This dissertation examines the paradoxical figure of the infectious hospital in contemporary India: a space that promises cure while simultaneously engendering and sustaining infections, including resistant ones. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in a corporate tertiary care hospital in southern India, it situates antimicrobial resistance (AMR) within broader global health discourses while foregrounding the everyday clinical negotiations of infectious disease (ID) specialists. It argues that AMR is not merely an epidemiological concern but also a profoundly social and political one, embedded in global regimes of blame, national projects of modernisation, and everyday practices of care. Rather than reproducing narratives that attribute resistance to “irrational” consumption or weak regulation, it highlights how hospitals themselves are critical sites where infections proliferate, interventions falter, and antimicrobials are both indispensable and endangered. Central to this work is the conceptualisation of the hospital after infection. Mobilising the dual connotation of “after” — as both pursuit and belatedness — the thesis argues that the contemporary hospital is perpetually chasing infections it cannot fully contain, while also creating the very conditions that allow them to thrive. This renders cure a fragile and contingent achievement, reliant on antimicrobials whose efficacy is constantly negotiated and never assured. In the end, the thesis proposes a move toward an affirmative biopolitics, one that acknowledges the entangled vulnerabilities of humans, microbes, and antimicrobials.
