Organizer: Brian P. Caton, Luther College

Chair: David Gilmartin, North Carolina State University

Discussant: K. Sivaramakrishnan, University of Washington

Since at least the early 1990s, scholars have been writing the history of science in colonial settings, particularly in India, to expose the ways in which the production and reproduction of discourses about the natural world established and reinforced networks of social and political power. In 1994 David Gilmartin cleverly tied together metropolitan scientists’ use of colonial territory and people as laboratories (imperial science) to civil administrators’ increasing willingness to experiment and their use of statistics as predictive tools (science of empire). Our panel revisits the themes and argument raised in Gilmartin’s work, drawing attention to resistance to imperial science and also to the ways in which the colonized participated in scientific projects, in order to improve their own life chances or those of their social group. While Gilmartin originally considered data from the history of hydrological engineering, panelists will investigate the colonial histories of laboratory science, local medical dispensaries, and veterinary technologies in order to expand and evaluate Gilmartin’s argument. Our discussions will aim toward the articulation of a theory of the power and knowledge relationships between science and empire that may be applied to other regions of Asia.

Lauren Nauta, North Carolina State University

This paper considers how a regional environmental approach to the history of colonial medicine complicates the place of the universal and the local in understandings of ‘imperial science’ and the ‘science of empire.’ Specifically, the paper explores how regional actors from a wide range of social groups participated in the making of colonial hospitals and dispensaries in the Punjab plains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through their struggles for survival in a particular semi-arid disease environment and set of agrarian relations of production and exchange, peasants, laborers, pastoralists, and traders shaped hospitals and dispensaries’ locations, areas of specialization, types of healers employed, and healing technologies and practices.  For instance, between harvests and along routes of seasonal migration, pastoralists and peasants often brought their animals as well as human relations to obtain cures for particular ailments, while hungry laborers incorporated vaccination and quininization practices into existing forms of seasonally-specific prophylaxis that involved consuming foods to alleviate disabling symptoms and side effects.  By way of charitable donations, user-fees, and taxes (which primarily funded these institutions), Punjabis also affected the expansion of facilities deemed especially efficacious, including surgical wards, family rooms, healers’ quarters, human and animal serais, food, and medicine.  Representing neither universal medical science nor irreducible local particularism, hospitals and dispensaries in Punjab developed clear regional specializations along seasonal, class, gender, and species lines to become – along with an array of other collective healing institutions – an integral part of the built healing environment of the region.

Brian P. Caton, Luther College

This paper argues that the development of an official civil veterinary apparatus, including veterinary medicine and animal breeding programs, provided an important means for both affecting the daily lives of ordinary Indians and integrating India into the growing global production of Eurocentric veterinary knowledge. The increasing professionalization of animal breeders and veterinary doctors in England in the late eighteenth century coincided with a period of rapid military conquest in India. In the early nineteenth century the first breeding programs, such as the ‘government cattle farm’ in Hissar, in Punjab province, initially produced cavalry remounts and draught oxen for artillery units, but by the 1850s the farm shipped stud bulls and rams across the province in order to ‘improve’ local varieties of cattle, sheep, and goats. Punjabi response varied widely by class, occupation, and geographical location: some offered to pay for cattle farm studs, others killed studs given away by government officers. The Indian cattle plague pandemic of 1869 accelerated official and popular interest in veterinary medicine and research, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, government had detached veterinary practice entirely from its military ancestry and had separated veterinary institutions from breeding programs such as the Hissar cattle farm. Veterinary hospitals encouraged sedentarization, and Punjabis published in provincial, all-India, and metropolitan professional journals. Both colonizers and colonized built these institutions, which sought to modernize both animal husbandry and rural governance.

Pratik Chakrabarti, University of Oxford, UK

Following the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, Ross, and Manson medical research and experimentation had become increasingly international and to some extent a collaborative endeavour. The expansion of the Pasteur Institute of Paris into French colonial territories has been described as ‘scientific imperialism’ and as a ‘Civilizing Mission’. Several Pasteur laboratories were set up in India at the same time. The paper explores the nature metropolitan and colonial connections in the unfolding of this particular laboratory research in early 20^th century India. First, it considers how far the origin of the laboratories in India can be analysed within a French scientific and imperial connection. The institutes in India were set up by British scientists with European and Indian funding, having no direct institutional allegiance to the Paris institute. The adoption of French research methodology was also a complex issue. Secondly, the paper attempts to understand the metropolitan linkages in Pasteurian research in India. At the turn of the century, India became a field for trials of international anti-plague serum. Yet the main concern behind the setting up of the Pasteur laboratories in India was to serve the needs of the colony; to provide better health care of its military and civilian population. By the 1920s most of the Institutes’ patients were Indians coming from different parts of the country. Phrases like the ‘Pasteurian population’ were commonly used and concerns like clothing, habits, cultural beliefs, and local treatments, were increasingly discussed in the laboratories. The paper emphasizes the need to understand the spread of Pasteurian methods in India in this convergence of international and local research and political imperatives.