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Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing
heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to
understand the functions of health experiences, distribution of
illness, prevention of sickness, social relations of therapeutic
intervention and employment of pluralistic medical systems, the
book interrogates the social construction of medical knowledge,
politics of science, and the changing paradigm of relationship
between health of the individual and the prerogatives of larger
colonial economic formations. Smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria
which visited colonial Bengal with epidemic vengeance, caught the
people unaware, killed them in thousands, and changed the society
and its demographic structures. The book shows how sometimes
through mutual adaptation but more often by cultural contestation,
people pulled on with their microbial fellow travellers, and how
illness became metaphor for the social dangers of improper code of
conduct, to be corrected only through personal expropriation of the
sin committed, or by community worship of the deity supposedly
responsible for it. As a result, Western medical science was often
relegated to the background, and elaborate rites and rituals,
supposedly having curative values, came to the forefront and were
observed with much community fanfare. Epidemics were also
interpreted as outcome of politically incorrect moves made by the
ruling power. To right the wrongs, people very often resorted to
social protest. The protest by the literati went sometimes muted
when its members seem to be beneficiaries of the colonial
government, but it turned out to be all the more violent when the
people, who had no private axe to grind, took up the cudgel to
fight it out.
Poonam Bala s Contesting Colonial Authority explores the interplay
of conformity and defiance amongst the plural medical tradition in
colonial India. The contributors reveal how Indian elites,
nationalists, and the rest of the Indian population participated in
the move to revisit and frame a new social character of Indian
Medicine. Viewed in the light of the cultural, nationalistic,
social, literary and scientific essentials, Contesting Colonial
Authority highlights various indigenous interpretations and
mechanisms through which Indian sciences and medicine were
projected against the cultural background of a rich medical
tradition.
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