Colonialism and healthcare

AT the onset, one wonders why this book has been written now. Health, Medicine and Empire - Perspectives on Colonial India published by Orient Longman is actually a collection of 10 essays that attempt to retell the history of medicine in colonial India. The editors of the book - Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison - make no claim to the volume's comprehensiveness but stress on the attention given to hitherto neglected topics like lunacy, Orientalism and Unani medicine.

Yet, one wonders, in an age of globalised medication and also when medical research is leaping forward not only in the developed and richer nations but within the country too, of what use is it to read about the "actual impact of imperial medicine on India's indigenous society".

With its monotonous flavour of a typical academic work, the book is eminently avoidable by those not interested in the subject. It is perhaps meant for a limited readership and does nothing to attract anyone beyond that club.

Having said that, for the review one is forced to look at the relationship between medicine and imperialism, howsoever disgusting it may be to read about the "strange innovations" in the treatment of fever among European patients. To recover their health and colour, they were prescribed to drink three glasses of pissat de vache (cow's urine, one of the panchagarya) for 12 days! This is to underline the general belief that European medicines were of little use in India, forcing Europeans to experiment with indigenous therapies that were bizarre to their contemporaries at home.

During the last decade of historical scholarship, it appears that together with environmental and ecological themes, diseases and medicine too formed the subject of "exciting research" and "medical archive is a fertile ground for those wishing to explore".

The essays compiled, therefore, look at epidemics as "windows" through which to view colonial society, recognise that medicine in British India cannot be easily decoupled from its colonial context but how indigenous people co-opted "imperial" medicine and adapted it to their own requirements. Some of the essays demonstrate the complexity of relationships between colonisers and the colonised and the diversity of colonial impacts upon indigenous society.

The historiography of health and medicine in colonial India makes the editors hopeful that the volume will make an important contribution to the South Asian society in general. Helped with an exhaustive bibliography, the book unveils some inevitable truths of history. For instance, how the British "lost the historic opportunity for initiating sanitary reform and in fact scuttled all initiatives put forward by the Indians themselves. The introductory chapter argues, the British developed a distinctly colonial mode of healthcare, characterised by residential segregation, and neglect of the civilian indigenous population.

The editors feel that each of the essays in their own way "illuminate a neglected feature of imperial history" and also raise as many questions as they answer. The mutual implication of knowledge and power denotes that high level of diseases were an index of imperial neglect. The authors' proclivity to borrow from past and current research papers associated with social history of medicine in colonial India, makes the book unabsorbing even though the different writers have tried to generate a synergy between the Westernised medical system and India's medical tradition.

The second chapter on "clinical christianity" doles out some contemporary interest in the light of attacks on Christian missionaries in the country in the recent past. Weaving through the diversity of the overseas protestant missionary movement, the chapter focusses on the missionaries' initial lack of interest in health and medicine.

The Christian ideal, blending "religion and medicine, faith and science, spirituality and corporeality" reconditioned the medical missionaries to their immediate environment by making concessions to local feelings on matters like gender, caste, class and communal differences.

However, the author notes, missionary medicine was not a simple humanitarian gesture promising to relieve sickness, suffering and diseases. "In missionary hands, medical interventions were designed not only to care and cure but also christianise". The purpose of the essay is to chart the change in mission attitudes towards the use of medicine as a vehicle of evangelism and the ways in which medical work struggled to gain place, power and prominence.

The book contains three chapters on mental and leprosy asylums in colonial India to delineate different aspects associated with these spaces from the point of view of the patient, the colonial health establishment and the world outside. There are two chapters on colonial intervention in two pilgrimage centres - during cholera and plague epidemics. What is discussed includes allied features of urban planning and local interest groups and their interactions with colonial health establishments.

Another two chapters explore indigenous initiatives and their interactions with the colonial health establishments. In one, discussion on Unani medicine examines its construction in the colonial context to meet the challenge of modern medicine given the crisis of confidence that affected Ayurveda and Unani. The other follows the development of the Indian drug industry under the Raj when indigenous enterprise got its break owing to the role of Swadeshi movement.

Those conversant with the subject may find flaws in the interpretations or may even remain shackled till the last pages. But for the uninitiated, any such satisfaction is missing. In a genetechnology-driven tomorrow, who wants to stick to the researcher's self-indulgences of sorts. If anything, the book may be considered for some reference value.

SOMA BASU

Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India, edited by Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, Orient Longman, Rs. 600.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : The folly of chivalry
Next     : Skindeep