Two banks of the same river: a conversation with Dr Justice D Y Chandrachud, the fiftieth Chief Justice of India, on medical humanities and jurisprudence

This essay emerges from a detailed interview with India’s former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Dr Justice D Y Chandrachud, on legal matters related to medical ethics. The interlocutors—a scholar of literary studies and a scholar of medical sciences who is also a noted public activist in disability litigation—cover a wide range of topics that include health advocacy, legal implications for medical practice, language and expression, autonomy and morality, and medical jurisprudence. This essay synthesises an attempted overarching perspective that the former Chief Justice (who served from 2022 to 2024) provided to medical humanities in the institutional Indian context of courts and universities as well as individuals and families. Dr Justice Chandrachud’s responses address the historical context of Indian law—how its colonial inheritance had to perforce interact with a wide and heterogeneous body of indigenous Indian religious and secular law, and how that interaction is still ongoing and continually re-interpreted. Dr Chandrachud references landmark judgements from varied global legal systems as well as canonical texts to discuss the challenges of judgements and policy to continually recognise, and then ameliorate, newer and subtler structures of exclusion. He foregrounds the importance of rights, where consent, confidentiality and non-discrimination are legal duties. The conversation concludes with the affirmation of how medical education and curricula need to customise pedagogy to facilitate and partake in a transformative and ethically informed citizenship.