ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

From Insidious Disease to Diagnosed Malignancy: Embodied Suffering and the Emergence of Gynaecological Cancer in British India

• In Event: Fertility and the Sexed Body: Forms of Control

English Abstract

This paper traces the emergence of gynaecological malignancies as a contested site of medical knowledge in early 20th-century India, where colonial biomedicine, domestic norms, and women’s experiences collided. Although important in metropolitan medical science, its recognition in India unfolded within a fragmented biomedical modernity shaped by racialized epidemiologies and social restrictions on women's clinical access. Drawing on clinical case notes and disease monographs, the paper shows that malignancies became legible only through negotiations between physicians and patients, where women's suffering was often silenced within colonial and nationalist ideals of reproductive essentialism.

The paper argues that Western-trained doctors blamed women’s delayed treatment on ignorance or cultural resistance, yet medical writings reveal physicians themselves frequently misdiagnosed early cancers, convinced that malignancy was too rare among the “Indian race.” This mutual misrecognition exposed deep uncertainties in colonial medical practice, demonstrating that malignant illness was interpreted through fluid, racialized, and culturally mediated frameworks, rather than universal biomedical norms. Women were not solely responsible for advanced-stage appearances in medical literature; the epistemic anxiety of authority also shaped the clinical outcomes.

This narrative highlights how gynaecological cancer did not emerge as a fixed biological entity in India but as a co-produced, unstable category forged through translation and the moral politics of examining women’s bodies. It demonstrates how women’s marginalized voices, and their negotiations with illness and pain, disrupted linear narratives of scientific progress, showcasing colonial medical modernity as a plural, contested, non-hegemonic, and deeply gendered process of making disease visible, rather than an authoritative knowledge system.

Author

• Rohini Dasgupta, University of Wisconsin-Madison