Poonam Bala, ed., Medicine and Colonial Engagements in India and Sub Saharan Africa

Abstract

Medicine and Colonial Engagements is a welcome addition to the growing scholarship on the institutionalization of medicine within colonial spaces. The authors demonstrate that this process was contested, uneven, and constantly re-negotiated – much like the colonial encounter itself. The authors in this volume explore the ways in which colonial systems of governance were negotiated on the bodies of colonized peoples, highlighting the links among race, gender, and medicine in the creation and expansion of the colonial project in India and sub-Saharan Africa. This timely volume is not divided into sections but is generally organized geographically. The first five chapters deal with India. The final six chapters deal with sub-Saharan Africa, with one chapter on missionaries and health care in south India interspersed between them. Beginning in colonial India, Poonam Bala argues that western medicine was more than simply a “tool of empire” in British India. Instead, it engendered cultural and social change, which went on to have important implications for the socio-cultural composition of the nationalist movement. Using archival material as well as statistical data from influenza in 1918, Bala further notes that the global epidemic was a turning point in Indian nationalism. She argues that the professionalization of Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM, perceived as “superstitious” by the colonial state) was an important step in the creation of an anti-colonial and nationalist vision of Indian modernity – not just in the sphere of medicine, but also in creating a modern Indian socio-cultural nation. Rachel Berger builds on this slippery intersection between colonial institutions and the ISM. Berger focuses on the life of Ayurveda practitioner Yashoda Devi to demonstrate that ISM practitioners were an important part of the evolving discourse around reproductivity and population control in early twentieth-century India. Berger reveals how Yashoda Devi was able to navigate the tensions between tradition (Ayurveda and ISM) and modernity (the institutionalization of public health) with success by maintaining traditional ideas of women as reproductive subjects even as she interacted with public discourse on population control policy. Sutanuka Bannerjee engages with the question of how a sexually fulfilled marriage was portrayed as a signifier of modernity, using issues of the Bengali periodical Nara-Naree published from 1939-1950. Like Yashoda Devi, the group of Bengali intellectuals and physicians who wrote for the periodical were able to navigate the tensions between traditional conceptions of domesticity and modern visions of a healthy marriage. They used their scientific expertise in sexology and the body to suggest that a modern and healthy nation demanded a companionate marriage characterized by romantic love and a fulfilling sex life.