Curing Calcutta: Race, Liberalism, and Colonial Medicine in British Bengal, 1830--1900 (2005)
Pande, Ishita (Author)
Princeton University
Prakash, Gyan
Edition Details: Advisor: Prakash, Gyan
Physical Details: 236 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation explores how medical discourse sought to shape colonial Calcutta as a modern city during the nineteenth century, just as the terms of medical discourse were altered and estranged by the context of alien rule. Medical doctors were important to colonial administration in India, and encountered difference---bodily, medical, and climatic---in their practice. In diagnosing these differences, colonial medical doctors contributed to ethnology, the science of race. Building on this ethnological impulse, medical doctors were involved in rationalizing empire as a cure for various Indian pathologies---physical, cultural, economic and political. This was expressed in the liberal empire as the mission to civilize. As the "second city" of empire after London and a key colonial "center of calculation" in matters of science, Calcutta served as a site for conceiving and implementing this grand plan to cure places and populations. Colonial Calcutta was not a mere stage on which a fully formed western medicine arrived, but a productive space, where colonial medicine was shaped by institutional and ideational networks that spanned Bengal and Britain, as I show in Chapter 1. I explore the connected histories of colonial medicine, Victorian ethnology and liberal political theory, to understand the representation of empire as a cure for Indian pathologies. The cure was premised on the idea that while the native of India in general, and the Bengali in particular, was racially different, he could be improved under British tutelage. This idea of a racialized but eminently reformable body was at the heart of liberal racialism. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 explore specific instantiations of these connected discourses. These chapters illustrate how the politics of difference, expressed as the idea of a reformable body, played into discussions on education in the 1830s, sanitation in the 1840s, and laws regarding marriage and sexuality from the 1870s to the 1890s respectively. In each of these instances, medical discourse and liberal imperial reform ran into contradictions, for their claims to universality were erected upon an obsessive mapping of difference. In the late nineteenth century, the native medical elite used the medical ethological idiom of difference and degeneration to put forth their own vision of a modern Calcutta. No longer merely the object of medicine and liberalism, the Bengali refashioned the colonial category of "Indian pathologies" into "pathologies of modernity."
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/09 (2006): 3421. UMI pub. no. 3188655.
Similar Citations
Article
Mohan, Jyoti;
(2004)
British and French Ethnographies of India: Dubois and His English Commentators
(/isis/citation/CBB000660568/)
Book
MacLeod, Roy;
(2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
(/isis/citation/CBB000110572/)
Book
Wald, Erica;
(2014)
Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780--1868
(/isis/citation/CBB001422202/)
Book
Pande, Ishita;
(2010)
Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB001211510/)
Book
Harrison, Mark;
(1999)
Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850
(/isis/citation/CBB000111160/)
Article
Gautam Chandra;
(2022)
Medical profession and unemployment in colonial Madras (1835–1930)
(/isis/citation/CBB106867993/)
Book
Bala, Poonam;
(2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)
Book
Ebrahimnejad, Hormoz;
(2009)
The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries: Historical Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB000933048/)
Book
Pati, Biswamoy;
Harrison, Mark;
(2001)
Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India
(/isis/citation/CBB000631004/)
Book
Pati, Biswamoy;
Harrison, Mark;
(2009)
The Social History of Health and Medicine in Colonial India
(/isis/citation/CBB001030086/)
Article
Kumar, Deepak;
(1999)
“Colony” under a Microscope: The Medical Works of W. M. Haffkine
(/isis/citation/CBB000340240/)
Article
Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv;
(2006)
“Merely Birds of Passage”: Lady Hariot Dufferin's Travel Writings and Medical Work in India, 1884--1888
(/isis/citation/CBB001030835/)
Article
Lang, Seán;
(2005)
Drop the Demon Dai: Maternal Mortality and the State in Colonial Madras, 1840--1875
(/isis/citation/CBB000770548/)
Chapter
Witz, Anne;
(2000)
Colonising Women: Female Medical Practice in Colonial India 1880-1890
(/isis/citation/CBB000101503/)
Article
Minsky, Lauren;
(2009)
Pursuing Protection from Disease: The Making of Smallpox Prophylactic Practice in Colonial Punjab
(/isis/citation/CBB000932125/)
Book
Mukharji, Projit Bihari;
(2009)
Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print, and Daktari Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB001251704/)
Book
Samiksha Sehrawat;
(2014)
Colonial Medical Care in North India: Gender, State, and Society, c. 1830-1920
(/isis/citation/CBB698190327/)
Chapter
Gilbert, Pamela K.;
(2003)
Mapping Colonial Disease: Victorian Medical Cartography in British India
(/isis/citation/CBB000501995/)
Article
Brown, Mark;
(2003)
Ethnology and Colonial Administration in Nineteenth-Century British India: The Question of Native Crime and Criminality
(/isis/citation/CBB000330743/)
Article
Ruth A. Morgan;
(2021)
Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia
(/isis/citation/CBB145766431/)
Be the first to comment!