Peculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained perception that people affected by leprosy are victims of the most terrible scourge imaginable. The experiences of those living in Bethany– a self-established leprosy community in South India– tell rather different, more nuanced stories about what it is like to have leprosy at the onset of the twenty-first century. In this richly ethnographic portrait of Bethany people’s lives– whether at home in the leprosy colony, away begging in Mumbai or representing their histories through drama performance–James Staples explores how this apparently powerless group appropriates, embodies and redefines dominant ideas about caste, religion, the human body and Indian ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. They do so, as the book reveals, against the backdrops of colonialism, missionary endeavour, vernacular Christianity, Hinduism, medical practices, development and the state.
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