Kantala comes to the clinic Tuberculosis, distributed emotions, and states of exhaustion

Inspired by a young woman’s insistence at a tuberculosis (TB) dispensary in Mumbai that kantala—a Marathi and Hindi term that signals exhaustion—prevented her from taking toxic but lifesaving tuberculosis medicines, this paper focuses on the state of exhaustion that her emotional expression glosses. It traces exhaustion through a global assemblage of TB care to argue that emotions are elicited, distributed, inhabited, and disavowed by the biopolitics of tuberculosis. It also examines how inequality is reified by biomedicine and anthropology’s tendency to individualize and interiorize emotion, especially in subjects viewed as irrational. It maps kantala through a network of actors, policies, and commodities brought unequally together by drug-resistant TB treatment programs’ state of exhaustion. The article provides a methodological approach with which to understand the affective work of global biopolitical assemblages and understand how power circulates within these assemblages even as they struggle to foster life.