Part of the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series book series (CIPCSS)
Abstract
Hygiene is back in the headlines. In slightly more than a decade, the SARS outbreak, the swine flu, and more recently the avian flu have created panic across the globe, forcing people to take notice of contagions that could turn deadly and infect scores of people in a relatively short time. The world suddenly became a shared landscape of closely linked contact zones that are teeming with hundreds of potent microbes, which do not care about national or cultural boundaries.
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Introduction: Contagion and
Cultural Politics of Hygiene
Hygiene is back in the headlines. In slightly more than a decade,
the SARS outbreak, the swine flu, and more recently the avian flu
have created panic across the globe, forcing people to take notice
of contagions that could turn deadly and infect scores of people in
a relatively short time. The world suddenly became a shared landscape of closely linked contact zones that are teeming with hundreds
of potent microbes, which do not care about national or cultural
boundaries.
This shift, understandably, has resulted in a spate of writings on
the precariousness of the global population. Experts and non-experts
alike have emphasized our alarming susceptibility to new forms of
microbial infections. Science writers and journalists, notably Richard
Preston, Laurie Garrett, Barry and David Zimmerman, and David
Quammen, have published sensational and dramatic titles on the
topic. And some of these, for example, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True
Story; The Demon in the Freezer; The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance; and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of
Global Public Health have became best sellers and are being taught in
courses on public and global health and international security.1 These
writings, highlighting the dangers of new and tougher microbes, discuss covert laboratory projects in the United States, and rogue nations
storing deadly microbes that could be used against that and other
nations, and they argue for freezing viruses that could come handy
in times of war.
Even seminal medical journals such as The Lancet and The New
England Journal of Medicine have adopted a distinct tone of urgency in
1
S. Prasad, Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
© Srirupa Prasad 2015
2 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
discussing illnesses like the common flu and the role of viruses that
are mutating into newer forms and becoming more formidable each
day. The US-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention now publishes a journal called Emerging Infectious Diseases. This
growing body of articles, books, media reports, and policy guidelines
on global preparedness in the face of new infectious diseases reflects
the emergence of an important debate and a major governmental
endeavor in health and medicine that has global reach.
India has zealously joined this new endeavor. The call for better
hygiene has brought together a number of forces and institutions
in the management of sanitation in India. The Indian government,
along with non-governmental Indian organizations, international
and national academic institutions, multinational companies, and
global philanthropic enterprises such as the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, have embarked upon what are termed public–private initiatives to promote public health. Since 2006, the Global Hygiene
Council, an organization funded by Reckitt Benckiser (famous for its
antiseptic product, Dettol), has, for example, undertaken a campaign
to bring together private and public initiatives to promote awareness
of hygiene and personal sanitation, especially among the economically weaker sections of the population. This initiative has marked
a new phase in the current public health agenda in India. It has
mobilized public and private entities and resources to ameliorate the
poor state of institutional capacity and sought to direct its focus on
improvements in the teaching, research, and policy of public health.
One of its campaigns, the Dettol Surakshit Parivar (Dettol Protected
Family), was designed to educate new mothers, students, and hospital workers about one of the most important aspects of personal and
collective hygiene – washing hands to prevent infection by germs.
Another influential entity in this enterprise, The Public Health
Foundation of India (PHFI), was launched in 2006 as ‘a response
to redress the limited institutional capacity in India for strengthening training, research and policy development in the area of Public
Health’.2
Structured as an independent foundation, PHFI adopts a broad,
integrative approach to public health, tailoring its endeavours
to Indian conditions and bearing relevance to countries facing similar challenges and concerns. The PHFI focuses on broad
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 3
dimensions of public health that encompass promotive, preventive and therapeutic services, many of which are frequently lost
sight of in policy planning as well as in popular understanding.3
Hygiene has undoubtedly attracted a lot of attention in India, as
in the rest of the world, as being the cornerstone for a robust program in public health for the twenty-first century. It has become
a sociologically significant phenomenon in which global concerns
are being managed by simultaneously roping in a number of actors
and institutions, ranging from the nation-state to the family. New
microbes, novel pandemics, and their global movements that have
forcefully reinstated the efficacy of hygiene have also reinvigorated
global academic interest in the genealogies of hygienic practices.
This book analyzes one such genealogy of hygiene in the context of
late colonial Bengal. It argues that the meaning and role of hygiene in
India were catalyzed on the crossroads of colonial governance, anticolonial struggles, cultural nationalism, and early twentieth-century
feminism. As a consequence of a variety of historical processes – political, economic, social, and cultural – engagement with hygiene not
only shifted public health discourse in the early twentieth century,
it also produced hygiene as a set of practices that guided gendered
domestic agendas in Bengal. These domestic agendas included guidelines for preparation of food, care of sick patients, childcare, and
patterns of domestic consumption of drugs and beauty products.
Spencer Harcourt Butler, a member of the Department of Education in the Governor General’s Council, highlighted these issues
while presiding over the second All India Sanitary Conference, which
opened its session at the Council Chamber, Fort St. George, Madras,
in November 1912. The need for a broader partnership and persistent
efforts at better hygiene was also not lost on Butler:
Ideas and interests have been quickened on all sides and there
are signs of a sanitary awakening in India, of the dawning of an
age of greater attention to public health ... You, I know, will not
fail, gentlemen, when the call for the expert resounds throughout
this ancient land. We specially welcome the presence of nonofficial representatives of the different provinces as an augury of
that co-operation between experts and laymen, without which as
I pointed out last year, it will be difficult if not impossible, to
4 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
achieve any widespread sanitary progress in this country ... You,
I know, will not fail, gentlemen, when the call for the expert
resounds throughout this ancient land; and, meanwhile, you will
push forward the work to which you have laid your hands with
dauntless patience and indefatigable zeal.
(1912:1)
In fact, by the early years of the twentieth century, colonial governance showed a degree of urgency with regard to sanitation that
was unprecedented. The first All India Annual Sanitary Conference
started in 1911, and by 1912, despite some differences of opinion,
one thing was unanimously agreed upon – sanitary reform was the
most important agenda facing the colonial Indian government at
that time. The language that was used to express this concern left
little doubt about the importance that the colonial rulers of India
attached to the cause of sanitation. The phrase ‘sanitary awakening’
not only referred to a state of governance within which the cause of
sanitation was given a fresh lease of colonial urgency, but also to a
new form of ‘consciousness’, a new moral-political realization, which
could bring about a very different order of social transformation and
become another element of the civilizing mission. Not surprisingly,
sanitation, for colonial officials, was equal in standing to, if not more
important than, medical research as a means for progress in medicine
and health.4
The Cultural Politics of Hygiene is a study of the emergence of
hygiene as a socially and medically useful knowledge and practice
in India and its intertwined relationship with cultural and social
transformation in colonial Bengal. It shows how hygiene emerged
from within the colonial governance and political engagements of
the Bengali middle class, and through a focus on the formation of
modern and cultured subjectivities.
The book analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative
and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within colonialist, anti-colonial, and modernist
discourses. In particular, it investigates how the emergence of hygiene
as a powerful ideology, knowledge, and practice redefined and reconfigured two of the most influential realms of social life in early
twentieth-century Bengal – the household and the nation. It argues
that hygiene emerged and materialized within the domestic and the
national realm around two intertwined and mutually reinforcing
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 5
axes: the emergence and arrangement of objects, commodities, and
things; and affect.
The emergence of hygiene took place through the accelerated production, availability, and visibility of a wide range of commodities
and things. Medicines, cosmetics, household goods, and food items
opened up a whole new way of imagining and practicing hygiene.
The history of hygiene will remain incomplete if this dense realm of
commodities and things is not taken into account in the very active
sense of producing the meaning and values of modern hygiene.
New ideas and practices about cleanliness, nursing, and nutrition
emerged, for example, in specific relation to a flourishing market of
commodities.
Affect, feeling, and sentiment were, however, no less important in
the production of the knowledge and practices of hygiene. Hygiene
as a modern discourse, as I show in this book, not only produced
emotions, it was also constituted through them. In fact, it would not
be an exaggeration to say that hygiene worked effectively by attributing emotions to a range of practices, involving both the individual
(citizen, householder, neighbor) and the collective (social, cultural,
and national) body. Disgust, fear, anxiety, and pain, for example,
were (and continue to be) important markers in defining health and
wellbeing.
Hygiene, colonialism, and affective histories
Can there be an affective history of hygiene? In other words, is it
possible to read into the narrative of modern hygiene active and animated tropes of emotion, affect, and feeling? In what ways can such
a reading of archives on hygiene and public health offer us a more
complex and layered understanding of the paradoxical and conflicted
ways in which this ‘tool of empire’ functioned?
In this book, I argue that affect was indispensable and integral
to chronicles of public health and hygiene in late colonial India.
Affect, emotion, and feelings produced an impressive template for
cleanliness, care, and order for the modern Indian nation, society,
and household. Such a template, I further argue, is not merely a
glaze on the more serious content of the public health and sanitary documents of the British Empire; it constitutes the very basis
of this colossal archive and the ideas and practices it mandated. The
archives of hygiene in colonial India direct us to the depths and
6 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
‘hidden forces’ of, to borrow a phrase from Ann Laura Stoler, and the
‘epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense’ that guided public
health endeavors in colonial India. That is, these archives present ‘a
display of sentiments that evinced more powerful mystic and mental
states’.5
A focus on affective tropes of hygiene opens up a ‘moving’ history
of the Empire and its huge apparatus, which churned out countless
ideas, documents, and aspirations.6 By ‘moving’ I mean the trials,
shifts, failures, frustrations, and fears that characterized the gestation, deliberation, administration, and documentation of hygiene,
public health, and sanitation in late colonial India. I use the term
‘moving’ also to highlight the dynamic relationship of the prescriptions of health and hygiene with the sensibilities of their prescribers.
Modern hygiene was thus as much a set of instructions for bodily
health, moral sanctions, and cultural prescriptions for individuals
and society, as it was an embodiment of the intellectual, emotional, and imaginative sensibilities of those who professed and wrote
about them.
Contagions of Feeling excavates the moving history of modern
hygiene by exploring the affective trajectories of public health as they
were defined, designed, appropriated, and manipulated for the needs
of the British Empire in late colonial India. Indians did not blindly
follow the sensibilities and goals of the colonial rulers, however. They,
in particular educated Indians, vigorously discoursed about health
and hygiene and tied these concerns in with nationalism, self-rule,
and modernity.
‘Contagion’ and ‘feeling’ are central elements in the moving history of hygiene in colonial India that I present in this book. I focus
on contagion to signify the interconnected impact of a wide range of
activities that encapsulated public health and sanitation in colonial
India. The narratives of public health in colonial India were surely
not all about infectious diseases, quarantine, and emergency sanitary
administration. Public health was equally about non-emergency, yet
essential activities, such as policing market places, maintaining vital
statistics of populations, and quality control of food and water. These
domains of hygiene and public health were entwined in their concern with transmission, and, consequently, infection and pestilence
caused by contagions. The concept of contagion was thus significant
in a number of ways.
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 7
Public health in colonial India can be traced back to the primary
concern, as historians of medicine have convincingly shown, with
the health and safety of British troops in India.7 Over time and with
the further consolidation of the British Empire, medicine diversified into a wide range of colonial activities that spanned research,
teaching, and other organizational work, epitomized by the highly
colonial-bureaucratic Indian Medical Service (IMS), for example.8 Yet
it would not be an exaggeration to argue that infection and contagion
always loomed as a menace that could erupt anytime unless vigilantly kept under control. The colonial state had to keep in mind
that infectious diseases such as cholera, plague, and smallpox were
huge financial burdens and these, at extreme moments, could grind
the entire administration to a halt as experiences during the worst
epidemics had shown.
In addition, and no less important, was another worry that was
voiced urgently at the international sanitary conferences – how international trade was badly impacted by epidemics and the resultant
quarantines. Contagion thus remained the shadowy but real threat
that was at the heart of colonial sanitary administration during the
entire tenure of the British Empire in India. If one reflects on the more
recent history of public health globally, one cannot fail to notice how
rapid disease transmission, the affliction of large populations, and the
impact of these on global economy and trade still remain the major
concern for the global public health community.
Priscilla Wald, for example, provides a fascinating account of the
dominant ‘outbreak narrative’ that ensues when an infectious disease breaks out in the post-HIV world. She shows that this particular
narrative trope gained prominence in the post-HIV era through a
predictable combination of ‘particular characters, images, and story
lines – of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious
microbes’.9 Tracing this ‘outbreak narrative’ to ‘U.S. economic and
political dominance in the institutionalization of ideas about global
health worldwide’, Wald argues that its ‘circulation across genres and
media makes it at once the reflection and the structuring principle of scientific and journalistic accounts, novelistic and cinematic
depictions of communicable-disease outbreaks, and even the contemporary proliferation of historical studies of the central role of
communicable disease in human history’.10 I find Wald’s idea of ‘outbreak narratives’ very useful, especially the way she deploys it to
8 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
excavate the cultural terrain of twentieth-century America. She shows
convincingly how science and myth are inseparable, the social and
the biological are interlinked, and how fiction and other cultural productions are the sources of some of the most authoritative scientific
narratives of our times.
I present contagion as an analytical centerpiece also by drawing
upon the scholarship in history of medicine in the context of colonial
India. Medicine, for colonial officials such as Butler, whose ideas of
sanitary awakening I briefly discussed earlier, was a means for social
change and therefore could not be realized if it was pursued only
within the walls of medical laboratories. Medicine was to be ably
served by scientists and doctors as much as by administrators such
as Butler or Lukis (the Surgeon General at that time). The concern
for these colonial officers was not simply the therapeutic and curative implications of medicine. Rather, for them, health and medicine
symbolized advanced forms of collective social life. One must take
note of the fact, however, that the sheer magnitude of this task made
it impossible for experts or administrators alone to realize it. This
exigency of management made it imperative to give a clarion call to
Indians to come together with colonial rulers in this sanitary mission,
which, although taken up by Indians, did not imply convergence of
goals.
I focus on Butler’s address to the All India Sanitary Conference also
because of the other important connection that it sought to forge –
between ‘experts’ and their work in the service of what Butler called
the ‘ancient land’ of India. The phrase ‘ancient land’ embodies the
tension that characterized liberal reformist agendas of the British
Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
opening speech of Butler was thus striking not only in its implications in terms of ideas for action, regeneration, and progress, but also
in revealing the philosophical and ideological premises of much of
British liberal political thought that undergirded imperial projects.
Uday Mehta and Thomas Metcalf have highlighted this tension
with great clarity. They argue that liberalism was truly a radical philosophy, which sought to draw the limits of state intervention in the
lives of individual citizens, and to that extent it carried with itself
doctrines of universalism, suffrage, and self-representation.11 Yet in
its historical actualization in the colonies, liberalism not only kept
groups of people and societies outside the purview of its universal
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 9
claims, it in fact became a tool that concealed disenfranchisement
and marginalization in the garb of ultimate greater good.
The transposition of ‘ancient land’ and ‘expert’ exemplified this
contradiction: the ancient land, which signified the outmoded institutions and social practices in India, could thus be regenerated by
proper knowledge and under the watchful eyes of (British/Western)
experts. Only good governance, enshrined in the doctrines of modern
knowledge and Western benevolence, could usher a social transformation that would bring the ‘ancient land’ out of the stupor of
age-old hierarchical customs and into the age of self-rule. The claim
for the universal possibility of social transformation was always questionable when it concerned colonized societies who were yet to be as
‘civilized’ as British society.
This philosophical and ideological climate undergirded the dominant colonial agenda in late colonial Bengal/India and was implemented through a mix of eighteenth-century European medical
policing, the nineteenth-century model of large-scale public health
initiatives, and the rudiments of twentieth-century consciousness
around preventive medicine and hygiene. Overall, colonial health
policies had two crucial imperatives – one military and the other
missionary.12 While military interest served as the blueprint for most
colonial governments’ undertakings in public health and sanitary
projects in the presidency cities and other urban centers, the missionary ethic or ‘clinical Christianity’ gained favor in relation to
preventive medicine and for personal hygiene and sanitation.13
Poonam Bala, highlighting the inordinate delay in the establishment of public health priorities in colonial India and their subservience to British commercial interests, has argued that while the
army was last on the British health agenda, in the context of colonial India, it was just the reverse.14 Bala contends that after the 1857
mutiny and subsequent takeover of the Empire by the Crown, army
health became the prime concern of the colonial health policy, which
was entrusted to the hands of the IMS. Radhika Ramasubban, similarly, argues that the health of the wider colonized population was
compromised at the expense of the medical needs of the colonial
military.15
Although some historians have contested a straightforward link
between medical priorities in colonial India and the interests of the
military, there is a consensus among scholars working on colonial
10 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
India that army health was the motivating force behind colonial
health policies.16 David Arnold, for example, shows how ‘colonial
enclavism’ and excessive attention given to the military and its
health requirements limited the scope of many public health initiatives before 1900. ‘[T]he continuing narrowness of official preoccupations’, Arnold writes, ‘was reflected in the annual reports of the
sanitary commissioners in the 1870s which devoted 80 or 90 pages
to the health of European soldiers, but less than a dozen each to the
“native” army, prisoners, and the “general population” ’.17
The Contagious Diseases Acts, which required forceful inspection
of prostitutes serving the military, became another exemplification
of the predominant concern for the army in colonial India. Anil
Kumar shows how Lock hospitals served the ‘twin purposes of facilitating mercenary sex and protecting the soldiers from the infections
of venereal diseases’.18 The health crisis of the army following the
Crimean War further consolidated the military focus of the healthcare system. Interestingly, this crisis in the army’s health prompted
Florence Nightingale to comment on the absolute necessity for a
public health re-awakening for a country that she described as the
‘land of domestic filth’ and a ‘focus of epidemics’. The cleverness of
Nightingale, as Mary Poovey argued, lay in the way she deployed the
ideal of ‘care’ to support Britain’s imperial designs in India.19
The plague of 1896–1897 eventually stirred Indians as well as
the colonial government to take notice of the enormity of public
health concerns in India.20 ‘The discovery of the dreaded bubonic
plague in Bombay City in September 1896’, Prashant Kidambi writes,
‘precipitated a political and social crisis unknown in colonial India
since 1857’.21 There was a spurt in sanitary activities following the
plague. Preventive measures to control epidemics were consequently
looked at more favorably and an urgent need for health education in the wider population was emphasized. Contagion, infection,
and disease transmission conveyed not only the predicaments of a
besieged colonial state in relation to health of Indians, there was
also intense international pressure given the commercial importance of the affected area.22 The term ‘pathogenic’ thus acquired
meaning and value through an interweaving of the medical and
the social. The ‘intermingling of social and scientific theories of
contagion’, as Priscilla Wald argues in a different context, also ‘led
to the articulation of a form of collective identity and a principle of
belonging that is at the heart of the outbreak narrative’.23
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 11
The main objective of Contagions of Feeling is to show that the
formation and vitality of any form of knowledge and practice are
intrinsically tied to the affective worldings of particular communities.
Moreover, given that social groups are defined by and rest on different codes of exclusion and inclusion such as gender, class, caste, or
religion, ideas and practices of hygiene commonly exemplify these
exclusions (and inclusions). At the heart of anxieties about microbial contagion lay apprehensions about social and moral belonging.
Social, cultural, and ultimately moral contamination produced the
same kinds of menace that pestilence did. These anxieties were germane to the production of discourses on disease, health, and body
in colonial Bengal and India more broadly. Affect in this context
was the catalyst that translated pestilence, filth, and disease into a
socially and culturally authorized vocabulary of purity, pollution, and
cleanliness.
Affective textures of contagion thus not only spread across a wide
range of discourses and practices, they also continually grow as affects
themselves become contagious. ‘Thinking of affects as contagious’,
Sara Ahmed explains, helps ‘us to challenge an “inside out” model of
affect by showing how affects pass between bodies, affecting bodily
surfaces or even how bodies surface’. However, as Ahmed elaborates, ‘affective contagion tends to underestimate the extent to which
affects are contingent... affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected, or only as an effect of how objects
are given’.24
This book examines genealogies of contagion in colonial
Bengal/India and thereby explores the dynamic and contested
passages between contagion as microbe and contagion as affect.
It analyzes epistemic, material, cultural, and affective dimensions of
contagion to open up entanglements of empire and nation, power
and difference, modernity and tradition.
Objects, affect, and hygiene
Despite the depth of intellectual engagement with hygiene, historians have not explored the ways in which specific objects and
commodities embody (and are made distinct by) certain affects and
the ways in which these objects become meaningful as cultural
productions in the context of health and medicine. It is, therefore, imperative to explore the affective histories that objects and
12 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
commodities engendered in the lives and imaginations of middle
class consumers in late colonial Bengal.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certain objects
became particularly charged with emotions and feelings about the
empire, national belonging, cultural identity, and economic selfsustenance. These objects became animated with particular affects
and feelings as the medical marketplace became flooded with
promises of cures and wellbeing. The affective charge of objects
often crossed over to, and was further animated by, debates on the
British Empire, Indian nationalism, and political self-rule in India.
These objects and commodities were thus instrumental in making
hygiene/cleanliness a vital ingredient in debates on cultural and
political self-fashioning. In this book, I delve into the mutual production of objects, commodities, and affect as a robust site of,
and mechanism for the production of hygiene as a discourse that
warranted a set of cultural practices.
The objects and commodities I focus on relate to health and wellbeing. Cures for a range of common ailments, products used for
cleanliness and disinfection, and specialty food for children and the
sick collectively created a thriving medical-therapeutic-curative marketplace in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. This
complex set of commodities and objects was instrumental in making hygiene, purity, and moral cleanliness vital elements of debates
on cultural and political self-fashioning. More specifically, I explore
four inter-related processes: (1) the commodification of medical and
hygienic products in late colonial India, (2) the ‘pluralism’ that
characterized the medical marketplace in India, (3) the gendered
nature of the new commodity consciousness, and (4) the linkages
between ideologies and practices of different institutions and sociopolitical structures that together defined medical consumerism in
Bengal/India during this period.
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries Bengali
(as well as other Indian language) and English newspapers and magazines became competitive advertising places where allopathic, homeopathic, Ayurvedic, electrotherapeutic, and hakimi nostrums vied for
legitimacy. Advertisements in Victorian England also offered medical assistance through a combination of pills, electrical treatment,
and surgery. However, their counterparts in Bengal/India offered not
only a multiplicity of cures within the allopathic tradition, but also
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 13
a plurality of other medical therapies as well: Unani, Ayurveda, and
homeopathy successfully competed against allopathic medicines and
practices. Homeopathy, although not a native medical tradition,
became immensely popular in urban Bengal.25 David Arnold and
Sumit Sarkar have argued that homeopathic treatment found increasing favor among urban Bengalis because it was cheap and easy to use,
and because it was not associated with British colonial authority.26
In short, the medical marketplace in colonial India/Bengal was a
site of contested knowledges and practices in which a number of
medical systems seriously challenged the monopoly of allopathic
drugs and cures. This was also significant because the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries presented a regeneration of the existing
medical knowledges and practices of Bengal. This was also the period
when the colonial state pursued an active and aggressive policy of
professionalization and regulation in Bengal that was productively
utilized by Indian businessmen.27 Ayurveda, for example, was given
fresh impetus by enthusiasts such as Gangaprasad Sen, Neelamber
Sen, and Gangadhar Ray, who were inspired to undertake large scale
production by establishing the pharmaceutical company N.N. Sen
and Company Private Limited.
Similar efforts were made to commercialize Ayurvedic drugs.
In 1901 several pharmaceutical companies, for example Dhaka
Oushadhalaya, Sadhana Oushadhalaya, and Kalpataru Ayurvedic
Works, were established and they soon became successful.28 Another
well-known pharmaceutical company, Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceutical Works Limited, was established in 1901 through the
pioneering efforts of Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray. This particular company was the first drug company completely owned and
managed by Indians. One particular factor that contributed to the
growth of the Indian therapeutic market was the disruption caused by
World War I. The War led to a drastic decline in imports and Indian
companies used this opportunity to spur local production.
The thriving medical market gained foothold through aggressive
advertising and in this it relied on the vibrant and growing print
capitalism in colonial India. In fact, the domain of medical-hygienictherapeutic advertisements constitutes one of the most productive
sites to explore the negotiations of a host of material and epistemological issues that were crucial in charting out the contours of
medical practice in late colonial India. While semantically dense and
14 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
culturally meaningful in their own accord, in colonial India, these
advertisements were also a part of a broader milieu that bridged
political practices of the state, the household, and the civil-public
sphere.
The Indian medical marketplace has often been characterized as
representing, to use E.D. Ackernecht’s phrase, a ‘therapeutic chaos’.29
It was, in fact, a vibrant and pluralistic market that consisted of a
plethora of curative products and possibilities. The gradual shift of
the British colonial state’s policy in favor of an anti-contagionist
and sanitarianist-environmentalist approach to public health, popular protests against the colonial government’s quarantine policies,
and a truly favorable response by Indians only in matters of surgery,
had amply demonstrated that the monopoly of biomedicine was
far from complete. Popular protests against the colonial government’s health initiatives did not imply chaos. Rather, they often
represented critiques of colonial rule, which were also utilized by
Indians to further pluralistic medical ideologies and practices. It was
thus no coincidence that hygiene as a mechanism to re-think
and re-organize both the corporeal and the ideological body of
the nation found a truly appropriate moment during this period:
a moment that Joseph Alter has aptly called a time of ‘somatic
nationalism’.30
In Contagions of Feeling, as discussed earlier, I locate affect at the
heart of circulations of commodities/objects/things and their social,
political, and cultural worldings. The affective becomes particularly
forceful when commodities, and more broadly commodity culture,
end up inhabiting charged economic and political times and spaces.
In this regard the book is located within a compelling body of scholarship in history, anthropology, and literary and cultural studies
that has explored the social, economic, and cultural lives of commodities, objects, and things in the contexts of colonialism and
empire. Historians and anthropologists have, for example, chronicled
the rich history of commodities and, more broadly, Indian markets
in the colonial and postcolonial period. Tea, cotton, indigo, and
opium are some of the items studied by these scholars. One particular commodity that has been frequently explored for its economic,
social, cultural, and political significance has been Khadi – the handspun and hand woven cloth that is derived from cotton.31 Khadi or
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 15
khaddar achieved an iconic status in the anti-colonial struggle when
Mahatma Gandhi made it the symbol of political and economic
self-rule.
More specifically, my concern in the analysis of commodities is in
line with Nigel Thrift’s emphasis on economies’ generation of ‘passionate interests’. Thrift, following Gabriel Tarde, argues, ‘economies
must be engaging: they must generate or scoop up affects and then
aggregate and amplify them in order to produce value, and that
must involve producing various mechanisms of fascination’.32 One
can see a similar set of processes at work in the affective life of
khadi, for example. A simple piece of homemade cloth became an
exemplary historic object through its association with, and manipulation by one of the most astute political leaders in history. Gandhian
khadi thus became what Sherry Turkle calls an ‘evocative object’.33 Its
power emerged and was sustained precisely through the cultivation
of and attachment to affects such as national pride and belonging
and economic self-sufficiency.
The ‘evocative objects’ of health and hygiene in colonial Bengal
were mostly everyday things whose meaning, significance, and power
shifted through history and in different social-economic-political
domains. These objects and commodities, as I show in this book,
signified the explicit medical and curative goal of cleansing, disinfecting, sanitizing, and purifying in the face of threat from contagions.
They also represented anxieties about social, cultural, and moral contaminations that needed to be remedied. Contagion thus invoked the
mode and pace by which sentiments and emotions became essential
for creating the immense influence of these objects.
In bringing affect to bear upon the history of production and
circulation of hygiene as a cultural project in late colonial Bengal,
Contagions of Feeling seeks to provide a history of the present.34
My book opens with recent debates in public health and draws attention to the affective charge that characterizes epistemologies and
practices of public health and hygiene globally. Public health today,
as it was during colonial times, is a set of bodily, cultural, and moral
discourses that are prescriptions for individual and social health.
In short, public health, as Deborah Lupton argues, is a ‘socio-cultural
product’ and its specific forms change with shifts in social, cultural,
and political contexts and desires.35
16 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
Contagions of Feeling is an interdisciplinary work. It draws from the
field of affect studies and history of medicine to explore the crucial
role of affect in getting ideas, practices, and objects – that constituted
health and hygiene – moving and circulating in private and public
spaces. Although for a long time hygiene has largely been the concern
of historians, in recent years scholars from several other disciplines
have analyzed hygiene, and this has also resulted in interdisciplinary
perspectives. Empires of Hygiene, for example, is a compelling exploration of the deeply imperial constitution of hygiene. Priscilla Wald
in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, on the
other hand, argues that outbreak narratives, far from becoming obsolete, are real and contemporary. Contagions of Empire contributes to
this growing body of work by attending to the more routine elements
of social, cultural, and political boundary-making that accompanied hygiene’s everyday articulations. These ordinary and everyday
articulations of hygiene were, nevertheless, extremely effective in
constituting imperial, anti-colonial, and domestic orders of hierarchy and exclusion. Contagions of Feeling explores such articulations
of hygiene in the context of late colonial Bengal by mapping the
‘contact zones’ where affect inhabited and suffused the texts and
commodities of hygiene.36
Apart from the history and sociology of public health and medicine
and affect studies, Contagions of Feeling also critically engages with
the large body of studies of domesticity. Hygiene, both as an ideology and as a set of practices, defined the very core of domesticity.
If domesticity was one of the most powerful cultural ideologies
that re-wrote the script of modern social life, hygiene constituted
one of its primary ordering mechanisms. Late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Bengal, not unlike Judith Walsh’s broader characterization of this era, represented an ‘age of domesticity’.37 Ideologies
of nationalism and colonialism were intricately tied to discourses on
health and wellbeing and the domestic became an important site on
which these were being contested and reimagined. In colonial as well
as nationalist ideologies, the imaginaries of nation, community, and
family were distinctly gendered.
The relationship between domesticity, colonialism, and nationalism was forged on the backs of a gendered division of labor within
the household. The ‘women’s question’ consisted of a set of prescriptions that defined the values, duties, rights, and responsibilities
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 17
of women inside and outside the middle class home. Contagions
of Feeling focuses on advertisements for hygienic commodities and
women’s writings on the ethic of care in particular to highlight the
gendered nature of ideologies and practices of hygiene in colonial
Bengal. My goal, however, is not to point to an alternative genealogy of therapeutic-hygienic practices that was outside the purview of
the colonial state and its institutional intermediaries. Rather, I argue
that hygiene was a broad and multi-sited corporeal process that
also included the Bengali middle class’s attempts to write itself into
history. In this process, middle class men, positioning themselves
in relation to the colonial rule, laid claims to ordering the family and the household by drawing upon a number of conceptual,
philosophical, and affective apparatuses.
Methods and sources
The origins of this book lie in my doctoral research. My dissertation was a historical–sociological analysis of the close link between
hygiene and its most effective realm of persuasion and action –
the household. While the history of hygiene and its coeval relationship with nation, domesticity, and culture remains the focus of
this book, the analytical framework has shifted and the empirical
material that I draw upon for that purpose has also changed. Specifically, in this book I explore the genealogy of hygiene by focusing
on two entwined axes of articulation of hygienic practices and ideologies, namely affect and objects/commodities. Together they made
hygiene meaningful and sensible as a social, cultural, and political practice and provided the material and cultural vocabulary of
hygiene.
Hygiene did not simply represent the medical intervention of the
colonial state, but was also a deeply cultural, political, and social
project. The power of hygiene as a mechanism of cleanliness, order,
and purification depended upon the degree to which it could affectively appropriate sites such as the household and the nation and
thereby produce acceptable social practices from such appropriations.
Such affective appropriations relied on transmissions of objects and
commodities and their attendant ideologies not just in the official
language, i.e. English, but also in the local language, Bengali. I have
extensively examined the Bengali archives and translated archaic and
18 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
modern Bengali writings to explore the cultural production of modern hygiene in colonial Bengal. I have been attentive to linguistic
nuances of concepts and ideas about hygiene.
Contagions of Feeling, with a focus on colonial Bengal, utilizes data
from a range of archival sources, including colonial public health
records, monographs by colonial officials and administrators, English
and Bengali newspapers, popular journals in Bengali, monographs
on a variety of health and hygiene concerns in Bengali, and autobiographies of middle class Bengali women. The purpose of using
the extensive archive of Bengali publications is not only to ensure
richness of archival representation, but also to explore the expanse
and depth of textual production on hygiene, sanitation, and health.
I have also used information from two other popular cultural media –
films and advertisements – in my study. Advertisements of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constitute a rich archive
of the moving history of commodities/products. They highlight the
economic logics, political agendas, and affective tropes that produced
hygiene in late colonial Bengal. I examine their affective articulations
that ‘moved’ products such as soaps or patent medicines in and out
of the marketplace, middle class homes, and the national space. The
two films I analyze were produced much later than the other archival
sources, in postcolonial India, and both of them retrospectively
reflect upon the 1943 Bengal Famine and the massive annihilation of
human lives that resulted from it. In that sense these films highlight
the lingering affects of the history of health and hygiene in colonial
India.
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries a thriving world of printing presses and publications became the primary
medium for information exchange and knowledge production in
colonial-urban Bengal. An active and politically engaged reading public already existed in urban Bengal during this period.38 Bengal had
witnessed the establishment of the first vernacular press in India
and was the home of earliest indigenous printing and publishing
industry. As Partha Chatterjee has rightly argued, it was through the
‘production and circulation of printed texts that the discourses of
modernity [were] disseminated in Bengal from the early nineteenth
century’.39
By the second half of the nineteenth century, as small- and
medium-scale Bengali entrepreneurs started investing in the growing market of books, newspapers, and periodicals, publishing became
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 19
one of the largest and certainly most influential sectors of indigenous industry.40 For example, in the short period of ten years between
the 1857 Mutiny and 1867, the number of Bengali titles on sale rose
from around 322 to over 900. There was an increase in the number
of books that were published every year from around the 1850s. The
massive growth in the production and circulation of books in Bengali
was formidable enough to prompt the colonial government to put in
place an administrative machinery for its surveillance.
My focus on Bengal is premised on the fact that at the end of the
nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, Bengal still constituted, economically, the core of the British Empire in India (Calcutta
was the capital of British colonial India until 1911). Moreover, the
Bengali middle class was socio-culturally visible (even though its economic position was dwindling), because of its collaborative relations
with the colonial administration and also because it led among the
first articulate protests against British imperialism. Bengal was also
important from the point of view of the growth of Western medical
knowledge and institutions because it was here that the state support
for medicine was first initiated.
Literature comprising of poetry, dramas, prose, and ‘tales’ constituted the largest percentage of Bengali publications. Titles in
medicine were printed from around 1818 and their number steadily
increased – from around 12 in 1818 to around 60 by the 1860s.41
Between 1875 and 1896 the number of Bengali titles on science
related topics was close to 800, of which around 600 were on
medicine and health.42 It is also worth noting that writings on health,
apart from being published under the category of ‘medicine’, also
spanned categories such as ‘home science’ and ‘social issues’. Moreover, while in the early nineteenth century medical texts were simply
translations or reprints of English texts, later, toward the end of the
nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, medical writings
were often original compositions. This transition marked a ‘curious
ambivalence’ in the nationalist response toward pursuit of knowledge. On the one hand, it represented pragmatic appropriation of
the new knowledge presented to Indians through colonial institutions, and on the other it reflected an insistence on the production
of a ‘distinctly Indian form of modern knowledge’.43
Wider debates over the representation and dissemination of knowledge and culture were thus evident in Bengali texts on health,
hygiene, and medicine. According to some historians, it was this
20 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
realignment and renegotiation that ‘mediated a new discourse in the
public domain that constituted our popular notion of science’.44 It
also led to enormous ‘public’ engagement in science and medicine in
Bengali from the second half of the nineteenth century. A detailed
survey of Bengali books, monographs, and periodicals on health,
hygiene, and medicine is available in Benoybhushan Roy’s (1995a)
study Uneesh Shatake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsha Bigyan Charcha (The
Pursuit of Medical Science in the Bengali Language in the Nineteenth Century). Roy lists nearly 600 books and journals in Bengali on Western
medicine, homeopathy, Ayurveda, Unani, and other Indian systems
of medicine and therapeutics. The medical archive is situated within
the above-discussed broader context.
In Contagions of Feeling, I have shifted from an exclusive focus on
the mutual production of hygiene and domesticity to developing
an understanding of hygiene and public health as a socio-cultural
project. In an atmosphere of anti-colonial nationalism, such a project
assumed added emphasis. Like its imperial counterpart, nationalism
was equally a project of the physical, moral, and cultural disciplining
of the individual and the collective. Public health in early twentiethcentury colonial India was a patchwork of nineteenth-century public
health diktats, driven by, on the one hand, a sanitarianism, which
focused on the dangers of contamination of the environment by
impurities in air and water. On the other hand, the early twentieth century marked the slow emergence of a model of public health
where notions of individual responsibility and risk emerged as driving concerns. Infection and contagion had a strong hold on medical
and lay imaginations at this time. Health and wellbeing were gradually defined as moral projects, wherein the policing and disciplining
of individual and social bodies were paramount.45
Outline of chapters
Contagions of Feeling consists of an introductory chapter, four additional chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction lays out the
analytical framework and archival focus of the book. It juxtaposes
two moments in the history of hygiene and public health in India –
the late colonial period, i.e. the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the present neoliberal time. I juxtapose these two
moments in history to highlight the continued importance of affect,
Introduction: Contagion and Politics of Hygiene 21
emotion, and feelings in charting trajectories of hygiene and public health. Of course, the ways in which affects have been made a
part of discourses on health in these two historical periods are vastly
different. In part, the economic and political incentives of these two
moments make the respective trajectories of affect distinct. Nevertheless, in both these periods we see affect as the driving force behind the
development of particular ideas and practices of hygiene. Moreover,
in both periods affect is articulated through diverse texts on hygiene.
In the context of colonial Bengal, on which I focus in the rest of the
book, such texts include colonial health records, advertisements, and
autobiographies, etc. Affective articulations, in fact, authorize and
‘produce’ the history of hygiene as a distinctly political discourse.
The second chapter, titled ‘Alimentary Anxieties: Affect in Food
and Hunger’, examines the relationship between body, food, and
nationalist imaginings. It explores the ways in which discourses on
food, hunger, nutrition, diet, and sustenance supplied the ingredients
for the imagining and disciplining of the ‘body’ of the nation and its
citizens. Principally, it offers a critical reading of two modes of representation – Bengali monographs and periodicals on food, nutrition,
and food adulteration, and two Bengali films, Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) and Akaler Sandhaney (In Search of Famine). It also
explores the trope of hunger in Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s collection of paintings titled Hungry Bengal which present powerful images
of death and devastation in the wake of the Bengal Famine.
‘Gandhian Affects: Hygiene, Body, and Swaraj’, the third chapter,
explores the intimate links between Mahatma Gandhi’s writings
on sanitation, cleanliness, hygiene, swadeshi, and satyagraha. Bodily
purity was one of the cornerstones of Gandhi’s practice of political non-violence. Political self-rule as well as bodily sovereignty, for
Gandhi, were ultimately moral issues. This chapter shows Gandhi’s
quest for the moral disciplining of the individual and political bodies,
which brought together elements of hygiene, cleanliness, and moderation that were hierarchizing, and also contradictory. Specifically,
I analyze the following writings of Gandhi: ‘The Story of My Experiments with Truth’, ‘Key to Health’, and ‘Diet and Diet Reform’, and
articles from the Indian Opinion to bring to light his weaving together
of values in hygiene and health with a particular caste and religious
politics. In particular, I explore (a) his legal and social work in the
context of a plague epidemic in South Africa and the plight of the
22 Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940
Indian community as a result of the aggressive plague control policies of the British government, and (b) his writings on what health
meant to him and how modern medicine destroyed it.46
The fourth chapter – ‘Imagining the Social Body: Competing
Moralities of Care and Contagion’ – explores autobiographical writings, short stories, non-fictional essays, and educational literature by
middle class educated Bengalis on domesticity, cleanliness, and wellbeing. Through the analysis of these texts, this chapter maps the
broader gender politics of care in late colonial Bengal. Analytically,
this chapter is situated within a paradigm in feminist autobiographical criticism that calls for a ‘post-colonial move’, and examines
autobiographical writings by previously colonized subjects in order
to highlight interfaces of imperialism, patriarchy, religion, and class.
Chapter 5, titled ‘Affective Remedies: Advertisements and Cultural Politics of Hygiene’, explores the mutual production of empire,
nation, domesticity, and consumption through the lens of commercial visual culture in late colonial Bengal. Through an analysis
of advertisements for drugs, pills, and tonics from different therapeutic traditions, this chapter shows that medical marketing in
colonial India consisted of several competing therapies, knowledge
systems, and cultural repertoires. Allopathic, homeopathic, hakimi,
and Ayurvedic remedies were equally highly in demand. These therapeutic systems together constituted a vibrant pluralism in the medical marketplace. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a
surge in advertisements for beauty products as well. Creams, soaps,
and toiletries signaled a new phase in middle class consumption.
These commodities were not simply products for material consumption, they also articulated hierarchical, albeit competing, perspectives
on beauty, charm, and refinement. Since this time period was also
politically vibrant, advertisements were often animatedly political in
their tone, often drawing on tropes of empire and anti-colonialism.
Advertisements for these commodities, as they attempted to create a new consumption class among women, were also, as I show,
inherently gendered
----
Notes
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Copyright information
© Srirupa Prasad 2015
About this chapter
Cite this chapter as:Prasad S. (2015) Introduction: Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene. In: Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520722_1
Publisher NamePalgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN978-1-349-55773-8
Online ISBN978-1-137-52072-2
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