ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Seeing Bodies, Scaling Pain: Adjudicating War Injury Disability at the End of Empire in British India

• In Event: Science at the End of Empire: Britain’s Studies of the Body

English Abstract

In May, 1945, Mohammed Ishaque wrote to the Mercantile Marine Department to plead for his wellbeing. Ishaque had been seriously injured when the ship he was employed on, S. S. Padron, was bombed and sunk in 1944. Upon his return to the British Raj, a Medical Board ruled him fit, disqualifying him from a higher pension. Ishaque protested, petitioning with an unusual weapon: X-rays taken over the course of lengthy hospital stays in Britain and Calcutta, demonstrating the severity of his fracture and its decalcifying results. Radiology, newly accessible in hospitals in India, became one of many new tools for adjudicating disability long after injury in the far reaches of the British Empire. Yet while it served Ishaque’s purposes and resulted in a boosted pension, it was also used to glimpse under the skins of disabled subjects, disqualifying their seemingly more ephemeral pain from state compensation. This paper parses an archive of South Asian disability claims from the Second World War, tracing how ability, debility, and the pensions to compensate it were measured and adjudicated from the last years of the British Raj through the bureaucratic reorganization under independent India and Pakistan. It tracks how disability pensions became subject to new modes of scientific interrogation and categorization, and interrogates how disabled petitioners made claims about their bodies to changing regimes, as the British Raj’s pensioning apparatus gave way to new bureaucratic bodies after Partition. In doing so, the paper centers disabled subjects as active participants in making disabled knowledge.

Author

• Hilary Buxton, Kenyon College