Projit Bihari Mukharji
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 132919 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Projit Bihari Mukharji |
| PRENOMES | Projit Bihari |
| SOBRENOME | Mukharji |
| ASSINATURA | MUKHARJI P B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0009-0001-6653-8634 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 61 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 89 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2003 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Bionomic historicism
The “global turn” in history of science has produced an awareness of multiple traditions of writing histories of science. Much of this new interest, however, is still located in the shadow of a handful of European intellectuals and their global networks. Joseph Needham is the first among these. As a result, non-Western scholars who were outside Needham’s networks, and even opposed to them, have largely been ignored. In some cases, such as in the …
From Selfless Mothers to Beloved Sisters
Bratakathas or narratives that form part of a set of mostly feminine rituals in Bengal have been the subject of scholarly interest for over a century. By the end of the 19th century, they had come to be seen as portals to a deep history of women by Abanindranath Tagore and others. In more recent decades, feminist scholars like Jasodhara Bagchi have tended to see them as technologies for patriarchic indoctrination. Both strands of scholarship conf…
Thank You to Our Reviewers
Vernacularizing, Braiding, and Plurigenericism
This contribution argues that a single conceptual framework cannot possibly accommodate the range of histories that will emerge from a genuine decentering of the history of science. It uses the example of the “decolonial” approach to show the pitfalls of trying to write global histories using a single framework. The paper then argues that “non-settler postcolonies” such as China, India, Turkey etc. demand their own, specific critical apparatus th…
Reordering Adivasi Worlds
Reordering Adivasi Worlds is a world unto itself. Instead to whittling down complex histories to pithy generalizations, it pulls the reader into a crowded and many-sided world. The author, Sangeeta Dasgupta, trenchantly refuses the clarity of neat transitions and fixed viewpoints in favor of a plurality of voices, viewpoints, and vocations.While the choice of the word “Adivasi” or “original inhabitant” in preference to the colonial-national desig…
No Time for Empathy
Between 1956 and 1964, in Calcutta, India, at least seven young children with congenital hemoglobinopathies, perhaps more, were injected with various strains of malaria to test their possible immunity. Some of the children were tested on repeatedly. The experiments exposed the already sick children to additional risks and suffering. Strikingly, these experiments started less than a decade after decolonization and were conducted by Indian doctors,…
The Hospitality of Ghosts
Memory studies have long demonstrated the need to critically assess the way societies remember significant, and particularly traumatic, events. The overwhelming focus of these studies has been on conquests, political riots, wars and holocausts. Very little account has been taken of the way epidemics are remembered. Yet, epidemics produce similar social disruptions and anxieties about the future as the varied episodes of political violence. Societ…
Casting Blood Circulations
In this article I examine three Bengali translations of texts about blood circulation from the last decade and a half of the nineteenth century. Through a close examination of these three translations, I demonstrate the importance of what Antonio Gramsci called “translatability” and what I have elsewhere called “braided sciences.” Taken together, these two heuristic devices demonstrate a relationship between social hierarchies and translation, on…
Genomic Citizenship
Darwin's bulbuls
The article explores the extent and nature of the relationship between Darwinian science and the British Empire. It does so by unpicking Darwin's British Indian examples of avian combat in constructing his ‘law of battle’. The article shows how Darwin's interpretation of these reports was simultaneously enabled, shaped and limited by the imperial context within which the reports were generated. Particularly important was Darwin's inability to see…
Jinns and the Proletarian Mumin Subject
This article describes an epidemic of jinn attacks on schoolchildren in contemporary Bangladesh. It explores the ways in which the psychiatric and state health establishment of the country has repeatedly labelled these outbreaks ‘mass psychogenic illness’ and dismissed the widespread local use of kobirajes in these cases. By exploring strategies through which the biomedical establishment has, notwithstanding its own failure to understand or treat…
Subaltern Surgeries
This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in British Bengal. The presiding judges explicitly accepted the right of more scholarly “traditional” medical practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners, to engage in their profession, even while criminalizing Sukaroo’s surgical practice. The decision therefore illustrates the need to distinguish subaltern therapeutics from the larger domain of trad…
Search for ‘Context’
Abul Hasanat (1905–?) was one of the most widely read Bengali sexologists. Having started researching in British India, he subsequently became a citizen of Pakistan and later of Bangladesh. He continued to research and publish throughout these changing political contexts. In this paper, I explore the difficulties in adequately ‘contextualising’ Hasanat’s sexology and propose instead the notion of a ‘material sexscape’ as the appropriate frame wit…
A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data
Identifying this natal link between statistical identities and distanced control does not of course mean that we should reject statistically “enumerated identities” tout court in favor of some more “fuzzy identities.”62 To do so would be to lapse into an ahistorical fantasy of return. This is where our third key theme, difference, comes into play—difference not merely in the sense of something that is disciplined and contained but, rather, as an …
"Historicizing "Indian Systems of Knowledge
Some recent authors have argued that “Indian Systems of Knowledge,” such as Ayurvedic medicine, cannot be historicized. They argue that Ayurvedic medicine must be understood as a “system” and with reference to its “metaphysical foundations.” Food has often played an important part in these antihistoricist arguments about traditional South Asian medicines. In this article, I first describe and historicize these antihistoricisms by delineating both…
Hylozoic Anticolonialism
Imperial ideology identified “science” and “progress” as the prerogative of the “West,” while “religion” and “spirituality” were located in the “East.” Yet, in practice, these neat dichotomies were far more difficult to sustain. Science and religion were braided together by spiritually inquisitive scientists as much in the West as in the East. Various strands of hylozoic thought that undermined the dichotomy of matter and spirit were located in t…
Akarnan
The histories of modern medical technologies have largely been studied exclusively within the biomedical context. Yet historians of medicine have increasingly demonstrated that a number of non-biomedical therapeutic traditions-Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine to name only two-have attained their own distinctive modernity. How has the incorporation of various medical technologies affected these neo-traditional medicines? What is the relationship bet…
Gender, Medicine, and Society in Colonial India
Occulted materialities
The accompanying image is that of the Hindu god, Vishwakarma. Images like this are common in eastern South Asia. A different image of the same deity is popular in northern and western South Asia, while yet another image dominates in the south. Factories, offices and workshops frequently display these images and offer ritual prayers to them. On a given day in the year, artisans and workmen worship their tools directly and offer a feast to Vishwaka…
Decolonizing Science in Asia
24 Field Trip Prakash Kumar, Projit Bihari Mukharji, and Amit Prasad Decolonizing Science in Asia The Summer Institute on “Decolonizing Science in Asia” (June 13– 17, 2016) at the Pennsylvania State University engaged substantive concerns about the place of Asia- focused works within science and technology studies (STS), which has its primary moorings in the so- called West. Contesting the claims of science as universal knowledge, the particip…
Dis-locating Subaltern Therapeutics
The article is about totka chikitsha , a particular type of subaltern therapeutics widely recognized in northern and eastern South Asia. These simple recipes often circulated through transient encounters, physical or mediatized, between strangers. During the colonial era, government employment and the traveling that it required made many Bengalis in clerical jobs particularly authoritative in totka therapeutics. Though this mode of therapy was se…
Vernacularizing the Body
Government-aided vernacular schools introduced "human physiology" as a subject in 1859. I use the first couple of schoolbooks and the debate running up to the introduction of the subject to open up the particular and specific histories through which modern anatomo-physiological knowledge was vernacularized in colonial Bengal. In so doing I have two interconnected goals in this article. My first goal is to analyze the precocious decision to teach …
Embracing academic elitism
This note began as a conversation at the South Asian History and Culture Roundtable of 2016. The conversation had started out as an attempt to explore ways of being ‘differently academic’, but soon became one about ‘academic elitism’ and the role the double-bind peer review. Was the peer review merely a way of social exclusion engineered to keep out those who do not conform to a narrow set of ideological positions? Or was it a genuinely valuable …
Cat and Mouse
In 1907, Lt.-Col. Andrew Buchanan, IMS, began to argue for the keeping of cats as the most effective form of public health to combat the annual outbreaks of plague. From then until about 1913 he vigorously promoted the scheme. He soon won some powerful international supporters such as Robert Koch and Shibasaburo Kitasato. Through their support, between 1908 and 1918, a number of countries both within and outside the British Empire adopted cats as…
Subjects of modernity
Critique and criticism are often hard to distinguish in scholarly accounts of modernity, especially when such accounts are written avowedly within a postcolonial tradition. Saurabh Dube's Subjects
From serosocial to sanguinary identities
A serendipitous encounter during the Great War left a brilliant Polish–Jewish scientist and his wife stranded at a Greek outpost with a small contingent of British and French Imperial troops. This chance encounter led to the birth not only of a new branch of science, that is, sero-anthropology, but also a novel theory about the origin of the blood group ‘B’ in India. In the following decades, this theory evolved and metamorphosed within British I…
The Bengali Pharaoh
Extant South Asian histories of race, and more specifically biometrics, focus almost exclusively upon the colonial era and especially the nineteenth century. Yet an increasing number of ethnographic accounts observe that Indian scientists have enthusiastically embraced the resurgent raciology engendered by genomic research into human variation. What is sorely lacking is a historical account of how raciology fared in the late colonial and early po…
Vishalyakarani asEupatorium ayapana
This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying historically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following late-colonial efforts to identify a medicinal herb mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana, this paper argues for a historicist analysis of the process of "retro-botanizing." In so doing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of "tradition," the "factualized" a…
Cat and Mouse
In 1907, Lt.-Col. Andrew Buchanan, IMS, began to argue for the keeping of cats as the most effective form of public health to combat the annual outbreaks of plague. From then until about 1913 he vigorously promoted the scheme. He soon won some powerful international supporters such as Robert Koch and Shibasaburo Kitasato. Through their support, between 1908 and 1918, a number of countries both within and outside the British Empire adopted cats as…
Profiling the profiloscope
The history of race and technology in British India has avoided engaging with the way in which this played out amongst nationalists. The history of biometrics too has similarly overlooked the role of anti-colonial nationalists. The history of the now-forgotten profiloscope allows us to address both oversights. But the history of the profiloscope is more than just a history of a technological apparatus. It is also the trace of a forgotten politica…
In-Disciplining Jwarasur
Extant scholarship on Jwarasur [the Fever-Demon] sees him as a colonial-era invention tied to the exigencies of colonial rule. Jwarasur is held to belong exclusively to the domain of Bengali ‘folk medicine’ rather than ‘classical Ayurveda’. We challenge both these contentions and draw four inter-related inferences. First, we posit that Jwarasur was not alien to classical Ayurvedic medicine. Second, we claim that Jwarasur was significant to the wa…
"Historicizing "Indian Systems of Knowledge
Some recent authors have argued that “Indian Systems of Knowledge,” such as Ayurvedic medicine, cannot be historicized. They argue that Ayurvedic medicine must be understood as a “system” and with reference to its “metaphysical foundations.” Food has often played an important part in these antihistoricist arguments about traditional South Asian medicines. In this article, I first describe and historicize these antihistoricisms by delineating both…
Going Beyond Elite Medical Traditions
The historian's overwhelming reliance on textual sources has kept the tradition of 'Chandshi' outside the view of the rich corpus of South Asian medical historiography that has developed of late. By supplementing the scant textual evidence by personal interviews and sittings in the clinics of these physicians, I seek to re-construct the history of this little-known, nontextual medical tradition practised by members of a socially dis-privileged ca…
A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data
Identifying this natal link between statistical identities and distanced control does not of course mean that we should reject statistically “enumerated identities” tout court in favor of some more “fuzzy identities.”62 To do so would be to lapse into an ahistorical fantasy of return. This is where our third key theme, difference, comes into play—difference not merely in the sense of something that is disciplined and contained but, rather, as an …
Parachemistries
The globalization of modern chemistry through European colonialism resulted, by the end of the nineteenth century, in the emergence of a number of parachemical knowledges. Parachemistries were bodies of non-European knowledge which came to be related to modern chemistry within particular historical milieux. Their relationship with modern chemistry was not necessarily epistemic and structural, but historical and performative. Actual historically l…
Decolonizing Science in Asia
24 Field Trip Prakash Kumar, Projit Bihari Mukharji, and Amit Prasad Decolonizing Science in Asia The Summer Institute on “Decolonizing Science in Asia” (June 13– 17, 2016) at the Pennsylvania State University engaged substantive concerns about the place of Asia- focused works within science and technology studies (STS), which has its primary moorings in the so- called West. Contesting the claims of science as universal knowledge, the particip…
The Flame and the Breeze
This is a preliminary report on the longevity practices discussed in a Bengali Islamic Yogic text by Haji Muhammad called Nurjamal ba Suratnama written in the last decade of the sixteenth century. This and other similar texts were authored by Bengali literati in the kingdom of Roshang that encompassed at the time both the Arakan and eastern Bengal. I first present the unique cultural and political context in which these texts were produced. Next …
Swapnaushadhi
Lokman, Chholeman and Manik Pir
As a Muslim-majority region, Bengal is conspicuous by its absence from histories of the institutionalisation of Islamic medicine in South Asia. Bengal’s invisibility in these histories is partly a result of exclusive scholarly pre-occupations with Unani Tibb and, to a much lesser extent, Tibb ul Nabi. ‘Islamic medicine ’ in Bengal was institutionalised under other names and drew upon other traditions. This article explores the institutionalisatio…
Feeble Bengalis’ and ‘big Africans’
Studies of contemporary globalization have tended to concentrate on the cultural and material influence of the ‘West’ on the rest of the world. By focussing on global networks which are not putatively mediated by the ‘West’ we arrive at a more nuanced and complex understanding of the phenomenon of globalization. Instead of seeing it as a tendency towards the growing homogenization of local cultural identities, we argue that globalization creates …
Subaltern Surgeries
This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in British Bengal. The presiding judges explicitly accepted the right of more scholarly “traditional” medical practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners, to engage in their profession, even while criminalizing Sukaroo’s surgical practice. The decision therefore illustrates the need to distinguish subaltern therapeutics from the larger domain of trad…
Hylozoic Anticolonialism
Imperial ideology identified “science” and “progress” as the prerogative of the “West,” while “religion” and “spirituality” were located in the “East.” Yet, in practice, these neat dichotomies were far more difficult to sustain. Science and religion were braided together by spiritually inquisitive scientists as much in the West as in the East. Various strands of hylozoic thought that undermined the dichotomy of matter and spirit were located in t…
Feringhee Dharma
Dharma Thakur has been widely studied as a Bengali folk deity. As an exemplary ‘folk’ deity, scholarship on him has been resolutely focused within a discrete local space. Scholars have sought to dig deep into a local past to understand the deity and his cult. As a result, the more recent historical contexts and particularly the impact of European Christianity upon such deities have been entirely ignored. Using one of the earliest texts of the cul…
Munisipal Darpan
This article interrogates the way in which the ‘state’ was imagined in Calcutta of the 1890s. Using a rare pamphlet of municipal sanitary propaganda written in the form of a drama, the article reveals a radically different vision of the state than the one available in the extant historiography. In this vernacular imagination of the state, the abstract institutional realities are recast as specific embodied hierarchies and exclusions. Since the te…
Symptoms of Dis‐Ease
Contemporary historical scholarship on South Asia’s ‘indigenous’ medical traditions date from the mid‐1970s. It was not until the late 1990s, however, that this became a thriving area of historical research. As work in the area has grown exponentially over the past decade and a half, many of the older frameworks of analysis have been critiqued and modified. Most recent scholarship in the field clearly expresses symptoms of the dis‐ease with many …
Babon Gaji's many pasts
Babon Gaji is a curious god. He is avowedly a Muslim, and the icons that represent him seek to capture his ‘Muslim-ness’ conspicuously in their attire, not to mention the name itself (Gaji = Ghazi = Muslim warrior-monk) and local lore. Yet he is worshipped by Brahmin Hindu priests who are equally conspicuous in flaunting their Hindu-Brahmin identity. There are no stories about the Gaji ever having been a Hindu or having had anything more than an …
Islam and Healing
Journal Article Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 Get access Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. xiii + 384. £55.00. ISBN 978 0 230 55438 2. Projit Bihari Mukharji Projit Bihari Mukharji Oxford Brookes University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Communist" dispossession meets "reactionary" resistance
The reflections in this article were instigated by the repeated and brutal clashes since 2007 between peasants and the state government's militias-both official and unofficial-over the issue of industrialization. A communist government engaging peasants violently in order to acquire and transfer their lands to big business houses to set up capitalist enterprises seemed dramatically ironic. De- spite the presence of many immediate causes for the c…
Prologue
Jessie's Dream at Lucknow
Nineteenth-century British histories of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ have usually been seen as a moment of unequivocal imperial confidence. Little account has been taken of the large number of complex, non-historical texts that memorialized the ‘Mutiny’. Victorian Britain witnessed a wide and varied interest in the representation of events of the past. The representations spanned many genres and continually multiplied in form and medium under the impetus …
Gender and Nation
The early cricketing tours
The Early Cricketing Tours
Imperialism, Nationalism and the Making of the Indian Capitalist Class 1920-1947
Sedentary Games and the Nationalist Project
To adapt a comment on Gary Sobers: Professor J.A. Mangan must be half a dozen scholars all rolled into one. To achieve what he has achieved, he must have had both the nerve of a gambler, the acumen of a financier, the skill of a psychologist, the critical precision of a surgeon, the patience of a saint and ten years' more knowledge than an ordinary scholar can ever possess. This is our tribute to the ‘pioneer’ – the man who shaped modern sports s…
A Man for the Future
Going Beyond Elite Medical Traditions
The historian's overwhelming reliance on textual sources has kept the tradition of 'Chandshi' outside the view of the rich corpus of South Asian medical historiography that has developed of late. By supplementing the scant textual evidence by personal interviews and sittings in the clinics of these physicians, I seek to re-construct the history of this little-known, nontextual medical tradition practised by members of a socially dis-privileged ca…
Feeble Bengalis’ and ‘big Africans’
Studies of contemporary globalization have tended to concentrate on the cultural and material influence of the ‘West’ on the rest of the world. By focussing on global networks which are not putatively mediated by the ‘West’ we arrive at a more nuanced and complex understanding of the phenomenon of globalization. Instead of seeing it as a tendency towards the growing homogenization of local cultural identities, we argue that globalization creates …
Prologue
The Culture and Politics of Local Sporting Heroes in Late Colonial Bengal and Princely Orissa
Instead of studying the histories of national or elite club teams, this article seeks to explore the social and cultural forces that shaped local sporting heroes in mid-twentieth century India. Using a prosopographic approach the article uses a case study of a single talented student-sportsman, Santimoy Pati, growing up in colonial Bengal and Princely Orissa in the closing years of the Raj to explore the reasons why young people took to sport, th…
Jessie's Dream at Lucknow
Nineteenth-century British histories of the Indian ‘Mutiny’ have usually been seen as a moment of unequivocal imperial confidence. Little account has been taken of the large number of complex, non-historical texts that memorialized the ‘Mutiny’. Victorian Britain witnessed a wide and varied interest in the representation of events of the past. The representations spanned many genres and continually multiplied in form and medium under the impetus …
Nationalizing the Body
Nationalizing the Body examines the different meanings of modern medicine that were employed in colonial South Asia, and explores the different discourses that were constructed around modernity
Islam and Healing
Journal Article Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900 Get access Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. xiii + 384. £55.00. ISBN 978 0 230 55438 2. Projit Bihari Mukharji Projit Bihari Mukharji Oxford Brookes University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World
Until recently, historians of South Asian ‘indigenous’ medicines were almost exclusively concerned with erudite, textual editions of these medical traditions. This had meant that the study of popular practical forms of these traditions was almost exclusively left to medical anthropologists. As a consequence, an increasing number of medical anthropologists in recent years have turned to the study of ‘globalization’, many have feared that the study…
Communist" dispossession meets "reactionary" resistance
The reflections in this article were instigated by the repeated and brutal clashes since 2007 between peasants and the state government's militias-both official and unofficial-over the issue of industrialization. A communist government engaging peasants violently in order to acquire and transfer their lands to big business houses to set up capitalist enterprises seemed dramatically ironic. De- spite the presence of many immediate causes for the c…
Babon Gaji's many pasts
Babon Gaji is a curious god. He is avowedly a Muslim, and the icons that represent him seek to capture his ‘Muslim-ness’ conspicuously in their attire, not to mention the name itself (Gaji = Ghazi = Muslim warrior-monk) and local lore. Yet he is worshipped by Brahmin Hindu priests who are equally conspicuous in flaunting their Hindu-Brahmin identity. There are no stories about the Gaji ever having been a Hindu or having had anything more than an …
Crossing colonial historiographies
This book offers an innovative engagement with the diverse histories of colonial and indigenous medicines. Engagement with different kinds of colonialism and varied indigenous socio-political cultures has led to a wide range of approaches and increasingly distinct traditions of historical writing about colonial and indigenous modes of healing have emerged in the various regions formerly ruled by different colonial powers. The volume offers a much…
Lokman, Chholeman and Manik Pir
As a Muslim-majority region, Bengal is conspicuous by its absence from histories of the institutionalisation of Islamic medicine in South Asia. Bengal’s invisibility in these histories is partly a result of exclusive scholarly pre-occupations with Unani Tibb and, to a much lesser extent, Tibb ul Nabi. ‘Islamic medicine ’ in Bengal was institutionalised under other names and drew upon other traditions. This article explores the institutionalisatio…
Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire
Journal Article Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 Get access Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp. 353. ISBN 978 0 19 957773 6. Projit Bihari Mukharji Projit Bihari Mukharji University of Pennsylvania [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford A…
Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal
Journal Article Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire Get access Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire, Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. Pp. xx + 257. £85. ISBN: 978 0 415 77815 2. Projit Bihari Mukharji Projit Bihari Mukharji McMaster University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History o…
Symptoms of Dis‐Ease
Contemporary historical scholarship on South Asia’s ‘indigenous’ medical traditions date from the mid‐1970s. It was not until the late 1990s, however, that this became a thriving area of historical research. As work in the area has grown exponentially over the past decade and a half, many of the older frameworks of analysis have been critiqued and modified. Most recent scholarship in the field clearly expresses symptoms of the dis‐ease with many …
Cultures of Fear
This paper is a slightly spruced-up version of a talk delivered at a roundtable cosponsored by the Society for the History of Technology and the History of Science Society at their annual conference in Cleveland. Asked to speak about the responsibilities and opportunities for historians of technology and science working on Asia, I tried to situate the question within contemporary South Asian realities. In the broadest terms, I lay out the widespr…
The “Cholera Cloud” in the Nineteenth-Century “British World”
Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on “thing theory.” By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizabil…
Munisipal Darpan
This article interrogates the way in which the ‘state’ was imagined in Calcutta of the 1890s. Using a rare pamphlet of municipal sanitary propaganda written in the form of a drama, the article reveals a radically different vision of the state than the one available in the extant historiography. In this vernacular imagination of the state, the abstract institutional realities are recast as specific embodied hierarchies and exclusions. Since the te…
In-Disciplining Jwarasur
Extant scholarship on Jwarasur [the Fever-Demon] sees him as a colonial-era invention tied to the exigencies of colonial rule. Jwarasur is held to belong exclusively to the domain of Bengali ‘folk medicine’ rather than ‘classical Ayurveda’. We challenge both these contentions and draw four inter-related inferences. First, we posit that Jwarasur was not alien to classical Ayurvedic medicine. Second, we claim that Jwarasur was significant to the wa…
Political science (42 obras) · Sociology (41 obras) · History (34 obras) · Law (34 obras) · History (27 obras) · Politics (27 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Philosophy (23 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (21 obras) · Epistemology (17 obras)