Electrification, urbanization, and politics: British Bengal to princely Cooch Behar

This chapter focuses on colonial modernity and on debates concerning domesticity in British Bengal. It aims to provide a better understanding of nineteenth-century Bengali contestations over received bourgeois models for relating the personal to the public world of civil and political life. The chapter describes how the Bengali modern has negotiated the distinction between personal/domestic and communal/public in reconstituting itself within a world system fashioned by imperialism.

Reviewed by: Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, market and homoeopathy by Shinjini Das Neshat Quaiser Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, market and homoeopathy By Shinjini Das. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Scholars studying South Asia's Indigenous medical traditions and their troubled relationship with Western medicine during the colonial period have predominantly focussed on medical practices such as Ayurveda and of late Unani and to some extent Siddha. Homoeopathy has received little attention from the scholars of South Asian medicine, despite the fact that India became the largest consumer of homoeopathic medicine. The reason is obvious that despite being of Western origin, homoeopathy was not a British colonial medical project like Western medicine/English medicine/allopathy/doctory, which had become an integral part of the larger colonial machination of domination. As such, the Indigenous medical traditions were faced with perceived and real threats of domination, denigration and extermination by the colonial structures of power. As a result, "the domain of medicine was, perhaps, the most compelling site for the articulation of sentiments against the claims of superiority of Western knowledge," as this reviewer has elsewhere argued. Thus, the book under review was much needed. The book primarily deals with the ways in which homoeopathy was "reconstituted as vernacular medicine" in colonial Bengal. This concern is explicated through a study of "how medicine, family and market were interconnected in British Bengal" (2). The book is divided into five chapters, a fairly long introduction and a conclusion (epilogue). The introduction outlines the significance of families, market, and the vernacular in colonial Bengal and explores the question "How does homoeopathy lend a useful lens through which to study the institution of family?" (6), and consequently its relation with the market and colonial state. This question is analysed with reference to salient features of the South Asian family as well. Chapter I deals with the question of a heterodoxy between the institutions with reference to bureaucracy, the print market and family firms. Chapter II analyses the biographical writings of a homoeopathic family linking it with the biography of science and medicine, the Hindu way of life and the ways in which homoeopathy was made a familiar vernacular science. Chapter III deals with the question of science in translation with reference to medicine, language and identity where the question of the Hinduisation of homoeopathy is brilliantly discussed, and homoeopathy in rural settings is also brought under discussion. Chapter IV finely outlines the issues relating to the questions of Indigeneity, self-help and the Hindu joint family. Chapter V relates to the making of a homoeopathic public with reference to elections, public health and legislation. The conclusion is a fine summing up. Thus, using homoeopathy as a point of departure, the book is an important signpost as to how new social, cultural, scientific, educational and political landscapes propelled by colonial contexts were effected and the ways in which these were responded to and appropriated by different sections of Indian society with rather conflicting vantage points. Thus, the book reconceptualises certain key issues such as caste identities, vernacularisation and Hinduisation of homoeopathy, discovering new Hindu identity, new commercial interests and ventures, the crucial role of the Bengali print market and culture and the intrinsically linked relationship between certain homoeopathic family firms, the colonial state and emergent nationalist politics. Through and against these dimensions and context, the book very competently deals with the new arts and science of negotiations with the politics of Western science, medicine and notions of modernity through homoeopathy that the different sections of people developed in colonial Bengal, having wider implications. Vernacular medicine is the key concept of the book. According to the author homoeopathy as vernacular medicine in colonial Bengal emerged through the processes of translation, domestication and Indigenisation through which it was reconfigured (246). But importantly, the author traces the vernacularisation of homoeopathy through "manifestly religio-cultural idioms of Hinduism in colonial Bengal" (27). However, there could be other factors, in addition to its not being part of and patronised by the British colonial state, that made homoeopathy vernacular and familiar medicine even in Bengal. Of these, predominantly the absence of surgery in homoeopathy was a crucial factor that made it...

Introduction: Medicine, race and liberalism in British Bengal

Ishita Pande is ambitious. She answers paradoxes involving “colonizer's ‘tool of othering’” on three medical-political fronts. She 1) critiques “racialized medicine” interrogating liberal colonial doctors and administrators who sought cures for “primitive” pathologies; 2) shows how race-based “modern” medicine defined “normal and the production of norms by liberal reforms” of racialized subjects in biopolitical realms of education, sanitation and law; and 3) exposes “native” self-regulating regimes that shaped “the modern Bengali subject in the last decades of the nineteenth century” (p. 16). She proceeds with subtle word study, formidable theoretical posturing, and plundering of colonial archives. Bhadralok (respectable gentry), less “the passive object of medical and ethnological gaze,” used the very tools of colonial medical outreach and grew self-critically to explain their own “degeneration” as a plague of modernity (pp. 16–17). Pande's ambitions largely succeed, even while leaving the reader wanting slightly more.Before examining “race and place”—followed by “blood and morals,” “city and citizenship,” and “sex and public”—Pande introduces her subject evocatively. We read about Foucault's clinics, Arnold's colonized bodies, and Said's orientalism, along with women and children as “others,” colonial “problems of difference,” and even anecdotes about a self-critical Bengali masturbator who, in 1885, was publicly seeking self-improvement from his “sinful” affliction. Beginning with late-Foucault's theories on knowledge, power, bodies and self-technologies, she asks important, if familiar, questions about medicine as symptom of empire, as fundamental to imperial liberalism. “What is colonial about colonial medicine?” “[How do] people and populations negotiate with, respond to or resist this kind of power?” (p. 4) Biopower is subsumed in “universalized difference” that includes colonial objectification and “native” subjectification of norming medical regimes. This is a step beyond tired disembodied inquiries into colonial state medicine. She presents under-utilized categories of race as having been “a scientific idea” (p. 8) and shows how colonial medical analyses became public medical-political tools regulating health, sanitation and legal practices. In regenerating “the silenced term of race” (p. 9), she questions colonial “‘scale of civilizations’ that divided the world into those…ready for citizenship and those who had to be made ready for it” (p. 13).In analyzing “race and place” Pande points to colonial contradictions involved in racial theories that “scientifically” scaled difference while simultaneously denouncing racism. She summons archives revealing how production of categorized difference—skull size, etc.—begat stereotypical notions like the “black Aryan” (p. 23) that both affirmed Indo-European British and Indian sameness and affirmed notions of “degeneration” used to justify imperial improvement of “native” pathologies. Pande focuses on the colonial fascination with Rammohun Roy (the black Aryan) and the British medical and ethnological production of Hindu constitution as linked with effeminizing, debasing and degenerating tropical climates (with Roy as the exception to the rule). She links colonial notions of Hindu race and place that outlined “the Hindu type” found particularly in degenerating tropical Bengal. Curious lacunae are left, however, that become more apparent as she proceeds: where are the Muslims and the colonial medical-political notions of the Muslim subject? If Rammohun Roy, why not Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan?In “blood and morals” Pande maintains a focus on Hindus in colonial medical-political agendas, especially in the activities of Calcutta Medical College. Not just the object of British medical gaze anymore, creation of “black doctors” was sought to overcome “superstitious” Hindu aversion to corpses and propel beyond “primitive” Ayurvedic medicine…and to overcome caste difference and civilizational degeneration. Though not dwelling long enough on reception of Sanskritic healing traditions, and only just mentioning Unani systems—here again, where are the Muslims?—Pande shows great colonial hope in the social and cultural effects of “native” fingers touching corpses and performing surgeries. “By touching the corpse, the native would lie outside the system of caste that defined his world, and would be ready to be reformed” (p. 83).Pande's most convincing work remains her section on “city and citizenship” insofar as she connects oft-analyzed colonial medical-political agendas with subjective Bengali appropriations of modern regimes of the self. Not just colonial policy, it is the “sanitary subject” negotiating with regimes of power that pushed toward bodily and social freedoms. Citizens were created that disrupted the paradox of colonial racism. “The hygienization of the city created a particular vision of self-government, which involved a new way of behaving in relation to the self and the city” (p. 128). The Bengali modern was taking shape under the colonial regimes of education, health, and law. The once-colonized nation was moving beyond diagnoses of degeneration into realizations that the real pathology was colonial medical-political biopower.Pande succeeds with an ambitious agenda, even if the reader might want a little more. The book, most suitable for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and specialists in the field, stakes out new ground in combining both objective colonial medical accounts with subjective appropriations on the part of Bengali subjects. It is worth interrogating on that account.

This book focuses on the entwinement of politics and medicine and power and knowledge in India during the age of empire. Using the powerful metaphor of ‘pathology’ - the science of the origin, nature, and course of diseases - the author develops and challenges a burgeoning literature on colonial medicine, moving beyond discussions of state medicine and the control of epidemics to everyday life, to show how medicine was a fundamental ideology of empire. Related to this point, and engaging with postcolonial histories of biopower and modernity, the book highlights the use of this racially grounded medicine in the formulation of modern selves and subjectivities in late colonial India. In tracing the cultural determinants of biological race theory and contextualizing the understanding of race as pathology, the book demonstrates how racialism was compatible with the ideologies and policies of imperial liberalism. Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal brings together the study of modern South Asia, race theory, colonialism and empire and the history of medicine. It highlights the powerful role played by the idea of ‘pathology’ in the rationalization of imperial liberalism and the subsequent projects of modernity embraced by native experts in Bengal in the ‘long’ nineteenth century.

Rabindranath Tagore and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, contemporaries in Bengali literature, were not only dominant writers of their time, each excelling in their own ways, but also pioneers in education par excellence. Although neither had any formal learning, both experimented with education by setting up their own academic institutions. Tagore initiated three institutions in Santiniketan, West Bengal—Brahmacharya Asrama (1901), Visva-Bharati University (1921) and Sriniketan Institute of Rural Reconstruction (1922)—each with specific objectives, while Rokeya started a school for Muslim girls, first in Bhagalpur, Bihar, in 1909 and then in Calcutta in 1911. This chapter examines the contributions of these two Bengal Renaissance writers to the field of education. It compares their pedagogical ideas and activities to show how their initiatives impacted the educational scene in British Bengal.

With five different plotlines over a prolonged course of sixty years in British Bengal and East Pakistan, Canadian-Bangladeshi writer Arif Anwar’s debut novel The Storm (2018) captures historical ethos through a series of micronarratives. An occupied Burma during WWII, a 1965 pre-Partition Calcutta, and a devastated Bhola after the 1970 cyclone — all these feature in this historiographic metafiction. Each character contributes as an independent narrator for the greater geopolitical mise-en-scènes of their times, rediscovering a forgotten past. This paper aims to identify the narrativised version of historicity that Anwar considers “authentic” in his novel. The findings propose a reciprocal commitment between narration and history on the basis of lived experiences or memories, phenomenological recurrences, and intersubjective surroundings.

The whole field of historical writing concerned with imperialism and the expansion of Europe has always been suffused with moral judgement. Many earlier historians of empire extolled European intervention in other societies as a force for moral, political or intellectual improvement. Yet, from the beginning, radicals castigated empires as immoral, bringers of racism, genocide and underdevelopment. Asian and African intellectuals, in turn, constructed historical narratives that made the liberated nation the bearer of moral progress in history. This paper argues that historians cannot, and should not refrain from moral judgement on particular issues, such as the excesses of slave trade or the official neglect that allowed the famine in British Bengal in 1943 to kill three million people. They should, however, avoid creating grand historical narratives that describe long-term changes, such as the growth of European empires, as moral or immoral, as progressive or wholly pernicious. This approach merely reduces complex developments to simple formulae and can sometimes be misused by contemporary politicians and ideologues.

Results from the preliminary analysis of a dataset consisting of population-level statistics for opium and three forms of marijuana for districts in the province of Bengal in British India for the period 1908–1928 are presented. The findings shed light on the importance of geographic phenomena for the economic analysis of drug consumption, and on the economic characteristics of opium and marijuana consumption. Exploratory spatial data analyses reveal spatial clustering for a number of variables that are important for understanding drug consumption. In addition, there is evidence of substitutability between marijuana and opium, and within the three different forms of marijuana. Finally, the consumption of all four products is responsive to changes in their prices.

<i>Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire</i>, by Ishita Pande.

The essential theme of this paper is to highlight the condition of health and hygiene in the British Bengal from the perspective of official documents and vernacular writings, with special emphasis on the journals and periodicals. The fatal effects of the epidemics like malaria and cholera, the insanitary condition of the rural Bengal and the cultivated indifference of the British Raj made the lives of the poor natives miserable and ailing. The authorities had a tendency to blame the colonized for their illiteracy and callousness, which became instrumental for the outbreak of the epidemics. On the other, in the late 19 th and the beginning of the 20th, the vernacular literature played the role of a catalyst in awakening health awareness, highlighting the issues related with ill health, insanitation and malnourishment. More importantly, it became an active link between the society and culture on the one hand, and health and people on the other. The present researcher wants to highlight these opposite trajectories of mentalities with a different connotation. The ideologies of the Raj and the native political aspirations often reflected in the colonial writings, where the year 1880 was considered as a landmark in the field of public health policies. On the other, the dichotomy between the masters and the colonized took a prominent shape during 1930s. Within these fifty years; the health of the natives witnessed many upheavals grounded on the social, economic and cultural tensions.

It is now over one hundred years that the women are fighting for their emancipation, equal rights and right to decision making from their male counterparts. However, this long struggle seems hardly providing equal rights to women, let alone the emancipation that they seek mainly. Although there has been significant change how women lead their life today from one hundred years ago, the inherent structure of patriarchy still suppresses them. This paper intends to scrutinize the condition of women in selected writing of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a major proponent of feminism during the then British Bengal, and Anita Desai, a contemporary postcolonial writer on feminism in India. The objective of this paper is to prove that the women cannot attain emancipation from patriarchy even if they are provided education and economic freedom.

Abstract‘Toleration’ is a notoriously slippery concept, and yet, as recent scholarship on the historical roots of Indian secularism has implied, it was a guiderail for East India Company decision-making in Bengal in the late eighteenth century. What, then, was the outcome when Europeans encountered what they were quick to regard as South Asian patterns of ‘toleration’? This article argues, first, that a medley of competing policy visions emerged from this interaction and, second, that where these visions overlapped was in perceiving political gain to ensue from facilitating existing South Asian devotional practices. A corollary consequence of this still-emergent policy framework was that most East India Company personnel were loath to intervene in any way but a reactive one when conflicts between devotees of Durga on parade and observers of the Shia Muslim holy day ashura escalated into reprisals and street violence in Calcutta in September 1789.

Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire

This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in British Bengal. The presiding judges explicitly accepted the right of more scholarly “traditional” medical practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners, to engage in their profession, even while criminalizing Sukaroo’s surgical practice. The decision therefore illustrates the need to distinguish subaltern therapeutics from the larger domain of traditional medicines. It also demonstrates that, though legislative intervention into medicine was limited in nineteenth-century Bengal, colonial law did in fact intervene and shape the medical landscape. All this becomes more significant because the Sukaroo case appeared in legal reports of the time, and then was rapidly and widely incorporated into legal textbooks and even annotated versions of the Indian Penal Code, thereby becoming an important legal precedent. It has continued to feature in postcolonial legal textbooks in South Asia and beyond. This long legal shadow cast by the case highlights the ways in which colonial case law has shaped the modern lives of traditional medicines in South Asia. In particular, it demonstrates the long history of tacit assumptions denigrating subaltern therapeutics that have structured the institutionalized medical pluralism operating in contemporary India.