children whose lives were ruined because their mothers could not get a simple dose before they were born.
If you know nothing about AIDS in India, this is actually worth a read. It is not all sadness and crying; there are some heartwarming moments of friendship, success, and the satisfaction of a life well-lived. Of course, there is the inevitable pretentious writing by a couple of authors with metaphors and flowery words thrown in for no reason. But you can always skip over these.
The book fell open on the chapter by Shobha De, and I thought it would be pretentious nonsense of the type she is so wont to write. I was rather surprised to find she had written a touching narrative of her servant who died of AIDS. So of course, I thought if Shobha De could write decent stuff, others would be definitely worth reading. They mostly were.
The stories followed a wide variety of people who were HIV positive. They were set mostly in the 90s when AIDS was booming but medicines were just becoming available. Many of the stories concentrated on sex workers, both male and female, who are probably the most high at risk among the population. But there were also stories about rape and medical negligence and malpractices. A couple of the stories also touched on children whose lives were ruined because their mothers could not get a simple dose before they were born.
If you know nothing about AIDS in India, this is actually worth a read. It is not all sadness and crying; there are some heartwarming moments of friendship, success, and the satisfaction of a life well-lived. Of course, there is the inevitable pretentious writing by a couple of authors with metaphors and flowery words thrown in for no reason. But you can always skip over these.
January 28, 2019
AIDS Sutra was published in 2008 and was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and they open the book with an introduction and a ‘thank you’ to the writers whose work follows. In the introductory chapter, written by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, we learn that nobody’s too sure exactly how many cases of AIDS and HIV there are in India but best estimates put the figure at something like 3 million – just imagine 3 million people living under the shadow of a disease which could be treated and controlled if they lived in a country with greater affluence and access to Anti-Retroviral drugs and without the societal constraints that prevent many sufferers from seeking treatment.
AIDS in India is a multi-faceted problem and the breadth of experience of the sufferers and the very diverse stories behind their infection are eye-opening. The stories told in AIDS Sutra were gathered by sending the authors around India to spend time with NGOs, charities, support groups and sufferers to learn about the experience of people living (and dying) with HIV and AIDS. In some cases we learn about how they became infected whilst in other cases it’s not revealed and really not important.
We start with the story of a doctor who lost his job after his HIV status was revealed not to him but to his brother-in-law who hid it from him, encouraged him to find a wife and then revealed his status to everyone shortly before the wedding, leading to it being called off. A lot of the writers report on their meetings with sex workers, their families and their clients, others with infected people who are bringing support to others in their communities. Perhaps one of the most tragic groups are the wives of truck drivers who are one of the most at risk groups in the country who are not directly involved in the sex trade. We are introduced to people running homes for AIDS orphans, friends of a famous deceased film director, transsexual ‘hijras’, drug addicts, men who have sex with men and devadasis, young girls given to the ‘goddess’ as temple dancers and widely sexually abused. If you ever thought that HIV and AIDS were gay issues or problems restricted to intravenous drug users, AIDS Sutra is a shocking revelation of just how widespread the problem is. Add to this the widespread prejudice towards sufferers and ignorance of how the disease is spread and controlled and it’s hard not to fear for the future of those carrying the disease.
The list of authors reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of great contemporary Indian writers, Non-Resident Indian writers and acknowledged expert commentators on the sub continent. Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai are both Man Booker Prize winners, Vikram Seth is the author of many books including the utterly awesome ‘A Suitable Boy’, and at the opposite end of the literary scale you’ll also find Shobhaa De, India’s answer to Jackie Collins and author of some of the worst sex and shopping schlock I’ve ever seen. Surprisingly, her account of how her family’s driver got AIDS and how they supported him through his illness was one of my favourite chapters in the book. William Dalrymple – the man who challenges Mark Tully for the role of India’s favourite English commentator on India – is in there along with a number of British or American Asian writers like Nalini Jones and Nikita Lalwani. In the new ‘wave’ of Indian writers I was pleased to find non-fiction writers Siddhartha Deb and the fabulous Sonia Faleiro. It was actually through looking for more writing by Faleiro that I found AIDS Sutra and bought the book.
I knew many of the authors, a few others had names I recognised but I’d not read their books and a few names were new to me. I expected to ‘use’ the book as an introduction to some new writers to broaden my field of Indian writers to read but the book didn’t work in that way. Similarly you could be forgiven for wondering if this just another of those charity ‘vanity’ projects where famous people churn out a few pages (or sing a song or draw a picture or climb Kilimanjaro with a film crew behind them) for a bit of kudos, a few ‘jolly good fellow’ points and an extra credit on their bibliography. It could so easily have gone that way but instead I found that I didn’t remember who wrote what – not because the stories were badly written, but because each story told in the book was so powerful that I found I was totally forgetting WHO wrote each – only the voices of the sufferers were what stood out. This is the most vanity-free, personality-suppressed collection of essays that I think I’ve ever read and the writers have not tried to stamp their mark on each story – instead they’ve acted at a megaphone through which each of the affected people can bring their story to the attention of readers around the world.
The stories are shocking, disturbing and sometimes frightening but they are also inspiring, uplifting and many will make you realise how little some people need to get by and how tenaciously many will cling to life and squeeze everything they can out of it. The most worrying aspect of the stories is the evidence of prejudice and persecution and the determination of some authorities to (so to speak) prevent the prevention. In one story a young woman is beaten up by the police for handing out condoms to sex workers. People are hounded out of the neighbourhoods. Illness is hidden from families and in some instances intentionally passed on to wives and other sexual partners. It’s easy for us to sit in our first world countries and condemn such ignorance but I fear is we looked to our own societies we’d find plenty of evidence that things aren’t so different here either.
AIDS in India is a multi-faceted problem and the breadth of experience of the sufferers and the very diverse stories behind their infection are eye-opening. The stories told in AIDS Sutra were gathered by sending the authors around India to spend time with NGOs, charities, support groups and sufferers to learn about the experience of people living (and dying) with HIV and AIDS. In some cases we learn about how they became infected whilst in other cases it’s not revealed and really not important.
We start with the story of a doctor who lost his job after his HIV status was revealed not to him but to his brother-in-law who hid it from him, encouraged him to find a wife and then revealed his status to everyone shortly before the wedding, leading to it being called off. A lot of the writers report on their meetings with sex workers, their families and their clients, others with infected people who are bringing support to others in their communities. Perhaps one of the most tragic groups are the wives of truck drivers who are one of the most at risk groups in the country who are not directly involved in the sex trade. We are introduced to people running homes for AIDS orphans, friends of a famous deceased film director, transsexual ‘hijras’, drug addicts, men who have sex with men and devadasis, young girls given to the ‘goddess’ as temple dancers and widely sexually abused. If you ever thought that HIV and AIDS were gay issues or problems restricted to intravenous drug users, AIDS Sutra is a shocking revelation of just how widespread the problem is. Add to this the widespread prejudice towards sufferers and ignorance of how the disease is spread and controlled and it’s hard not to fear for the future of those carrying the disease.
The list of authors reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of great contemporary Indian writers, Non-Resident Indian writers and acknowledged expert commentators on the sub continent. Salman Rushdie and Kiran Desai are both Man Booker Prize winners, Vikram Seth is the author of many books including the utterly awesome ‘A Suitable Boy’, and at the opposite end of the literary scale you’ll also find Shobhaa De, India’s answer to Jackie Collins and author of some of the worst sex and shopping schlock I’ve ever seen. Surprisingly, her account of how her family’s driver got AIDS and how they supported him through his illness was one of my favourite chapters in the book. William Dalrymple – the man who challenges Mark Tully for the role of India’s favourite English commentator on India – is in there along with a number of British or American Asian writers like Nalini Jones and Nikita Lalwani. In the new ‘wave’ of Indian writers I was pleased to find non-fiction writers Siddhartha Deb and the fabulous Sonia Faleiro. It was actually through looking for more writing by Faleiro that I found AIDS Sutra and bought the book.
I knew many of the authors, a few others had names I recognised but I’d not read their books and a few names were new to me. I expected to ‘use’ the book as an introduction to some new writers to broaden my field of Indian writers to read but the book didn’t work in that way. Similarly you could be forgiven for wondering if this just another of those charity ‘vanity’ projects where famous people churn out a few pages (or sing a song or draw a picture or climb Kilimanjaro with a film crew behind them) for a bit of kudos, a few ‘jolly good fellow’ points and an extra credit on their bibliography. It could so easily have gone that way but instead I found that I didn’t remember who wrote what – not because the stories were badly written, but because each story told in the book was so powerful that I found I was totally forgetting WHO wrote each – only the voices of the sufferers were what stood out. This is the most vanity-free, personality-suppressed collection of essays that I think I’ve ever read and the writers have not tried to stamp their mark on each story – instead they’ve acted at a megaphone through which each of the affected people can bring their story to the attention of readers around the world.
The stories are shocking, disturbing and sometimes frightening but they are also inspiring, uplifting and many will make you realise how little some people need to get by and how tenaciously many will cling to life and squeeze everything they can out of it. The most worrying aspect of the stories is the evidence of prejudice and persecution and the determination of some authorities to (so to speak) prevent the prevention. In one story a young woman is beaten up by the police for handing out condoms to sex workers. People are hounded out of the neighbourhoods. Illness is hidden from families and in some instances intentionally passed on to wives and other sexual partners. It’s easy for us to sit in our first world countries and condemn such ignorance but I fear is we looked to our own societies we’d find plenty of evidence that things aren’t so different here either.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews