As the government and NGO public health campaigns in Tamil Nadu promote biomedical methods of cancer prevention and treatment as “modern” and “rational” approaches to cancer, localized notions that cancer is often a karmic punishment for an immoral act committed in the past or the physical manifestation of a kind of injustice that an adversary renders through the deliberate use of sorcery is being recast as a “backward” and “irrational way of thinking.” Yet women in Tamil Nadu continue to draw from both these ways of understanding cancer. In this paper, we explore how cancer patients and survivors in Tamil Nadu weave the public health discourse together with other sociocultural and religious discourses of cancer to create complex understandings and experiences of social suffering caused by cancer and to find ways to mitigate such suffering. Based on interviews conducted in hospital wards with women cervical and breast cancer patients and survivors, this paper explores how women often experience cancer as a biological, social and spiritual affliction that can be cured only when biomedical modalities of treatment are used in conjunction with religious modalities of healing.