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Wed 22 March
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    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

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    14:15
    16:30

Fri 24 March
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    10:45
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    16:30

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Wednesday 22 March 2006 10:45
F-2 HEA02 State interventions and private negotiations in the practice of colonial medicine
Room F
Network: Health and Environment Chair: Rosa Medina-Domenech
Organizers: - Discussant: Rosa Medina-Domenech
Nandini Bhattacharya : "Tropical Aggregation of Labour?" Contested territories in the tea plantation enclaves in colonial Bengal, India
The tea plantations in Bengal have been understood as enclaves within a peasant society. Though the tea estates of Duars, north Bengal were formally held in thirty year leases from the British Government, in practice the colonial state intervened little in the management of the vast areas of the tea ... (Show more)
The tea plantations in Bengal have been understood as enclaves within a peasant society. Though the tea estates of Duars, north Bengal were formally held in thirty year leases from the British Government, in practice the colonial state intervened little in the management of the vast areas of the tea plantations. The largely European managers and assistant managers controlled the workers’ labour and their bodies, in fact if not in law; and the dwellings of the coolie lines were provided, too, by the estate management itself. When it came to prophylactic action against malaria, however, there were long-standing disputes between the local government, the estate management and the external medical specialists about both the causes of hyper endemicity in the area and the policies to counter them. I would argue that the policies that were eventually devised to battle malaria in the tea estates were not implemented at the estate level due to various local factors. These included the exigencies of the local self government in the region, colonial forest and revenue policies and the economies of the plantation system . Further, while there “controlled” experimentsto locate anopheline carriers and conduct anti larval operations in some tea estates, there were no sustained efforts to use the knowledge gained from the experiments on a wider basis within the tea plantations in north Bengal. Thus while the tea plantations provided a space that was in some senses ideal for anti malarial research in colonial Bengal, and thereby enriched medical knowledge, the transmission of this knowledge into public health policies did not occur. (Show less)

Sanjoy Bhattacharya : Marking the limits of state power?: Reassessing the dynamics of smallpox vaccination in British India, 1857-1947
Historians sometimes present official campaigns of smallpox vaccination as a means by which colonial India’s British rulers marked ‘natives’, collected information about them and thereby controlled indigenous communities. Such descriptions are generally based on rather simplistic assumptions of an all-powerful central government, which was supposedly able to enforce the design ... (Show more)
Historians sometimes present official campaigns of smallpox vaccination as a means by which colonial India’s British rulers marked ‘natives’, collected information about them and thereby controlled indigenous communities. Such descriptions are generally based on rather simplistic assumptions of an all-powerful central government, which was supposedly able to enforce the design and deployment of interventionist policies in different provincial context. This paper submits that the situation was always much more complex. Not only was the colonial administrative edifice much less united and weaker than many of its officials were ever willing to publicly admit, state-sponsored efforts at extending the scope of vaccination were hamstrung by a variety of political, economic, technological and social factors. Particularly noteworthy in this regard was widespread incidence of bureaucratic opposition (as opposed to civilian resistance), which was usually linked to the numerous technical problems faced in relation to the smallpox vaccines; these difficulties, which were not easily resolved, led to the development of a series of deeply fractured smallpox control policies across different British Indian provinces. Apart from highlighting the importance of making a distinction between policy goals and implementation, a careful assessment of this aspect of public health also reveals how official policies were renegotiated at different levels of the colonial administration, so much so that they were often unrecognisable at the point of delivery. (Show less)

Kai Khiun Liew : “Everybody’s business becomes nobody’s business.” Demarcating responsibilities of public health in the Rubber plantations of British Malaya (1900s-1942)
With the phenomenonal boom in the rubber industry followed by its introduction into the mass market by the late 19th century, the rubber tree, which grew favourably in the soil of British Malaya, became synonymous with the colony’s political economy. There were however, significant obstacles that large rubber estates had ... (Show more)
With the phenomenonal boom in the rubber industry followed by its introduction into the mass market by the late 19th century, the rubber tree, which grew favourably in the soil of British Malaya, became synonymous with the colony’s political economy. There were however, significant obstacles that large rubber estates had to overcome before profits could be reap. A crucial factor was the health of the estate workers, many of whom were migrant Tamil workers shipped to open up and work in malaria infested agricultural lands. While both the colonial administration and the plantation managers agreed on the importance of maintaining a healthy workforce, they differed strongly over the responsibility of the public health measures. Planters were often suspicious of the state’s attempts to impose unnecessarily greater legal and financial burdens. This came in the legal obligations of rigid standards of estate health and also public health provisions to more common areas outside their jurisdictions as part of larger anti-malaria measures. While not shying responsibility of the health of their coolies, the planters felt that it should be the state with its infrastructure and its responsibility to provide for larger health facilities and drainage and sanitation projects in the colony as a whole.

An exploration of the heated tussles between planters and the state over the demarcation of the responsibilities of public health in these rubber estates reveals not only the tensions between private and public interests. The experience of British Malaya also provides a critical appreciation on the interactions between the developments of public health and medicine measures with that of the notions of property and governance against the backdrop of international capital and labour flows. (Show less)

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan : Contesting the claims of Colonial'scientific' medicine: Indigenous Medical Practitioners and the politics of recasting scientificauthority in British Colonial India (1890-1940)
This paper examines the impact of British Colonial medical intervention in the context of the ideas and rhetoric that projected and sustained colonial medicine. It argues that ideas regarding the scientific nature of colonial medicine were critical to validating its authority in the colony. Colonial medical intervention or its scientific, ... (Show more)
This paper examines the impact of British Colonial medical intervention in the context of the ideas and rhetoric that projected and sustained colonial medicine. It argues that ideas regarding the scientific nature of colonial medicine were critical to validating its authority in the colony. Colonial medical intervention or its scientific, rational-critical nature represented the promised gains of a rational, civilizational modernity to Colonial subjects. These ideational claims were however constantly contested and recast by groups, such as indigenous medical practitioners as they sought to appropriate these claims and to relocate the locus of colonial authority and its sanction.



This paper traces the efforts of colonial medical administrators in the frontier province of Punjab( now part of Pakistan and India), to draw the boundaries of legitimate, scientific medicine in the spheres of colonial medical education and in the registration of professional medical practice. It centrally examines the responses of practitioners of indigenous medicine, such as the practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine as they faced the threat of loss of state patronage and occupational status and began to mobilize through urban vernacular print publicity to contest and recast the claims of colonial medicine.



Their mobilization and writings 'indigenized’ the claims of colonial medical science by reconstructing histories of Hindu science and redeploying the arguments of orientalist philology regarding the scientific contents of vernaculars to project the claims of indigenous medicine and indirectly also legitimized an indigenous modernity. Yet these ideas and representations were also characterized by internal ambiguities and negotiations, as the claims of colonial medicine and its scientific norms were simultaneously appropriated and recast by diverse groups of practitioners and their urban patrons to validate both the interests of the Hindu nation as much as the competing aspirations of Sikh ethnic, community interests at the level of the province and locality. This paper therefore argues for locating the understanding Colonial medical intervention and responses to its concerns amongst the politics of mobilization and political-cultural claims of both the nation and ethnic community identities. (Show less)



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