Panel No. 29

Panel Title: Medicine and Disease in Colonial India

Convenor: Dr. Laxman D. Satya, Associate Professor, Department of History, Lock Haven University, Pennsylvania, USA

   Friday 9 July, 13–18

Panel Abstract: This panel has three papers in it. The first paper deals with the ‘Great Game’ and the threat to British Empire from the deadly disease plague at the beginning of the 20th century. The second paper analyzes the consequences of the impact of British Empire on the environment and how it led to the proliferation of deadly diseases in central India. The third paper grapples to show how the British imperialists tried to divide the so called ‘natives’ of their Indian empire in the name of controlling the sexually transmitted diseases that proliferated due to the indulgences of British colonial armies.

Papers accepted for presentation in the panel:

No abstracts delivered by the convenor.

The presenters in the panel are:

Paper Giver 1: Sanchari Dutta, Wolfson College, Oxford, UK

Paper 1 Title: Plague, Quarantine and Empire: British Indian Sanitary Strategies in Central Asia, 1897-1907

Paper Abstract: In 1897, the Indian Foreign Department received intelligence about the imposition of travel restrictions on the Leh-Yarkand road, by a Russian medical officer. It seemed that this measure was designed to safeguard Russia against the raging plague outbreak in India. The subsequent quarantine arrangements included the deployment of Cossack enforcements at frontier outposts, with the putative aim, to severe lines of trade and communication between Kashmir and Kashgar.
The same year, the Bombay epidemic and quarantine regulations to prevent its spread were the focal points of deliberations at the Venice Sanitary Convention. The ensuing discussions were dominated by the sanitary defense of the Middle East, as the region was commonly held to be the point of intersection between Asia and Europe. The Venice stipulations consequently, called for the establishment of sanitary bases in the Persian Gulf as the first bastion against disease importation into Europe.
The Venice directives of Gulf quarantine and Russia’s sanitary sanctions on india’s northern frontier were not discrete events; rather, as my paper demonstrates, this was indicative of the advent of bubonic plague as a deciding factor in the ‘Central Asian question’, with its enormous implications on the safety of the empire in India. In probing the linkages between quarantine and imperialism, I argue that acute colonial competiton engendered the emergence of quarantine – with its various adjuncts – as a viable means of informal imperial control in Central Asia. Primarily, however, the scope and limitations of the sanitary intervention was shaped by the complexities and dynamics of the local political dictates of the region.

Paper Giver 2: Laxman D. Satya, Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania, USA

Paper 2 Title: Medicine and Disease in Colonial Deccan: A 19th Century Perspective

Paper Abstract: This paper will analyze how the encroachment of the British colonial state on the environment led to the proliferation of epidemic diseases in the Deccan region of Central India. Focus will be on how colonial commercialization and infra-structural change brought about the spread of smallpox, cholera, malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, plague, etc. It will study the ecological damage done by the British Empire and its relationship to epidemic diseases. In this context demographic and environmental changes will be studied along with colonial forestry, land use, water management, droughts, famines, labor mobility, colonial technology, bureaucracy and capital investment. The final section will deal with the question of colonial medicine and its failure to address the problem of public health and how the colonized subjects resisted the oppressive nature of the imperial medical establishment.

Paper Giver 3: Projit Bihari Mukharji, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK

Paper 3 Title: Reproductive Health as a Metaphor for Division

Paper Abstract: By the middle of the 1830s the triumph of the Anglicists in India House had meant that the hitherto ambivalent attitude of the colonial state towards native medicine was reversed in favor of a more pronounced patronage to Western Allopathic Medicine. Of the eight branches of classical Ayurveda, faculties were founded at the newly formed Calcutta Medical College for six. The only two that were ignored were the ones dealing with venereal diseases and infertility. The incorporation of these into the Medical College as full faculties was not until a hundred years later in the 1930s.
Medicine dealing with reproductive health was therefore largely left to the Vaids and Hakims. By the second half of the century though, the inordinately large incidence of venereal disease in the British Indian Army was forcing the Government to take sexual medicine and disease more seriously. The 1860s saw a spate of Contagious Disease Acts. But in these Acts the matter was treated more as a police matter rather then a medical problem and prostitutes were sought to be registered in police stations.
The flip side of this attitude of treating sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases as a police matter than a medical problem was that in 1868, when a one man committee was set up to look into the problem, he clearly states in his report that, it was a problem that was predominant among the ‘lower classes,’ native or European. Further when a circular is sent out four years later to gather the opinion of District Magistrates on the issue of control of venereal diseases through the control of prostitutes, we meet with a number of elite Hindu District Magistrates, including the redoubtable Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the doyen of Bengali literature and the author of India’s national song ‘Vande Mataram’, arguing that such practices did not effect the elite Bhadralok in general and the high caste Hindus, in particular.
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, when Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal had evoked large-scale protests from the Bengali elite, we find the imperial Gazetteer, arguing that factors that affected reproductive health adversely were more prevalent among caste Hindus than the subaltern classes and ‘muslims.’ Once again the native Hindu elite, like most comprador colonial elites, seem to have internalized this trope of colonial de-legitimation. A spate of literary texts critical of the sexual mores of the high caste Hindus are paralleled by an inordinately large number of advertisements for sexual medicines in the daily press, sometimes reaching as far as 70 per cent of the total advertisements. By the 1920s the issue of ‘obscene’ advertisements is important enough to draw comment from Gandhi himself.
Even in the 1930s when sexual complaints and reproductive health is ‘medicalised,’ it hardly ceases to be a metaphor for division and otherisation. The sub-committee on Population under the National Planning Committee established by Jawaharlal Nehru, clearly states that India’s problem is not population explosion per se but ‘mis-population,’ it goes on to clarify the term further to mean, that the ‘wrong sections’ of the population are growing. Within the discourse on venereal diseases, population, not to mention the nebulous category of ‘diseases of women,’ in this time my paper shall attempt to show that ‘reproductive health and ‘sexual ailments’ came to be viewed as a metaphor for otherisation. The medical, administrative and the elite discourses and attitudes on the issue all reflect this proclivity, though albeit the story will probably not be as neatly chronological as this schematic abstract may suggest.