Other than trains, hospitals are the most secular spaces in contemporary India. This applies as much to upper-end luxury hospi-resorts such as — Apollo and Escorts — as it does to the lowliest nursing home in any corner of the country. However, even as I assert this, a caveat comes to mind — the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, which had hospitals and even doctors sharply divided along communal lines.

In itself, it may or may not be a picture post card communal harmony moment, but if you keep the Gujarat experience in mind, then this little incident certainly substantiates my assertion.

Three days ago, in the medical ICU ward of Batra Hospital in New Delhi, which has been my virtual home for the last ten days, I saw an orthodox Muslim-beard, cap, kurta pajama, hand over his gown, mandatory for visits inside the ICU, to an elderly Hindu rural woman from Eastern Uttar Pradesh, complete with a straight pallu sari, sindoor, bindi and mangalsutra.

Hospital visits

Their commonality owed to more than the medical exigency they then faced. They had traveled some distance to visit Batra.

They were not blood relatives, but both had pleaded with the guard to be allowed inside. In both cases, they were performing a duty not merely to their family, but also to a peculiar value that we as a society place on hospital visits. Our attitude towards hospitals, more correctly towards hospitalisations, across all our diversities is a curious mixture of total dependence on the medical staff and an equal distrust of them.

When one of us is admitted to a hospital we like to throng the hospital waiting arena and vie for a sight of the patient. An automatic hierarchy emerges in terms of who gets to see the patient even if the patient is not herself capable of seeing anybody or anything.

Depending on the closeness of relationship, or the closeness that needs to be flaunted — the rich and powerful are considered important and are always welcome — an order of preference is allotted to the visitors. Even a patient lying in coma would have a throng of friends and family competing to get inside to catch a glance — ek nazar dekhna hai.

But we consider it sacred, all of us, to visit the hospital and keep up a vigil even in scenarios where we may never even get a glance of the patient.

At Escorts in Delhi, where I have spent a lot of time over the last few years, and which one of us has not had relatives or friends undergo heart treatment there, one usually does not get to visit the patient who is hidden deep inside the many high-tech special wards of that state of the art med-hospice. There is no use for attendants there because the hospital does not even ask you to procure medicines.

But as a matter of routine, each in-patient receives or causes the hospital to receive at least ten attendants during the day who sit around, update each other and run after terribly elusive doctors for the slightest news.

Naturally, this translates into tremendous business for the hospital cafeterias. During the night, with the same devotion, at least two attendants take turns to sleep on the hospital premises, keeping a perfectly useless vigil.

Representing mini-India

At anytime during the year, but especially during winters, which is more partial to heart ailments, the Escorts waiting arena represents a mini-India, but strictly for that India which is latterly arriving on the scene. Delhi Punjabis followed by western UP businessmen and Purabia landed gentry form the largest component of those waiting in the lounges.

All of them however, have the same attitude towards doctors, the hospital and their patients. All experience the same helplessness when faced with doctors and medical procedures about which they know little, obnoxious guards who behave offensively and a management that is only interested in making money.

There is a further clash between the new luxury hospitals with their westernised credos of how much access each patient should be allowed and the Indian style freewheeling appropriation of hospital space.

They want to convert the hospital into a sanctified zone of individual exchange between a paying patient and a professional caring staff, the Indian attitude resists this commodification of caring, the hospital is the site to display your family loyalty and unity, not a neutral space of capital exchange. We like to wash, bathe, pray, eat and lounge around in hospitals, they want to mould us into model visitors who should leave their patients to those who know how to handle them best.

The humane factor

At Batra, although it is hardly inexpensive, the doctors and the staff, including the guards, are far more humane and adjusting than at other luxury hospitals. They allow you to go inside the ICU in turns if you have more than one attendant.

The doctors call you out to brief you twice a day and the pharmacy, from which you have to cart your own medicines, properly refunds you for the unused stock of medicines. All of us have set up mini-households there with our sacred books, clothes, tea flasks, water and even our fixed chairs.

Street-side wisdom has it that after education, health is the second biggest business sector in India.

The challenge before us is not merely to build more five-star hospices for an ageing and more affluent populace, but to also accommodate two divergent views about hospitals and medical treatment in general. If Foucault discovered the birth of modernity in the discipline and disciplinisation of medical institutions, then Indians are the right lot to transform that modernity – by refusing to be disciplined when it comes to hospitals.

[First published in Mid-Day.]