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Thesis ID: CBB001561564

Curing Calcutta: Race, Liberalism, and Colonial Medicine in British Bengal, 1830--1900 (2005)

Pande, Ishita (Author)

Princeton University
Prakash, Gyan
Publication date: 2005
Language: English

Publication Date: 2005
Edition Details: Advisor: Prakash, Gyan
Physical Details: 236 pp.

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Ethnology Great Britain, colonies Medicine Colonialism Medicine and race 19th century India

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."

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/09 (2006): 3421. UMI pub. no. 3188655.

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