Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890-1940 : Contagions of Feeling

This book examines genealogies of contagion in between contagion as microbe and contagion as affect. It analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within the colonialist, anti-colonial, as well as modernist discourses. "Can there be an affective history of hygiene? Is it possible to read into the narrative of modern hygiene active and animated tropes of emotion, affect, and feeling? New microbes, novel pandemics, and their global movements that have forcefully reinstated the efficacy of hygiene have also reinvigorated global academic interest in the genealogies of hygienic practices. Cultural Politics of Hygiene in Bengal/India, 1890-1940 analyzes one such genealogy of hygiene in the context of late colonial Bengal. It argues that the meaning and role of hygiene in India were catalyzed on the crossroads of colonial governance, anticolonial struggles, cultural nationalism, and early 20th century social feminism. Affect, feeling, and sentiment were, however, no less important in the production of knowledge and practices of hygiene. Hygiene as a modern discourse, as shown in this book, not only produced emotions, sentiments, and feelings but was also constituted through them"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-x Introduction: Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene....Pages 1-22 Alimentary Anxieties: Affect in Food and Hunger....Pages 23-42 Body, Hygiene, and the Affective Politics of Gandhi’s Swaraj....Pages 43-59 Imagining the Social Body: Competing Moralities of Care and Contagion....Pages 60-88 Affective Remedies: Advertisements and Cultural Politics of Hygiene....Pages 89-112 Conclusion....Pages 113-116 Back Matter....Pages 117-142