ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Disease in a Temple Town

• In Event: Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 4 - Imperial Medicine Contested

English Abstract

Baidyanath (also, Deoghar) is a place of pilgrimage in India whose origins lie deep in antiquity. But its emergence as a temple town during colonial rule was connected to the growth of East Indian Railway’s chord line, a rising pilgrim traffic, and the colonial state’s efforts at creating hygienic modernity as congregates continued to descend on the township. Conquered early as part of forays into Bengal Presidency, the colonial state wished to bring the town under its epidemic governance. This paper highlights two episodes – a smallpox breakout in 1866 and a late nineteenth and early twentieth century outbreak of plague -, to highlight the civic engagement of specific classes of colonized subjects with the colonial state. Looking at disease governance through the eyes of the subjects, it captures scattered responses to resurrect an alternative imaginary of ways Indians expressed themselves as political and social beings. As the colonial state implemented a deferral of biomedical citizenship (Anderson, 2006) and suspended basic rights at times of epidemic (Arnold, 1993), those in Baidyanath advocated a different social ethic and ethic of livelihood. This political assertion resisted the colonial state’s attempts to mark colonial bodies as simply pathological.

Author

• Prakash Kumar, Pennsylvania State University