Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

"The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asias experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and Indias place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine."--Provided by publisher Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of figure and tables 10 Notes on contributors 11 Acknowledgements 13 Introduction 14 1 The sentencing of assisted suicide in the Nizamut Adawlut, 1810–1829: religion, health and gender in the formation of British Indian criminal law 29 2 The great shift: cholera theory and sanitary policy in British India, 1867–1879 50 3 Hakims and Haiza: unani medicine and cholera in late Colonial India 74 4 Of cholera, colonialism and pilgrimage sites: rethinking popular responses to state sanitation, c.1867–1900 87 5 Western science, indigenous medicine and the princely states: the case of Ayurvedic reorganization in Travancore, 1870–1940 111 6 Christian missionary women’s hospitals in Mysore state, c.1880–1930 135 7 The epidemiological, health and medical aspects of famine: views from the Madras Presidency (1876–78) 161 8 Gender and insanity: situating asylums in nineteenth-century Bengal 185 9 Confining ‘lunatics’: the Cuttack Asylum, c.1864–1906 209 10 What did the ‘wise men’ say? Gender, sexuality and women’s health in nineteenth-century Bengal 245 11 Feminizing empire: the Association of Medical Women in India and the campaign for a Women’s Medical Service 265 12 Indian physicians and public health challenges: Bombay Presidency, 1896–1920 284 13 Tracking kala-azar: the East Indian experience and experiments 303 Index 326