Chair: Gyan Prakash, Princeton University

Discussant: Charu Gupta, University of Delhi, India

The introduction of Western science and technology had significant implications for socio-cultural and ideological life in colonial North India. Western medicine and science circulated largely by means of the colonial government and Christian missions; however, vernacular sources can best describe the interactions arising from this institutionalization of Western science in India, and its gendered ramifications. Indigenous institutions and literary writing of the turn of the century from the nineteenth to the twentieth provide a more nuanced reading of the meaning of technology transfer. The panelists seek to explore the social character of scientific knowledge as it was being debated in the Hindi and Bengali public spheres. How were concepts of health and disease broached in vernacular literatures? How did Western sexology interact with Indian systems of thought and how were anxieties about child marriage and masturbation debated in the wake of social reforms and nationalist awakening? Using Hindi and Bengali sources ranging from popular literature (pamphlets, novels, women's and medical journals) to sophisticated writings, our papers demonstrate key imbrications of women in the project of scientific modernity. We will show how writers reconciled scientific knowledge with the socio-cultural background of their male and female reading audience, how traditional concepts such as srngara were reinterpreted for mixed gender audiences, and how topical questions in the fields of health, hygiene and women’s bodies were debated in the literary sphere.

Valerie L. Ritter, University of Chicago

Calls for women's uplift, and the concomitant criticism of sexuality in literary, religious, and folk mediums created a serious problem for Hindi poets: Should srngara be dispensed with entirely? If not, then how can the genres and motifs of srngara be reinvented for a "modern public" including "proper women"? How can this aesthetic mode and its long history be interpreted as something other than cultural decadence? In this paper, I will address how some Hindi poets and critics responded to these questions in the early twentieth century, politicizing srngara itself, and invoking various genres of English popular science and poetics. I argue that a particular vision of "nature" informed new renditions of poetic love, representing a complex aesthetic effect of epistemological shifts occurring in colonial India, circa 1890-1930.

Shobna Nijhawan, York University, Canada

The institutionalization of Western medicine in colonial India had significant implications for the cultural politics in colonial north India. Scientific novelties that led to the introduction of vaccinations, the establishment of hospitals and dispensaries, discourses on hygiene and bacteriology, and new attitudes to pregnancy were much-debated topics in Hindi fiction and periodicals. In this paper, I investigate how literature of the early twentieth century assessed the effectiveness of allopathy and (re)-discovered indigenous approaches to the cure and prevention of disease. I will be specifically concerned with essays (and advertisements) on the topic of medicine in the Hindi women’s journal Stri Darpan (1909-1928) and with the novel Gaban (1931) written by Premcand. The nationalist scope of both writings, I argue, was conducive to the revival of indigenous medical concepts. But this is only one side of the literary attitudes towards medicine. My analysis will also trace the gender politics as they manifested around medical discourses and will expose how a ‘healthy’ blend of Eastern and Western medicine turned into the larger project of modernity.

Ishita Pande, Princeton University

In the late nineteenth century, in the wake of the Age of Consent Act(1891), Bengali doctors and the English educated bhadralok explored questions about

conjugality and sexuality in a variety of popular medical journals published by the vernacular press. In this paper, I explore the curious twinning of anxieties about child marriage and masturbation in these discussions. What allowed the entwining of child marriage- an archaic practice that broke female bodies, with male masturbation, loathed in the nineteenth century as a modern pathology?

I unpack this curious twinning in the context of the colonial medical corpus and its translation as an expression of Bengali racial and sexual anxieties. I read a series of articles on this theme, the tone of which is captured in one of Chikitsa Sammilani’s series, provocatively titled "Man’s Enemy: Woman". I discuss the trend in the context of the emergence of the menstrual cycle as a "measure of man" in Victorian ethnology, the idea of the woman as a bearer of the code of culture in the Liberal vision of a "scale of civilization", the idea of the woman as object and agent of degeneration in Victorian medical discourse, and the nationalist resolution of the woman question.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the native of Bengal had come a long way from being observed, classified and instructed, and was translating medical science to fit his own social and political agenda. "Woman" had a strange place in the vernacular discourse on degeneration.