6 - Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs

Summary

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 author name, 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.