Hygiene

SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE: DOMESTICITY, GENDER, AND
NATIONALISM IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL AND INDIA
BY
SRIRUPA PRASAD
B.A., University of Calcutta, 1993

M.A., University of Delhi, 1995
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 2006
Urbana, Illinois
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We hereby recommend that the thesis by:
SRIRUPA PRASAD
Entitled:
SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE: DOMESTICITY, GENDER AND
NATIONALISM IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL AND INDIA
Be accepted in partial fulfillment o f the requirements fo r the degree of:
Doctor of Philosophy
Signatures:
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Committee on Final Examination*
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* Required for doctoral degree but not for master’s degree
ABSTRACT
My dissertation explores the ordering of modem domestic life through the
paradigm of hygiene and wellbeing. It investigates how hygiene, both as an ideology and
as a set of practices, defined the very core of domesticity. If domesticity was the most
powerful cultural ideology that re-wrote the script of the institution of the family and the
household in much of modem social life (in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries),
hygiene and health became one of its primary ordering mechanisms. My dissertation
investigates different facets of health and hygiene in the realm of the domestic, in order to
put these twin aspects of modem social and cultural life in the context of late colonial
Bengal into broad relief. Even though, the late 19th and the early 20th centuries Bengal
constitutes the historical context and provides the empirical material for my analysis, the
implications of my analysis extends much wider because it would not be wrong to call
th th
the late 19 and the early 20 centuries the “age of domesticity” globally. During this
period the domestic was not only an important source of a variety of cultural ideologies,
it was also the site of disciplining (ordering) the family and through that the disciplining
of the emerging citizens.
My dissertation shows how hygiene became a powerful cultural mechanism and
was at the heart of nationalist imaginings of the domestic (family, community, and
society at large). What is cmcial to understand is not only how the emerging ideologies of
a nation were intricately tied to health, well-being, or an imagined community, but also
how this exercise laid bare the fragments and limitations of nationalism as an ideal,
particularly along fissures of class, caste, region, and gender. The modalities in and
through which hygiene became an object of knowledge and an important force in
iii
ordering domesticity, in the nationalist imagination, were based on discourses of purity,
order, reproduction, regeneration, restraint, and regulation. It is important to note here
that these modalities constituted a very different ordering mechanism as compared to the
medical-scientific discourse of modem and public colonial institutions in India.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................... 1
M e d ic in e , A r c h iv e , and L a n g u a g e ............................................................................................................. 4
M e t h o d o l o g y ............................................................................................................................................................... 9
CHAPTER ONE: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE........................................16

I n t r o d u c t i o n .............................................................................................................................................................. 1 6
D e f in in g the S o c ia l : D o m e s t ic it y , H y g ie n e , a n d the N a t i o n ............................................ 1 6
W hat is t h e S o c i a l ? .............................................................................................................................................. 18
C ultural N a t io n a l is m a n d t h e S o c i a l ...............................................................................................2 2
M e d ic in e , W e l l - B e in g , a n d t h e S o c i a l ................................................................................................ 3 3
W o m e n ’s M ovem ent, D o m e s t ic it y , a n d t h e S o c i a l .................................................................. 4 9
CHAPTER TWO: CULTURAL POLITICS OF TASTE, CONSUMPTION AND

THE BENGALI HINDU DOMESTIC............................................................................. 55
In t r o d u c t i o n ..............................................................................................................................................................5 5
B hadralok a n d it s O t h e r / s ........................................................................................................................... 5 9
C o n s t r u c t in g C r is is and L o c a t in g the S e l f : R e p r e s e n t a t io n in B engali
P e r i o d i c a l s ..................................................................................................................................................................6 4
W it h in a n d B e y o n d C r is is , R e c o n s t r u c t in g the Self: T o w ards a Culture of
T a s t e ..................................................................................................................................................................................71
T h e P o l it ic s of Culture a n d the Q u e s t io n of H i s t o r i c a l S p e c i f i c i t y ...................... 8 4
CHAPTER THREE: HYGIENE AND GENDER IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL

...................................................................................................................................................90
In t r o d u c t i o n ..............................................................................................................................................................9 0
L e a v in g B e h in d the D o m e s t ic ? ...................................................................................................................9 3
C l e a n l in e s s , C a r e a n d the M odern B engali D o m e s t i c ........................................................ 9 9
C o n c l u s i o n ................................................................................................................................................................. 1 1 3
CHAPTER FOUR: HEALTH AND HYGIENE IN THE MARKETPLACE 115

A d v e r t is in g and C o m m o d i t y C u l t u r e ............................................................................................... 1 1 6
A d v e r t is e m e n t s a n d t h e N ew M e d ic a l M a r k e t p l a c e .......................................................... 1 2 6
A d v e r t is in g , R e p r e s e n t a t io n , and C o n s t r u c t io n of the S o c i a l .................................1 3 4
CHAPTER 5: WOMEN’S WRITINGS, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND THE

NATION................................................................................................................................144
In t r o d u c t i o n ........................................................................................................................................................... 1 4 4
A u t o b io g r a p h y a s a G e n r e .......................................................................................................................... 1 4 6
W o m e n ’s W r it in g s in B e n g a l , In d i a , a n d the F e m in is t A g e n d a ................................... 1 5 9
W om en W r it in g H ome and H y g i e n e .....................................................................................................1 6 5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................... 179
REFERENCES.................................................................................................................... 186
CURRICULUM VITAE.....................................................................................................195
INTRODUCTION
My dissertation explores the ordering of modem domestic life through the
paradigm of hygiene and wellbeing. It investigates how hygiene, both as an ideology and
as a set of practices, defined the very core of domesticity. If domesticity was the most
powerful cultural ideology that re-wrote the script of the institution of the family and the
household in much of modem social life (in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries),
hygiene and health became one of its primary ordering mechanisms. My dissertation
investigates different facets of health and hygiene in the realm of the domestic, in order to
put these twin aspects of modem social and cultural life in the context of late colonial
Bengal into broad relief. Even though, the late 19th and the early 20th centuries Bengal
constitutes the historical context and provides the empirical material for my analysis, the
implication of my analysis extends much wider because it would not be wrong to call the
late 19th and the early 20th centuries the “age of domesticity” globally. During this period
the domestic was not only an important source of a variety of cultural ideologies, it was
also the site of disciplining (ordering) the family and through that the disciplining of the
emerging citizens.
My dissertation shows how hygiene became a powerful cultural mechanism and
was at the heart of nationalist imaginings of the domestic (family, community, and
society at large). What is crucial to understand is not only how the emerging ideologies of
a nation were intricately tied to health, well-being, or an imagined community, but also
how this exercise laid bare the fragments and limitations of nationalism as an ideal,
particularly along fissures of class, caste, region, and gender. The modalities in and
through which hygiene became an object of knowledge and an important force in
ordering domesticity, in the nationalist imagination, were based on discourses of purity,
order, reproduction, regeneration, restraint, and regulation. It is important to note here
that these modalities constituted a very different ordering mechanism as compared to the
medical-scientific discourse of modem and public colonial institutions in India.
To clarify at the outset, my dissertation does not aim to point to “alternative”
therapeutic-hygienic practices outside the purview of the colonial state and its
institutional intermediaries. Rather, it seeks to show that hygiene was as much a
corporeal process as an attempt of the middle class to write itself into History, and this
process derived its legitimacy for ordering the family and the household from a number
of conceptual and philosophical apparatuses, which were not necessarily of Indian origin.
In the chronicles of history of medicine, the period from the mid-19th till the early
20th century, despite much progress in bacteriology and in the research for specific
curative drugs, has been termed as a phase of “therapeutic chaos” (Acherknecht 1973:
118-125).1 A thoroughly pluralistic market that consisted of a plethora of curative
products and possibilities, the gradual shift of the British colonial state’s policy in favor
of a anti-contagionist and sanitarianist-environmentalist approach for public health (not to
mention popular protest against its quarantine policies), and a tmly favorable response
only in matters of surgery, had amply demonstrated that the monopoly of Biomedicine in
the late colonial Bengal or India was far from complete. In the same All-India Sanitary
Conference where Hartcourt Butler of the Governor General’s Council had commented
on the coming of age of sanitarianism in 1912, Motilal Ghosh, the editor of the fiery
Amrita Bazar Patrika, also lamented on how there was a complete collapse of health in
1 Ackerknecht, E. H. 1973. Therapeutics: From the Primitives to the 20th Century. New York: Hafner
Press.
Bengal under British rule. Hence it was no coincidence that hygiene as a mechanism to
re-think and re-organize both the corporeal and the ideological body of the nation had
found a truly appropriate moment in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries: A moment
that Joseph Alter has aptly called “somatic nationalism” (Alter 2000).
I have located the production of hygiene as a means as well an end within the
nationalist imagination through a case-study of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries
Bengal. I was not only interested in investigating how an ideology of hygiene and
wellbeing became pervasive by the early twentieth century, but also in exploring some of
the strategies and rhetorical tropes through which medical knowledge was built into the
representational politics of the educated Hindu Bengali middle class, members of whom
were prominent anti-colonialists as well. In this regard writings practices around the
production and practice of knowledge in this physical culture, such as books and
monographs, journals and popular magazines, autobiographies and newspapers were the
most important source of information for my analysis. Most of these archival sources are
in Bengali and I have translated them for the purpose of my analysis in this dissertation.
Nationalist concern with health and wellbeing in the late colonial Bengal, like
elsewhere in India, which was articulated in the terminology of progress, led to a
proliferation of writings on health, hygiene, and medicine. My focus on Bengal was
premised on the fact that at the end of the 19th century, Bengal still constituted
economically, the core of the British Empire in India (Calcutta was the capital of British
colonial India till 1911). The Bengali middle class was socially-culturally visible (even
though its economic position was dwindling), because of its collaborative relations with
2 Alter, J. S. 2000. G andhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics o f Nationalism. Philadelphia: University o f
Pennsylvania Press.
the British administration and also because it led among the first articulate protests
against British imperialism. In Bengal the British encountered one of the most persistent
and strident discontent that heralded the beginnings of an Indian nationalist mass
movement. Bengal was also important from the point of view of the growth of western
medical knowledge and institutions because it was Bengal where the state support to
medicine was first initiated.
MEDICINE, ARCHIVE, AND LANGUAGE
It would not be an understatement to contend that a thriving world of printing
presses and publications became the primary medium for information exchange and
th th
knowledge production in colonial-urban Bengal between the late 19 and the early 20
centuries. Despite obvious limitations of Benedict Anderson’s argument that “print
capitalism” consolidated the idea of antiquity so fundamental to the “subjective idea of
the nation”, there is no doubt that in urban Bengal one notices the emergence of an active
•2
body of reading publics, constituting a truly political-public sphere. Bengal witnessed
the establishment of the first vernacular press in India and the earliest indigenous printing
and publishing industry. Bengal was also the “seedbed of Indian nationalism”. Bengali
subsequently became the medium for a self-conscious and articulate urban literati. 4
As Partha Chatteijee has rightly argued, it was through the “production and
circulation of printed texts that the discourses of modernity [were] disseminated in
3 Veena Naregal elaborates how Anderson’s thesis about print capitalism and the growth o f modem
vernacular cultures needs modification with respect to the colonial situation , where print entered as part o f
a modem capitalistic order but grew under circumstances inimical to the development o f an indigenous
market. Naregal, V. 2001. Language Politics, Elites, and the Public Sphere: Western India under
Colonialism. New Delhi: Permanent Black. Also see Orsini, F. 2002. The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920-1940:
Language and Literature in the Age o f Nationalism. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
4 Ghosh, A. 2003. “An Uncertain Coming o f the Book: Early Print Cultures in Colonial India”, Book
History, Vol. 6: 23-55.
Bengal from the early nineteenth century” (Chatterjee 1995: 25).5 In the second half of
the nineteenth century, the publishing industry was perhaps the largest indigenous
industry in Calcutta, with small and medium scale Bengali entrepreneurs investing in the
booming market of books, newspapers, and periodicals (Roy 1995: 30).6 Between the
period right after the 1857 Mutiny up until around 1867, the number of Bengali titles for
sale rose from around 322 to over 900. There was an increase in the number of books that
were published every year from around the 1850s. The massive growth in the production
and circulation of books in Bengali was formidable enough to prompt the colonial
government to put in place effective machinery for surveillance of Bengali publications.
It is to be noted that “literature” comprising of Bengali poetry, dramas, prose, and
“tales”, constituted the largest percentage of Bengali publications. Titles in medicine
started getting published from around 1818 and their number steadily increased - from
around 12 in 1818 to around 60 by the 1860s (Bose 1998).7 Between 1875 and 1896 the
number of Bengali titles on science related topics was close to 800, out of which around
600 were on medicine and health (ibid. 1998: 16). It was around the second half of the
19th century that such writings reached a peak in terms of numbers as well range of
topics. What is also to be noted, which I have tried to establish in my dissertation, is that
while writings on health were published under the category of “medicine”, categories
such as “home science” or “social issues” also included writings that dwelt on health and
hygiene, particularly as a body of “prescriptive” literature. While towards the early part
5 Chatterjee, P (ed.). 1995. Texts o f Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis:
University o f Minnesota Press.
6 Roy, T. 1995. “Disciplining the Printed Text: Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance o f Bengali literature”,
in Partha Chatterjee (ed.) Texts o f Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis:
University o f Minnesota Press.
7 Bose, P. K. 1998. Samayiki: Collection o f Essays from O ld Journals and Magazines: Volume One,
Science and Society, 1850-1901. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers.
of the 19th century, medical texts were translated versions of English texts, later into the
20th century, such writings were original compositions rather than mere translations or
reprints. Such a transition most probably marked the “curious ambivalence” in the
nationalist response to the pursuit of knowledge: On the one hand a very pragmatic
appropriation of new knowledge presented to them through colonial institutions and on
the other an insistence on the production of a “distinctly Indian form of modem
knowledge” (Chatterjee 1995: 15).8
This “curious ambivalence” also raises the cmcial question of power in the
interactions between the English and educated urban Bengali literati. The shift towards
writing in Bengali on medicine or science indicated a deeper concern with the unequal
status of English and the Indian languages, (in this case, Bengali) and the anxieties it
created. As Alistair Pennycook has shown, English language as the medium of instruction
in the colonial educational institutions was ultimately a mode of colonial governance
(Pennycook 1998).9 For Gyan Prakash “translation meant a realignment of power”,
“significantly, Western-educated intellectuals themselves approached translation as an
issue of renegotiating power” (Prakash 1999: 50).10 Prakash illustrates the case of
Rajendralal Mitra, the well known 19th century Bengali intellectual and Orientalist. He
contested the role of English as the only and tmly adequate vehicle for a universal
science. He therefore asserted that it should be indigenous interest that should define the
process of translating English works on science and medicine into Indian languages.
8 Chatterjee, P. 1995. “The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal”, in P. Chatterjee (ed.) Texts o f Power:
Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press. See also Bayly, C.
A. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence gathering and social communication in India, 1780-1870.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
9 Pennycook, A. 1998. English and the Discourses o f Colonialism. New York: Routledge.
10 Prakash, G. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination o f Modern India Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Prakash writes of Mitra’s insistence, “Indian interests must govern the translation of
Western science, that the process of dissemination and hybridization must be subjected to
the pressure and agency of subaltern languages” (Ibid. 1999: 51).
The spurt in Bengali writings on health, medicine, and hygiene that was seen from
th
the mid 19 century therefore bore this tension. While there were few such writings in
th
the early part of the 19 century, an increase in the second half was in part due to the
increased government funding in developing educational institutions apart from the
missionary ones. The other reason was a fillip in non-governmental enterprise behind the
promotion of science and medicine. From the second half of the 19th century, one also
notices a consolidated effort by well-off and educated Bengalis to staunchly encourage
the cause of pursuing scientific disciplines in Bengali so that the public at large would be
able to take part in the dissemination and practice of modem medicine and science.
A movement that began with translations of English works into Bengali in due
time graduated into a full fledged enterprise of writing books in Bengali. From around
1818 well into the early 20th century, there was a spate of important publications in health
and hygiene in Bengali.11
It is within this context that the medical archive pertaining to the period between
the late 19th and early 20th centuries needs to situated. Wider debates around
representation and dissemination therefore characterized publication of Bengali texts on
health, hygiene, and medicine. According to some historians, it was this realignment and
renegotiation that “mediated a new discourse in the public domain that constituted our
11 For a list see Roy, B. 1995. Uneesh Satake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsha Bigyan Charcha. Calcutta:
Ananda Publishers, p. 41-48.
1 *y
popular notion of science” (Basu 2004). What needs to be stressed is this “public”
engagement in science and medicine in Bengali from the second part of the 19th century
as knowledge/s that had to be disseminated and popularized. A very detailed survey of
Bengali books, monographs, and periodicals on health, hygiene, and medicine is to be
found in Benoybhushan Roy’s Uneesh Shatake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsha Bigyan
Charcha, (The Pursuit o f Medical Science in the Bengali Language in the Nineteenth
Century, 1995). Roy’s bibliography lists around 600 books and journals in Bengali on
western medicine, homeopathy, ayurveda, unani, and other Indian systems of medicine
and therapeutics.
Bengali books and periodicals played an impressive role in the popularization of
medical knowledge. As in the case of books, in the case of periodicals too, the purpose
was to make medical science, knowledge that could be readily accessed by the physician
as well common people. There were around 17 periodicals on medicine and health that
were published between 1850 and 1900 (Bose 1998: 53).13 On the one hand, while there
were periodicals on domestic medicine and hygiene, on the other there were periodicals
which were aimed at meeting the needs of physicians who were trained in Bengali. There
were journals specifically for homeopathic treatment and there were journals, which
defined as its purpose the necessity to bring together knowledge of the diverse medical
systems such as allopathy, ayurveda, and homeopathy.
12 Basu, A. R. 2004. “Emergence o f a marginal science in a colonial city: Reading psychiatry in Bengali
periodicals”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 41 (2): 103-141.
13 Also see Roy, B. 1995. Uneesh Shatake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsha Bigyan. Calcutta: Ananda
Publishers.
METHODOLOGY
My data collection focused at investigating this medical archive in Bengali,
though I also did analyze writings in English. I wanted to map the different forms of
textual material that were published between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries on
hygiene and health in Bengali. My primary objective in researching this archive was to
understand how medical knowledge (in the late 19th century and the early 20th century
ideology of “preventive medicine and personal hygiene”) emerged out of discourses on
domesticity and, in turn, actively influenced discourses on domesticity. I contend that this
symbiotic relationship between “hygiene” and “domesticity” became particularly distinct
during the period, when both anti-colonial cultural nationalism and the early Indian
women’s movement (and creation of a modem discourse on gender relations) had gained
ground.
Advocates of both these movements, though from very different ideological
positions, had appropriated the “household” as the undisputed site of physical, cultural,
moral, and political re-generation. My archival work was therefore aimed at analyzing
this close link between ideas on hygiene and health and their indisputably most effective
realm of persuasion and action - the household. To that end, I collected medical writings
from a diverse set of texts in Bengali (books and monographs, periodicals, newspapers,
autobiographical writings, and advertisements), which particularly highlight this
connection between domesticity and hygiene. These texts in Bengali constituted my
primary archival focus. Other than that, I gathered documents and reports in English as
well, with a view to uncover the perspectives and proceedings within British-colonial
medical institutions and administrative bodies, which by the early 20th century had an
increasing Bengali/Indian membership as well. I also gathered reports in English
pertaining to some of the well known women’s organizations that had become politically
prominent by the early 20th century. Below I give a detailed account of these two sets of
archival material.
My archival research was conducted at two places- Calcutta, India and London,
United Kingdom. In Calcutta I collected data from three places- the National Library, the
Hiteshranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
and the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat. These three libraries and archives together constitute
the biggest repositories o f 19th and early 20th centuries’ collection of Bengali writings on
a diverse range o f subjects. In London, I conducted my archival research at the British
Library, which entailed collection of reports and records in English as well as in Bengali.
My rationale for juxtaposing two kinds of texts - one that related to the public
institutions, medical, political, and administrative, and the other, which represented the
private or the domestic - was to draw linkages between different “ideologies” and
“practice”.
Monographs, books, and periodicals on a range of domestic issues such as food
and nutrition, cleanliness, luxury consumption exemplify this connection between the
realm of ideas and that of practice. Not only that, the domestication of hygiene and
medicine was a particularly gendered process, sometimes directly and sometimes
indirectly mediated by women’s early feminist interests. The world of Bengali women’s
writings, especially with regard to medicine are found not in the disciplinary journals of
medicine and health, nor in the official reports of medical institutions such as schools,
10
colleges, and professional bodies, but as a dispersed array of writings - literary prose,
social tracts, or tracts on domestic duties. Women’s roles in the production and practice
of medical knowledge have therefore to be appreciated in their absences or very limited
roles in the public sphere or the state.
I will furnish a brief description of the material in Bengali that I collected in the
three above-mentioned libraries and archives, all located in Calcutta, India. Among the
categories of books I consulted, were those on health and medicine as well as
autobiographies. The Bengali periodicals that I researched on can be classified into three
categories: (a) writings in medicine that were edited by male physicians, intellectuals
social reformers, and educationists, (b) writings more broadly in science again by male
authors, (c) writings on domesticity, which were by both educated men as well few
prominent and distinguished Bengali women, (d) and writings in exclusively women’s
journals that were edited by well known Bengali women. To name just a few, some of the
prominent journals that I explored, in the above-mentioned categories respectively, were:
(a) Chikitsha Sammilani, Chikitsha Darshan, Chikitsha Darshan, Swasthya, and
Swasthya Samachar, (b) Bigyan Darpan and Rahashya Sandarbhya, (c) Grihasthali,
Grihasthamangal, and (d) Paricharika, Dashi, Bangalakshmi, Bamabodhini Patrika, and
Mahila. All these periodicals were famous for their contribution to the respective issues.
Among books, I did a careful reading of books on “family affairs”, food, nutrition, and
diet, infectious disease, home remedies, fevers, stomach ailments, care of the sick,
reproductive and maternal health, “practical sanitation”, homeopathic and ayurvedic
home remedies, and diseases of women.
11
At the British Library I researched on three sets of materials: (a) colonial-public
health records and annual reports, particularly related to the Bengali presidency, reports
of some of the well known medical schools and colleges in Bengal, and medical -
research-professional institutions such as the School o f Tropical Medicine and Hygiene,
Carmichael Medical School, Calcutta, or the Calcutta Medical College', (b) the other set
of textual material that I looked at were reports of organizations such as the Association
o f Medical Women in India, All India Women’s Conference, Women’s Indian
Association, Sarda Union, the Countess o f Lady Dufferin’s Fund, International Council
o f Women and the National Council o f Women in India', and (c) advertisements from
English newspapers owned by both English as well as Bengali entrepreneurs or
intellectuals. These advertisements, which were primarily of hygienic and therapeutic
products, for example soaps, health drinks, to patent medicines, marked the growth of an
active medical-hygienic marketplace by the early 20th century. Some of the newspapers
that I consulted were The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika, and Bengalee.
The methodological approach within which I conducted the analysis of this
archive has been informed by a particular critical move within historical sociology - one
that emphasizes the fact that the relationship between archival texts and the object of
study is in fact dialectical. It stresses that historical texts themselves are problematic in
terms of meanings and need to be analyzed in the particular cultural and political contexts
in which they have been produced so as to decipher the objectives, which guided the
composition of these texts in the first place. That is to say, while archival materials
represent a social process or reality, the social (and institutional) process in turn actively
constitutes the production of that text, a process similar to what Jacques Derrida calls
12
“consignation”, in a different context (Derrida 1995: 3).14 What I attempt to do is to
critically “read” these texts both as “signs” and “products” of a modem social as well as
cultural life, in order to understand one of the vital dimensions of such a collective life -
health and well-being.
My dissertation consists of five chapters, elaborating different aspects of the co
emergence of discourses on domesticity and those of personal hygiene between the late
19th and the early 20th centuries colonial Bengal. It is an illustrative case of how hygiene
became a personal as well as collective ideal for “modem” Bengali life. Hygiene marked
not only a shift from public health to personal preventive medicine it re-organized some
of the fundamental aspects of Bengali domesticity.
In chapter one, titled, “Social Production of Hygiene”, I introduce some of the
theoretical concerns that structure my enquiry. The primary question it seeks to explore is
the importance in undertaking a sociological study of hygiene as a social, cultural, and
political ideology in late colonial Bengal or India. I show that hygiene signified not only
a practical set of sanitary stipulations around the body and its well being, but it became a
concern around which gender, class, and nationalist identities were forged. It argues that
this vocabulary around hygiene evolved out of a number of discourses and because of a
number of factors such as cultural nationalism, issues of identity formation, the women’s
movement and a broader movement in colonial public health policies.
Chapter two, titled, “Cultural Politics of Taste, Consumption and the Bengali
Hindu Domestic”, analyzes the cultural formation of the Hindu, Bengali middle class
(bhadralok) through some of its discourses on consumption and domesticity. In
14 Derrida, J. 1995. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press.
13
particular, it analyzes the role of culture of food and culinary practices in the nationalist
self-construction of middle class Bengali Hindus. Situated within a broader process of
self-fashioning, gastronomy became one of the primary means in the construction as well
as presentation of this class in late colonial Bengal. I do a close reading of writings on
food published both in Bengali monographs as well as periodicals and show how
prescriptions and proscriptions around particular food items provided the basis for the
construction of a physiological-moral-cultural boundary that distinguished the educated
middle class from other “inferior” classes in Bengali society.
The third chapter, which is titled, “Hygiene and Gender in Late Colonial Bengal”,
contends that while health and personal hygiene were defined through a characteristic
“Hindu” ideal of domesticity, domesticity implied a particular coexistence of “physical”
and “moral” cleanliness, order and purity that could be attained by personal bodily well
being. I analyze two of the very common concepts within this vocabulary - “care” and
“cleanliness”. These two concepts are united in the idea of “order”, which is not really a
mark of social status, or individual quality, but a state of arrangement, that draws its
legitimacy from the pursuit of everyday mundane and material household activities. This
order, in contrast to the conceptions of orthodox Hindu ritual in whose form it was often
expressed, was not performed by men, even though they remained its most powerful
ideologues; instead it was ensured by the activities of women in modem Bengali/Indian
households.
Chapter four titled, “Health and Hygiene in the Marketplace”, explores the
development of a medical marketplace and forms of medical consumerism in the context
of late colonial Bengal. Late 19th and early 20th centuries marked the beginning of a well
14
developed commodity culture, which consolidated a modem mandate on hygiene.
Hygiene became a practicable idea through a world of hygienic and medical commodities
and these commodities created a new order of hygiene in turn.
The fifth chapter is titled, “Women, Self-Representation, and the Nation”. It
explores the writings of educated, Bengali middle class women on the role of practicing
personal health and hygiene. In particular, it investigates how did the writing about
wellbeing relate to the broader ideology of hygiene? I argue that these writings by
Bengali women were acts o f retrieval by which they sought to lay a claim on the
production of knowledge about a domain (health and medicine), of which they were
considered naturalized beings, but at the same time were unable to be experts in its
objective understanding.
15
CHAPTER ONE: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE
INTRODUCTION
This chapter analyzes the theoretical and methodological issues that foreground
my dissertation. The problematic that this chapter addresses is- why is there a necessity to
sociologically analyze early twentieth century histories of sanitary reform, hygiene,
domesticity, and nationalism in the context of late colonial Bengal/India? This chapter
will explore the contribution that my dissertation makes to different fields of scholarship,
namely, historical sociology, sociology and history of medicine, sociology of
nationalism, sociology of India, and feminist theory, through a study of a variety of
discourses on health and hygiene in late colonial Bengal. The central research questions
that this chapter explores will be constituted in separate sections.
DEFINING THE SOCIAL: DOMESTICITY, HYGIENE, AND THE NATION
The central agenda of this chapter is to analyze the social production of hygiene in
the late 19th and the early 20th centuries Bengal and India. The primary question it seeks
to answer is- how was the social produced around hygiene and sanitary reform? In other
words, how did sanitary reform and broader ideology of hygiene become the focus of a
number of social concerns by the early years of the twentieth century in colonial Bengal?
I argue in this chapter that hygiene, both as a movement for sanitary reform (as a set of
practices) as well as a broader social ideology in the context of anti-colonial nationalism
became a site, productive albeit contested site on which a number o f social identities
particularly around gender, class, caste, nation, and religion were forged.
Hygiene provided the basis for a physical and moral ideology around which a
diverse set of social problems were articulate and got coalesced. Diet and nutrition,
16
demarcation of household spaces, professionalization and feminization of nursing, care
and cleanliness, maternal and childcare, and consumption were some key issues that were
problematized and politicized as hygiene became a central concern both as a phase in the
practice of public health undertaken by the colonial state as well as a nationalist issue. As
a nationalist issue hygiene became the centerpiece in the conception of a robust
nationalist identity.
A number of social actors contributed in defining both what hygiene meant as an
ideology and what entailed its practical application. Physicians, nationalist leaders, male
social reformers, colonial officials and scientists, and middle class women social
philanthropists and literary figures- were the key social actors, who became involved in
the management of hygiene as an ideology that bridged both the public and the private
because of its focus on domesticity. Domesticity became the spatial, material, and
ideological medium through which hygiene was realized as a set of practices and as an
ideology. The relationship between domesticity and hygiene was a two-way relationship.
On the one hand, there was a definite shift from broad based public health initiatives to
personal hygiene, which by the early twentieth century became the cornerstone of
preventive medicine. On the other hand, the material and the ideological space of the
domestic/household became the ultimate domain within which hygiene could be
practiced in its desired form. I define domesticity as constitutive of ideas and practices
(i.e. in the Foucauldian terminology discourses) of spatialization that implied both
architectural as well as ideological space of the Hindu household.
This chapter shows that the development of a particular cultural vocabulary with
regard to personal and preventive hygiene in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries
17
Bengal/India was a result of colonial health policies and broader state of medicine and
health, cultural nationalism, issues of identity formation, and the women’s movement.
WHAT IS THE SOCIAL?
In the foreword to Jacques Donzelot’s classic book The Policing o f Families
(Donzelot 1979)15, Gilles Deleuze wrote, “Clearly it is not a question of the adjective that
qualifies the set of phenomena which sociology deals with: the social refers to a
particular sector in which quite diverse problems and special cases can be grouped
together, a sector comprising specific institutions, and an entire body of qualified
personnel (“social” assistants, “social” workers)” (Deleuze 1979: ix).16 In introducing
Donzelot’s book and his intellectual intervention in and through the concept of the
‘social’, Deleuze argues that the ‘social’ can be defined as a new kind o f ‘landscape’ that
became gradually visible from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The
social became the way to draw lines between the processes, functions, and the boundaries
of the public and the private around a variety of issues such as wage labor, child care,
insurance, health, or marriage. It also became an autonomous site of sorts, which,
according to Deleuze became governable by its own set of rules.
As Nikolas Rose has argued, “ ‘the social’ does not refer to an inescapable fact
about human beings- that they are social creatures- but to a way, in which human
intellectual, political and moral authorities, within a limited geographical territory,
thought about and acted upon their collective experience for about a century” (Rose
15 Donzelot, Jacques. 1979. The Policing o f Families. New York: Pantheon Press. Donzelot offers a critical
discussion o f the emergence o f the “social” as a sector that negotiated the relationship between the private
and the public, the state and civil society, the family and the state, and the judicial and the administrative
through the authority o f a new set o f social experts, like the social worker, the doctor, and the statistician.
16 Deleuze, Gilles. 1979. “Preface”, in Jacques Donzelot, The Policing o f Families. New York: Pantheon
Press.
18
1n
1999: 101). Social therefore has been connected to ideas of morality and economy. The
development of the ‘social’ both as the site and paradigm of intervention has been linked
necessarily to a conception of the moral that underwent a shift between the eighteenth
18
and the nineteenth centuries (Faubion 1995: 66). As Rose points out, by the nineteenth
century, instead of human societies being discrete entities and its people united by its
own repertoire of customs and language, there was a conception, which created a moral
catalogue of nations and peoples being positioned in different but linked orders of
morality. This shift necessitated an evaluation and framing of the relationship between
different institutions, like the family, the economy and the conduct of the individual.
Therefore the moral was to be constructed through an intervention into the conduct of
individuals and institutions and geared towards their mutual benefit (Foucault 1979).19
The other related idea to social has been that of economy. A shift from autonomy
of the economic sphere in classical political economy to an understanding of economy,
which signified a shift towards a subtle balance between the social productivity of
individuals and their autonomy from structures of political control, most notably the state
(Barry, Osborne, & Rose 1996).20 According to Rose, “The moral was a kind of plane of
intersection between experience, inheritance, conscience, character and conduct, located
within a wider space of the character of a people as a whole” (Rose 1999: 103). To him,
while the economy was to be understood in terms of its own rules and causalities, the
moral domain on the other hand became accessible for expert intervention by the church
17 Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers o f Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
18 Faubion, James. A. Ed. 1995. Rethinking the Subject: An Anthology o f Contemporary European Social
Thought. Boulder: Westview Press.
19 Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
20 Barry, Andrew, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose. Eds. 1996. Foucault and Political Reason:
Liberalism, neo-liberalism and rationalities o f government. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
19
or politicians. Social was therefore the mode of intervention, as well as the potential
outcomes of that intervention, which were both defined and evaluated on the basis of the
government of people through themselves as social beings (Burchell, Gordon, & Miller
1991).21
The social also came to signify production in a sense- production of social
identities and social responsibilities and “a promise of happiness to the citizen who
• • O')
partakes m his own freedom” (Bell 1996: 81). The birth of this social has been
connected to liberalism- a mentality of rule that put the responsibility o f social and
national well-being in the hands of the state as well as the people (Gobetti 1992).23 The
state would be the guardian of law and order while the people would be entrusted with
civilized, self-government and the social as an ideology and as an intervention would
precisely guarantee that. The four features of liberalism according to Rose are- a new
relation between the government and knowledge; a novel specification of the subjects of
rule as active in their own government; an intrinsic relation to the authority of expertise;
and a continual questioning of the activity of rule (Rose 1996).24 For Michel Foucault the
two poles of this ‘mentality of rule’ would be the disciplining of the individual body and
bio-politics, which takes place not through the central authority of power of the state, but
through a dense network of micro political processes (micro-physics of power).25 In any
case, the social became the centerpiece in a frame that connected the political and the
21 Burchell, Graham, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. Eds. 1991. The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
22 Bell, Vikki, 1996. “The promise o f liberalism and the performance o f freedom”, in Andrew Barry,
Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose edited, Foucault and Political Reason. Page 81.
23 Gobetti, Daniela. 1992. Private and the Public: Individuals, households, and body politic in Locke and
Hutcheson. London: Routledge.
24 Rose, Nikolas. 1996. “Governing “advanced” liberal democracies” in Barry, Osborne, and Rose edited,
Foucault and Political Reason. Pages 44-47.
25 Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History o f Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.
Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage.
20
economic with the individual, family, civil society, and the nation in Western political
thought.
Identifying the social as the site and the technology for the formation of new
citizen-subjects was intrinsic part of nation building projects in the nineteenth century
and the twentieth century Europe. Anthony Giddens in his book The Consequences o f
Modernity (Giddens 1990) commented on the primacy o f ‘society’ as the central unit of
Oft
analysis in sociology. Questioning such a naturalized move, he explained that the
reason behind this is the easy identification of modernity with the idea of ‘society’ as a
bounded system or as ‘nation-states’. He wrote: “Yet although a sociologist speaking of a
particular society might casually employ instead the term “nation”, or “country”, the
character of the nation-state is rarely directly theorized” (Ibid. 1990: 13).
This naturalized connection between the social and the nation is commonly
accepted in sociological theorizing but it needs to be critically investigated, particularly
the connections between the nation and its ideologies and histories of imperial social
formations. And to what extent the birth of the nation and its ideologies were connected
to the histories of imperial social formations. I am not concerned with analyzing how
European modernity and the accompanying processes and ideas (that are used
unproblematically both in social theory and political practice) have developed through
Europe’s encounter with its colonies.27 My goal in bringing the role of colonialism within
26 Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences o f Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
27 Stoler, Ann, Laura. 1999. Race and the Education o f Desire: Foucault’s History o f Sexuality and the
Colonial Order o f Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Catherine. 1994. “Rethinking Imperial
Histories: The Reform Act o f 1867” in New Left Review 208: 3-29. See also Hall, Catherine. 2002.
Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867. Cambridge: Polity
Press. See Burton, Antoinette. Ed. 2003. After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation.
Durham: Duke University Press. Also see Sinha, Mrinalini, “Teaching Imperialism as a Social Formation”,
in Radical History Review 67(1997). For discussions on the interconnectivity o f European modernity with
21
the discussions of the social is with the purpose of highlighting the colonial genealogy of
the social in the social production of hygiene in late colonial Bengal/India and its
intertwining with cultural nationalism.
The social in the context of colonial Bengal, as my dissertation shows, became a
set of interventions in and through which hygiene became the ideological and practical
object for cultural nationalism, public health and medicine, and the Indian feminist
agenda. During this process new alliances were forged and class, caste, and national
identities and gender relations were negotiated and formed. The social became the way in
which political expertise of colonial governance interacted with the cultural authority of
nationalism in forging the link between hygiene as a simple health practice and its
broader ramifications as a socio-political ideology. Here hygiene epitomized the zone of
formative conflict between the totalizing bio-politics of the colonial public health
machinery and the cultural desires and norms of nationalism.
CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND THE SOCIAL
In his book, The Dynamics o f Cultural Nationalism (Hutchinson 1987) John
Hutchinson made a conceptual distinction between political and cultural nationalism, in
order to provide a dynamic theory of cultural nationalism. According to Hutchinson,
cultural nationalism precedes political nationalism but even after the nation state
formation, nationalist revivals continue in ethnic forms. For him, both cultural and
political nationalisms have politics, but their goals and their respective modes of
organization are very different. He wrote:
its imperial experiences, see Magubane, Zine. 2004. Bringing Empire Home: Imagining Race, Class and
Gender in Britain and Colonial South Africa. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
22
Political nationalists share with cultural nationalists an antipathy to the
bureaucratic state, but they tend to look to reason as their ethical source. Their
ideal is a civic polity of educated citizens united by common laws and mores like
the polls of classical antiquity. By contrast, the cultural nationalist perceives the
state as an accidental, for the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilization,
which is the product of its unique history, culture, and geographical profile...
Unlike the political nationalist, the cultural nationalist founds the nation not on
‘mere’ consent or law but on the passions implanted by nature and
history... Rejecting the ideal of universal citizenship rights of political
nationalism, cultural nationalists demand that the natural divisions within the
nation- sexual, occupational, religious, and regional- be respected, for the impulse
to differentiation is the dynamo of national creativity.
While his project seeks to recover a positive role for cultural nationalism, Hutchinson
fails to clarify that cultural nationalism can be a very class specific agenda/strategy that is
based on an ideology of exclusivity of that class as the guardians of a pure culture, for
example, as in the case of Bengali cultural nationalism. Moreover, in many nationalist
movements, the political and are strongly linked and indispensable to each other
(Hutchinson 1987: 122).29 For example, it would be a mistake to separate between the
political and cultural nationalist ideologies of Gandhi.
28 Eugene Weber shows how the Parisian culture was imposed on the rest o f the French population in a
fashion very similar to colonialism. See Weber, Eugene. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The
Modernization o f Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
29 Hutchinson, John. 1994. “Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration”, in Hutchinson, John and
Anthony D. Smith edited Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
23
Nevertheless, Hutchinson’s elaboration is useful for my analysis of late nineteenth
century Bengali and Indian cultural nationalism. According to Hutchinson, the basic
principle of cultural nationalism is the campaign to ‘re-create’ the idea of the nation as a
living principle in the lives of the people. For cultural nationalists, nature and history are
the twin passions (as opposed to more overtly political aspirations of political
nationalists). In his view, therefore, culture becomes the ideological axis for national
regeneration. Hence, he arguing against the predominant conceptions of nationalism,
accords cultural nationalism not only a fundamental place in the formation of nations but
also re-affirms the role that cultural nationalism played in the ‘moral’ innovation,
particularly in bringing traditionalists and modernists together to give birth to
autonomous communities. For Hutchinson, cultural nationalism is a forward- looking
process that moves through constant renewals as for example the revivalist nationalisms
of Ireland. To the extent that cultural nationalism is a dynamic and productive force in the
social production of the self, Hutchinson’s definition is helpful for exploring the
processes through which cultural renewal took place for middle class Bengali bhadralok
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
To understand the importance of culture as one of the fundamental tools and basis
for de-colonization, one must mention Frantz Fanon’s writings on national culture. For
Fanon, cultural re-discovery is the fundamental way to national liberation (Fanon
1990).30 Fanon accords a fundamental place to culture as the way to national freedom.
This he says is necessary because, “colonial domination, because it is total and tends to
over simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a
conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national
30 Fanon, Frantz. 1990 [1967]. The Wretched o f the Earth. London: Penguin Books.
24
reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of
the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation,
and by the systematic enslaving of men and women” (Ibid. 1990: 190).
A national culture under colonialism is completely destroyed according to Fanon,
which over a span of centuries completely emaciates the cultural vitality of the people, to
whom such culture belongs. This situation reaches a point, according to Fanon, when “the
necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and
comes to be felt by the great majority of the people” (Ibid. 1990: 192). For Fanon, this
moment marks the birth of the native intelligentsia as a producer and not only a colonized
consumer. The production of national literature assumes a tone of indictment, followed
by appeal and then the “word of command”. According to Fanon, this new found national
consciousness through literature destroys old literary styles and creates new ones along
with a new reading public as well. For Fanon, the demand for national culture and the re
affirmation of the existence of such a culture represents a battlefield (Loomba 1998: 146-
151).31
Leela Gandhi writes, “Although Fanon’s writings, maintain a deep ambivalence
toward the political desirability of an entrenched and centralized postcolonial nation
state, he remains unequivocally committed to the therapeutic necessity of anti-colonial
national agitation. While nationalism comes under suspicion as the only legitimate end of
decolonization, it is nevertheless postulated as the principal remedial means whereby the
colonized culture overcomes the psychological damage of colonial racism” (Gandhi
1998: 111). Gandhi analyzing Fanon’s central text The Wretched o f the Earth,
31 Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.

32 Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
25
comments that Fanon puts a political premium on nationalism because of its ability to
“heal the historical wounds inflicted by the ‘Manichean’ structure of colonial culture
which confines the colonized to a liminal, barely human existence” (Ibid. 1998).
For Fanon therefore, culture is the first and foremost element in the new social
formation in a postcolonial society. The possible ways of social re-generation can only be
realized through culture, which for Fanon remains of fundamental value and tool for an
incipient nation-society. In fact the contours of both an incipient nation and the state have
to be imagined and executed first through the assertion and consolidation of new social
relations that were unrealizable within a colonial framework. The social, which is also the
cultural, will precede both the nation and the state. Culture with its taboos and
preferences will be the first building block for the realization of the existing social
relations and responsibilities.
Among the theories on cultural nationalism that I analyze in this chapter, Partha
Chatterjee’s perspective on nationalism and its links to culture addresses the problem
from a different angle altogether. For him, the confounding relationship between
nationalism and culture to begin with has been a problem both of liberal-bourgeois as
well as Marxist paradigms (Chatterjee 1993a).33 But before going into that debate, I wish
to explore the basic argument that Chatterjee puts forth regarding anti-colonial
nationalism. In his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Chatterjee 1993a)
Partha Chatterjee brands Benedict Anderson’s formulation of nations as “imagined
communities” as marked by sociological determinism.34 Responding to the contention
that all third world nationalisms were copies of the three modular forms of nationalisms
33 Chatterjee, Partha. 1993a. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse.
Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press.
34 Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
26
that Anderson had analyzed, Chatterjee contends that if imagination is as real and
profound as Anderson argues, then where was the possibility for its creativity when it
came to so called third world nationalisms in colonies like India?
He writes, “I have one central objection to Anderson’s argument. If nationalisms
in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular”
forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have
left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world
shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity, have thought out on our behalf not only
the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anti-colonial
resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever
colonized” (Chatterjee 1993b: 5).35 In trying to answer that question, Chatterjee explains
that the nationalist texts were addressed both to the colonial masters as well as to the
indigenous public.
He writes, “To both, nationalism sought to demonstrate the falsity of the claim
that the backward peoples were culturally incapable of ruling themselves in the
conditions of the modem world. Nationalism denied the alleged inferiority of the
colonized people; it also asserted that a backward nation could ‘modernize” itself while
retaining its cultural identity. It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it challenged
the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises
o f ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based” (Chatterjee 1993a: 30). The
central claim is that the relationship between anti-colonial and ‘metropolitan’ nationalism
is thus one of a complex relationship between both borrowing and difference.He writes,
“I object because I cannot reconcile it with the evidence on anti-colonial nationalism. The
35 Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
27
most powerful as well as the most creative results of the nationalist imagination in Asia
and Africa are posited not on an identity but rather on a difference with the “modular”
forms of the national society propagated by the modem West” (Ibid 1993a).
He explains how anti-colonial nationalism creates its own site of sovereignty: “It
does so by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains- the
material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside”, of the economy
and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its
superiority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied and
replicated. The spiritual, on the other hand, is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential”
marks of cultural identity. The greater one’s success in imitating Western skills in the
material domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one’s
spiritual culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anti-colonial
nationalisms of Asia and Africa” (Ibid. 1993a: 6).
Anthony Smith defines the essential concern in a nationalist project as the process
of constructing a present out of the past. Smith’s theory is a departure from modernist
theories of nationalism, which explain the rise of nationalism in the context of a
particular configuration of social, economic, and political forces. Nation within modernist
the paradigm, is a superstructural emergence that seeks to ameliorate deeper social,
economic, and political problems within modem industrial society.
In his book, The Ethnic Revival, Smith departs from this modernist perspective,
which locates the nation merely as an outcome of modernization and modernity (Smith
1981).36 Most theories of modernist paradigms are either materialist, for example, in Tom
Naim’s or Ernest Gellner’s exposition, where such materialism is shown to be a part of
36 Smith, Anthony. 1981. The Ethnic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
28
cultural modernization. The central argument of Smith is that there is an ethnic core to
any nationalist re-generation, which has a shared history, memory, or culture. His
strongest criticism is thus leveled against modernist theories of nationalism, which define
nationalisms only as outcomes of processes of modernization. This results in, according
to Smith, overlooking the root of nationalist consciousness that can be traced to ethnic
ties and memories. He labels this kind of nationalism as ‘ethno-symbolic approach’,
which can be explained through the persistence and zealous resurrection of cultural
symbols, ethnic identities, shared memories, and even pre-modem ties at certain points in
the collective life of the people. Smith contends that his ‘approach’ is able to explain the
conditions under which nations and nationalisms emerge, and the specific configurations
they adopt. It also explains, he claims, the non-rationalist and non- materialist roots of
nationalism, particularly the power of symbols such as language, dress, cultural practices,
preservation of ancient architectural sites, codification of myths etc, which further
explains why there is strong popular support for such ethnic nationalisms.
Even though it is as an important intervention and critique of modernist theories
of nationalism, Smith’s approach gives by one hand, what it takes away by the other.
While he appreciates the power that cultural symbols have in creating solidarities at
certain historical moments, and the participation of the whole populace in such processes,
Smith attributes something essential and fixed to such movements, originating in a given
repertoire of ethnic identities. Smith’s focus on the historical analysis of the genesis of
nationalism accords the same fixity and essence that modernists like Eric Hobsbawm
attribute to industrial life and modernization as marking the true origins of modem
nationalism.
29
Dipankar Gupta has argued that the cultural space of nation-states is enlivened by
popular participation and not by geography that becomes the territorial basis of the nation
state (Gupta 2000).37 In his criticism of ‘ethnic nationalism’ models by sociologists like
Anthony Smith, Gupta says that explaining nationalism through ethnic identity fails to
appreciate that nationalism is a relatively new phenomena and more importantly the fact
that “the new solidarity that emerges among an enlarged conception of ‘we’ finds its
expression through actual political participation in a cultural space or territory” (Ibid.
2000: 113). Gupta emphasizes the fact that what distinguishes a nation is the popular
sentiments of the people, which are more vital and indispensable than the formal
apparatuses and structures of power and territorial demarcations. Hence according to him,
territory became central to the identities of the newly formed nation-states of India and
Pakistan only after Partition in 1947.
For Gupta the crucial factors in the formation of a nation-state are an enlivened
cultural space and political participation. As important it is, as a critique of Smith’s
position, for not equating the nation with the institution of the state, Gupta’s theory of
nationalism ends up reifying notions of popular participation in the birth of the nation
state. In this context I would like to stress that nationalism is also a process for the
creation of authority, both cultural and moral. Nationalism while it seeks to create a
sovereign culture or community as Chatteijee contends is also disjunctive in nature. 38
37 Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Culture, Space, and the Nation-State. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
381 borrow this term from Homi Bhaba’s discussion o f a disjunction that is created (but often remains
unacknowledged) between the narrative temporality that is inherent in the processes by which people
become part o f a national-cultural identity and the historicity that is accrued to a nation. He contends that
the nature o f representations o f a nation as a culture and a people is always in contradiction with its
apparent claim to historicity. Bhaba is basically commenting on the ambivalent nature o f the nation in
terms o f its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy and the effects it has on the narration o f the
nation. Bhabha, Homi. 1995. “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins o f the modem nation”, in
Homi Bhaba edited, Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.
30
There has been an ideological separation and incompatibility between the self
representation of nationalism as a national community and its actualization in concrete
social relations. The romanticization of a national community was equally based on the
ideological construction and justification of social, cultural, and moral distinctions
between the different dominant groups and subaltern population based on identities of
5
-Q
class, caste, gender, and religion (Weber 1976). What is furthermore important to
emphasize is the fact that such distinctions are created much more at the local or regional
levels than vis-a-vis a centralized political elite (Noiriel 1996).40
What is important to bring out of these perspectives on cultural nationalism is the
ways in which these theorists have explored how the social becomes re-defined during
periods of nationalist cultural reconstruction. At a very fundamental level, cultural
nationalism is understood to be the way in which cultural identity is evoked and made
part of a national community. This becomes particularly crucial and formative during
periods when such cultural identity is either threatened by external influences for
example colonial or imperial domination or by internal social reconstruction for example
industrialization or modernization. The cultural nationalist agenda therefore “regards the
nation as the product of its unique history and culture and as a collective solidarity
39 Weber, Eugene. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization o f Rural France, 1870-1914.
Stanford: University o f Stanford Press. Weber describes how the French nation actually emerged in the last
years o f the 19th century through the forceful cultural colonization o f the rural French population into the
dominant culture o f urban France.
40 See Noiriel, Gerard. 1996. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity
Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press. Gerard Noiriel describes how for a national culture to be
diffused, it has to be appropriated by individuals within a regional or local context and through an
interaction with relations around gender or trade within such local contexts.
31
endowed with unique attributes. In short, cultural nationalism is concerned with the
distinctiveness of the cultural community as the essence of a nation” (Yoshion 1992: l).41
The social can be therefore be defined as the practices through which particular
cultural notions, ideas, and values are made functional ingredients of the relationship
between individual and the broader social structure. It is the configuration of
relationships between the different groups and members of a society, which are defined
or re-defined on the basis of the new cultural paradigms that emerge during times of
nationalist fervor. Cultural values, prejudices, and boundaries therefore become the most
important basis of social organization or re-organization. Both institutions and patterns of
everyday living are imagined on the basis of these renewed and revived cultural idioms
and it is through such social configuration and re-configuration that cultural diffusion
takes place.
My objective in delineating some of the prominent scholarly perspectives
analyzing the phenomena of cultural and ethnic nationalism has been to highlight the role
of the social as it evolved and assumed a particular configuration around the issue of
cultural identity and nationalism. I contend that in the context of anti-colonial cultural
nationalism as a distinct form of consciousness as well as an explicit political project- the
social acquires a distinct configuration. In the west, the invention of the social is argued
to have taken place as a response to myriad social phenomena that emerged as a result of
urbanization, industrialization, or migration from country to cities. The conceptualization
of social as a new form of defining and evaluating social relationships in the context of
anti-colonial nationalism also took place in response to immediate social processes and
41 Yoshion, Kosaku. 1992. Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry. London:
Routledge.
32
problems, but with an acute awareness of the fact that such a scenario was in the first
place intimately tied to a cultural decline resultant from the ills of colonial rule. Colonial
rule or the West, however, neither hegemonized these cultural imaginations not were they
the dominant (even though they the most powerful actors) forces in the social
regeneration. To that extent the social and the cultural were intimately tied together in
ideas on society and social membership in emerging conceptions of nationhood within
anti colonial nationalist movements.
MEDICINE, WELL-BEING, AND THE SOCIAL
This section argues that in the discourses of anti-colonial Indian nationalism,
hygiene, sanitary reform, and a broader ideology of personal hygiene became central to
the social, physical, and moral life of an incipient nation-state and society by the early
twentieth century. It shows how hygiene became a fundamental ideology of middle class
urban Bengali as well as Indian society to organize a set of bodily practices and to serve
as the rationale for broader social organization. Hygiene, both as an agenda for physical
and moral wellbeing as well as a crucial principle for social distinction, became an
important feature of early twentieth century anti colonial cultural nationalism, in Bengal
and elsewhere in India. I define the social in relation to hygiene in two ways. Hygiene as
a particular ideology and phase in public health marked a shift in focus from the natural
surroundings/landscape, which could be regarded as sources of diseases to a focus on the
corporal body as the site that had to be protected against disease. What the new science of
hygiene did was to draw a boundary between the body and its environment where the
33
body became the target of a host of preventive measures in order to protect it from the
natural environment (Armstrong 2002).42
Late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries witnessed the emergence of
hygienic practices as one of the fundamental means to secure the health and well-being of
the society around issues of nutrition, maternal welfare and child care, and housing and
sanitation. Social therefore became a set of diverse ways in and through which this new
ideology (with the corporal body as the focus) of hygiene was made a part of a broader
concern around health and well-being.
The social was defined in relation to hygiene in another way as well. In a climate of
anti-colonial nationalism, the traditional discourses on the management of health were
deployed and the role of hygiene was emphasized as a fundamental religious and cultural
ingredient. Urban middle class cultural proclaimed that hygiene was fundamental to the
observance of Hindu religious practices. Hygiene’s religious importance was
emphatically stressed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in discourses
around health and more broadly broader in discourses on social vitality, whose lack or
weakness was argued to be a reflection of a society that was being eroded of its religious
values. Restoring health was thus a means to restore such spirituality in everyday life and
vice versa. Hygiene in educated middle class discourses also became a mark of social
identity- a distinguishing line between those social groups who followed hygiene both as
a religious, moral, and physical principle and those who did not.
In Disease and Representation, Sander Gilman argues that notions and anxieties
about disease in one social group are closely related to those of “otherness”. She says,
42 Armstrong, David. 2002. A New History o f Identity: A Sociology o f Medical Knowledge. New York:
Palgrave.
34
“But the fear we have of our own collapse does not remain internalized. Rather, we
project this fear onto the world in order to localize it, and, indeed, to domesticate it. For
once we locate it, the fear of our own dissolution is removed. Then it is not we who totter
on the brink of collapse, but rather the Other” (Gilman 1988: l).43 What we see in the
interaction between the social and the medical in the context of colonial Bengal or India
is actually a two way construction. While the dominant colonial representations of
disease actively used and depended upon corresponding colonial classification of social
groups as degenerate people”, or “uncivilized people” with little reflection of the “self’,
the dominant Indian nationalist discourses around health and well-being did not involve
‘immunity of the self. The Indian nationalist discourses while often recognizing
“otherness” as sources of diseases were inward looking as well; and this necessarily
happened through processes of cultural revivalism and valorization. Invoking culturally
pure practices around the body and its immediate surroundings thus not only projected
the “other” as the root of sickness and contamination, the “self’ was also simultaneously
secured as the physical as well as cultural and moral armament.
In order to understand the relationship of hygiene and the social, there is a need to
critically look at the ‘household/domestic’ practices around health, medicine, and hygiene
in late colonial Bengal for two reasons. First, the inherent lacunae in the colonial medical
administration and medical education led to the skepticism of many that the colonial
institutions at the service of medicine were far from offering a real possibility for cure
and well being. This resulted in the urban, educated, and liberal-minded Bengali
nationalist-reformers, arguing that the physical and moral space of the household offered
43 Gilman, Sander. 1988. Disease and Representation: Images o f Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
35
the best possibilities for therapy and good health. It was not so much medicine per se, as
much as ‘medicine-in-hospital’, which became the focus of a stringent nationalist
critique. There were several reasons for which colonial medicine as well as public health
failed to become the object of pride for most Bengalis/Indians in late colonial India. I
explore some of the tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas in the dialogue between
imperialism and anti-colonialism around the vital issues of health and wellbeing, in order
to understand and evaluate the relationship between domesticity and health.
The domestic as a site for the production of medical ideologies and practices needs
to be explored for another reason. As a result of colonial rule in Bengal/India there was
always an opposition (imagined and real) between the colonial state and the
community/nation (Indian). The colonial state had control over the ‘public’ space.
Therefore ‘domestic’ became an ideological battleground over questions of cultural
identity and moral authority of the Indians. Hence in contrast to the west, where the
domestic was open for intervention by the state, in late colonial Bengal/India, the attempt
of the nationalist Hindu Bengali middle class was to culturally and ideologically seal the
‘domestic’/private against possible intrusions by the colonial state. My study therefore
highlights the centrality of the ‘domestic’ in the nation building process by analyzing
Bengali middle class discourses and their investment in creating a gendered cultural ideal
for a healthy Indian self.
Social action in relation to public health in late colonial Bengal and India in one
sweep brings together the individual as well as the collective, the past as well as the
present, notions on miasma as well as germ theory, general populace as well as the elite
and educated groupings of middle class men, and last but not the least the colonial state
36
as well as anti-colonial nationalist aspirations. The annals of fifty years of colonial public
health and sanitary history were marked with important acts, tumultuous phases, and
subtle ideological shifts. Many of these shifts took place in the context of the changing
nature of anti colonial nationalist as well as international politics and the constantly
altering nature of British imperial rule. Despite the shifts in medical ideology and the
move on the part of the colonial authorities to define its medical policy in increasingly
populist terms through local self government, colonial public health was characterized by
inherent lacunae, which remained a constant throughout its checkered history, and that
was its ‘colonial’ nature.
At the outset, let me clarify, a few concepts. Firstly, the word limitation deserves an
explanation. The usage o f the word limitation immediately conjures the existence or
possibility of an ideal or standard against which the deficiency or limitation is to be
measured or defined. I use the word limitation in two senses: First in relation to the ideal
that medicine was preached as a universal ideology (in its Eurocentric spirit despite its
differences across the western world,) as well as one with ameliorative possibilities and
second in relation to the role that medicine as a token of British colonial benevolence was
supposed to stand for. Colonial public health in Bengal failed to meet the stakes raised by
both these ideals and subsequently came under stringent criticisms by an increasingly
vociferous Indian middle class voice/s.
The other concept, which demands an explanation, is that of margins. I use the
word in the sense that John Pickstone uses it to categorize the political economy of
twentieth century medicine specifically as practiced in Britain and more generally in the
37
western world (Pickstone & Cooter 2000: 2).44 Pickstone labels the successive stages of
this history as productionist, communitarian, and consumerist which are differentiable by
decreasing degree of the role of the state. He also argues that there are two other types of
medicine, which, according to him, emerged in the 19th century. These were the medical
care of the destitute and the protection of the public against hazards, which came to be
known as ‘public health’. He describes these two medicines as medicines of the margins-
“about medical management of people at the margins of the economy, and about
protecting living spaces from contamination, contagion, poisons, adulterated food etc”
(Ibid. 2000: 4).
I use the term margin to argue that in case of British colonialism the entire
definition of state medicine and public health-in-colony were premised a very limited
notion of reformist liberalism. This idea has been convincingly argued by Uday Mehta.
Mehta analyzes the contradictions between inclusionary possibilities of liberal theory and
historically exclusionary workings of liberal colonial statecraft (Mehta 1997).45 Medical
management in Britain could be divided into a central and marginal, but in Bengal or
India such a classification does not hold because there was no distinction between the
care of the destitute and that of the politically visible and influential classes. To that
extent, it would not be an understatement to say that in its mode of functioning, medicine
and public health in Bengal were very much at the margins.
My analysis of late colonial public health enterprise in Bengal is based on this
conception of a margin and the inherent limitation, which characterized such a mode of
44 Pickstone, John and Roger Cooter (eds.). 2000. Medicine in the 20lh Century. Reading: Harwood
Academic Publishers.
45 Mehta, Uday. 1997. “Liberal Strategies o f Exclusion”, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.)
Tensions o f Empire: Colonial Cultures in Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University o f California Press.
38
functioning. I would like to mention here that I do not use the word margin reiterate the
distinction that has often characterized mainstream scholarship in history and sociology
of medicine- that is between the colony and the metropole. What I mean is that in the
dominant colonial discourses there was a sense of correspondence and identification
between those social groups who were at a geographical and climatic distance (i.e. the
colonies) and therefore prone to being a hothouse of an array of illnesses, and those social
groups at home who were immigrants or from the working class. Therefore the margins
at home became synonymous with the colonies as a whole.
The second All-India Sanitary Conference opened its session at the Council
Chamber, Fort St.George, Madras in November 1912. The Honorable Sir Spencer
Harcourt Butler, member of the Department of Education in the Governor General’s
Council presided over the meeting. In his opening speech he said:
Ideas and interests have been quickened on all sides and there are signs of a
sanitary awakening in India, of the dawning of an age of greater attention to
public health. We specially welcome the presence of non-official representatives
of the different provinces as an augury of that co-operation between experts and
laymen, without which as I pointed out last year, it will be difficult if not
impossible, to achieve any widespread sanitary progress in this country... You, I
know, will not fail, gentlemen, when the call for the expert resounds throughout
this ancient land; and, meanwhile, you will push forward the work to which you
have laid your hands with dauntless patience and indefatigable zeal (1912:1).
By the early years of the twentieth century, colonial governance stamped a degree of
urgency on sanitation, which was unprecedented. The first All India Annual Sanitary
39
Conference started in 1911, and by 1912, despite differences of opinion about modus
operandi, one thing was unanimously agreed upon, sanitary reform was the most
important agenda facing the colonial Indian government at that time. Some of the words
used clearly expressed the heightened sense of importance that colonial rulers of India
attached to the cause of sanitation. The word ‘sanitary awakening’ not only referred to a
state of governance within which the cause of sanitation had been given a fresh lease of
colonial urgency, but also as a new form of ‘consciousness’, almost a new realization,
which could bring about a very different order of social transformation humbly put as the
civilizing mission. Sanitation, for colonial officials such as Harcourt Butler and Surgeon
General Pardey Lukis was equal in standing if not more important than medical research
as a means for medical progress.46
Medicine for both of them was a means for social change and therefore could not
be realized if it was pursued only within the walls of the medical laboratories. Medicine
was to be ably served by scientists and doctors as much as by administrators such as
Butler or Lukis. The concern for these colonial officers was not so much the therapeutic
and curative implications of medicine. Rather, for them, health and medicine stood for
ways of more advanced forms of collective social life. One must take note of the fact,
however, that the sheer magnitude of this task made it impossible for experts or
administrators alone to realize it. The simple exigency of management made it imperative
to give a clarion call to Indians to come together with colonial rulers in this sanitary
mission, which, however, did not have much effect.
46 General Pardey Lukis was a sanitary commissioner with the Indian Government in 1911. Butler and
Lukis were important figures in the research on malaria in India as members o f the Indian Research Fund
Association.
40
The other important connection that was sought to be forged in this speech was
between the experts and their work in the service of what Harcourt Butler called the
‘ancient land’ of India. What was meant by and why is it necessary to read it carefully
rather than take it as a simple token of colonial administrative rhetoric? The phrase
‘ancient land’ embodies the tension within which all liberal reformist agendas of the
colonial government were caught up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was at the
heart of the liberalism that was practiced in the British empire on the back of reforms on
free trade, education, and evangelism.
This opening speech was striking not only in its implications in terms of ideas of
action, regeneration, and progress, but also in revealing the philosophical and ideological
premises of much of British liberal political thought that under-girded many imperial
projects in the colonies. Uday Mehta (Mehta 1997) and Thomas Metcalf (Metcalf 1998)
argue that liberalism was truly a radical philosophy, which sought to draw the limits of
state intervention in the lives of individual citizens and to that extent it carried with itself
doctrines of universalism, suffrage, and self representation.47 Yet in its historical
actualization, particularly in the colonies, liberalism not only kept groups of people and
societies outside the purview of its universal claims, it in fact became a tool, which
concealed such disenfranchisement and marginalization in the garb of ultimate greater
good.
The phrases ‘ancient land’ and ‘expert’ exemplified this contradiction because
they were deployed to argue that if the ancient land of India stood for outmoded
institutions and social practices then it could only be regenerated by proper knowledge
47 Metcalf, Thomas. 1998. Ideologies o f the Raj. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
41
under the watchful eyes of good governance. Only good governance, enlightened in the
doctrines of knowledge and benevolence could usher in a level of social transformation
that would bring the ‘ancient land’ out of the stupor of age-old hierarchical customs into
the age of self-rule. Thus the universal possibility of social transformation was always
questionable when it concerned colonized societies, which were argued to have not
reached the degree of civilization as the British society.
In such a philosophical and ideological climate, the dominant colonial agenda
around medical administration in late colonial Bengal and India resembled a hybrid of
eighteenth century European medical policing, nineteenth century model of large scale
public health initiatives, and rudiments of a twentieth century consciousness around
preventive medicine and hygiene. Overall, the colonial health policies had two crucial
An
imperatives, one military and the other missionary. While the military interest served as
the blueprint for most of colonial governments’ undertakings in public health and sanitary
projects around the presidency cities and other urban centers, the missionary ethic or
“clinical Christianity” gained increasing favor in relation to preventive medicine, and for
personal hygiene and sanitation.49
Scholars like Poonam Bala have argued that it took an inordinately long time for
the British to establish public health priorities, which were still subservient to the
48 Warwick Anderson labels these two as constituting the “routines o f colonial health work”. Anderson,
Warwick. 1998. “Where is the Postcolonial History o f Medicine?’ in Bulletin o f the History o f Medicine 72
(3): 522-530.
49 Rosemary Fitzgerald uses this term. Fitzgerald, Rosemary. 1994. “Clinical Christianity: The Emergence
o f Medical Work as a Missionary Strategy in Colonial India, 1800-1914”, in Biswamoy Pati and Mark
Harrison edited, Health, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India. Hyderabad: Orient
Longman.
42
commercial interests of the British (Bala 1991).50 She has argued that while the army was
last on the British health agenda, in the context of colonial India, it was just the reverse.
The preservation of the military was the foremost concern of the British colonial health
authorities. Bala contends that after the 1857 mutiny and subsequent takeover of the
Empire by the Crown, army health became the prime concern of the colonial health
policy, which was entrusted in the hands of the Indian Medical Service or the IMS.
Radhika Ramasubban similarly argues that the health of the wider colonized population
was compromised at the expense of the preservation of the colonial military
(Ramasubban 1982).51
Though historians like David Arnold have contested a straightforward link
between medical priorities in colonial India and the interests of the military, there is a
consensus among scholars working on colonial India that army health was undoubtedly
the motivating force behind colonial health policies.52 For example David Arnold shows
how “colonial enclavism” and excessive attention given to the military and its health
requirements limited the scope of many public health initiatives before 1900. He states,
“the continuing narrowness of official preoccupations was reflected in the annual reports
of the sanitary commissioners in the 1870s which devoted 80 or 90 pages to the health of
50 Bala, Poonam. 1991. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal; A socio-historicalperspective. New Delhi:
Sage Publications.
51 Ramasubban, Radhika. 1982. Public Health and Medical Research in India: Their Origins under the
Impact o f British Colonial Policy. Stockholm: SAREC.
52 Harrison, Mark. 1994. Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914.
43
European soldiers, but less than a dozen each to the ‘native’ army, prisoners, and the
‘general population’” (Arnold 1994: 138).53
The Contagious Diseases Acts, which required forceful inspection of prostitutes
serving the military, have been cited by scholars as another marker of the predominance
of the army in colonial concerns around health. For example, Anil Kumar shows how the
lock hospitals “came to be maintained to serve the twin purposes of facilitating
mercenary sex and protecting the soldiers from the infections of venereal diseases”
(Kumar 1998: 106).54 The health crisis of the army following the Crimean War further
consolidated the focus of the healthcare-system on the armed forces. This crisis in the
army’s health prompted Florence Nightingale to comment on the absolute necessity for a
public health re-awakening for a country that she described as the “land of domestic filth”
and “focus of epidemics”. The cleverness of Nightingale, as Mary Poovey’s powerful
analysis has shown, lay in the way she deployed the ideal of “care” to support Britain’s
imperial designs in India (Poovey 1988).55
Apart from the grand order of the colonial army that occupied the energies of
medical authorities, the other influence on the politics of care in the army, which then
targeted the Indian households, was missionary spirit. Appropriately termed as “clinical
Christianity”, missionary work was another “agency” at work in the spread of hospital
network and western medicine in India. Florence Nightingale’s shock at the condition of
army’s health created enough stir to inspire a serious healthcare reform in the army. Her
53 Arnold, David. 1994. “Public health and public power: medicine and hegemony in colonial India”, in
Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks edited, Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and
India. London: British Academic Press.
54 Kumar, Anil. 1998. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911. New Delhi: Sage
Publications.
55 Poovey, Mary. 1988. Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work o f Gender in Mid-Victorian England.
Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
44
influence, however, was not limited to the army’s health. Nightingale’s spirit and a wider
missionary medical ethic laid the groundwork for the “civilizing mission” in medicine
and health undertaken by the colonial government. Such a spirit took shape in two
important forms - public health measures and educational propaganda. Missionary spirit
marked a shift from the more overtly regulatory techniques of public health that were
deployed for the health management of cities or particular sectors of cities.
Even though the health of the military remained the primary focus of the British
colonial government in India, the colonial government engaged in other healthcare
projects. Another set of concerns around public health typically included inoculation,
registration of births and deaths, prevention and control of disease, prevention of food
adulteration, water management, and health relief. These measures collectively
represented what David Armstrong has described as recognizing “dirt” as the main
danger, which within the new sanitary science defined the line of separation between the
space of the body and that of the environment (Armstrong 2002).56 As Alison Bashford
puts it, it represented ordering categories of clean and unclean, healthy and unhealthy,
and normal and pathological (Bashford 2001).57 These measures, which according to
Thomas Osborne set the agenda for public health, pointed to a domain not just of
maximization of the population by the State, but the regulation of something positive in
CO
its own right - “public health” - through infrastructural techniques (Osborne 1996).
56 Armstrong, David. 2002. A New History o f Identity. New York: Palgrave.

57 Bashford, Alison and Claire Hooker (eds.). 2001. Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies. London:
Routledge.
58 Osborne, Thomas. 1996. “Security and vitality: drains, liberalism and power in the nineteenth century”,
in Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose edited, Foucault and Political Reason. Chicago:
University o f Chicago Press.
45
The other important public health agenda in colonial Bengal and India was
establishment of public medical institutions, such as hospitals and dispensaries which
became visible sites of colonial authority. According to Mark Harrison, “the
establishment of charitable dispensaries from the 1830s was one of the earliest attempts
to provide western medical care for the Indian people”. However, as David Arnold
argues, the dispensary movement was also an expression of colonial hegemonic
aspirations.
The colonial authorities realized the value of these small local dispensaries in the
public health movement. Dispensaries became active in administering smallpox vaccines,
passing information on sanitation and hygiene, and performing small scale public health
measures. Dispensaries were frequently cited by colonial authorities as proof that the
“native minds were gradually coming out of their natural prejudices”. In presidencies
such as Madras and Bengal dispensaries grew over time and employed Indians as well
(Harrison 1994: 88-89).59 The dispensaries to an extent played a positive role, especially
in encouraging vaccination among the Indian people. Nevertheless, they did not become
active nodes for propagation of hygiene and sanitation on a wider scale. The lack of
success of dispensaries was because of shortage of funds and ineffective management.
Moreover, these were only visited in disproportionate numbers by the poorer
Europeans and Anglo-Indians and later by poorer Indians. The middle and upper classes
had reservations about these dispensaries based on religious and cultural values.
Dispensaries, as Mridula Ramanna has shown in the case of Bombay, became a
battleground of sorts between British and Indian participation and involvement. She has
59 Harrison, Mark. 1994. Public Health in British India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
46
shown how colonial responses towards these institutions were contradictory while Indian
responses were ambivalent. Hence, even though in general wealthy Indians did not get
involved with dispensaries, during moments of medical crisis, for example the Influenza
pandemic of 1918-1919, they were much more forthcoming in offering all kinds of
medical service than their colonial counterparts (Ramanna 2001).60
Another domain of healthcare in which the colonial governance had influence was
that of personal hygiene. Earlier, public health procedures basically attempted to “procure
the health of an undifferentiated “public” with generalized methods of prevention”
(Porter & Fee 1994).61 In Britain, the late nineteenth century marked a shift from this
model of collective public health to more a personal doctrine of hygiene. In India,
however, such a shift was never complete. While on the one hand, doctrines of preventive
sanitation were gaining ground, the government continued its urban public health
undertakings.
In the context of Bengal/India, an increasing consciousness around the ideology
of personal hygiene and preventive medicine emerged from around the second half of the
th
19 century. Historians o f medicine have commonly attributed this growing favor
towards personal hygiene and preventive medicine to the emergence of bacteriology and
germ theory of disease, which gained support within the medical community from the the
second half of the 19th century. This thesis, however, is only partially correct because
60 Ramanna, Mridula . 2001. “Gauging Indian Responses to Western Medicine: Hospitals and Dispensaries,
Bombay Presidency, 1900-20”, in Deepak Kumar edited. Disease and Medicine in India: A Historical
Overview. Delhi: Tulika Books.
61 Porter, Dorothy and Elizabeth Fee. 1994. “Public health, preventive medicine and professionalization”, in
Andrew Wear edited, Medicine in Society: Historical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
47
there were some local factors too that helped in creating the conditions for an increasing
sensitivity towards preventive medicine in the urban areas.
Even as late as 1920s, colonial sanitation projects did not have much success.
Lack of funds, conflict of interests within the medical and political administrations and
that between influential Indians and their British counterparts, racial discrimination that
tb
was practiced very much even in the early years of the 20 century created a scenario that
was portrayed in the Report o f the Sanitary Organization Committee in the most bleak
terms. Nevertheless, the blame for this failure was put on the climate of Bengal and the
apathy of its dense and illiterate population. Further, the plague outbreak of 1896
revealed the cracks in the public health system under colonial government. It was a crisis
both in terms of a realization of the failure of the system to prevent such a catastrophe as
well as the draconian policing measures that the colonial state had undertaken to check
the movement of the populations, which resulted in much hue and cry.62
The plague epidemic stirred Indians as well as the government to wake up to the
enormity of the public health menace.63 There was definitely a spurt in sanitary activity
following the plague. Epidemic and preventive measures were consequently looked at
more favorably and urgent need was felt for medical education within the wider
population. In the aftermath of the war, there were actually two things that happened,
which influenced the urban perception around questions of personal health and hygiene.
First, among the urban, western-educated, middle classes there was a distinct impact of
62 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. 1992. “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896-1914”, in Terence
Ranger and Paul Slack edited, Epidemics and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63 Arnold, David. 1992. Colonizing the Body. Berkeley: University o f California Press; Ray, Kavita. 1998.
History o f Public Health: Colonial Bengal, 1921-1947. Calcutta: K.P.Bagchi & Company.
48
political nationalism. Medicine was no exception to this influence of political
nationalism. This period of political nationalism witnessed the growth of indigenous
medical systems (for example Ayurveda movement). But around the same time, through
the Medical registration acts between 1912 and 1919, the divide between “western”
medicine and the already existing medical systems were being drawn by the colonial
government more forcefully (Bala 1991).64
In the years immediately after the First World War, discourses around domesticity
and the household also underwent a change. Some historians have argued that from the
time of the WWI, domesticity came to signify a physical aggregation of a multiple and
distinct set of problems. Till that time, discourses on domesticity were largely expressed
within a “spiritual” paradigm that was laced with Victorian notions of discipline,
punctuality and domesticity, organically linked to ‘afterlife’ bliss (Banerjee 1995).65 The
shift to an understanding of domesticity as a set of problems to be organized and resolved
through everyday activities (for example, material hardships following the war) became
the other axis around which the discourses around preventive medicine and personal
hygiene developed.
WOMEN’S MOVEMENT, DOMESTICITY, AND THE SOCIAL
Women’s movement in India took off in the early 20th century. According to
some scholars, it matured in the 1920s, building on the earlier 19th century social reform
movement. Women’s movement progressed during the high noon of anti-colonial
nationalism, which in a large way defined its nature, objectives, and outcomes. The most
64 Bala, Poonam. 1991. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
65 Banerjee, Sudeshna. 1995. “Spirituality and Nationalist Domesticity: Rereading the Relationship”, The
Calcutta Historical Journal, Vol. 19-20.
49
important agenda for the women’s movement was attainment of equal rights and adult
franchise for women.66 The movement for equal rights was posited by women’s
organizations in relation to domesticity and its associated issues of motherhood, hygiene,
child care, or put simply women’s division of labor within the household, and outside
work, i.e. labor outside the realm of the household. Education or a broader agenda of
raising consciousness in women united these two concerns.67
Urban and educated Indian women started defining their goals, philosophies, and
strategies through the formation of at first regional/provincial and then all India
organizations. Between 1917-1927 the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC),
Women’s Indian Association (WIA), and the National Council of Women in India
(NCWI) were formed that established an all India network of early feminist
organizations. For the purpose of my discussion in this chapter, I will focus exclusively
on the role of Indian women’s movements in building a feminist consciousness around
domesticity and its management.
The early twentieth century saw an increasing number of educated women
entering professions such as medicine, science, and teaching. By the year 1921, there
were 68,000 women medical professionals, 30,000 women in education and scientific
fields, and 6,000 in law and business (Ibid. 157). The growth was significant because up
until 1905, the number of women in medicine was very small. Moreover, this increase
occurred despite the fact that women in, for example, the medical practice had to face
66 Sen, Samita. 2000. “Towards a Feminist Politics: The Indian Women’s Movement in Historical
Perspective”, in, Policy Research Report on Gender and Development. Working Paper Series No.9,
Available online: http://www.worldbank.org/gender/prr. Forbes, Geraldine. 1996. The New Cambridge
History o f India: Women in Modern India. Volume IV.2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
67 Basu, Apama and Bharati Ray. Eds. 1990. Women's Struggle: A History o f the All India Women’s
Conference 1927-1990. Delhi: Manohar. The work o f the All India Women’s Conference and the
Women’s Indian Association are noteworthy in encouraging educational reforms for women.
50
different forms of discrimination and harassment, such as racism, sexism, and community
ostracization, despite their upper caste and class status. Midwifery was another profession
which women entered in the early twentieth century, marking a big change from the
1880s, when there were only about half a dozen trained midwives in Calcutta (Borthwick
1984).68 Such an alteration in the demographies of previously male-dominated
professions came about as a result of rise in feminist consciousness. Not surprisingly,
concomitant to these changes was an increased focus on the domestic and role of women
in it.
The issue of hygiene and health came to occupy center stage in early Indian
feminist concerns. Indian feminists primarily sought to explore the relationship of women
to household, family, and more broadly domestic life, which again was not surprising.
During the early part of the 19th century, women had become the sign of everything that
was decadent in Indian society and in urgent need of reform. Reform took a distinctly
modernist language that pitted tradition against progress. Campaigns for social change
resulted in the abolition of sati in 1829 and the paved the way for widow remarriage in
1856. Women and their condition became therefore symptomatic of a deeper
civilizational malady that became the focus of intervention by elite Indian men as well as
British administrators, each for their own reasons.
In the second half of the 19th and early part of the twentieth centuries, there was a
shift in two ways. First, concern for women’s conditions and their amelioration was
gradually taken up by women themselves. And second, there was focus on more concrete
problems/issues that concerned women. For middle class educated women, issues of
68 Borthwick, Meredith. 1984. The Changing Role o f Women in Bengal: 1849-1905. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
51
political participation, professional employment, or child care, motherhood, and
sexuality, were defined in the first instance through their domestic identities. Even
discourses around women’s work in the public realm were often justified or criticized on
the basis of whether such work hampered her primordial duties within the household as a
wife or a mother.
As Samita Sen argues, “the colonial discourse had assumed the existence of a
“domestic” domain to demarcate what the colonizers found difficult to know but that
without knowledge of which the colonial state would not have been able to understand
and master Indians. This domestic domain became in the colonial discourse the
repository of India’s singularity, of Indianness. Nationalism inherited this language.69 In
urban India, women’s exclusive domesticity became the most effective marker of middle
class status. The question of women’s division of labor within ideologies of domesticity
was discussed in and through the negotiation of her sexuality. Constructions of sexuality,
child care, thrift, motherhood, and ideal household management, which were couched in
a distinctly upper caste and middle class vocabulary, were some of the practical issues
that dominated colonialist and nationalist discourses around gendered domesticity.
Women’s associations and organizations primarily defined their feminist
ideologies through an exploration of women’s duties within the household as tokens of
power and authority. Autonomy signified the consciousness of women in having proper
knowledge of domestic duties that could ultimately serve a more noble cause, that of
serving the society and the nation. Explaining how motherhood became one of the crucial
projects towards modernizing the domestic (especially in the discourses of nationalism),
69 Walsh, Judith. 2004. Domesticity in Colonial India. Lanham: Lowman & Littlefield Publishers; Sarkar,
Tanika. 2001. Hindu Nation, Hindu Wife. Delhi: Permanent Black.
52
Judy Whitehead argues, “the revivalist mother image, symbolizing woman as the
protector of the home, the embodiment of sacred power, and the iconic representation of
the nation, was renegotiated during the 1920s as the urban middle class linked the
modernist ideal of national and scientific progress to the private practices of the home
and child-rearing” (Whitehead 1996).70 Proper and respectable roles for women were
linked to the purity of each nationalist agenda through the metaphorical extension of
images of motherhood from the household to the “imagined community” of the nation in
the early 20th century (Bannerji 2001).71
The modernist re-framing of the domestic was based on medical explanations of
the time and focused entirely on raising the hygienic and sanitary standards of the
domestic household of the middle classes. In Indian nationalism, the health of the nation
was linked to the goal of swaraj, that was to be achieved through self-governance over
the physical, moral, and spiritual aspects of social life. The new enthusiasm for personal
hygiene as the basis of public health drew its energies from the increasing importance
placed upon the newly evolved germ theories, whereby the individual and his or her
immediate environment gained a renewed significance. The WIA and AIWC launched
powerful campaigns for education in hygiene, particularly child and maternal welfare
lessons.
Motherhood became one of the most intensely debated topics that the feminist
agenda was confronted with. Issues such as prenatal care, right food for the mother and
the child, dangers of midwifery that was not modem enough, which tied together
70 Whitehead, Judy. 1996. “Modernising the motherhood archetype: Public health models and the Child
Marriage Restraint Act o f 1929”, in, Patricia Uberoi. Edited. Social reform, Sexuality and the State. New
Delhi: Sage Publications.
71 Bannerji, Himani. 2001. Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism. New
Delhi: Tulika Books.
53
complex issues of class, gender, caste, and nation, were widely debated by the feminists
(Engels 1996).72
72 Engels, Dagmar. 1996. Beyond Purdah: Women in Bengal 1890-1939. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
54
CHAPTER TWO: CULTURAL POLITICS OF TASTE, CONSUMPTION AND
THE BENGALI HINDU DOMESTIC
INTRODUCTION
This chapter explores the cultural formation of urban, Hindu, Bengali middle
class (bhadralok) through a reading of its discourses around consumption and

7T
domesticity in the context of late colonial Bengal. In particular it analyzes the role of a
culture of food and culinary practices in the nationalist self-construction of the middle
class Hindu Bengalis.
Situated within a broader process of cultural self-fashioning, gastronomy became
one of the primary sites for the construction and presentation of the Hindu Bengali
middle class in late colonial India, particularly in its role as the future guardians of an
incipient nation.
A vocabulary around the art and science of food supplied the ingredients that
sought to create a legitimate culture for the Bengali middle class.74 Prescriptions and
proscriptions of particular food items provided the basis for the construction of a moral-
73 The term bhadralok has a number o f meanings, which have been used interchangeably in the literature on
the sociological characteristics o f this social formation. Literally meaning ‘civilized class’, this term
describes the educated middle class especially in the context o f colonial Bengal- signified by terms like
intelligentsia, middle class or the literati. Partha Chatterjee uses the term to mean the principal agents o f
nationalism in colonial Bengal (Chatterjee 1993b). Pradip Sinha analyzes the identities o f the bhadralok as
a social class that appeared at the turn o f the century in the political-cultural horizon o f colonial Bengal.
According to Sinha, the members o f this class were involved in schools, colleges, religious reform
movements, and in mobilizing public opinions. Most importantly the self- perception o f this class was
defined by the idea that society in Bengal was divided between bhadralok (the civilized class) and itarlok
(the uncivilized class) (Sinha 1993: 72-3. See Sinha, Pradeep. 1993. Calcutta: Essays in Urban History
(Calcutta: Firma K. L. M. Pvt. Ltd.).
741 borrow the term from Pierre Bourdieu, who uses ‘legitimate culture’ to define the kind o f cultural and
aesthetic values that are imparted by educational institutions through its curriculum. A certain kind o f
intellectual capital is indispensable for entry into the world o f legitimate culture according to Bourdieu
(Bourdieu 1996: 28).
55
cultural boundary that distinguished the bhadralok from other ‘culturally inferior’ groups
within Bengali society.
The nationalistic aspirations for the construction of identity of this class were in
reality a politics of self-identification based on notions of cultural exclusivity. My
analysis of this process of cultural self-legitimation is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s
understanding of cultural and social reproduction. In analyzing bhadralok discourses
around food, consumption, and culture I contend that the meaning/s of culture needs to be
elaborated not just to imply, “all goods, material and symbolic, without distinction, that
present themselves as rare and worthy of being sought after in a particular social
formation” (Bourdieu 1977:178), but also to signify the orientation, the setting, and the
context in which the “production, circulation, and consumption of the various forms of
cultural and economic capital” (Bourdieu 1996: 6) take place.75
In the first section of this chapter, I outline the historical context in which the
Bengali bhadralok found itself by the early twentieth century. Losing its ascendancy in
certain spheres of public life, most crucially economic, this class became more articulate
of its losses. Its role as a stringent critic of colonial rule was underscored by its desire to
project itself as distinct and superior from certain other social actors, who inhabited the
local urban landscape of colonial Calcutta. What this ideological divide did for the
bhadralok was to create a powerful referent, always present, helping it to consolidate its
intellectual-cultural supremacy at a time that was critical in terms of its material and
political uncertainties.
75 See also, Swartz, David. 1996. “Bridging the study o f culture and religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s political
economy o f symbolic power”, Sociology o f Religion Vol. 57 (Spring).
56
In the first part of the second section, I explore how certain anxieties around
selfhood came to be constructed by an active Bengali print media and how they became
the real grounds for an ideological-cultural re-configuration of the Bengali middle class
self by the first half of the twentieth century. The second part deals with an elaboration
on the cultivation of a culture of food in Bengali periodicals and magazines. In the
context of the nationalistic political climate of early twentieth century Bengal, periodicals
and newspapers in Bengali constituted, “an important space in which the idea of India as
a national community could be imagined and experienced simultaneously by a growing
vernacular readership” (Sarkar 2001: 233).76
The popular print media became an important tool for social critique that actively
debated the critical state of Bengali society and prescribed ways of possible amelioration.
I label these anxieties as discourses on crisis, which were symptomatic and expressive of
a productive phase in the emergence of the Bengali bhadralok as a class and a cultural
formation in late colonial Bengal. This crisis was perceived to have become a powerfully
degenerative force, an undeniable external reality that destroyed the material as well as
moral fabric of Bengali/Indian society.
Crisis was described most crucially not only in terms of heightened anxiety with
the dwindling levels of bodily well-being but also more broadly in relation to the
organization of everyday living. Critiques of such conditions found expression in the
construction of a vocabulary around proper kind of food and taste and more importantly a
proper life.
76 See Sarkar, Mahua. 2001. “The Politics o f (In) visibility in Late Colonial Bengal”, Journal o f Historical
Sociology Vol. 14 (2): 233.
57
In the third section I analyze Bengali middle class sensibilities around food and
health within Bourdieu’s theory of the correlation between class identities and cultural
production. Bourdieu’s theoretical conception of struggles for cultural capital among
social actors is very useful in conceptualizing the cultural-hegemonic aspirations of the
Bengali middle class: In particular his ideas around culture as a powerful agent of social
differentiation is profoundly helpful in understanding social exclusions produced within

• 77
different domains of culture- ranging from literature to food and taste.
Grounding this chapter in a historical-empirical case study of early twentieth
century Bengal, I argue that Bourdieu’s analytical framework leaves two issues relatively
un-explained. First, while his analysis explains the interactions between the social and the
individual, it lacks any explanation as to how such interactions can be conceptualized
differently in different historical moments, for example during times of widespread social
transformation under forces such as colonialism. Second, and in tandem with my
previous point, I argue that in the symbolic struggles around the control of cultural capital
between the dominant and the dominated, Bourdieu leaves no space for an analysis of the
formation of the dominant class itself. That is, the process through which the doxa (the
cultural bedrock of any society) itself gets constituted is relatively unexplained by
Bourdieu. This I argue results from Bourdieu’s analytical framework being over
determined by social reproduction and not social transition.
77 Swartz states that Bourdieu’s increasing popularity in sociology o f culture, particularly in the context o f
his sociological analysis o f nineteenth century artists, writers, consumer and cultural tastes in modem
French society (Swartz 1997).
58
BHADRALOK AND ITS OTHER/S
Bengali bhadralok’s discourses on crisis cannot be abstracted from the particular
socio-economic and political context within which their class found itself embedded in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal have
commented on the “economically decisive decade” of the 1930s (Bose & Jalal 1998).
Labeling it as the depression decade, historians of India have concurred on the extent of
economic hardship- in the wake of the depression and illustrated- “how closely the Indian
economy was tied to the capitalist world economy, and hence how vulnerable Indian
society was to its dramatic downturns” (Ibid. 1998: 146). The Census of 1921 recorded
the economic hardships faced by the middle class as a result of the prices of essential
78
commodities increasing sharply (Baneijee 1997). As some historians working on the
early twentieth century Bengal have commented, “the perception of domestic adversity
was induced, to begin with, by an itemized sense of dearth deriving from war-time
shortage and high prices” (Ibid. 1997: 179).
Historian Joya Chatterjee argued, “The 1940s was a crucial decade in the history
of Bengal, which saw the culmination of the critically important trends that have shaped
Bengal’s destiny in the second half of the twentieth century” (Chatterji 2001: 297).79
According to her, it was since the 1930s that the Hindu bhadralok perceived itself to be
in the midst of a crisis. The reasons cited for the crisis were quite a few. The loss of the
Hindu electoral base in Bengal steadily eroded after 1937, the steady promotion of
78 See Banerjee, Sudeshna. 1997. “Spirituality and Nationalist Domesticity”, The Calcutta Historical
Journal, Vol. 19-20.
79 See Chatterji, Joya. 2001. “The Decline, Revival, and Fall o f Bhadralok Influence in the 1940s: A
Historiographic Review”, in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.) Bengal: Rethinking History. Calcutta: Manohar
Publishers.
59
Muslim interests by the colonial Government of India, a distinct decline of the zamindari
system and its debt-collecting rentier interests, and the war, among others.80
However, the decline of this class as a socio-political process had started much
earlier, becoming apparent in the sensibilities and apprehensions of this class during its
transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. A number of historical accounts
have shown that Calcutta was a thriving colonial city by the middle of the 19th century,
when civic funding and improvements though concentrated in the European parts of the
city, did initiate a number of phenomena, which can be considered as distinct markers of
an industrial-commercial urban scenario.81 The population of Calcutta increased rapidly
in the thirty years between 1891 and 1921 and in 1911 the census recorded the population
figure of 1,718,426. Calcutta was then the only city in India to attain the ‘million mark’.82
The conscious British policy of residential urban segregation changed over time
into dense areas of mixed population. This developed out of the colonial need to conduct
economic activities such as wholesale business and retail trading. A host of economic
80 The Zamindari system was one o f the most important land revenue systems under the British colonial
state. As land revenue was the principal source o f income for the state, a variety o f mechanisms were
created in different parts o f India to achieve this end. In the case o f colonial Bengal, one o f the most
controversial arrangements was the ‘permanent settlement’ o f 1793. According to historian Sugata Bose,
this was a system, “by which a private property right in revenue collection was assigned to the zamindars
(landlord) o f Bengal. The revenue demand from these zamindars was settled in perpetuity; they were
expected to collect rent from the raiyats (peasant) and remit a part o f it as revenue to the state. Lord
Comwalis, the author o f the permanent settlement with the zamindars, also hoped that they would become
improving landlords modeled after the estate holders o f England” (Bose & Jalal 1998: 70). The landed and
literate Hindu groups did well for themselves under the zamindari system during the early nineteenth
century as compradors and collaborators. According to Jaya Chatterji the Depression had a particularly
disastrous impact on Bengal: it led to an erosion o f the zamindari system and severely thwarted the
prospects o f the bhadralok. See Chatterji, Jaya. 2001. “The Decline”, in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.)
Bengal: Rethinking History. New Delhi: Manohar Publications.
81 See Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. Delhi, Oxford University Press; Sinha, Pradeep. 1978.
Calcutta in Urban History. Calcutta: Firma K. L. M. Pvt. Ltd.); and Nair, P. T. 1990. “Civic and Public
Services in Old Calcutta”, in Sukanta Chaudhuri (ed.) Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I. Calcutta:
Oxford University Press.
82 See Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calcutta and Calcuttans: From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma K. L. M.
Pvt. Ltd.; Bagchi, Amiya Kumar. 1990. “Wealth and Work in Calcutta: 1860-1921”, in Sukanta Chaudhuri
(ed.) Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I. Calcutta: Oxford University Press.
60
intermediaries populated these areas of commerce that created slum like conditions
(Biswas 1992). The hectic building activity and land purchase in Calcutta stemmed from
a novel notion of real property, where the valuable items were the bazaar (market) and
bustee (slums).
According to a number of historians, compradors (dewans and banias) played a
crucial role in the growth of an urban scenario where the economic principle was that of
maximizing income from rent. Mixed neighborhoods also developed in some of the
residential areas where members of the uppermost social classes of Calcutta resided in
opulent houses and continued to depend upon a host of socio-economic services from the
slum dwellers (Ibid. 1992). Therefore, by the mid 19th century, the composition of these
slums was characterized by a variety of castes, occupations, and linguistic groups- in
short, a condition of urban heterogeneity, representing a distinct socio-cultural world
comprised of motley of occupational and caste identities. Urgency for purer and firmer
social organizations, which emerged in response to the above-mentioned context, can
easily be deciphered in the upper caste Hindu bhadralok discourses of this time.
Flocking of immigrants was another factor that contributed to urban heterogeneity
in Calcutta. Economic historians have commented that most immigrants who came to
Calcutta during this period made their living from work in trade, industry, transport, and
other services (Bagchi 1990). What was distinct was that despite a large industrial
population, Calcutta under colonial rule witnessed almost a total lack of town planning
leading to a non-separation of residential and industrial zones. Thus problems such as
overcrowding were rampant. According to economist Amiya Bagchi, “it can be said that
the city passed the peak of its manufacturing and administrative functions by 1921,
61
thereafter becoming more a city of traders, moneylenders, professionals, and of course
labourers” (Ibid. 1990: 216).
The population pressure on the city was not met with corresponding levels of
improved civic and public services in the non-European quarters of the city. This was
paradoxical because the population density jumped in the Indian residential
neighborhoods over the years while the European dominated quarters hardly recorded
any population growth. From the 1870s local self-government and representational
politics became a part of municipal administration of Calcutta. Yet in reality, instead of
leading to improvement in civic amenities, local self-government became the site for a
sharper conflict of interest between the resourceful Indians and the European and neither
of the parties was ready to spend money on civic improvements.
The worst affected was the dense network of slums with its abominable level of
civic amenities, which was devastated each year by the wrath of infectious diseases. The
slums were indispensable for the subsistence of the bhadralok because a number of
economic services were provided by the slum dwellers. Yet these ‘spaces’ signified for
the bhadralok, an integrated mass of caste and linguistic groups with no allegiance to
caste boundaries and therefore always a threat to the apparently integrated order of upper
caste Hindu identity.
A reading of the 1911 and 1921 censuses show that Bengali Hindus were
involved in a variety of industrial ownerships, though mostly small-scale printing presses,
oil mills, bakeries, flour mills, rice mills, iron foundries, iron and steel works, and a few
tanneries and leather works (Ibid. 1990). This social base of a modest industrial
62
ownership, according to historians, did get a fillip during the 1905 Swadeshi movement.83
But the impact was short-lived. Moreover, as Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal have noted,
“the growing commercialization of Indian agriculture based on commodity production for
the world market did create some brief periods of boom... But peasants were now
exposed to the vagaries o f the world market as never before. Fits of optimism in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century were followed by disappointments and, finally, in the
late 1890s these were swept away in a spate of devastating famine” (Bose & Jalal 1998:
101).
Therefore, though by the late 19th century, Calcutta was a densely populated
urban center with innumerable socio-economic groupings, the bhadralok as a class did
not fare well economically at least in the upper echelons of economic activities. For
example in business, Marwaris, a linguistic group from the western part of India, and
other North Indian trading groups controlled one of the major sources of commerce- the
jute industries. It is relevant to note how the Marwaris, as real estate urban investors
became more than just economic actors in the eyes of the bhadralok. The loss of its
economic position to this immigrant group in due course of time was translated into an
image about them as an immigrant group with no organic ties with the city of Calcutta.
What such constructions did for the bhadralok was to secure an imaginary and ideal
identity for itself (upper caste Hindu and culturally-morally dominant) though neither
demographically nor economically was it the dominant social actor.
83 The Swadeshi Movement was an outcome o f the Partition o f Bengal in 1905 and continued until 1908. It
had two distinct phases. One was the ‘moderate’ phase that involved press campaigns, petitions and big
meetings. A failure o f such measures led to the adoption o f more ‘extreme’ measures o f boycott o f British
goods etc. The movement had two trends-one, constructive Swadeshi that aimed towards self- help,
national education, village reconstruction, and national industries. The other phase o f political ‘extremism’
was aimed at direct boycott and civil disobedience.
63
In such a context it could not severe it’s real (as well as imaginary) ties from the
village life and rural countryside. Many of the middle class Bengalis were recent
immigrants to the city, who still had families back in the villages (Sarka 1997; Sarkar
2001). They came to Calcutta after the disintegration of the zamindari system and were
working as educated professionals or in clerical and mercantile establishments under the
British. Moored in nostalgia, village life for them became a sign that stood for everything
that the city dwelling bhadralok yearned for.
CONSTRUCTING CRISIS AND LOCATING THE SELF: REPRESENTATION IN

BENGALI PERIODICALS
In 1919, an anonymous writer in a Bengali periodical ruefully commented:
Industrialism has come upon us. But today our country is witnessing only its
destructive side. Construction has yet not begun. Village after village is being
deserted and gradually crumbling down while the cities are swelling. But there is
neither health, nor peace, nor strength in these cities. Moreover there is no
discipline, no bliss, and no happiness.
Echoing a similar sentiment another writer stated,
Some days ago the health officers of Calcutta Corporation published the health
report of Calcutta. Even the most humble office working resident of the city will
gain some awareness reading the report. It is evident that even if one leaves out
the scarcity of wealth, the ills of a fast and changing life, crushing mental anxiety,
84 Quotation has been taken from a prominent Bengali periodical called Swasthya Samachar (News on
Health) that published articles on domesticity, health, and hygiene. Anonymous, Swasthya Samachar
(Calcutta, 1919), 113.
64
moral degeneration, and the lack of healthy food and clean hygienic shelter, one
would easily agree that there is no dearth of disease here.85
In the same journal, yet another contributor wrote,
In this city of Calcutta, from nine in the morning everyday, one can see Bengalis
mostly from the middle classes scurrying towards their respective workplaces. I
have observed for years now how these keranis travel to their offices in crowded
tramcars. They barely thrust some hot rice into their mouths in the morning and
clad in their dhotis or coat pants, these people are forever pleasing their English
O /f
masters by saying “yes sir” and carrying out every order they make.
The quotations above evoke what became some of the most decisively negative
images of a colonial cityscape in Bengal by the first half of the twentieth century. They
also offer a window to some of the pervasive tropes in and through which the Bengali
middle class intelligentsia sought to reckon with the conditions of its own existence.
These quotations explicitly refer to an immanent sense of powerlessness as experienced
by the bhadralok. Articulated through a number of concerns, from an oppressive colonial
rule, an uncontrollable pace of social change that significantly altered the parameters of
quotidian existence, these articulations, most importantly, documented a critical
introspection about the “present” (read: a disjunction with the past that was perceived as a
particularly blissful time characterized both by national glory and fulfillment).87
85 Anonymous, “Kolikatar Swasthya” (The Health o f Calcutta) Swasthya Samachar, Issue 10, No 4
(Calcutta, 1922), 121.
86 Phanindra Krishna Gupta, “Bangali Jatir Sharirik Abanati O Tahar Pratikar” (The Decline o f Health in
Bengalis and its Reform )Swost/iya Samachar, Issue 12, No 2 (Calcutta, 1924), 47.
87 The English word for kerani is clerk. Historically, clerk as a social identity became most visible under
the British colonialism, when a huge network o f colonial administrative offices required the professional
65
Expressions of hopelessness in popular print media during that period has led
some historians to comment that these writings became “unanimous in their description
of a diseased, unproductive morally decaying bhadralok, as well as in their invocation
of a series of self-images which could be best described as “negative and bleak” (Sarkar
2001: 29-30). From magazines to newspapers- a disenchantment with its urban face
signified for the Bengali bhadralok not only the visible markers of a changing city, but
also the less obvious yet powerful ways in which such an undeniable external reality
ultimately destroyed the bodily and moral fabric of Bengali society.
What were some of the anxieties, which occupied the pages of popular Bengali
periodicals and magazines? The dominant emotion expressed in the pages of these
periodicals was that of suffering, hardship, and loss. Suffering was painted as constraints
created by an urban way of life over which the common folk had no more control. These
excerpts were therefore reflections on how the present represented a time of
deterioration- of the body and the mind alike. Dearth of health, wealth, and happiness
were the cumulative results of a reality that was gradually degenerating. Physical distress
resulted mainly from economic hardships. During the crucial post world war years of the
early twentieth century, such a lament was not without a very real basis. The financing of
the war by the British led to widespread economic adversities as mentioned earlier.
Majority of Indians, particularly the salaried professionals and wage earners were
severely hit.
In its representation in the popular press, crisis was both a set of experiential
moments as well as a potential ideological strategy for nationalist self-construction. Crisis
services o f educated Indians. The figure o f the clerk or kerani became quite a target o f public ridicule in its
role as servants o f the British. Insert references.
66
became a visible narrative trope by the second half of the 19th century in the popular
press. As early as 1855, in a Sarbasubhakari (Welfare for All), an article titled, “Can
Subjects be Happy under an alien Sovereign?”, commented:
“[I]t is a truth that however civilized a King-Ruler is, in reality he cannot
guarantee the welfare of all his subjects. Out of his selfish concern for his race, he
will first and foremost be concerned about the welfare of his own
nation.. .Hundreds of our own people in Bengal are leading lives that are the
verge of complete destruction, they are begging from door to door in their
desperation to procure the basic means to survive, what is our government doing
oo
to come to their rescue?”
Sarbasubhakari was dedicated to an explicitly “reformist” agenda oriented towards
debates around social evils such as child marriage. About twenty years later the educated
Bengalis were lamenting the disastrously low standards of living, health, and well-being
for the common man on the pages of Sangbad Prabhakar for instance. Sangbad
Prabhakar (1812-1859) was an important newspaper, publishing articles on religion,
society, and literature besides news items on India and foreign countries. It also played an
important role in creating a strong public opinion against indigo planters in Bengal.89
88 See, Sarbasubhakari (Welfare for All) as quoted in Benoy Ghosh, Samayikpatre Banglar Samajchitra -
A Portrayal o f Bengali Society in Bengali Press (Calcutta, 1980). Sarbasubhakari was first published as a
monthly in August 1850. It was the mouthpiece o f an organization by the same name, which was
established in 1849. The main objective o f this periodical was to debate and discuss various agendas o f
social reform from child marriage to women’s education with support from well-known Bengali reformist
figures like Vidyasagar. Unfortunately the magazine had an interrupted career between 1850 and 1856.
89 Samgbad Prabhakar, 1247 B.S. (1840) was one o f the longest circulated Bengali dailies from 1839 and
recorded details o f the Indian social reform movement until the end o f the 19th century. As a news chapter,
Prabhakar performed an important part in molding public opinion and educate local authorities on matters
o f education, economic, and urban development problems.
67
By the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries there was a definite sense
of crisisIdushshamay that the literate middle class believed to have overtaken their lives.
Invoked through negative images of poverty and disease stricken Bengali bhadralok,
prominent newspapers such as Hindu Patriot lamented the rising cost of food and
dwindling resources of the family’s breadwinner.90 Other reasons for serious concern
were also a sudden escalation in new “artificial” wants- a result of English education and
with it “western” ways of life.91 With the number of educated men rising there was no
parallel emergence of suitable jobs for them, and these educated men neither had capital
to set up trade or experience in agriculture.92
But newspapers such as Hindu Patriot, which represented the interests of the
British Indian Association (a well to-do section of the Bengali society), could not really
mirror the real harsh realities that threatened the lower rungs of the Bengali social milieu
economically. These interests were much better voiced and galvanized by newspapers
such as Sadharani and Amrita Bazar Patrika, which upheld the cause of the petty
professionals working for the colonial state or the numerous commercial

• QT
establishments.
This crisis, both as a real and perceived phenomenon in the popular press, has
been analyzed by historians working on colonial Bengal as part of a broader intellectual
90 Dushshamay translated into English means adverse or bad times.

91 Mary Hancock describes how such disillusionment with the present became a rationale behind the social
and moral reform movement in general in the context o f late colonial India. See Hancock, Mary. 1999.
“Women and Home Science in British India”, in Antoinette Burton (ed.) Gender, Sexuality and Colonial
Modernities. New York: Routledge.
92 Hindu Patriot was one o f the most re-known English news chapters after 1857. Its editor Harish
Mukherji was famous for his fiery editorials on the Indigo issue. For an analysis o f the role o f this
newschapter and some o f its limitation see Chittabrata Palit. 1980. New Viewpoints on Nineteenth Century
Bengal. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers.
93 Sadharani was a weekly published from Chinsurah, a suburb o f Calcutta from 1873. The periodical
offered critiques o f various local bodies and the government. News from rural areas o f Bengal was its
special focus.
68
and political agenda of the Bengali intelligentsia during this period. One line of analysis
has shown how crisis was symptomatic of a deeper challenge that the Bengali
intelligentsia faced in trying to set itself a political agenda while interrogating some of its
“indigenous customs and traditions” along with its “overall colonial connection”. For
example, Tanika Sarkar argues that the complex and apparently irresolvable negotiations
forbid the analysis of Bengal/Indian history in terms of simple binaries- renunciation or
acceptance of colonial rule.
The other line of analysis looks at the narrative trope of crisis to illuminate the
complex identity politics of the Bengali bhadralok. For example, historian of modem
India, Sumit Sarkar comments on the broader impact of print culture that flourished from
the nineteenth century and traces the representation of this politics to demonstrate the
“partially distinct Tower middle class world’, ideal-typically embodied in the declining
traditional rural literati and the city clerk (kerani): a milieu that has been neglected by
historians virtually everywhere” (Sarkar 1997: 191). This educated group of social actors
included “men as well as few women, highly educated professionals as well as petty
clerks, artists, hack writers and theatre persons”.
The engagement with the crisis o f the present became one of the most powerful
narratives that connected the world of popular print, its readers, their lives, and the
possibilities for amelioration. Such amelioration was imagined through a new social
order. In fact Bengali periodicals and newspapers constructed this crisis as much as it
“imagined” a nation and society as ways to move beyond.94 The reflections on the crisis
941 use the word “imagination” in the sense o f Benedict Anderson’s formulation (Anderson 1991).
69
o f the present, therefore, exemplify an introspective though conflicting evaluation of the
middle class self and hence can be termed as a moment of self reflexivity.
While self-reflexivity has been identified with modem selfhood as acts of self-
introspection, in the late colonial Bengal especially in the context of a period punctuated
by overt expressions of nationalist politics, for the educated middle class, this act
remained paradoxically “inward looking”. I argue that though narrow (read: parochial)
this was indeed a formative moment in the self-identification of the Bengali intelligentsia
as it sought to define an exclusive cultural status for itself (in the face of economic and
political bankruptcy) in the acts of the writing narratives of this crisis.
In the following section, I use writings from some of the most popular Bengali
journals of that period- Grihasthamangal (Bliss in the Household); Swasthya (Health);
Bangalakshmi (The Goddess Queen of Bengal); Bigyan Darpan (The Mirror of Science);
and Chikitsha Sammilani (The Unity of Therapies).95 Swasthya Samachar was a well-
known journal on health and medicine, while Grihasthamangal was a monthly guide
journal, which aimed to advise the rural readers on issues of successful farming. Inspired
by the prospects of a self-sufficient agrarian economy, Grihasthamangal also published
articles on domestic science, fiction, and poetry. Swasthya was another landmark
periodical on medicine and public health of late colonial Bengal, while Bangalakshmi
was a monthly journal in Bengali that published writings on women, family, and moral
issues along with biographies of famous women of the time.
95 Grihasthamangal, 1335 b.s. (Bliss in the Household, 1928); Swasthya, 1305 b.s.(Health, 1898);
Bangalakshmi, 1337 b.s. (The Goddess Queen o f Bengal, 1930); Bigyan Darpan, 1289b.s. (The Mirror o f S
Science, 1882) and Chikitsha Sammilani, 1292b.s.(The Unity o f Therapies, 1885).
70
I have chosen a diverse set of periodicals for my analysis in order to highlight the
popular and discursive base of expressions of crisis and to analyze some key issues
centered on it. What was then the nature of engagement that the Bengali print world had
taken up through discussions about crisis? What was the crisis after all? What role did an
active public sphere in the early twentieth century Bengal play in drawing out the
relationship between the world of the Bengali bhadralok and the conditions and
possibilities of its existence?
WITHIN AND BEYOND CRISIS, RECONSTRUCTING THE SELF: TOWARDS A

CULTURE OF TASTE
Anxieties around bodily welfare and vitality became one of the outstanding
concerns within this overwhelming perception of crisis to the extent that crisis became
synonymous with the ailing body of the middle class Bengali. Crisis threatened the very
corporeality and vitality of the body as well as its holiness and completeness. It was not
paradoxical therefore that in the face of post-war economic hardships, the middle class
desired a life of abundance, that could only be realized in the remote and steadily
impoverished (both in space and time) rural world of Bengal.
Mourning the loss of the once thriving village way of life, an author attributed the
doom that had be-fallen the Bengalis to the “urban way of life (nagarik jiban)”:
In the city the sufferings of the bhadralok and the keranis are no less. The number
of clerks who work in the colonial administrative offices, in shops and under
traders, is about 75,719. People from around the city, villages and the suburbs
also come to work and stay in this city. The keranis in their hurry to reach the
workplace, stuff some hot rice into their mouths and work at their desks, their
71
heads down from ten in the morning to six in the evening. Then they come back
home inhaling all the dust and smoke and with heavy hearts. Those who work in
shops and bazaars have to suffer equally. Sitting in cage-like shops the whole
day, haggling with customers, and keeping an eye on business. Amidst the noise
of trams, cars, and buses, poisonous exhalations and impure air-these people
cannot possibly experience the elixir of good life and good health.96
The author writes further:
The other major problem is the shortage of food. It is such a pleasure even today
to think of the village life of Bengal. The granaries were full of paddy; the ponds
were full of fish, fresh vegetables in one’s own farm; milk from one’s own cows;
living was such a bliss in all that abundance. But today one cannot get fresh and
pure milk, ghee or oil even if one pays a high price. Everything that you buy from
the market (bazaar) is adulterated, and the shopkeepers (dokandaar) inevitably
sell impure things.97
Above is a portrayal of the demise of good life in and through a detailed account
o f the everyday material activities that urban living had thrust upon the hapless
bhadralok. The life of the kerani became a symbol of bodily waste and his identity was
completely overtaken by an image of coerced bodies. From scurrying to workplaces,
holding heads down drowned in work, to inhaling dirt and grime, the middle class was
transformed into this everlasting sign of an ailing body. Deterioration in health was
obviously due to lack of good food made inaccessible to the middle class households by
96 Quotation has been taken from Anonymous, “Nagarik Jiban”, in Swasthya Samachar, 1919, 115.
97 Ibid.
72
sky rocketing prices and because of a steady decline in their nutritional standards. The
middle class body was therefore posited within an oppositional set of registers-
abundance, purity, and happiness versus dirt, pollution, scarcity, and misery.
Growing dearth of good quality food was not only a result of a stifling economy;
it was an obvious outcome of profit seeking urban commercialization as well. Alarmed at
poor standards of health among young boys in Bengal, in an article titled “Bangali
Chhatrader Swasthya Gelo Je?' (The Students of Bengal are losing their Health), an
author wrote,
There are two reasons why people fail to go for the right kind of nutritious food.
One is poverty. The other is ignorance. I can say one thing with conviction. In our
country it is not the poor who die without food. It is the rich who die eating the
wrong sorts of food. The people in Calcutta, who go to sweetmeat shops and
restaurants, are not poor. They go either because that is the fashion now, or they
go out of ignorance. Young boys have taken a fancy for chops and cutlets, which
are made out of stale meat or fish. Yet they buy these at high prices. These babus
cannot do without indulging in these harmful habits.. .adulterated and impure

QO
(bhejal) foods were the primary reason for all kinds of dyspeptic ailments.
Adulteration was extensively discussed in the Bengali press of that time. For example,
journals on domestic science such as Bangalakshmi reiterated how adulteration of
everyday articles- oil, rice, flour and sugar had become commonplace. These journals
stressed the fact that it was not poverty but a lack of consciousness that was more
dangerous. Also blamed were corrosion of “existing” practices and the emergence of
98 Shrishachandra Goswami, “Bangali Chhatrader Swasthya Gelo Je?” in Grihasthamangal, 1930, 3-4.
73
“new” practices of sociability driven by a desire for luxuries (Biswas 1992)." A new
food culture around “refreshment” along with widespread complaints of adulteration
became the new menace with a speedy growth in the number of markets and the
mushrooming of eating-places, restaurants, and hotels around the city.100
Concerns over food adulteration, while symptomatic of a wider and more
pervasive frustration with deterioration of the body, was also expressed in relation to the
popularity of new kinds of fast foods, which resonated with potentially new and
unbridled forms of consumption.101 In another article titled, “Khadya Drabye BhejaV'
(Impurities in Food), an author catalogues the items, which were high on the list of food
items regularly adulterated in the city of Calcutta. The Bengal Municipal Act, as early as
1884, had tried to prevent the spread of food adulteration, but it failed miserably. In 1919,
the Bengal Food Adulteration Act was passed, further articulating the provisions taken to
control the menace. In Calcutta, a Special Food Instructor was appointed to examine the
adulteration of food items, particularly milk, oil, sugar, and spices but it still failed (Ray
1998). Regarding milk the author wrote,
It is impossible to get pure milk. The milk sold in the shops of Calcutta is mostly
mixed with water. If you do not watch carefully, the goalas (milkmen) will
99 See Biswas, Oneil. 1992. Calcutta and Calcuttans: From Dihi to Megalopolis. Calcutta: Firma K. L. M.
Pvt. Ltd. He gives an account o f the steady growth in the number o f restaurants in Calcutta from around
the middle o f the nineteenth century.
100 See Ray, Kabita. 1998. History o f Public Health: Colonial Bengal 1921-1947. Calcutta: K P Bagchi &
Company. She discusses the extent and seriousness o f adulteration as a public health menace and the
limited role o f the colonial administration in its attempt to curb it. See also Samaddar, Sivaprasad. 1978.
Calcutta Is. Calcutta: The Corporation o f Calcutta. Samaddar provides a discussion o f the fast growth o f
markets (both municipal and private) in Calcutta between 1874 and 1940.
101 Food and diet were two o f the most important issues that occupied physicians. There was a body o f
dietary prescriptions that emerged around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Books were
extensively written on “dietary science”. To give a few notable examples, see Chandra Kanta Chakrabarty,
Khadya O Swasthya (Food and Heath, 1924); Nibaran Chandra Bhattacharya, Bangalir Khadya O Pushti
(Food and Nutrition for Bengalis, date o f publication); and Bipin Behari Mandal, Swasthya Sakha (A
Companion to One’s Health, 1927).
74
invariably mix water in the milk. For this reason the grihasthas of Calcutta are in
no position to get pure milk.102
Regarding mustard oil, the most popular cooking medium, he opined similarly,
We cook and fry most of our food in this oil. We use pure mustard oil to massage
our bodies too. Good mustard oil is extremely good for cold and cough and for
reducing pains in muscle joints. But it is almost impossible to avail pure mustard
oil in Calcutta today. Even the village Kalus procure oil from the Calcutta mills
but sell them claiming that they have pressed oil in the villages and not in the
city.103
The above quotations are expressive of a connection between traditions of
culinary practices within domestic households, deteriorating standards of marketing of
essential household items, and harmful consequences for one’s well being. Things of
everyday use such as milk became indexes of wholesome domestic life, severely
threatened by economic mismanagement of the colonial state, its administrative
intermediaries, and traders. They also reflect a despising of particular groups of emerging
actors, within the Calcutta urbanscape, such as the goalas (milkmen), the dokandaars
(shopkeepers and small tradesmen), and the kalus (oil pressers), who gradually bore the
brunt of the blame that the Bengali middle class expressed to explain its own misery.
An overall concern with everyday hardships merged with more specific concerns
around dirt and disease, which by the early twentieth century had become a part of the
public health vocabulary. The growing importance of germ theories of disease created a
102 Nisithnath Dhar, “Khadye Drabye Bhejal”, in, Swasthya Samachar (Calcutta, 1914), 234.
103 Ibid. 235. Kalus were a caste group, whose traditional occupation was pressing oil seeds to produce oil.
75
distinct divide between food cooked and sold in the market versus food prepared at home.
An article from the popular medical journal Swasthya stated,
To save your health, one must follow certain rules and today’s sweetmeat shops
do not adhere to any of those rules. The shops are really cramped holding at the
same time too many and too many things. Flour, ghee, and sugar are mixed not
only with water, but water that is polluted with dead insects, flies, and other
germs. It is quite amazing when one wonders how these sweetmeat makers stay
and work in those unhygienic conditions. The Municipality can easily keep such
conditions under check if it wants to. The shops are dark with soot; the floors are
dirty, and full of germs. The ghee that the sweetmeat makers use is of low quality
and fully adulterated. In recent times many dokandaars in Calcutta are being
penalized for selling adulterated foods.104
The quote above not only portrays particular places as lacking in standards of
hygiene and cleanliness, but also people, who are described as people without any
regards for others’ health and purely interested in ulterior economic motives. Therefore
crisis in relation to food and well-being was produced at the intersection of bhadralok’s
perceptions of people and places, what these people and places signified for the
bhadralok was a palpable set of fears and anxieties. These anxieties reinforced particular
social identities (lower caste, class, and religious) which in turn became a shorthand for a
number of dichotomies such as healthy/unhealthy; pure/impure; and or inside/outside—
supplying the concepts and imageries for a Hindu middle class vocabulary around a
prescriptive versus a proscriptive social, cultural, and moral order.
104 Anonymous, “Bajaarer Khabar” (Food from the Market), in Swasthya. (Calcutta, 1901), 175.
76
An anonymous writer in Swasthya Samachar lamented:
Faced with competition from mechanized cotton mills, our weavers have lost their
business and have now shifted to cultivating the lands. Now that exporting rice
has become the most lucrative trade, every farmer wants to cultivate rice only. As
a result, cows have not more meadows left for grazing and growing other
vegetables is no more possible because there are no more empty fields left. The
cows do not get green grass and as a result do not give good milk anymore. Milk
and vegetables are two most crucial protective foods. And moreover the
zamindaars are leaving village homes to stay in Calcutta. There is nobody left in
the villages to carry on production of these essential items. Therefore the high
standards of food are no more available. Earlier, people were also satisfied with
less. Therefore coarse rice and a piece of coarse cloth were all that were needed to
lead a peaceful and happy life.105
Food and taste played an important role in the ideological consolidation of the
fragmented self of the Bengali bhadralok. The discourses on food operated on ideological
and cultural registers to “think about” the crisis that had befallen the bhadralok (Roche
2000).106
The following section explores two issues. First I analyze conceptions of society,
nation, and belonging through “rice”, the single most important item through which the
Bengali culture of food was/is imagined. The second is an exploration of the idea of
105 Anonymous, “Bangladesher Swasthya” (The Health o f Bengal), in Swasthya Samachar (Calcutta, 1935),
42.
106 Roche, Daniel. 2000. A History o f Everyday Things: The Birth o f Consumption in France, 1600-1800.
77
“moderation”, which became the organizing principle around nationalist Bengali culture
of food and consumption.
Mediating between “need” on the one hand and “pleasure” on the other,
moderation in consumption was appropriated as a principle of social and moral
distinction. The popular press produced these ideas and possibilities and thereby
constantly created the ground for the bhadralok to alleviate its immanent sense of
material, physical, and psychological disarray.
In an article, titled, “Bread as World”, Carole Counihan elaborates bread as a lens
for analyzing contemporary social and economic change in the context of Sardinia. She
describes the changing patterns of Sardinian consumption as a discernible process of
individualization that took place with regard to bread - the fundamental item of food,
when actions gradually became more independent of community ties (Counihan 1997).107
James Johnston, who calls bread the “staff of life” in Britain until the twentieth century,
j AO
has also looked at the centrality of bread as a cultural signifier (Johnston 1977). The
purpose of my citing these works is to locate the importance with which certain items of
everyday food occupy a place of immense symbolic and ideological currency at particular
points of time.
Rice and milk were two such fundamental items in the gastronomical ensemble
that made up the discourses on food in late colonial Bengal. A fulfilling and nutritious
conception of meal included rice as well as other items prepared at home. Rice was made
important at the interface of conceptions o f nutrition on the one hand and an allegiance to
107 See Counihan, Carole. 1997. “Bread as World”, in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik edited Food
and Culture. New York: Routledge.
108 See Johnston, James P. 1977. A Hundred Years o f Eating. McGill: Queen’s University Press.
78
the existing gastronomic tradition on the other. But the importance of rice lay not only in
its being the most staple item of food but also in it being a response to a number of socio
economic and political factors. In an article, titled, “Swasthya Samashya” (The Problem
of Health), the author stressed,
For us, the most fundamental items of food are rice and milk. In recent times their
high prices have forced people to the verge of chronic starvation. In the name of
free trade and commerce, we are exporting rice every year, worth ten crores of
rupees- is not it the reason for high prices of food like rice?109
Similarly, in a book titled, Bangalir Khadya O Pushti (1935), author Nibaran Chandra
Bhattacharya wrote,
A strong opposition has developed against the most vital food of the Bengalis-
rice. We have been ordered to give up easily available, moderately priced rice,
which our own country produces and instead survive on flour imported from
foreign countries.110
In the registers of food, rice was also discursively conjured up around the twin concerns
of an urban colonial-commercial economy and an eroding moral economy that
characterized the collective tradition of Bengalis. Sidney Mintz aptly states, “eating
particular foods serve not only as a fulfilling experience, but also as a liberating one - an
added way of making some kind of a declaration. Consumption then is, at the same time a
form of self-identification and of communication” (Mintz 1997: 13).111 Even if not
109 Surendranath Guha, “Swasthya Samashya”, in Swasthya Samachar (Calcutta, 1925). 65.
110 Nibaran Chandra Bhattacharya, Bangalir Khadya O Pushti (The Health and Nutrition o f Bengalis)
(Calcutta, 1935). 15.
111 Mintz, Sidney. 1997. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press.
79
expressed in the explicit vocabulary of resistance and freedom, rice definitely evoked a
sense o f belonging and identification with a lost agrarian past and its pre-
colonial/commercial self-sufficiency.
Rice became a symbol of resistance to the “colonization of taste” as C. A. Bayly
talks about with reference to cloth and its connection to the genealogy of twentieth
119
century swadeshi. In late colonial Bengali middle class discourses on food rice also
became meaningful and desirable in its opposition to wheat. In the Bengali bhadralok
discourses wheat became a synecdoche for a number of non-Bengali communities. These
communities, who based their diet on roti (bread) made from wheat and daal (lentils)
were pejoratively labeled as Hindustanis. Therefore, rice became an index of othering
that had both external (colonial) as well as internal (Indian) referents.
At the heart of defining a Bengali conception of meal in terms of rice as one of
the principal staples was an imagination of Bengalis as a collective people. The imagined
economic and moral geography of Bengalis discursively constructed them as a “poor”
race or ja ti and portrayed them as people who were religious or socially conservative by
nature.
In the context of constructing a Bengali imaginary through these two primordial
characteristics, experts on food and nutrition called for reviewing the principles of food
reform. By the early twentieth century attempts were being made to define the parameters
of food habits along social and religious lines. The political objective of this strategy was
112 Bayly, C. A.1992. “The Origins o f Swadeshi: cloth and Indian society, 1700-1930”, in Arjun Appadurai
(ed.) The Social Life o f Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
80
to instill on the one hand a sense of self-identification, and on the other, a perception of
being different from the other.
As early as 1889, well-known social reformers such as Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay
wrote about food and culinary practices as expressions of deshachar (rituals of the
country or nation or desk) or a way to partake in the cultural project of the nation
11^
(Mukhopadhyay 1889). Explaining how a race lost its distinctive identity when it came
in contact with another people in a relation of domination, he argued, it was imperative
for the subjugated race to uphold its tradition. It should adhere to its earlier practice of
self-sufficiency in food and realize the importance of home grown fruits and vegetables.
A conception of a wholesome catalogue of food was also premised on environmental or
climatic logic. An author categorized foods consumed by countries, which were
temperate versus foods consumed by tropical countries like India.114 Anonymously
another commentator on food wrote, “[i]n warm countries, one can derive nutrition from
the sole consumption of a vegetarian diet. But in colder countries, one needs to eat meat
and fatty foods”. 115
What distinguished bhadralok discourses on food, gastronomy, and particularly a
conception of a “meal” was the idea of moderation, which had implications not so much
with regard to what was included or excluded in each meal but as to how the serving of
the meal was undertaken.116 In late colonial Bengal, the cooking and handling of food had
113 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. 1889. Paribarik Prabandha (Essays on the Household and Family). Calcutta:
Kashinath Press.
114 Anonymous, “Adhunik Swasthya Bigyan” (The Modem Science o f Nutrition), in Chikitsha Sammilani
(Calcutta, 1885), a reputed popular medical journal.
115 Anonymous, “MitachaP’ (Moderation) in Swasthya. (Calcutta, 1901). 78.
116 See discussion on Georg Simmel’s conception o f meal in Johanna Makela’s article (1991) “Defining a
Meal”, in, Elisabeth Furst et al (eds.) Palatable Worlds. Oslo: Solum Forlag. See Jack Goody for an
81
been likened to samskara (the act of handling food as being similar to a religious ritual),
deshachar (ritual of one’s country or nation) or mitachar (ritual or practice in
moderation) by a number of authors. It was urged that cooking or handling of food should
invoke a sense of spiritualism (Mukhopadhyay 1889). To some the importance of food
was stressed as a medium that could establish a balance between the mind and the body
(Bhattacharya 1935).117
The notion of moderation implied not only an appreciation o f the role of food and
a culture of food practices as an indigenous tradition but also its role in making visible
the contours of social differentiation. It is through an appreciation of the idea of
moderation that the middle class nationalist discourses on food incorporated different
registers of social hierarchy into the overarching framework that defined the particular
culture of food in Bengalis. That is how distinctions between the diets of the poor versus
that of the middle class were worked out. While the poor, showed constraint because they
could not afford to have a lavish register of food items it was argued, in the context of the
middle class, moderation was a result of moral deterrence. Nibaranchandra defined the
true purpose of the art of cooking as, “Cooking as an art has to be completed in
moderation. It should be undertaken with the following purposes in mind- it should
promote health, robustness, efficiency, and longevity in a nation” (Ibid. 1935: 98).
Moderation was also commonly translated into the language of the amount of food
analysis o f how food and sociability were linked together in the caste system. Goody, Jack. 1982. Cooking,
Cuisine, and Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
117 Nibaranchandra Bhattacharya, Bangalir Khadya O Pushti (Food and Nutrition o f Bengalis) (Calcutta,
1935).
82
consumption as well as the time that ought to regulate such intake that was permissible
1 1o
for a good life and health.
The discourse on moderation operated through mutually re-enforcing registers
such as ‘tradition’, a frozen Hindu past, eating and cooking as domestic rituals to
propitiate gods or to realize the godliness in every domestic activity. These were
extended into the moral sphere for both personal and collective spiritual reform.
Moderation as an ideological maneuver attempted to relocate the notion of need that was
inherent in any discourse on eating and its effects on bodily and psychological well-being
to religious/divine/cultural domain.
The importance o f moderation as a moral ethic lay in it being able to mediate
between need on the one hand and pleasure/degeneration on the other. The hedonism of
the urban middle class Bengali bhadralok lured away by the new range of food and
snacks, with the vendors and hawkers flooding the streets of the city or being
unrestrained in the consumption of certain kinds of food such as meat or alcohol, was
thereby sought to disciplined by a divine-ideological conception of moderation and
balance.
Jukka Gronow in his article titled “Need, Taste and Pleasure: Understanding food
and consumption” argues that nutrition science in the western modernity was premised on
popularizing the utility of the concept of need. He says, “[njutrition science has been
active in creating a modem consumer, who is able to recognize his needs, and to
rationally satisfy them within the limits of his economic resources. The ideal rational
consumer is also able to recognize his false or artificial needs, and to unerringly interpret
118 Anonymous, “Ahaarer Pariman” (Ideal Level o f Food Consumption), in Swasthya (Calcutta, 1900).
Also see Rameshchandra Ray, “Hindu LokachaP’ (The Rituals o f Hindus), in Swasthya Samachar
(Calcutta, 1925).
83
the needs of his body. He is equally able to avoid the temptation of gluttony” (Gronow
1991: 43). Apart from the problematic assumption of taking the rational man as the ideal
consumer, what such an interpretation does is to locate the conception of need as well as
the actor in a very narrowly individualistic paradigm. The concept of moderation,
expressed in ideas such as deshachar, mitachar, lokachar, the personal food practices of
an individual in the context of colonial Bengal, were also important principles of social
and collective organizing. The moral economy of food and gastronomy therefore had
political implications in so far as restraint or balance could be translated into an ethic of
greater good.
THE POLITICS OF CULTURE AND THE QUESTION OF HISTORICAL

SPECIFICITY
Culture in Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical edifice is a paramount site of struggle
around recognition (or distinction as he used the term). In that struggle, according to
Bourdieu, individuals and groups perpetuate their claims of superiority around cultural
resources, processes, and institutions (Swartz 1996).119 Cultural appropriation, as for
example in relation to taste, and cultural production, as for example in relation to
creativity, are forever caught up in a process of legitimization by the dominant class
(Garnham & Williams 1980).120
The underlying motive behind this on-going struggle for Bourdieu is a basic
human desire to ensure the reproduction of social differences. This chapter explores the
emergence of an educated urban middle class cultural politics in late colonial
119 Swartz, David. 1996. “Bridging the study o f culture and religion: Pierre Bourdieu’s political economy o f
symbolic power”, Sociology o f Religion, Vol. 57 (Spring).
Garnham, Nicholas and Raymond Williams. 1980. “Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology o f Culture: an
Introduction”, Media, Culture, and Society, 2: 209-223.
84
Bengal/India, and is located within this overall theoretical premise. More specifically,
Bengali middle class aspirations in creating a culture of “taste” around food and more
generally consumption were expressions of an urge to define and possess what Bourdieu
has called cultural capital- that sought to equip this class with both cultural status as well
as moral authority to reproduce itself as the most powerful social group at the particular
191
historical conjuncture of late colonial Bengal (Bourdieu 1993). Bourdieu’s theoretical
exposition is helpful in understanding the strategies through which culture became
absolutely central to the self-reproduction of the Bengali bhadralok. 122 I will in particular
explore his concept of habitus to argue that while it is a concept that fundamentally seeks
to explain human action as a strategy and forms an anchor linking the individual to the
social, it lacks an understanding of historical or collective change: By which I mean a
specifically historical and collective state of social, economic, cultural and political
conditions together creating a context within which the formation of a particular class
habitus (or construction of tradition) itself takes place. This I argue is because during the
historical moment that I explore in this chapter, both the middle class as well as its
cultural ensemble was in the process of being formed.
More generally I contend that phases of crisis cannot be explained only as
problems of adjustments of the elements that constitute the already formed class habitus,
but instead they direct us to the question of the conditions under which a class habitus
gets shaped. Moreover, during nation/culture building, the processes behind the
formation of a class habitus do not necessarily correspond to “class” opposition. Rather
121 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field o f Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press.
122 Swartz, David. 1997. Culture and Power: The Sociology o f Pierre Bourdieu. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
85
alterity can be constructed in reference to other identities, such as region, caste, or
religion as well (Dyke 1999).123
The central axis of Bourdieu’s theory of human action is his concept of habitus,
which he defines as,
Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to
function as structuring structures, that is as principles of the generation and
structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated”
and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules,
objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at
ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being
all this, collectively orchestrated without being the production of the orchestrating
action of a conductor (Bourdieu 1977: 72).124
Habitus for him implies the habituated forms of action, which are not guided by
conscious rational calculations but what he calls by a “sense of the game”- an
accumulated set of unconscious perceptions that help human beings to cope with forever
changing situations (Garnham & Williams 1980; Swartz 1997). Therefore habitus for
Bourdieu is the invisible, practical, guiding motor that turns “necessity into virtue” and
the “social or history into nature” (Ibid. 1977). Habitus therefore has the infinite
capability as a body of inbuilt strategies to adjust itself to the functioning of the field.
Only exceptional moments such as crisis can disrupt such fine-tuning according to
Bourdieu. Crisis is a moment when the “habitus can be superseded” by other principles
123 Dyke, Chuck. 1999. Bourdieuean Dynamics: The American Middle Class Self-Constructs”, in Richard
Shusterman (ed.) Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
124 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline o f a Theory o f Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
86
such as overtly rational calculations especially when the financial stakes are high (Swartz
1997).
Therefore crisis is a temporary moment which for Bourdieu is a “necessary
condition for the questioning of doxa but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the
production of a critical discourse” (Bourdieu 1977: 169). It thus implies that the phase of
crisis is relatively short lived, always induced by external forces, and ultimately leading
me
to the internal stabilization of the habitus (Calhoun 1995). What Bourdieu leaves out
then is the endogenous origins of crisis and possibilities for the creation of new critical
discourse/s.
Moreover, at certain moments, ideological production and reproduction, even
while occurring seemingly at different axes, take place temporally at the same time. I
argue that bhadralok representations of crisis as a degenerative moment was not only a
set of objective externalities (economic and political), it was equally a set of anxieties and
fears that this class felt in the face of the wider social transformation in colonial Bengal.
The processes in and through which this crisis was perceived and represented in the
popular press became productive of the bhadralok class habitus. It has to be remembered
that this particular processual nature of the construction of habitus in this case was a part
of the nation-society building project itself.
If “history became nature in habitus” as Bourdieu contends, discourses on crisis
in late colonial Bengal illustrated the creativity with which history/tradition was itself
being produced by the Bengali bhadralok as an ideological cornerstone of its moral-
ideological project.
125 Calhoun, Craig. 1995 Critical Social Theory. New York: Cambridge University Press.
87
In sum therefore, this chapter shows a particular historical conjuncture in the
formation of the Bengali Hindu bhadralok cultural habitus in late colonial Bengal. What
is significant in the emergence of this cultural formation is the set of real and material
conditions that the bhadralok found itself embedded in by the late 19th and early 20th
century. Economically, the Bengali bhadralok, employed either in the petty trades or as
clerks in the colonial administrative professions, was increasingly being marginalized by
emergent and more powerful economic actors like the Marwaris. Politically, though local
self- government gave Bengalis a greater share of political power, the attendant political
leverage was limited because of colonialism and it seldom became accessible to the
ordinary salaried bhadralok. Rapid urbanization, burgeoning population, the wrath of
epidemics like malaria and cholera and dwindling standards of livelihood further pushed
this class into a state of hopelessness and despair.
• • i 'yfy
The social location of the bhadralok can be defined as liminal (Turner 1967). On
the one hand, while it projected itself as the rightful guardians of true Bengali culture, on
the other hand, its own position, as a class was not stable and highly contested and
fraught with contradictions. Therefore, I argue that the reproduction of an authentic
Bengali cultural habitus was taking place co-temporally with the production of the
bhadralok as a stable class category. The bhadralok attempted to secure and reproduce
the real cultural roots (embodied in notions of an adequate, simple and abundant living)
for Bengalis in and through the sign of an idyllic rural life that was moored in nostalgia.
The habitus which itself was in the process of formation, was grounded in an
appropriation of tradition and its elements associated with disappearing rural prosperity.
126 Turner, Victor. 1967. The Forest o f Symbols. Cornell: Cornell University Press.
88
This habitus provided the bhadralok a strategy for social categorization. The desire to be
placed higher on the social hierarchy was justified by the invocation of an immanent
sense of crisis, not only as a lament for the long lost rural past and the associated cultural
richness but also as a powerful and productive social tool for the bhadralok. This habitus
therefore culturally and ideologically redeemed the crisis stricken bhadralok from its
present condition of social marginalization.
89
CHAPTER THREE: HYGIENE AND GENDER IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL
INTRODUCTION
In the late nineteenth the early twentieth century, usually regarded as the high
noon of British imperialism in India, there was an unprecedented wave of publications on
issues of hygiene, health, and medicine in Bengali.127 For example, between 1875 and
1896, the number of books published in Bengali exclusively on health and medicine were
190
close to 472. Popular magazines, journals, books, tracts, and monographs in Bengali,
collectively became a veritable site where a wide array of concerns with regard to health,
hygiene, and therapeutics were debated.129 From public health to personal hygiene, from
food to diet, from motherhood to reproductive health, from childcare to home remedies,
and from care of the sick, to moral ramifications of a clean and sanitized Bengali/Indian
household—‘health’ came to occupy a very important place in the public-intellectual
print culture of late colonial Bengal as well as India.
These publications were a part of a wider ‘popularizing’endeavor, whereby
qualified professionals, petty clerks, literary stalwarts, as well as hack writers reflected on
the ‘unhealthy’ state of the individual as well as the ‘wider body politic’ in Bengal/India,
127 This wave o f publications in Bengali on health and hygiene coincided with a much wider print
phenomenon in different Indian languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil.
128 Source for figure is P.Bose (ed). 1998. Samayiki (Collection o f Essays from Bengali Periodicals 1850-
1901 on Science and Society, Volume I) (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers).
129 B. Roy, in Unish Satake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsabigynan Charcha (The Pursuit o f Medical Science in
Vernacular Language), (Calcutta, 1995) catalogues seventeen journals exclusively on medicine, health, and
hygiene between 1866 and 1899. They are Chikitsak 1273 (The Physician 1866); Chikitsa-Darpan 1273
(The Mirror o f Treatment 1866); Grihastha- Chikitsa 1273 (Household Treatment 1866); Chikitsatatwa
1281 (The Doctrine o f Therapy 1874); Chikitsa Kalpadrum 1285 (The Boon Tree o f Therapeuticsl878);
Chikitsa Sammilani 1291 (The Unity o f Therapeutics 1884); Chikitsa Darshan 1294 (The Philosophy o f
Therapy 1887); Chikitsak 1296 (The Physician 1889); Chikitsa Lahari 1297 (1890); Bhishak Darpan 1297
(The Physician’s Mirror o f Treatmentl890); Homoeopathy Tatwa Prakash 1297 (The Doctrine o f
Homoeopathic Treatment 1890); Ashu Chikitsa Paddhati 1297 (Guide to Emergency Treatmentl890);
Chikitsatatwa O Bigyan Samiran 1300 (Report on Doctrine o f Therapy and Medical Sciencel893);
Chikitsak O Samalochak 1301 (The Physician and the Critic 1894); Medical Intelligentsia 1302 (1895);
Swasthya 1304-08 (Health 1897-1901); Naba Chikitsa Bigyan 1304 (The New Science o f Therapy 1897)
and M edical Journal 1306 (1899).
90
and suggested measures to ‘regenerate’ both (Chatterjee 1995).130 The use of Bengali (or
other Indian languages), in these writings, served two important purposes, while on the
one hand, texts written in Bengali highlighted the pride and importance of pursuing
knowledge in one’s mother tongue, on the other hand, it ensured a wider audience.
Scholars have noted how such an engagement with health and hygiene (along
with other issues such as sexuality and conjugality) in and through vernacular languages
became historically and politically significant as it got intertwined with an aggressive
‘cultural nationalism’ witnessed across India between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries (differences in forms notwithstanding).131 As Tanika Sarkar has aptly
suggested, Hindu nationalism of late colonial India was characterized by the zeal to
preserve domestic practices and customs as emblematic of the ‘Hindu way of life’ where
the ‘private’ or ‘home’ and the ‘nation’ became yoked together, legitimated by the
imperatives of a upper caste Hindu religious-cultural identity formation (Sarkar 2001: 36-
7). The aspirations of an incipient nation were to be made real and possible through
‘reforming’ the processes and practices of the ‘domestic’ or ‘private’, but defined by
codes of a permissible religious-moral culture that was under threat from the polluting
effects o f ‘western/colonial’ rule.132 Formation of the nation, which started at ‘home’,
therefore involved ‘re-thinking’ and ‘re-forming’ of a whole range of practices, from
130 Chatterjee, P. 1995. “The Disciplines in Colonial Bengal”, in P. Chatterjee (ed.) Texts o f Power:
Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press.
131 Whitehead, J. 1996. “Modernising the motherhood archetype: Public Health models and the Child
Marriage Restraint Act o f 1929”, in P. Uberoi (eds.) Social reform, sexuality and the state. New Delhi,
1996; Sarkar, T. 2001. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press; Gupta, C. 2001. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and
the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Delhi: Permanent Black; Lai, M. 2003. “The ignorance o f women is the
house o f illness: gender, nationalism, and health reform in colonial north India”, in M. Sutphen and B.
Andrews (eds.) Medicine and Colonial Identity. New York: Routledge.
132 Sangari, K. and S.Vaid (eds.). 1989. Recasting women: Essays in colonial history. New Delhi: Kali for
Women; Chatterjee, P. 1993b. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton:
Princeton University Press; Chakrabarty, D. 2001. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
91
bodily to moral; and ideas around hygiene, health, and therapy played a crucial role in
securing those ideals within the physical boundaries of the real as well as the
metaphorical ‘home’.
This chapter explores some of the concerns that were articulated at the
intersection of discourses on anti-colonial cultural nationalism and hygienic-sanitary
reform and domesticity within and through Bengali writings on health and hygiene in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that while health and personal
hygiene were distinctly defined through a Hindu ideal of domesticity in late colonial
Bengal/India, domesticity necessarily implied a particular co-existence of physical and
moral cleanliness, virtue and purity, that was attainable only through personal hygiene
and personal bodily reform. It therefore contends that in late colonial Bengal, nationalist-
modemist aspirations for a ‘healthy self conceptually emanated from, and was ultimately
secured within, the boundaries of the household. To that extent, notions of ideal
domesticity became synonymous with notions of health and hygiene.
In the first section of this chapter I provide a critical analysis of some of the more
recent scholarship on the history of medicine in India. I suggest that such scholarship has
largely ignored the productive role of the ‘household’, or the ‘domestic’, as a site to
review Bengali/Indian perceptions and reactions around health and hygiene as these were
disseminated through a network of mutually reinforcing colonial ideologies and
institutions. I also argue that reformist ideologies around domesticity have to be brought
into the heart of chronicles of health, hygiene, and medicine of colonial Bengal/India. In
the second section I analyze three sets of texts, writings by Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay,
Radha Gobinda Kar, and Saratkumari Chaudhurani, to illustrate how domesticity and
92
notions of personal hygiene and sanitary reform were intricately linked in the context of
Bengal between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I also show how a
certain kind of language around hygiene crystallized from the fact that it was developed
in the first and last instance in and through an understanding of domesticity and domestic
space. This will be explored particularly within the context of the development of a
thriving print culture in Bengali in the late colonial period and the state of medical
practice in late colonial Bengal. I end by reiterating the importance of bringing together
notions of hygiene and domesticity together to appreciate the particular cultural
genealogy of sanitary reform in late colonial Bengal.
LEAVING BEHIND THE DOMESTIC?
Recent scholarship on history of medicine has unearthed a complex and multi
layered relationship between colonialism and developments in health and medicine in
India. One of the main concerns addressed in this literature has been the question of
whether and to what extent medicine really became an ‘imperial tool’ marked by a
superiority that characterized the ‘west’ as a people and as a system of knowledge. These
writings have shown that the basic contradiction lay in the conception of medicine that
intrinsically had a humanitarian and philanthropic core and its appropriation as a ‘tool of
empire’.133 Around this fundamental enquiry, a number of specific debates have emerged
in the history/s of medicine in India, as I will show in the following.
Colonial discourses on medicine in India have been typically characterized by
parallels between its humid tropical climate and its proneness to a myriad of diseases,
which in turn were perpetuated by the unsanitary and insalubrious habits of its people,
1331 borrow this term from Daniel Headrick (1988). Headrick, D. 1988. Tools o f Empire: Technology and
European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
93
ignorant in the basic lessons of modem sanitation. It is argued that since the climate and
environment could not be changed colonial rule sought to sanitize and ‘reform’ the ills in
people’s attitude and knowledge.134 Historians of medicine have shown that colonial
agenda around the administration of health and medicine in India was marked by certain
shifts. Initially, health was a matter of colonial pre-occupation only as a means to secure
the health and survival of British troops in India. David Arnold has commented on the
‘enclavist’ nature of medicine that was defined primarily in terms of its efficacy in the
army and jails in colonial India (Arnold 1993).135 It was around the second half of the
nineteenth century that colonial attitudes towards the question of health assumed a more
overtly aggressive imperial stance that sought to make medicine a colonizing discourse
itself. Historians of medicine have shown how this aggressive imperial stance served as
the means for the articulation of power by a ‘racially superior’ sovereign over a ‘racially
inferior’ body of subjects. They have also analyzed how such arrogance was secured in
and through a dense network of colonial medical institutions and professional bodies such
as the Indian Medical Service or the IMS.136
Mark Harrison and Biswamoy Pati have cast a more critical eye to the chronicles
of medicine and health in colonial India. Focusing on the complex and contested
134 Michael Worboys discusses the role o f such imageries playing a very real role in the emergence o f ‘
tropical medicine’ as a medical field towards the end o f the 19th century. Worboys, M. 1976. “The
Emergence o f Tropical Medicine: A Study in the Establishment o f a Scientific Specialty”, in G. Lemaine,
R. Macleod, M. Mulkay and P. Weingart (eds.) Perspectives on the Emergence o f Scientific Disciplines.
The Hague: Aldine. See also Chandavarkar, P. 1992. “Plague panic and epidemic politics in India, 1896-
1914” in T. Ranger and P.Slack (eds.) Epidemics and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press ;
Kumar, A. 1998. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911. New Delhi, Sage;
Kazi, I. 2001. “Environmental Factors Contributing to Malaria in Colonial Bengal”, in D. Kumar (ed.)
Disease and Medicine in India: A Historical Overview. New Delhi, Tulika; Kumar, D. 1997. “Unequal
Contenders, uneven ground: medical encounters in British India, 1820-1920”, in A. Cunningham and B.
Andrews (eds.) Western medicine as contested knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press..
135 Arnold, D. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century
India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
136 Bala,P. 1991. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective (New Delhi: Sage);
Jeffery, R. 1988. The Politics o f Health in India. Berkeley: University o f California Press.
94
negotiations between colonial officials and Indians occupying positions of power in local
government and municipal bodies, they have argued that the exercise of authority over
matters of health priorities and policies were seldom unilateral. Locally, Indians in many
places were in a position to exercise considerable political pressure that could thwart
• 137
some of the colonial agendas around public health and sanitary administration. This
strand of historical research has stressed the conflicting ideological positions represented
by imperial sanitary measures on the one hand and Indian political perspectives opposed
138
to such priorities on the other.
Medicine practiced in colonial India has come under scrutiny from yet another
intellectual perspective. Feminist historians in recent years have brought to fore an area
of investigation that has been completely overlooked in the scholarship on the history/s of
health and medicine in India.139 This critical scholarship shows that the arena of medical
administration under colonialism has been assumed to be a site that was predominantly a
male domain of experts, officials, and administration. Even if women were brought into
such histories as a token, it was more as an answer to the reductive question of whether
medicine in India during the colonial period was becoming more acceptable to Indian
women or not. Feminist historians have, therefore, begun to highlight the crucial role of
137 Harrison, M. 1994. Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914 (New
York: Cambridge University Press); Pati, B. & M. Harrison (eds.). 2001. Health, Medicine and Empire:
Perspectives on Colonial India. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
138 Ray, R. 1979. Urban Roots o f Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict o f Interests in
Calcutta City Politics, 1875-1939. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House. He specifically discusses the
complex politics o f the municipal self-government in Calcutta and the role o f various Bengali/Indian
leaders in the Calcutta Corporation in municipal affairs.
139 In their introduction to the co-edited volume Health, Medicine and Empire,
B. Pati and M. Harrison argue that rather than designating the practice o f health and medicine by colonial
administration in colonies as ‘colonial medicine’, a more appropriate way o f explaining it would be to
define it as ‘medicine in the colonies’ (Pati & Harrison 2001: 23).
95
women and the gendered nature of medical discourses in India.140 They have
deconstructed the racist ideologies of British women (as well as their male counterparts)
and shown how the concerns of British women for the health of their Indian counterparts
that were expressed through the ominous sign of the zenana justified the need for
imperial intervention. They have also chronicled the real life ordeals of Indian female
doctors struggling to secure a foothold in a profession that was distinctly gendered.141
Novel and critical as this recent feminist intervention has been in bringing the role
of women and gender to bear upon the trajectory/s of health and medicine in colonial
India, this engagement is still limited. A more detailed body of work needs to be
undertaken by historians and sociologists to assess the roles of women as well as
ideologies of gender (as they simultaneously interacted with those of race, class, caste,
and religion) in the ‘construction’ of a different and more complicated genealogy/s of
medicine and health in colonial India. I believe one of the reasons this has not happened
is because a rich battery of texts on health and medicine in different Indian regional
languages (the colonial equivalent of ‘vernacular’) is yet to be tapped and analyzed.
History/s of medicine and sanitation in India is still decisively dependant on an archive
140 M. Lai has critically analyzed the politics o f the ‘The Countess o f Dufferin Fund’ and illustrated how
concerns around making medicine available to women were typically the outcome o f colonial imageries,
which described Indian women to be in need o f the blessings o f ‘western’ medicine that could alleviate
their sufferings. M. Lai. 1994. “The Politics o f Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess o f
Dufferin’s Fund, 1885-1888”, Bulletin o f History o f Medicine, 68: 29-66.
141 Meera Kosambi traces the struggles o f Anandibai Joshee, the first Indian woman to go abroad and
qualify as a medical doctor. Kosambi, M. 1997. “Anandibai Joshee: Retrieving a Fragmented Feminist
Image”, Economic and Political Weekly, (7 December): 3189-97. M. Karlekar analyzes the impact o f
debates around women’s education in Bengal to reflect on the educational and professional career o f
Kadambini Ganguly, the first Indian woman doctor. Karlekar, M. 1986. “Kadambini and the Bhadralok:
Early Debates over Women’ Education in Bengal”, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXI (17): 25-31
Geraldine Forbes explores the ways in which imperialism, feminism, and racism worked to marginalize
Indian women in their professional medical careers and also the impact o f this process on women as
patients and clients. Forbes, G. 1994. “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: patterns o f
control”, Women’s History Review, Vol. 3 (4): 515-30. Forbes, G. andT. Raychaudhuri (eds.). 2000. The
Memoirs o f Dr Haimabati Sen: from child widow to lady doctor. New Delhi: Roli Books.
96
that was produced by a colonial state at the exegesis of an imperial project. Then there is
the pivotal question of language - whether and to what extent could English, as a
language, even while it sought to organize a huge colonial archive for the purpose of
governance, bridge the hiatus between the discourse/s of the state and those of the civil
society. In recent years, while historical studies on nationalism or gender history, have
increasingly ventured into the archival terrain of a wide variety of vernacular texts from
popular journals, literary texts, to pedagogic tracts, such intervention has hardly touched
in any serious manner scholarship on history of medicine in the context of colonial
Bengal as well as India.
There are, however, a few exceptions, which have initiated a movement within
history of medicine to include vernacular writings on health, hygiene, and therapeutics as
an archive worthy of critical scholarship. These writings have identified some of the
discourses as well as ‘cultural critiques’ that interaction between existing medical
traditions and ‘western’ medical ideas prompted.142 As I show in this chapter, the
generation of ideas around hygiene and well being were as much a product of cooperation
and contestation between different cultural vocabularies of health and medicine as much
as it was the product of a new politics of culture that found expression in a wide canvas
of vernacular writings.
The other obvious reason behind the invisibilities of women and gender was that
even while for urban educated women in India choosing a career in medicine was
becoming a reality from around the second half of the nineteenth century; it was a
142 Lai, M. 2003. “The ignorance o f women is the house o f illness: gender, nationalism, and health reform
in colonial north India”, in M. Sutphen and B. Andrews (eds.) Medicine and Colonial Identity. New York:
Routledge. Amit Ranjan Basu discusses the role o f Bengali periodicals in the emergence o f psychiatry as a
discipline in colonial India. See Basu, A. R. 2004. “Emergence o f a Marginal Science in a Colonial City:
Reading psychiatry in Bengali periodicals”, The Indian Economic and Social History Review Vol. XLI (2).
97
transition fraught with impediments. Even when medical education was imparted to
women in India, most notably through the Dufferin Fund established in 1885, it was with
a view to have a pool of qualified female ‘hospital assistants’, who could work under
British women physicians or run small district hospitals or dispensaries. As Geraldine
Forbes shows, by 1887 there were just around 150 Indian women enrolled in these
programs (Forbes 1994: 519). For example, in Bengal though the Calcutta Medical
College opened its doors to women students in 1883, the experiences of being a female
student in an aggressively male institution was far from liberating (Ibid. 1994: 520).
Specifically in colonial Bengal, till around the early years of twentieth century the
percentage of Bengali women coming forward to study medicine was still very small
(Borthwick 1984: 323).143
In 1887, the Campbell Medical School and College in Calcutta started admitting
female students but till well into the first half of the twentieth century percentage of
women compared to men was significantly lower. For example, in the Campbell Medical
School between 1923-24, while the number of male students who were taught during the
year, who remained from the previous year and those who were admitted during that
year, taken together, was 675, the corresponding number of female students was only 29.
144 Across India, the total number of Indian women studying L.M.S. (Licentiate in
Medicine and Surgery) in medical colleges was 230 and the number of those studying in
medical schools pursuing L.M.P. (Licensed Medical Practitioner) was 5.145 Between 1932
143 Borthwick, M. 1984. The Changing Role o f Women in Bengal, 1849-1905. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
144 Oriental and India Office (henceforth OIOC) v/24/756. D.i.VII (4). 1923-24, Annual Reports o f the
Medical Schools in Bengal, 1923-24.
145 OIOC v/24/4482, 1929, Forty-fifth Annual Report o f the National Association fo r Supplying Medical
A id by Women to the Women o f India fo r the year 1929.
98
and 33, the figures were 567 males versus 27 women in the Campbell Medical School
and for 77 male students who passed the Licentiate Examination of the State Medical
Faculty of Bengal the corresponding number of females was only 1. In sum, despite the
gradual opening up of medicine as a profession, women were still a marginal presence in
late colonial India. Moreover, even if women were becoming instructed in medicine, they
seldom acquired the status of a ‘medical expert’ in a field that was by definition a man’s
world. To that extent, Indian women physicians or trained medical assistants seldom
authored independent books on medicine or wrote in established medical journals of the
time. Their writings were mostly journalistic, literary, or autobiographical. It is in and
through these writings that women expressed and ‘produced’ discourses on health and
hygiene, even though these writings were largely limited to issues of domesticity.
It is time to re-visit these writings to unearth the ‘domestic’ world of medical and
hygienic practices. They crucially bear testimony to the fact that medical ideas taught at
colonial public institutions, such as medical schools, colleges, hospitals, and dispensaries,
were at the same time a part of a wider cultural discourse/s on the household, kinship,
family, sexuality, conjugality, and maternity. Therefore, practices of hygiene were
inseparable from practices of domesticity. History of medicine has largely defined
reactions of Indians to ‘western’ medical ideas and policies in terms of opposition or
resistance. Such a perspective has left out the non-oppositional yet equally productive
forms of engagement that Indian men and women had with medical ideas and practices.
CLEANLINESS, CARE AND THE MODERN BENGALI DOMESTIC
In 1911, Dr Hari Nath Ghosh, teacher, physician, and an expert in sanitary science
at Campbell Medical School and Hospital, Calcutta wrote a book titled, Swasthya-Tattva
99
(The Elements of Practical Sanitation). This book was approved and prescribed by the
Central Text Book Committee as a text book for the third and fourth standards (grades) in
rural and urban schools. He wrote:
‘Sarirang Byadhi Mandirang ’, that this body is the house of all diseases has been
a common wisdom in the ayurveda shastras. The goal of the sciences of health is
to stop disease from entering this abode.146
He further explained:
The true purpose of education in the sciences of health is to keep your body
healthy and prevent untimely death. Being versed in the ideas of cleanliness and
orderliness is the first and foremost lesson to be learnt. Being attentive to one’s
personal cleanliness and that of one’s household surroundings is absolutely
critical.147
Dr Hari Nath Ghosh was not the only one who emphasized the need for personal
and household sanitation and cleanliness as the pillars of a sanitary ‘science’. A decade
ago Chandra Nath Basu, a legal professional, wrote a commentary on the essentials of
personal and household sanitation called Garhasthya Swasthyabidhi (The Rules of
Domestic Health) a tract, which elaborated on the necessity of regular baths, the
architectural layout of middle class Bengali households, the rightful location of the
‘kitchen’ within the household, and a detailed account of food preparation and dietary
stipulations.148
Hence a vocabulary of hygiene and sanitation that was developed around the
household and personal habits was well in place by the early years of the twentieth
146 H. Ghosh, Swasthya Tattva (Calcutta, 1911), p. 1.

147 Ibid., p.2.
148 C. Basu, Garhasthya Swasthyabidhi (Calcutta, 1899).
100
century, both in Bengal as well as India.149 The lexicon around sanitation and hygiene
achieved a more lucid and easily understandable lay language through the medium of a
wide selection of popular journals and magazines. Maneesha Lai has shown the role
played by one of the popular Hindi women’s journals, Stri Darpan, which regularly
published articles on health, hygiene, and sanitation since its inception in 1909.150
Similarly, Bengali popular journals of that period reiterated that personal hygiene and
sanitation were the orders of the day.151
The definitions of domesticity (in its upper caste nationalist Hindu vocabulary) in
Bengal as well as in other parts of India, therefore, emerged simultaneously with
‘modem’ notions of sanitation and personal hygiene. The domestic was identified as the
space that gave birth to and preserved the highest ideals of personal cleanliness and
order.152 A distinction was drawn between the inside and the outside in physical as well
as ideological terms.153 Moreover, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, the outside implied
‘chaos’ and the household signified everything that was its opposite—cleanliness, health,
and orderliness.154 I further argue that such a dichotomy (inside/outside as clean/dirty)
149 Charu Gupta explores how the development o f a Hindi print culture in colonial north India gave a birth
to a lexicon around domesticity, sexuality, and obscenity as forms o f a predominantly Hindu nationalist
patriarchal culture. Gupta, C. 2002. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu
Public in Colonial India (New York: Routledge).
150 Lai through an analysis o f articles published in Stri Darpan, explores the engagement o f Indian people
with the ideological and practical ramifications o f western medicine (Lai 2003).
151 Popular journals on domestic science, medicine, and economic affairs to give just a few examples
commonly featured articles on hygiene in late colonial Bengal and India.
152 Domesticity as a theme became the subject matter o f a vast range o f didactic texts, published between
1880s and 1920s where the physical space o f the household also at the same time became the moral safe
house for upper caste Hindu nationalists.
153 P. Chatterjee has discussed this separation more in ideological terms as corresponding to a distinction
between the ‘material’ and the ‘spiritual’ domains in nationalist rhetoric. Chatterjee, P. 1989. “Nationalist
resolution o f the women’s question”, in K.Sangari and S.Vaid (eds.) Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial
History. Delhi: Kali for Women. There have been ample criticisms o f this view, where it is argued that in
everyday life, such separations were hard to maintain (Gupta 2002).
154 Chakrabarty, D. 1991. “Open Space/Public Space: Garbage, Modernity and India” South Asia 14 (1):
15-31. Sudipta Kaviraj also makes a similar argument adding further that the public space in Calcutta
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was conceptualized at two levels, one had to do with the demarcation of social space,
between ‘us’ and ‘them’ (them could be Muslims, colonial men and women, or the lower
classes). The other, specifically in the context of colonial cities, had to do with the
demarcation of urban space, which followed a strict distinction between European/native
or healthy/unhealthy logic. The ‘European’ quarters were planned and cleaner than the
‘native’ quarters.155 Therefore the outside as dirty and unhygienic automatically secured
the projection of the inside/household as a space that was clean and hygienic.
In the following I will analyze the interaction between some of the concepts and
ideologies popular in the Bengali domestic lexicon, which became important registers in
charting out the distribution of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘care’ as deep social virtues, the true
essence of which were argued to emanate from and reside within the household. These
idioms became the identifying marks of a ‘culture of hygiene and care’ within Bengali
domestic households, which also became the basis for a critique of the more impersonal
mode of medical care provided in the public medical institutions in colonial Bengal, for
example, in the hospitals. Such a cultural critique of non-household based care always
secured the importance of the household as the domain, which could produce and
maintain ideal standards of health and hygiene.
In the following, I will attempt to ground my basic contention that social and
domestic reform cannot be seen separately from the emerging discourses around health
and hygiene in late colonial Bengal. I cite from three writings to argue that despite
emerged out o f the contest between bourgeois order o f the middle class and those who flout its rules.
Kaviraj, S. 1997. “Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta”, Public
Culture 10(1): 83-113.
155 Late nineteenth century colonial public health records o f Calcutta are full o f exclamations regarding the
difference o f the degree o f cleanliness between the European and the ‘native’ quarters o f the city located
mostly in the northern parts o f the city. OIOC v/25/840/1, April 1885, Calcutta Health Officers ’ Quarterly
Report regarding health o f Calcutta during the first quarter o f 1885.
102
obvious differences in the nature of authorship, these writings were united in highlighting
the role and position of domesticity on hygiene and vice versa. One can discern shifts in
their discourses, representative of a move from the classic nineteenth century social
reformism to a neo-Brahmanic scientific rationalism to the philanthropic social feminism
of early twentieth century.
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay wrote in 1889:
Cleanliness and purity are not the same things—but almost the same. It is not
necessary that the man or woman who is clean and tidy outwardly, is pure and
tidy at heart too. But somebody who is pure and clean at heart is always clean and
tidy on the outside too. Treating all external differences as insignificant and
inferior is a result of not understanding the true essence of our religions. The
world is nothing, the body is nothing, your family and surrounding is nothing—to
be attached to these is a sign of one’s insignificance. But the shastras also uphold
the noble duty of caring for one’s body, one’s home, and all the things, that are
needed in and to beautify one’s home.156
He further added:
A House where the sick is not cared for well, is not a Home at all. It is an abode
where there is less of care and affection and more of self-interest, there is less of
self-sacrifice and more of luxury. Women and men belonging to such a household
156 B. Mukhopadhyay, Paribarik Prabandha (Essays on Family) (Calcutta, 1882), p. 63-64.
103
are easily deflected from the path of true religion, and never become the owners
of a good and higher order of life.157
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, a traditionalist at heart was one of the most visible
intellectual figures of nineteenth century Bengal who espoused doctrines of social and
1SR
national regeneration through personal and domestic reform. Reform for him meant a
progressive elevation of one’s moral standards in the face of a perceived sense of a deep
crisis in the social, moral, and cultural milieu of the nation. Even though he was a staunch
traditionalist, moral for him (though conceptualized within a zealously defined Hindu
cultural-nationalist paradigm) never became an otherworldly spirituality that sought a
reformation of the soul simply by-passing the business of mundane material life. Bhudeb
was a materialist whose ideologies productively brought together Spencerian ideas of
‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘social progress’, where self-development (around
performance of household activities) and social progress were end results of one and the
same process.
His notions of good conduct were grounded principally through an austerity with
regard to both bodily and material discipline. The above excerpts are from his well-
known book, Paribarik Prabandha, (Essays on Family, written in 1882), a collection of
pedagogic writings charting out some of the ideal duties of the Bengali householder
(grihastha or grihi or sansari).159 These words have been widely used in the huge corpus
157 Ibid., p.202.

158 Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay wrote extensively on issues o f family, domesticity, education, and society. B.
Mukhopadhyay, Sikshavidhayak Prastab (Essays on Education) (Chinsura, 1856); Paribarik Prabandha
(Essays on Family) (1882); Samajik Prabandha (Essays on Society) (1892); Vividha Prabandha
(Miscellaneous Essays) (1895); Achar Prabandha (Essays on Social Rituals) (1905).
159 S. Banerjee, comments how the concept o f grihi has been essentially a male householder who could
perform the household duties o f this world and was in a position to secure a moral legitimation in the other
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of didactic literature on nationalist domesticity in the late nineteenth century, where the
family or the household constituted a sphere marked by the supposed spiritual-cultural
superiority of Indians in contrast to their western counterparts. To that extent the griha
implied the physical space of the private household, grihi the householder and grihastha
signified the quality of residence or emotional embeddedness within this domestic space.
Sansar had no one single meaning. It pointed to a conception of the world where one’s
personal being was intimately connected to one’s immediate family, society, community,
as well as the wider world. Therefore the range of duties for human beings extended not
only to one’s mundane and immediate physical and material realm, but also to the wider
order of things. Analyzed within this moral economy, for Bhudeb, there was no
difference between good health and dharma (Basu 2000).150 His intellectual intervention
has to be seen in the context of a ‘neo-Brahmanic world view and a Shastric order’,
where physical and bodily activities became an obviously rational projection of a spiritual
afterlife (Banerjee 1996: 176).
Some of the concepts, which help interpret Bhudeb’s nomenclature around
domesticity, occur not only in the above excerpts but also throughout his other pieces in
Paribarik Prabandha and in his larger oeuvre of work. Cleanliness, purity, home, house,
family, and care were therefore more than concepts for bodily/personal hygiene and
domestic reform. For him they constituted an essential ethical blueprint for social and
national regeneration. Cleanliness and in particular, the twin notions of parishkar and
parichhannata were (and are) two commonly used Bengali words. What is to be noted
here is that these words were (and continue to be) always used together in every day
world. Banerjee, S. 1996. “Spirituality and Nationalist Domesticity: Rereading the Relationship”, The
Calcutta Historical Journal 19-20: 173-204.
160 Basu, S. 2000. Bhudev Mukhopadhyaya and The Indian Tradition (Calcutta: Bibhasa).
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vocabulary. The first word meant clean or the state of cleanliness, the second word meant
tidy or neat or the state o f neatness or tidiness. The Chalantika Adhunik Bangla Bhashar
Abhidhan (Chalantika Modem Bengali Language Dictionary)161 expresses the translation
of the second word into English through a number of synonyms - tidiness, neatness,
purity, honesty, and candor. It is relevant to note that the latter term has an implicit sense
of order built into it. It is more than just a state, which is free of dirt and therefore clean.
It points to a sense of arrangement that could be physical, bodily, or mental. Apart from
the semantic plurality what is interesting in this constellation of distinct but related terms
is not so much an absolute dualism between dirt/filth versus cleanliness, but the overall
cultural-moral logic with which this dualism has been aligned (Douglas 2002).162
The other concept that Bhudeb elucidated was that of sheba or care and that of the
care giver - shebak or shebika. A shift in discourse around care and the caregiver from
Bhudeb to Kar to Chaudhurani is evident, the moral economy of care moved from a
concern around social participation to one that combined care with the notion of rights
and self-responsibility, eloquently articulated by Chaudhurani. Cleanliness and care were
united in a distinct physical, mental, and moral conception o f ‘space’ (physical and
moral) in the Bengali social and cultural imagination around in the early 20th century.
This was as much an outcome of the meanings of new spaces (emergent under
colonialism) as much an already existing understanding of space based on hierarchies of
161 Basu, R. (ed.). 1962. Chalantika Adhunik Bangla Bhashar Abhidhan. Calcutta: Bangla Academy.
162 Douglas, M. 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis o f Concepts o f Pollution and Taboo. New York:
Routledge.
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age and gender, notions of purity versus impurity, and other physical and social
1^
boundaries.
Dr R.G. Kar’s exposition on care was equally tied to his perspectives on
domesticity. In 1897, in his book, Rogee Paricharjya: Being a Handbook of Nursing, he
wrote:
It is not easy to sit at the bedside day after day, night after night, attending the
sick with the right moral judgment and a truly caring and cheerful
involvement.. .only an educated woman can become the ideal nurse.164
Dr Radha Gobinda Kar was a physician as well as a writer. He received his
medical degree (Licentiate Royal College of Physicians or L.R.C.P.) from the University
of Edinburgh. Kar was devoted to the cause of broadening the expertise of young Bengali
medical doctors in the tenets of western pharmacopoeia, by translating English medical
texts into Bengali. He also sought to popularize medical knowledge for the wider
population by writing books on medicine in Bengali.165 Rogee Paricharjya was first
written for students of Calcutta Medical School and later a new edition was printed for
professional nurses not trained in the government medical institutions.166 A long list of
medical books is credited to him, including Bhishak Suhrid or the physician’s vade
mecum (1880), Dhatri Sahachar or A Companion to Midwifery (1893), Bhaisajya
163 Veena Das provides a rich analysis o f how notions o f purity and impurity have been articulated in Hindu
caste rituals specifically as exposited in the Grihya Sutras. This study provides an understanding o f some o f
the ritual practices in the domestic set up o f Hindu families and how they were negotiated in changing
historical contexts. Das, V. 2000. Structure and Cognition: Aspects o f Hindu Caste and Ritual. Delhi:
164 R. G. Kar, Rogee Paricharjya (Calcutta 1897), p. 20.
165 B. Roy, Unish Satake, p. 44, 47.
166 Ibid,, p.47.
107
Ratnabali or The Gems of Medicine (1896), and Plague (1898) among others.167 Trained
in British medical tradition, his intellectual pedagogy combined the pursuit of western
clinical medicine with that of the Indian ayurvedic tradition. His efforts led to the
establishment of the first non-governmental private hospital in Calcutta in 1916. It was
named Belgachhia Medical College and was inaugurated by the governor of Bengal, Lord
Carmichael. Later in 1919, its name was changed to Carmichael Medical College and
1AS
after independence the name was further changed to R.G. Kar Medical College.
By the end of nineteenth century nursing was becoming a profession and
physicians such as Kar considered nursing to be an indispensable part of the practice of
medicine.169 In the preface to the book he commented,
Every medical man in this country will admit that want of proper nursing
interferes with a cure in many cases of illness. With the object therefore, of
helping both professional nurses and lay people these pages are presented before
the public. 170
For Kar the tough physical and moral demands, which became incumbent on the
process of caring for the sick made it difficult to be left in the hands of the untrained.
While for Bhudeb, caring for the sick was synonymous with a good household that was
defined by principles of Hindu spirituality, for Kar, caring for the sick was a
responsibility that became a specialized activity within the broader realm of domestic
duties. Kar further wrote:
167 Ibid., p. 47, 85, and 87.

168 Mukhopadhyay, J. 1999. Banga Abhidhan. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers.
169 For Kar, instead o f shebik or shebika, a nurse was to be titled as Dhai or Dhatri. Kar. ibid., p. 2-3.
170 R.G. Kar, Rogee Paricharjya, Preface.
108
The bed of the sick man should ideally be situated in a way so that the nurse can
move around the bed and reach the patient from all sides. Nursing for the sick is
the most important art of medicine.171
Kar defined caring for the sick as an art that required training but for Bhudeb it
was much more an attitude that was a natural quality of a person with the right spiritual
morality and compassion. He described both the nurse or dhatri and the physician as
soldiers, waging a war against a ‘particular disease’. She was at the same time the
mediator between the sick and the physician. But for him the physician remained the
1TJ
commander-in-chief of the army while the nurse was the soldier who ‘did’ the fighting.
Therefore for him, the dhatri was to be duly informed in the logistics of war. The
qualities of an ideal nurse were sound work ethic, skill, patience and endurance, ability to
judge, and discipline. In Kar’s writings, nursing was ‘feminized’, in several ways. It was
an activity that was a product of training, but at the same time, it was based on the
i •j'y
emotional and naturally empathetic dispositions of a woman. Further, nursing was to
be a home based service. Caring as a naturalized feminine activity was made synonymous
with the naturalized space of the household as the ideal place for true recovery and well
being.
The activities Kar listed as indispensable for nursing was all described within the
purview of the Bengali household. His entire articulation of concepts and practices of
nursing made no mention of hospitals as spaces for care. Nursing as an order of activities
171 Ibid., p.25.

172 Kar ibid., p. 5.
173 Charles Rosenberg explores the feminization o f nursing in the context o f early 20th century United
States, and shows how it led to reforms in the profession o f nursing. Despite nursing becoming a proper
profession, by the 1920s it had reached a critical point when there was an overabundance in the number o f
nurses but a small percentage was called for home nursing, as hospitals became the center o f medical
activity. Rosenberg, C. E. 1987. The Care o f Strangers: The Rise o f Am erica’s Hospital System. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Press.
109
was attendant on an order of vigilance and care that could be secured only within the
domain of the domestic.174
In contrast to these two male figures of the Bengali reformist, nationalist,
intellectual sphere, Saratkumari Chaudhurani and her writings offered a perspective to
another world, which was just beginning to change but slowly by the early twentieth
century in India - the increasing visibility of middle class educated women as public
17S
actors. She was one of the earliest literary figures of Bengal, who wrote extensively in
Bengali but used a pseudonym throughout her literary career. Bom in 1861 in Lahore,
Chaudhurani started education at the age of six in an European School. Both she and her
husband, Akshaychandra Chaudhuri, were ardent literary enthusiasts who were actively
engaged in the editorial activities of Bharati, one of the most famous literary magazines
of 19th and early 20th century Bengal. She wrote primarily for Bengali magazines and
journals and only one of her writings was published as a book that was titled, Shubha
Bibaha.176
Her journalistic and literary writings were considered by many as subtle yet
powerful portrayals of the ways in which women internalized and reproduced masculinist
ideologies. She wrote on women’s issues, which were published in Bharati. Though not a
feminist by today’s definitions, her short stories and essays on women’s education,
women’s social work, domesticity, and political rights written in a straightforward and
focused style, can be read as representative of the social feminism of the early 20th
century. For my analysis I focus on her writings (originally written between 1900-1920),
174 Kar ibid., p. 22-25.

175 Basu, A. and B. Ray (eds.). 1990. Women's Struggle: A History o f the All India Women’s Conference
1927-1990. Delhi: Manohar Publications.
176 Mody, R. (ed.). 1999. A Quest fo r Roots. Calcutta: Stree Sakti.
110
which have been published as an edited volume, titled, Saratkumari Chaudhurani
i nn
Rachanabali and the Collected Works of Saratkumari Chaudhurani, published in 2000.
She wrote:
To realize the worth of keeping oneself and one’s home clean, one need not to go
to school. Women can themselves arrange for such cleanliness inside their own
homes. It is not because we do not have enough time or because we are poor, but
178
because we have not realized the value of cleanliness.
She argued that such a scenario had emerged as a result of the new household
demands on women because of a faster pace of urban life in the late colonial Bengal. The
domestic schedule was then determined by the work time for men and school time for
children. She attributed this responsibility to women of the household:
There is no doubt that keeping home clean and tidy, render it free of dirt and
disorder, is only possible by the supreme wifely virtues of the true woman. If all
Hindu women are given proper education, I believe they can go out into the world
and work, as much as run a household in the most efficient and peaceful manner.
This is the rule of the hour.. .if women learn the ideals of personal hygiene she
can inculcate those habits in her children as well. 179
Chaudhurani was by no means the only one, who reiterated the centrality of the
domestic as the true abode of health and hygiene and the woman as the agent of
cleanliness,both physical and moral. Her personal values have to be seen in the context of
a broader struggle in the fields of child and maternity welfare and concerns with
177 Bandyopadhyay, B. & S. Das (eds.). 2000. Saratkumari Chaudhurani Rachanabali. Calcutta: Bangiya
Sahitya Parishat.
178 Ibid., p. 274.
179 Ibid., p. 270.
I ll
preventive medicine in the late colonial Bengal/India. The Women’s Indian Association
(WIA) and the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC) were undertaking programs to
spread the message of elementary principles of sanitation, hygiene, and childcare within
the context of women’s rights in the early 20th century (Basu & Ray 1990: 80-82).
Both Kar and Chaudhurani waxed eloquence on the exclusive qualities of women
to be supreme in the management of a clean household and caring for the infirm. To that
extent both treated caring as a feminized virtue. They differed in one sense though. For
Chaudhurani, a woman’s orientation towards domestic cleanliness was a part of a deeper
wifely duty, a primordial disposition. So much so that she said, ‘[i]f you enter a
household, in one glance you can understand how good and able the woman of the
household is’ (Bandyopadhyay & Das 2000: 277). Yet, she elaborated this mastery in the
context of a new set of liberties and choices, which the ‘new woman’ deserved. She
emphasized that self care and care for others occupied the same high moral ground and it
• 180
was important for women not to remain too uncaring toward themselves. For Kar, a
woman was the best caregiver, but care had to be informed. If such knowledge was
absent, it had to be acquired. Care referred to a skilled yet gendered realm of ‘expertise’.
One can see a relational functioning of a number of elements in Kar’s writings - remedial
aspects of nursing, place that offered a full and uninterrupted possibility of such care - the
household, and the figure of a duly trained nurse. Yet, Kar’s dhatri (the nurse or
caregiver) was Chaudhurani’s sugrihini (the perfect housewife), united by her specialized
knowledge in care giving. Therefore ‘caring’ both as a profession and as an intrinsic
180 Carol Gilligan powerfully explores the contradictions that women face in charting a moral position for
themselves between individual rights and social responsibilities. Gilligan, C. 1982. In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
112
calling was always carried out in a field of changing relationships and social values that
ultimately defined the order of domesticity.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have explored the history of two ideas that have been integral to
the practice of medicine and hygiene - ‘cleanliness’ and ‘care’ - and analyzed how these
were articulated in the domain of the domestic, which became culturally meaningful in
the context of late colonial Bengal. I have argued that shifts in the meanings of these
medical concepts, which also exemplified particular ideologies, were strongly connected
to the shifts in the discourses around domesticity and social reform. Through an analysis
of the writings o f Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay, Radha Gobinda Kar, and Saratkumari
Chaudhurani, I have shown the commonalities as well as divergences in the way their
concerns around health and hygiene were articulated in and through a broader discourse
on domesticity and reform.
For Bhudeb, as I have shown, bodily well-being was inseparable from domestic
well-being, which was for him an index of social and national participation. For Kar,
caring and hygiene moved to a realm of learnt knowledge that required specialized
expertise. ‘Feminization of nursing’, for him was tied to discourses on ‘domestication of
care’. Chaudhurani’s commentary illustrated the contradictions that a changing socio
economic scenario brought about in the lives of early 20th century Bengali women and
the increased burden of responsibility that such a shift entailed. For her, an economy of
care had to sort out the ambivalence between responsibility and new desires. Excavating
the discourses on social reform, medicine, and social feminism, I have illustrated the
113
enduring links that health, personal and social have had with ideologies of domesticity
despite its changing forms.
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CHAPTER FOUR: HEALTH AND HYGIENE IN THE MARKETPLACE
This chapter explores the development of a medical marketplace and patterns of
medical consumerism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Bengal/India. More
specifically, through an analysis of advertisements (primarily from newspapers but also
from some popular women’s journals as well as a few well-known medical journals) for
medical and hygienic products, it will investigate: (1) commodification of medical and
hygienic ideologies in late colonial India, (2) medical ‘pluralism’ that characterized the
domain of medical marketplace in India, (3) gendered nature of this new commodity
consciousness, and (4) linkages between ideologies and practices of different institutions
and socio-political structures, which defined medical consumerism in Bengal/India
during this period.
In relation to these issues this chapter will explore following key questions: What
was the role of medical advertising in chronicles of history of medicine in Bengal/India?
Can a study of medical advertisements lead us to a new trajectory of history of sanitary
reform and preventive medicine in the context of colonial India? To what extent can an
understanding of medical marketplace in India offer a new understanding of concepts
such as ‘hygiene’ and ‘cure’ that remain central to discourses on preventive medicine?
What was the relationship between colonialism, nationalism, and the accompanying
broad set of social, economic, and political changes and development of medical
marketplace? And how was domesticity, both as a fundamental strategy of
advertisements as well as its main target, used to create a new class of consumers among
women?
115
In the first section, I analyze sociological and historical scholarship on the
relationship between advertising and commodity culture. In the second section I describe
the medical advertisements, their nature, the products they represented as well as created,
the common places of their publication, and the shifts which occurred between late years
of the 19th century and early years of the 20th century in colonial Bengal. In the third
section I show how: (a) these advertisements constitute what can be described as
“consumption routines” as opposed to spectacular consumption or consumption that is
necessarily a signature of resistance or subversion, and (b) these advertisements in India,
unlike their “western” counterparts did not have a religious connotation. Moreover,
household or domesticity was dominant trope of these advertisements. Through an
analysis of these advertisements I explore the phenomenon of ‘pluralism’ in the medical
marketplace in the context of late colonial Bengal and India.
ADVERTISING AND COMMODITY CULTURE
There is a large body of scholarship that has sought to explicate different facets of
consumption and consumer societies and their relationship to modernization and
modernity. I will briefly review this body of literature so as to present my broader
argument.181 Consumer culture, at a very basic level, is identified with the continuous
process of self-creation through accessibility of things, which are themselves presented as
new and always improving. According to many scholars the 1920s marked the first
decade of a generalized ideology of affluence, at least in the sense that it encouraged a
powerful link between everyday consumption and modernization. Consumption became
181 There is a rich body o f sociological and anthropological literature on consumption. See Baudrillard
(1968, 1970, 1975), Sahlins (1976), Douglas and Isherwood (1979), Bourdieu (1984), Appadurai (1986),
McCracken (1988), Simmel (1904), and Veblen (1894, 1912). Another order o f writings is by Adorno and
Horkheimer (1974), Walter Benjamin (1989), and Michel de Certeau (1984).
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the guide to be modem (Even 1976).182 Sociologists like Don Slater trace the origins of
consumerism much earlier, in the 1880s. During the period between 1880 and 1930,
according to Slater, “a modem norm emerges concerning how consumer goods are to be
produced, sold and assimilated into everyday life” (Slater 1997).183 Raymond Williams
argues that emergence of commodity experience as a spectacle rather than mass
production, marked the birth of consumer culture (Edwards 2000).184
Consumer society has been analyzed in terms of three fundamental and
interlinked characteristics. First is the perception of consumer society as a profit driven
capitalist society, particularly by Marxist theorists. Second, is the view that consumer
society is utilitarian as it consists of individuals who practice consumerism. This view is
espoused in most theories of advertising and marketing. The third view is that consumer
society is basically a dense and shifting universe of “signs” and “meanings”, where
consumerism is strongly connected to identity formation. This is the position of cultural
historians and cultural sociologists (see for example Williams 1982).185 Some of the
characteristics that sociologists such as Slater have attributed to modem consumer culture
are: (a) it is the culture of a market society, (b) it is in principle universal and impersonal,
(c) it identifies freedom with private choice and private life, (d) consumer needs are in
principle unlimited and insatiable; e) it is the privileged medium for negotiating identity
and status within a post-traditional society and f) that consumer culture plays increasing
role in the modem exercise of power (Slater 1997).
182 Ewen, S. 1976. Captains o f Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots o f Consumer Culture. New
York: McGraw Hill.
183 Slater, Don. 1997. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
184 Edwards, Tim. 2000. Contradictions o f Consumption: concepts, practices and politics in consumer
society. Buckingham: Open University Press.
185 Williams, Raymond. 1982. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late C l9th France. Berkeley:
University o f California Press.
117
A fundamental contention of all theories of consumption is that consumers and
their relationship with commodities are framed as messages vis-a-vis the social world.
Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood contend that goods act like a code or language and
as a means of making social behavior intelligible. According to them, it is “to make
visible and stable the categories of culture” (Douglas & Isherwood 1978: 61).186 They
further argue that consumers use commodities to construct an understandable world and
to establish and maintain social relations. According to them, commodity assumes a
variety of meanings and significations according to contexts of its use and cultural
competence of its users. Such a claim is premised on an assumption that commodities and
broader material culture are central to human identity and our notion of the self. Material
objects are an integral part of individual and collective biographies and their histories.187
Jean Baudrillard like Douglas and Isherwood does not attribute the origin of
“needs” to individuals, which are then satisfied through good and commodities. In
contrast to Douglas and Isherwood he argues that the individual is never enough to
understand consumption in the present day. For him needs are created within a “system
of objects” that is produced by and circulated by advertising and marketing. For him,
consumption is a logical next step in capitalism. The main difference between Douglas
and Isherwood and Baudrillard is that for the former the source of social power “is an
autonomous mode of cultural action”, while for the latter, “the delineation of structures of
social meaning is seen to originate from external agencies such advertising and media”
186 Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. 1978. The World o f Goods. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Page 61
187 Many critics o f theories o f consumption have argued that this perspective suffers too much from a
functional reasoning. Structuralism sought to rectify the limitations o f functionalism by arguing that no
symbolic order is a purely neutral, waiting to be materialized in speech and culture by conscious human
agents. According to structuralists, it is the process o f signification itself that create meanings (Lee 1993).
Lee, Martyn J. 1993. Consumer Culture Reborn: The cultural politics o f consumption. London: Routledge.
118
(Lee 1993: 29).188Nevertheless Douglas and Isherwood and Baudrillard are united in
arguing that the purpose of goods and commodities is to communicate (Corrigan 1997).189
Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu, on the other hand, explicate how distinction is in
fact constructed and communicated. Veblen has been credited as a pioneer of
consumption studies.
Made famous through his work of the relation between class and consumerism,
titled, The Theory o f the Leisure Class (1899, 1934), Veblen provides a social criticism of
consumerist patterns of the middle or what he calls the “leisure” classes. For him,
“conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman
of leisure” (Veblen 2000: 191).190 He further writes, “in order to avoid stultification he
[leisure class individual] must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on
him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable
goods. He becomes a connosoisseur in creditable viands of various degrees of merit, in
manly beverages and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games,
dancers, and the narcotics” (ibid. 190).191
Veblen argues that as society increases in affluence, through the advance of
technology and mass production, there emerges a leisure class, for whom consumption is
more than simple satisfaction of needs. Consumption becomes an index of social
distinction. Conspicuous consumption becomes visible expression of monetary excess
and strength of this class. Located broadly within the Veblenian tradition, Bourdieu’s
work has been a sophisticated exploration of the relationship between class, consumption,
188 Lee, Martyn J. Page 29.

189 Corrigan, Peter. 1997. The Sociology o f Consumption. London: Sage.
190 Veblen, Thomstein. 1899. “Conspicuous Consumption”, in Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt edited.
2000. The Consumer Society Reader. New York: The New Press. Page 191.
191 Ibid. Page 190.
119
and cultivation of taste (see Bourdieu 1984). Bourdieu argues that human actors are
neither slaves of external and fully socializing social structures nor fully free to choose
any path of action. In his book, Distinction, he describes various forms of capital and how
they work in social fields of consumption.
Bourdieu’s fundamental contribution is in outlining interrelated concepts of
different forms of capital: Economic capital (financial resources), social capital
(organizational affiliations, and networks) are contrasted with cultural capital (taste,
knowledge), which is a set of distinctive social skills (Bourdieu 1984).192 Cultural capital
usually is invested in practical knowledge and skills, or in objects, or in institutionalized
official degrees or diplomas. This capital is encouraged and fostered in the social milieu
of cultural elites. According to Bourdieu, consumption is not at par with other forms of
social identification, as for example, those forged through work or religion and politics.
To this end, Bourdieu distinguishes notion of “taste” and makes it the basis of a distinct
mode of social reproduction. Economic capital is exhibited through consumption of
goods of material scarcity and cultural capital through accumulation and appropriation of
aesthetic and interactional styles that align with cultural elite’s sensibilities (Bourdieu
1988).193
There is another line of debate, which explores relationship between modernity
and consumerism and cultivation of a particular self through such a process.
Consumerism, in this line of debate, is commonly identified with advent of mass culture,
which as a poor substitute of pristine cultural purity and authenticity of pre-industrial
192 Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: Social Critique o f the Judgment o f Taste. Harvard: Harvard
University Press.
193 Otnes, Per. Edited. 1988. The Sociology o f Consumption: An Anthology. New Jersey: Humanities Press
International.
120
societies that was the ultimate guarantee of a true and unadulterated self. Hence, in this
case, culture and consumption are posited as an opposition. De-regulation of desire is
linked to fostering of image and powers of unfettered human individual, who could
exercise any amount of choice in and through consumption. Consumption therefore broke
cultural framework of a society that was also its moral framework.
Culture is equated with a set of substantive values, in and through which the
society represents and reproduces itself. Proponents of this view of culture are of the
view that culture should govern higher values of life, values which in turn should be the
basis of everyday life as well as the material order. Hence culture is argued to a social
ideal promoting the self and the community. Romanticism like the ideal of culture is used
to address cultural deficits of modernity and to call for the development of an organic
being. Yet at the same time, this epistemology according to Don Slater has a
contradictory relationship with modernity. On the one hand, while romanticism critiques
modem consumerism, on the other hand, consumer culture is seen to promise those
values, which are destroyed by civilization (Slater 1997).
According to sociologist Colin Campbell (1989), this is most evident in
advertising (Campbell 1987).194 For Campbell, it is not only hard rational, individual
choice that is driving ethic behind consumerism. Consumerism is about collective values,
desires, and social identity as much as about individual choice. For him, modem
consumerist hedonism is not about satisfaction of need, but pursuit of pleasure for its own
sake. Campbell traces this outlook back to a “romantic ethic”. This romantic ethic co
existed with the Protestant ethic of self control. According to Campbell, the “Other
194 Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit o f M odem Consumerism. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
121
Protestant Ethic” in different ways shaped evangelical, romantic, and liberal religious
traditions down to the present. It was incorporated into secular cultural forms (Lears
1995).195
As Campbell argues, it helped eroticize Anglo-American attitudes toward
consumption. According to Lears, “the Other Protestant Ethic introduced the possibility
of a psychological experience of abundance.. .Mystic dreams of spontaneously flowing
spiritual abundance were translated into secular language of the marketplace. Religion
and commerce combined to redefine abundance in psychic rather than physical terms.
Undermining elite injunctions about frugality and self control, the Other Protestant Ethic
helped shaped the dynamic of deprivation and desire that lay at the heart of the
developing commercial culture. Originating in the eighteenth century, the cult of
sensibility became romanticized, democratized, and gendered in the nineteenth century,
as women were assigned sole proprietorship of sentiment. This division of cultural labor
reinforced the tendency to link femininity and consumption” (Lears 1995: 49).196
These analyses of commodity and consumer culture are more broadly focused and
medical market place is not directly discussed in them. Medical Fringe and Medical
Orthodoxy, 1750-1850, an edited volume that was published in 1987, was an important
step towards mapping of relations between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ medicines in
particular historical contexts (Bynum & Porter 1987).197 These case studies in the context
of Europe and America have explored how ‘medical orthodoxies’ and ‘medical fringes’
were contested in the process of creation of a medical-public sphere. In the past fifteen
195Lears, Jackson. 1995. Fables o f Abundance: A Cultural History o f Advertising in American. New York:
Basic Books.
196 Ibid. Page 49.
197 Bynum, W.F. and Roy Porter. Edited. 1987. Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1750-1850.
London: Croom Helm.
122
years, the terms of the debate have changed and validity of narrow dualisms such as
orthodoxy versus fringe or mainstream versus alternative/subaltern has been increasingly
questioned. For example, the essays in Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-
2000 which belong to this new genre of research, consider it imperative to look into
parallel histories of medicine and their interaction in a much more “plural” and yet
power-laden field (Ernst 2002).198
The domain of medical-hygienic-therapeutic advertisements constitutes one of the
most productive sites to explore negotiations of a host of material as well as
epistemological issues that were crucial in charting out contours of medical practice in
late colonial India between the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. While semantically
dense and culturally meaningful in their own accord, in colonial India, these
advertisements were also a part of a broader milieu that bridged political practices of the
state, the household and the civil-public sphere.
In recent years, scholarship in history of medicine in India has excavated a
complex genealogy of health and medicine at the intersection of forces such as
colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism. However, what has remained unexamined is
the way in which medical ideologies were targeted at individual and collective bodies.
Moreover, trajectory/s of personal hygiene and preventive medicine in the history of
medicine in India has remained relatively untouched. I contend that medical marketplace
had a mutually productive relationship to the Indian household. Culturally new forms of
domestic consumption were being charted out by the medical marketplace, which at the
same time were being formed by these new imperatives, created at the level of the
198
Ernst, Waltraud. Edited. 2002. Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000. London:
Routledge.
123
domestic. Moreover, the medical marketplace was closely linked to broader socio
economic and political processes and reflected a coming together of a plurality of
medical ideologies and practices.
Focusing on this period becomes historically significant because while on one
hand, this was the phase of sanitary reform and preventive medicine in India, defined by
principles of control and surveillance, coincidentally this was also the time that witnessed
an unprecedented growth of the medical marketplace based on a principle of open
competition. Anil Kumar argues, pharmacology did not take off until the early 20th
century as a result of the sustained ‘drug import’ policy of the British. In the absence of a
th tli
modem drug industry, in the years between the late 19 and early 20 centuries, there
was a thriving universe of ‘bazaar drugs’ that created the Indian medical marketplace
(Kumar 1998).1"
James Harvey Young in his book, The Toadstool Millionaires (Young 1961)
makes an important statement. He states: “The medicine man had something to teach
because he had operated in an economy of abundance almost from the start. Since
sickness was well-nigh universal, the demand for his wares was potentially inexhaustible.
But then, so was also supply” (Young 1961).200 By the early twentieth century, as I
mentioned at the outset, Bengali and Indian newspapers had become a competitive
marketplace, with allopathic, homoeopathic, ayurveda, electrotherapy, hakimi nostrums
each vying for legitimacy. While advertisements in Victorian England offered medical
assistance as a combination of pills, solutions, electrical, and surgical, its counterpart, the
medical marketplace in Bengal/India offered a multiplicity of allopathic tradition but also
199 Kumar, Anil. 1998 Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835-1911. New Delhi: Sage
200 Young, James. Harvey. 1961. The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History o f Patent Medicines in
America before Federal Regulation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
124
a plurality in other medical and therapeutic epistemologies as well - unani, ayurveda, and
homoeopathic successfully competed against allopathic medicines and practices.
The medical market place in colonial Bengal operated on a single principle -
supply of a variety of therapies to a variety of maladies. This was significant also because
between in the late years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th there was a
definite sense of re-generation within the already existent medical groups of Bengal. This
was also the period when in Bengal the colonial state pursued an active and aggressive
policy of professionalization and regulation.201 Ayurveda, for example, was given fresh
impetus by enthusiasts like Gangaprasad Sen and Neelamber Sen or Gangadhar Ray,
who were inspired to undertake large scale production by the pharmaceutical company
named N. N. Sen and Company Private Limited. Similar efforts were made to
commercialize Ayurvedic drugs.
In 1901, Dhaka Oushadhalaya and other pharmaceutic companies were
established and became successful, like Sadhana Oushadhalaya and Kalpataru Ayurvedic
Works. 202 Then there was the Bengal Chemicals and Pharmaceutical Works Limited,
which was established in 1901 through the pioneering efforts of Acharya Prafulla
Chandra Ray that was the first drug factory completely owned and managed by Indians.
One of the factors that gave incentives to the Indian market was the disruption caused by
the war, which led to a drastic decline in imports and consequently stimulated a large
growth in local production. Homoeopathy was another system of medicine that became
201 Bala, Poonam. 1990. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal. New Delhi: Sage.
Jeffery, Roger. 1988. The Politics o f Health in India. Berkeley: University o f California Press.
202 Kumar, Anil. 2001. “Indian Drug Industry under the Raj”, in, Pati Biswamoy and Mark Harrison edited
Health, Medicine and Empire. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
125
immensely popular in urban Bengal as well (Pahari 1997).203 David Arnold and Sumit
Sarkar argue that homoeopathic treatment found increasing favor among urban Bengalis
because it was cheap, easy to use, and because it was not associated with British colonial
authority (Arnold & Sarkar 2001).204 Monopoly of allopathic drugs was therefore far
from complete.
ADVERTISEMENTS AND THE NEW MEDICAL MARKETPLACE
The publication of the first newspaper in India also marked the birth of
advertising in India. Bengal Gazette, the first Indian newspaper, was published by James
Hicky in 1780, a surgeon by profession and a disgruntled employee of the East India
Company, whose motto was to report impartially and truthfully. The life of this
newspaper was cut short by the aggressive authority of Fort William and its officials like
Warren Hastings, in view of the candid reports that Hicky published on the corruption
and mis-govemance of Fort William.205
In its brief period of circulation (1780-82), Bengal Gazette also carried
advertisements, which were added by Hicky purely for monetary reasons. These
advertisements were mostly for 'patent' medicines. Patent medicines were concoctions
made by so called 'doctors' that were thus patented and sold under the name of these
doctors. As more newspapers in English and Indian languages started to be published the
number and scope of advertisements also grew.
203 Pahari, Subrata. 1997. Unish Satake Banglai Sanatani Chikitsha Byabastha (Medical Systems in
Nineteenth Century Bengal). Calcutta; Progressive Publishers.
204 Arnold, David and Sumit Sarkar. 2001. In search o f rational remedies: homoeopathy in nineteenth
century Bengal, in, Waltraud Ernst edited, Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000. London:
Routledge.
205 http://www.pitara.com/discover/5wh/104.htm
126
By the 1880s advertisements occupied a very prominent space in the newspapers. Such a
dramatic increase in advertising led a writer in Chikitsa-Sammilani (A Compendium on
Therapeutics), a Bengali popular-medical journal, to ruefully comment that the number of
advertisements for allopathic, homoeopathic, hakimi, ayurvedic, and ‘patent’ medicines
had paralleled the number of diseases in India (Anonymous, 1886).
The comment of the writer was not unfounded, because by the early 1900s,
advertisements for medicines, hygienic products, and ‘miraculous remedies’ consumed
more than fifty percent of the advertising space in almost all the Indian newspapers
(Mishra 1987).206 Ointment, eye drops, pills for all kinds of ailments, ayurvedic
medicines for cure of nerve diseases, asthma, and ‘weaknesses’ were regular items in
these medical advertisements.
The early advertisements consisted of simple messages that were 'classified' into
different categories for easy reference and had a mailing address from where they could
be ordered. 1880s also marked a change in the nature of advertising because the
advertisements started to include detailed pictures and slogans. Nevertheless, advertising
became a specialized profession only in the 1930s. The first full-fledged Indian
advertising agency, the National Advertising Agency, was launched in 1931. Realizing
the potential of advertising, newspapers started carrying testimonials that claimed its
importance. In 1932, the well-known newspaper Bengali ran a notice that stated: ‘Proof
That It Pays To Advertise’.207 This was a testimony by the Advertising Association’s
Research Department, which claimed that bold advertising by companies even in times of
depression could keep up or even increase profits. Such testimonials for advertising were
206 Mishra, Dasarathi. 1987. Advertising in Indian Newspapers, 1780-1947. Behrampur: Ishani
Publications.
207 Bengalee. 1932. Page 3.
127
not uncommon, for example another one stated, ‘Put Your Faith in an Advertised
Good’.208
During this period of gradual consolidation of advertising in India, not only
medicinal and hygienic products but also medical ideologies were commodified. In the
following I will analyze the nature and the role of medical advertising in colonial India.
The striking aspect of medical advertisements was not only their sheer number but also
the way medicines and healthcare products ‘representing’ different medical systems were
advertised together.209 For example, English language newspapers such as The Statesman
brought out innumerable advertisements that simultaneously eulogized hakimi treatments,
homoeopathy, and surgical dentistry on the same page.
Similarly, well-known Bengali newspapers such as Amrita Bazar Patrika
regularly advertised ‘genuine ayurvedic medicines’ along with, for example, the magic
touch of ‘germolene’, which, at that time, was a commonly used biomedicine in the
British Empire. In other words, newspapers (most crucially), popular magazines, and
journals offered a richly diverse world of therapeutic and hygienic commodities and
products, which while creating a thriving medical marketplace and a class of consumers
in late colonial India, also became an important site for the expression of medical
ideologies, vocabularies, and rationalities.
Medical advertising during this period was also crucially linked to changes in
socio-economic and political conditions. For example, during and after the First World
War, there was a rise in medical advertising in the light of the race by foreign
manufacturers to capture the Indian market. However, parallel to this development one
208 The Statesman. 1925

209 http://www.magindia.com/historv.hist2.html
128
also notices a trend towards ‘Indianisation’ in medical advertisements. For example,
advertisements by Bengal Chemicals, established in 1892, reiterated the superiority of
Indian products. By the 1940s, medical advertising definitively became a ‘national’
industry.
For my analysis of medical and hygienic advertisements, I have chosen six
newspapers (Hindoo Patriot, Bengalee, The Statesman, Amrita Bazar Patrika, and the
Indian Mirror) that were published from Calcutta, the colonial capital till 1911. In the
following I will provide a brief description of these newspapers in order to contextualize
my analysis. Bengalee, an English newspaper published from Calcutta from 1862 to
1931, started as a daily and subsequently turned into a weekly. Bengalee had a series of
renowned editors including Girish Chandra Ghose, its founder, and Surendranath Banerji.
In 1931, an evening edition, Calcutta Evening News, was started and the mofussil edition
continued to be known as Bengalee. The two editions were, however, amalgamated into
one from 1932 and renamed the Star o f India.
Since its inception, the Bengalee had been serving as an important organ of the
Indian nationalist movement. Its articulate views about the excesses of the Anglo-Indian
community, Ilbert Bill, protection of ethnic societies, agrarian relations, famines and
contemporary social movements had tremendously influenced public opinion. Under the
editorship of Surendranath Banerji the paper became the most circulated weekly in the
late 19th and the early 20th centuries. After the Surat Rift (1907) in the Indian National
Congress, the paper became the mouthpiece of the moderate wing of the divided
Congress. The moderate stand of the paper on the Swadeshi and the extremist nationalist
129
politics considerably diminished its popularity. The death of Surendranath Banerji in
1925 further weakened the paper and eventually it stopped in 1931 (Banerjee 1985).210
Hindu Patriot a weekly English newspaper, was first published in January 1853
under the proprietorship of Madhusudhan Roy with Girish Chandra Ghosh as Managing
Editor. In June 1855, Haran Chandra Mukheijee, elder brother o f Harishchandra
Mukherji of Bhawanipur, became the new proprietor. The actual owner of the paper,
however, was Harishchandra Mukherji who had to keep himself shielded from the
Military Auditor General under whom he worked.
The Hindu Patriot under Harishchandra played a vital role in bringing to light the
tyranny of the Indigo planters, particularly during the post mutiny period. Regular
editorials against such tyranny on the poor hapless indigo raiyats attracted public
attention and evoked universal condemnation from a large cross-section of educated
Indians. Other principal social issues highlighted by the Patriot in its columns were
female education and Hindu widow remarriage. As regards female education, the paper
advised everybody to follow the lead given by John Drinkwater Bethune and on the
question of widow remarriage it sided with the reformists and supported the cause of
legalising such marriages. The paper, however, opposed the implementation of divorce
laws in Hindu society.
Although the principal objective of the Hindu Patriot was to shed light upon
negative aspects of the anomalies in British Government in India, it pinned very high
hopes on the liberalism of the British public and parliament. Thus, it always advised
Indians to address their grievances to the British public and parliament whenever the
British Indian administration failed to redress their complaints. The focus on the negative
210 Banerjee, Tarashankar. 1985. Various Bengal: Aspects o f Modern History. Calcutta. Ratna Prakashan.
130
aspects of British rule was not intended to tarnish the image of the British Indian
government. Rather, these criticisms were with the intention of making the administration
aware of public grievances and their causes so as to enable the government to effect
speedy rectification. To the Hindu Patriot, British rule in India was not blindfolded
imperialism but something highly noble to be supported for public welfare. Indians had
still much to learn from the English and hence English rule was to be endured.
The Statesman commenced its publication in 1875 as a daily and became a
leading newspaper of Calcutta. Initially, it was designed to suit the needs of the
Europeans and the Western educated Bengali elite. The colossal success of the Statesman
was principally due to editors like Robert Knight, Roy Emerson and a competent editorial
staff. Advertisements of varied sorts also graced its columns. The advertisements brought
forth good revenues contributing to its speedy and stupendous success. The editorials
published in the paper were not only highly informative and incisive but covered a wide
range of subjects. The newspaper also contained a variety of news items that generated
further interest amongst its reading clientele.211
These items included the agitation against the Age of Consent Bill in 1891, the
government famine policy of 1943, engine-run trams in Calcutta, the programs of the
moderates and extremists in the Indian National Congress, Sister Nivedita’s views on
cleaning of Calcutta streets, witchcraft, kulin polygamy even after government
interdiction of the custom, the Quit India Movement, the birth of the Muslim League, the
two Bengal partitions of 1905 & 1947, the birth of Pakistan and India's independence,
Aurobinda's implication in the Maniktala bomb manufacturing case, widow remarriages
in Calcutta and its outskirts, the prosecution of Surendra Nath Banerji, Gandhi’s
211 http://banglapedia.search.com.bd/
131
assassination, etc. As for foreign news, the paper dealt extensively with the theme of
Russia's ambitions in the Balkans and the factors leading to the outbreak of both the First
and the Second World Wars.212
Amrita Bazar Patrika, was published in 1868 in Bengali from a small village of
Magura at Jessore in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by Tusharkanti Ghose and his
father Sisir Kumar Ghose. Soon the paper became the cause of anger and wrath of the
British government for its active participation in the India’s freedom movement. Its
venue of publication was later shifted from Jessore to Bagbazar in Uttar Kolkata
(northern part of the city). The paper was converted to an English daily in 1876 to escape
the draconian Vernacular Act. In its long history of 110 years the Amrita Bazar Patrika
like The Tribune (originally published from Lahore), played not only an important role
during the freedom movement but also later in independent India. The Indian Mirror was
started in 1861 with Keshabchandra Sen as the editor. It was affiliated with the Brahmo
Samaj. It was one of the newspapers, which was vocal supporting the Age of Consent
(Bose I960).213
The Bengali journal, which I use for my analysis of advertisements, is
Grihasthamangal (Welfare of the Household). It is relevant to note that despite the fact
that there were many journals that were published during the 19th century, not many had
advertisements. Grihasthamangal was one of the very few Bengali journals that
contained advertisements. It was a monthly journal that was published from Calcutta. It
started in 1927 as an agricultural guidebook, printing information on farming, use of
212http://www.asiamap.ac.uk/newspapers/browsing.php?Browse=Country&Countrv=IND&Language=all&
ln stitu tio n = all
213 Bose, Nemai Sadhan. 1960. The Indian Awakening and Bengal. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyaya.
132
pesticides, manures etc. It also published articles on trade and commerce and domestic
science issues.214
Advertising was still very much a local entrepreneurial business when it took off
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in colonial Bengal as well as India. It constituted a
“mosaic of markets”, rather than a “bloc of consumers” and there was hardly any
“national market” as far as branded products were concerned (Pope 1983).215 Advertising
especially of hygienic and medical products was very much a local/regional phenomenon
and its targeted consumer body was urban-based. The advertisements of products had one
thing in common- they were united in creating a message of urban consumerism
These advertisements defined new norms and practices around hygiene and cleanliness
and through an assortment of new commodities that could be purchased, it signaled the
boundaries, within which problems related to one’s bodily health and well-being could be
solved and fixed. From around 1880s, there was a prolific growth in the range of products
that were advertised. While in the United States, the take off of advertising as an industry
was concomitant to the consolidation of consumer rights, most notably by the passage of
the 1906 Food and Drug Act, in Bengal or India consumer rights where not instituted
until the middle of the twentieth century.
Hygiene was advertised under the label of “beauty”, “medicine”, or “foods”. In
the first case, hygiene was inseparable from the definition and meaning of beauty and in
the second from the fundamental medical ideology that emerged and gained currency by
the early 20th century. When advertise as foods, hygienic products referred to the
conditions under which they were produced and packaged.
214 http://www.cssscal.org/
215 Pope, Daniel. 1983. The Making o f Modern Advertising. New York: Basic Books.
133
Soaps, talcum powder, hair oil, perfume waters, facial creams, dental creams, shaving
creams, and a variety of essences and perfumes constituted a common range of cosmetics
that were advertised as hygienic products.
The focus of medicine in the early 20th century on personal cleanliness and
hygiene led to soaps and dental creams being advertised as either beauty or medicinal
products. Under the label of medicine, cures for ocular and dental ailments, common
cough and cold, weakness and frailty, a range of fevers, a wide variety of stomach
ailments, rheumatism and arthritis, and women’s reproductive health related problems,
especially around menstrual dysfunctions were commonly advertised. Baby food,
primarily milk food became one of the most advertised items during the early years of the
20th century. Foods for strength building, such as barley, special foods, or tonics were
also frequently advertised.
ADVERTISING, REPRESENTATION, AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE SOCIAL
Advertisements on health care and hygienic products created and circulated
women in Bengali media not unlike in the rest of the world between the late 19th and
early 20th centuries.216 As women in the early 20th century became one of the principal
targets and agents of advertisements on hygiene and well-being, gender expressed itself
in and through the “purposes”, “problems”, “issues”, and “places” that were defined as
concerns of women and their natural activities. Hygiene became an agenda to be lived,
practiced, and consumed through women’s activities and it maintained little distinction
between home-making and consuming. Hygiene was therefore produced as an ideology
216 Stage, Stage, and Virginia B. Vincenti. Edited. 1997. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the
History o f a Profession. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Tomes, Nancy. 1998. The Gospel o f Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press.
134
in and through the deployment of gender and responsibilities of the women.
Advertisements with images or pictures emerged in the last years of the 19th century, but
and advertisements with pictures of Bengali or Indian women’s did not appear until the
turn of the 20th century.
In most advertisements in Bengal during this period, women and family became
the site for the production of this new consumer ethos and domesticity provides the
broader ideology that justified such a placement. In recent times, family and the domestic
has come under feminist scrutiny, which has led to not analyses of the production of
commodities but also their consumption (Lury 1996).217
In this chapter I argue that hygiene became a broader social, cultural, and political
ideology by the securing the domain of consumption in and through the sign of the family
and the household (Forty 1986).218 Advertisements for beauty and hygienic/health
exclusively framed women within the domain of the household or grihastha- either as
wives or as mothers. Any beauty product that had to do with “charm” was portrayed
through the figure of a “western” or “English woman”.
These pictorial representations commonly followed what Jackson Lears describes
for advertising in America: “Breath and body perfumes, talcum powder and toilet water,
all were placed in settings redolent with luxurious sensuality. There was a strikingly overt
eroticism about many of these images, in specific icons and more generally in the air of
the languorous ease displayed by the mature and voluptuous women, whom historians of
fashion have identified as the beau ideal of the late 19th century” (Lears 1994).219
217 Lury, Celia. 1996. Consumer Culture: Cambridge: Polity Press.

218 Forty, Adrian. 1986. Objects o f Desire: Design and Soceity, 1750-1980. London: Thames and Hudson.
219 Lears, Jackson.. 1994. Fables o f Abundance. : A Cultural History o f Advertising in America. New
York: Basic Books;
135
Advertisements in the early 20th century showed slim women attired in less decorous
clothes and often having the look of a woman who had also stepped into the public realm.
But again images of only English or western women were deployed. For example, most
of the advertisements in the Statesman - from Cuticura Powder fo r a Fresh Complexion,
Pears Transparent Glycerine Soap, to Palmolive Soaps - portrayed non-Indian, typically
European women.
This was ironic because some of these advertisements, such as those for fairness
creams especially targeted Bengali and Indian women urging them to use these creams in
order to become fairer like their European counterparts. “Femininity” when conferred on
Bengali women in these advertisements, always referred to “woman within her
household”.220 Advertisements relating to medicine involving Bengali women were
fundamentally around the category of motherhood and the figure of the woman as a
mother. The advertisements on heath during this period (and this remains constant
between the 1890s and the early 1900s) included depictions of physicians who had
expertise in diseases of women and children, certificate holding midwives, or maternity
nursing homes.221
Advertisements of certain hygiene and medicinal products as well as foods very
often showed women as agents for change in the food habits of the family. Hygiene and
health became the tools that women could wield through the food she chose for her
family. Patented health foods occupied an important place in these advertisements. The
entry of Robinson’s Barley, Cadbury’s Cocoa, Brown and Poison’s Corn Flour, Nestle’s
Swiss Milk Chocolate, Ovaltine, and Malted Milk- into the Indian market and gave birth
220 Grihasthamangal. 1928: Number 6.

221 Statesman.
136
to a completely new vocabulary for securing health and vitality.222 The striking aspect of
this discourse on “vitalism” was the way in which these advertisements combined an
ideal of “naturalness and purity” of one place to the lack of the same in another, the latter
being the “hot climate of India”. Jackson Lears labels this commonly used wisdom
“imperial primitivism”.223 Therefore, “Cadbury’s Cocoa was made in an English factory
in a Garden Village amidst pure and healthful surroundings”, “Liptons’s Jams and Fruits
[were] better than all others because Lipton [used] only English Grown Fruit”, and
“Ovaltine was from the Britains’ most fertile fields and richest pastures”.224
Such references for a divine land as the site for the production of food items were
usually accompanied with claims that denied any possibility of impurity through human
touch. Hence advertisements for baby’s milk food would typically label it as “completely
untouched by hand”. Naturalism became an important certificate of quality by the late
19th century and was commonly expressed in the advertisements for food items that were
imported from Britain. Such assurance gained further meaning in the context of the fact
that such foods were argued to be perfectly suitable for “hot countries with hot climates”.
Advertisements of a variety of products that specifically related to children’s nurturing or
well-being were typically expressed through the caring figure of a Bengali or Indian
mother.
222 According to Raymond Williams, patent food was one o f the most heavily advertised products in the
late 19th century besides new inventions like the sewing machine, the camera, the bicycle and the
typewriter. See Williams, Raymond. 1993. “Advertising: The Magic System”, in Simon During edited The
Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
223 Lears, Jackson. 1994. Fables o f Abundance: A Cultural History o f Advertising in America. New York:
Basic Books;
Anne McClintock alludes to something o f a similar phenomenon, where commodities become epitomes o f
civilization itself. She characterizes much o f imperial advertising as marking a strong degree o f
“commodity racism” and an “imperial spectacle”, which draws stark and unbridgeable contrasts between
the civilized empire and the savage colonies. See McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
224 Statesman, Bengalee, and Advance.
137
In the advertisements for baby tonics, baby foods, medications for a host of
children’s ailments, and even ayurvedic medications that promised to make “women
fertile and bless them with children” there was a definite strategy of emotionalization.
This strategy was deployed in order to use the mother-child bonding to generate a special
bond with the consumer item. Such representations typically showed a mother holding a
child on her lap, who was definitely Indian looking, had her head covered, or wore jewels
that had Indian designs, and in postures that were very much a part of a Bengali/Indian
cultural repertoire.
Robert Goldman argues that advertisements never self consciously raise the issue
of class, but constructs it in more subtle ways (Goldman 1992).225 The case of
advertisements in colonial Bengal had a similar character. In terms of the representations
of class there was no overt reference to class in the advertisements. However, since
hygienic and sanitary reform was very much a middle class phenomenon in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, advertisements of hygienic products were obviously aimed at
this particular class. In most of these advertisements class was constructed by signifying
activities, values, and social roles through a particular vocabulary. For example words
such as purity, fragrance, pleasant taste were commonly used to represent a middle class
notion of well-being. As far as the co-representation of gender and class is concerned,
there was no representation of middle class women as public beings. Representation of
women as public beings was absent even though by the early 20th century middle class
women were entering the professions and partaking in more public forms of politics and
social welfare.
225 Goldman, Robert. 1992. Reading Ads Socially. London: Routledge.
138
Another important characteristic of these advertisements was a relative lack of
reference to nationalism. However, between the 1920 and 1930s the advertisements
depicted a distinct trend towards popularization of Indian made medicines and
concoctions. These advertisements sometimes showed a picture of a Bengali or Indian
woman, validating the purity or efficacy of a particular medication produced
indigenously.
The period between the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Bengal marked a new
phase in the culture of commodity consumption. At the most visible level, this new
culture brought about a distinct transformation of the urban city space, for example,
Calcutta. By the early years of the 20th century, Calcutta was a thriving city that had a
teeming population, a host of “modem” civic services and a flourishing marketplace. The
rich world of advertisements, even if it does not provide an accurate index of
consumption, nonetheless is an indication of the fact that a consumer culture was
definitely becoming an important part of economic and social life of Calcutta.226
According to Don Slater, a consumer society “denotes a social arrangement in
which the relation between lived culture and social resources on which they depend, is
mediated through markets. Consumer culture marks out a system in which consumption
is dominated by the consumption of commodities” (Slater 1997: 8).227 While in no way,
late colonial Bengal or India can be compared to what has been termed as a “consumer
society” or “market society”, a budding consumer culture reflecting a social arrangement
that was mediated through markets was definitely visible by the early 20th century. This
226 Chaudhuri, Sukanta. Ed. 1990. Calcutta: The Living City, Volume I: The Past. Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Ray Choudhury, Ranabir. Ed. 1987. Calcutta a Hundred Years Ago. Calcutta: Nachiketa Publications.
227 Slater, Don. 1997. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
139
emerging consumer culture, which became an important force to reckon with in everyday
life, continually referred to the “experience of modernity”. Advertising’s primary
message became that everyday life should be “modem”.228Nevertheless advertisements
of medical and hygienic products very much like other domains of medicine and hygiene
reflected an ambiguity. Even though they emphasized the experience of a new self
through the user of a new range of commodities, confusion remained because of a
perceived conflict between needs and pleasures. What was distinct in this context was the
increasing hold of this new commercial order on the domestic.
In the context of western capitalism, in its most advanced form, advertising has
tended to shift the emphasis from the customer in the shop or on the doorstep to the wider
concept of the more “virtual” or “unknown” consumer. The underlying sociological logic
has been that the shift from “traditional” to “modem” forms of society entailed an
increase in human needs in conjunction with an increased attachment to the values of
materialism and commodities (Leiss, Kline, Jhally 1986).229
In their influential book, Social Communication in Advertising (1986), William
Leiss, Stephen Kline, and Sut Jhally define and analyze four stages through which
advertising progressed in western capitalist societies. In the first phase advertising
operated primarily through newspapers and magazines and was characterized by an
overall strategy of utility and information based. The second stage that occurred between
the 1920s and 1930s, marked the beginning of a more “symbolic” rendering of
228 Thomas Richards traces the history o f the spectacle that commodity had become and gave rise to He
shows how consumption o f commodities was tied to the the experience o f modernity in mid-Victorian
Britain. See Richards, Thomas. 1991. The Commodity Culture o f Victorian England: Advertising and
Spectacle, 1851-1914. London: Verso.
Leiss, W, Kline,S., and Jhally, S. 1986. Social Communication in Advertising: Persons, Products, and
Images o f Well-Being. London: Methuen.
140
advertising culture, and used radio as a medium. The third and fourth stages, which
spanned between the 1950s and 1980s, were centered on the development of advertising
through television and moved from a “behaviorist strategy centered on personalization to
a market segmentation strategy centered on the use of lifestyle categories. This shift has
been labeled as the shift from narcissism to totemism in terms of the overall cultural
frame of reference.
It is problematic to apply such a periodization in the history of advertising in
Bengal or India. Advertising in India was mainly undertaken through newspapers and
popular magazines until well into the middle of the 20th century because the radio from
the 1930s was under the colonial state and it was used for the purpose of colonial
propaganda in the context of the anti-imperialist nationalist movement. The radio became
a semi-commercial enterprise only after 1947. So the role of radio was minimal in the
widespread dissemination of an active consumer culture comparable to the western
world, especially in the United States.
While, there was a growth in Indian business interests as well as a capitalist
consciousness from around 1917, this period was characterized by economic upheavals
(Bose & Jalal 1998); Habib 1995).230 The paradox was that though there was a distinct
growth of Indian business and industrial consciousness, the flooding of the Indian urban
marketplace with cheap imported goods and commodities by the colonial state made it
difficult for the Indians to compete (Richards, 1991:144).231 Thomas Richards argues that
the relationship of imperialism with the colonies was fundamentally that of commodities
230 Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. 1998. Modem South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy. Delhi:
Oxford. Habib, Irfan. 1995. Essays in Indian History: Towards a Marxist Perspective. Delhi: Tulika.
231 Thomas Richards writes “Commodities turned up not only in Africa, but in Ceylon, Java, Tibet, China,
and India”. Richards, Thomas. Commodity Culture. Pagel44.
141
controlled by the colonial state. The larger point I am trying to make here is that in the
context of consumer culture in colonial India, it was difficult to make a clear cut
separation between need, pleasure, and spectacle.
The representational styles as well of advertisements in the newspapers during
colonial times depending upon whether it was British or Indian. English advertisements,
particularly for beauty and health were replete with words such as “purity”, “grace”,
“natural”, “improvement”. For example, all advertisements of soap are labeled as
providing the “purest” beauty care. There was also a zeal to express that a particular soap
or perfume becomes a step to “refinement, which adds much to the joy of existence”.232
These advertisements were couched in a message that aimed at paving the way for
improvement of the self through practicing certain acts of consumption, very similar to
what Colin Campbell describes as the Other Ethic.
These advertisements were clear in their representation of the pleasures that could
satisfy both the body and the mind and encourage a higher sensation. Though the
connection between the body and the soul was not directly shown, most advertisements
that had to do with the betterment of the body were linked to the movement of the soul to
a higher level or ideal. Indian advertisements, that is advertisements of Indian products,
or that had representations of “Indian” men and women were on the contrary secular in
nature. Even at the height of anti-colonial nationalism, Indian advertisements did not
display any connection forged between bodily pleasure and spiritual vitality.
Indian advertisers tried to motivate the readers to use their products by Indianising the
appeal. For example, advertisements by Bengal Chemical, established in 1892, Dhariwal,
a woolen cloth dealer, or The Hindu Biscuit Company, Indian Homoeopathic Laboratory,
232 The Statesman.
142
Sakti Oushadhalaya emphasized superior quality of Indian products. Advertisements for
Kuntaline, a perfumed oil, appeared frequently in newspapers carrying recommendations
of prominent personalities, vouching for its superior Indian quality. Even such
advertisements, which argued for superior quality of Indian products, were never couched
in spiritual terms. This is significant, because the vocabulary of anti colonial cultural
nationalism continually emphasized upper caste Hindu spirituality. Even when they were
Indianized, consumer goods explored a world of everyday consumption merely as a new
and powerful reality of domesticity.
143
CHAPTER 5: WOMEN’S WRITINGS, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND THE
NATION
INTRODUCTION
This chapter is situated within a paradigm in feminist autobiographical criticism
that in recent years has called for a “post/colonial move”. This move excavates a variety
of autobiographical writings by previously colonized subjects (women colonized at the
interface of imperialism, patriarchy, religion, class for example). It also attempts to
understand “what happens when the colonized subject takes up a generic practice forged
in the West and complicit in the West’s romance with individualism” (Smith & Watson
1998: 28).233 A number of intellectual and political agendas have informed such a move,
one of the most important being, “whether the subaltern can speak”, and ask how can
subalterns speak from within or from outside a dominant, Western model of identity?
This chapter analyzes writings by middle class, educated Bengali women, mostly
from urban Calcutta between the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explore and analyze
their perceptions and ideologies around health, hygiene, and well being. By writings, I
mean not only autobiographical writings, but also short stories, educational writings for
children and articles in popular journals and magazines (edited by women). These were
written by women both in their real names as well as anonymously. The fundamental
question I seek to answer in this chapter is to what extent women’s own writings about
health and hygiene, particularly with regard to issues related to motherhood, child care,
and personal hygiene, were framed within the paradigm of Hindu domesticity. These
issues had become important both within the women’s movement as well as in the
233 Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. 1998. “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s
Autobiographical Practices”, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson edited, Women, Autobiography, Theory: A
Reader. Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press.
144
domain of medicine, a realm of expertise which consisted of both Indian and British men
but only English women. Bengali women therefore wrote about illness, health, and its
relation to domesticity, not in official journals of medicine, but genres like short stories,
autobiographies, and popular journals. The reason I include these genres other than
personal autobiographies, is because, one, the term “women’s autobiography” has been
expanded to include a myriad of writing practices that took specific forms under specific
historical, national, and material settings. So for example, terms like “autobiographical
practices”, “women’s personal narratives” have become popular and proper. Second, for
my specific case, I consider these other genres as “autobiographical acts” because these
were the only forms available to urban, literate Bengali women, for them to comment
upon and discuss issues (for example health and hygiene), which were otherwise given a
specific authority in the public realm by groups, other than themselves. So it was through
these writings that they could and chose to be visible in the public sphere in late colonial
Bengal.
In the first section of this chapter, I discuss and review some of the recent feminist
literature on autobiographical practices undertaken by women and questions of identity
and subjectivity. I also discuss how this new move has also opened up directions in
feminist analyses of women’s autobiographies particularly in the context of Indian and
South Asian historiography. In the second section, I provide an account of the essays and
articles written by Bengali women that form a part of my analyses. In the third section, I
analyze the writings and look at both the representational practices and forms that these
women engaged in, while producing their discourse on hygiene and domesticity. Also
using Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactic, I argue that these writings by Bengali women
145
were acts o f retrieval by which they sought to lay a claim on the production of
knowledge about a domain, of which they were considered naturalized beings, at the
same time unable to be experts in its objective understanding.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS A GENRE
In claiming women’s autobiography to be both personal yet truly literary, Celia
Lury argued, “in recent years, the women’s movement has shown an increase of interest
in the use by women of private diaries, journals and confessional and autobiographical
forms. Perhaps because of the personal character of women’s oppression in the forms in
which it is first experienced, many of what are now acknowledged to be major feminist
texts have been quite unlike the main sources of, for example, Marxist theory, in that they
have taken the form of autobiographical writing” (Lury 1987).234 The 80s have been
considered to be an emergent moment in feminist autobiographical criticism because
women’s autobiographies were considered to be literary in their own merit. Feminist
autobiographical criticism also asserted that the aesthetic ideal used to evaluate men’s
autobiographies were inadequate when used to understand women’s personal writings.
For example, the characteristics which were considered the hallmarks of a good
autobiography were mostly attributed to those composed by men. Estelle Jelinek , for
instance, dwells on the features of a “good” autobiography. “It must center exclusively or
mostly on their authors, not on others; otherwise, it becomes a memoir or reminiscence.
The autobiographer should be self-aware, a seeker after self-knowledge. He must aim to
explore, not to exhort. His autobiography should be an effort to give meaning to some
234 Lury, Celia. 1987. “The Difference o f Women’s Writing: essays on the use o f personal experience”, in
Studies in Sexual Politics. Manchester: University o f Manchester.
146
personal mythos” (Jelinek 1986: 4). Scholars like Jelinek therefore celebrated women’s
autobiographies like their lives, which showed usually not a pattern of linear
development towards some clear goal, but were “rather fragmentary, irregular, and
discontinuous” (Lury 1987: 50).
From the 1980s onwards, women’s autobiography has become the prized site for
thinking about issues of writing at the interface of feminist, postcolonial and
postmodernist perspectives. It has been regarded as one of the most powerful forms, in
and through which women have written themselves into history. In the 1970s, there were
some remarkable pieces of writing by women, which consolidated the claim that
“experience” could be and should be made the subjective groundwork for women’s
autobiographical writings. Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, Shulamith Firestone’s
The Dialectic o f Sex, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Angela Davis’ An Autobiography
were some of the foundational texts that marked the beginning of the assertion that the
personal was indeed the political as well.
There was also a move at the same time from feminist literary critics as well as
historians to include women’s writings into their analyses. While literary critics drew
attention to a rich tradition of women’s literary production through genres like diaries,
letters, and personal journals, historians stressed more for the recovery of women’s texts
as constituting an archive. As a disciplinary move, women’s histories found a new fillip
when new attention was paid to everyday histories and social histories instead of political
histories. An initiatory gesture was also made by critics like Patricia Meyer Spacks in The
Female Imagination. Spacks delves into women’s writings analytically rather than
235 Jelinek, Estelle, C. 1986. The Tradition o f Women’s Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present.
Boston: Twayne Publishers.
147
analyzing these writings as simple replications of women’s lives. In her other books as
well, she argues that women have characteristic ways of self perception. Hence for
Spacks, women’s autobiographies function partly through a “mode of self-denial”
(Spacks 1980: 132). Spacks critiqued these characteristics as well and encouraged
women’s struggles to opt for a more positive identity.
While these moves from within feminist literary criticism gave an intellectual
support to look at women’s personal writings as valid scholarly material, autobiography
as a genre and its traditional paradigms of evaluation still had a strong hold. For,
autobiographical critics like Georges Gusdorf and Georg Misch, autobiography remained
representations of the best minds of the time as they were supposed to mirror the Zeitgeist
of the times (Smith 1987).237
The first wave of feminist critics of autobiography stressed the “experiential”
dimension of women’s writings, and made it its distinctive mark and strength, as a
literary and archival genre. Jelinek’s Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism that
marked a watershed moment in feminist autobiographical criticism made experience the
primary content of women’s autobiography and, as a result, there were obvious
differences between men and women’s writings based on narrative strategies. The first
wave of feminist autobiographical critics dwelt on the issues of the distinct narrative style
of women’s writings, which was nonlinear or oral narratives, a fragmentary, fluctuating
narrative voice, or writings that were grounded in personal and domestic experiences. But
236 Spacks, Patricia, Meyer. 1980. “Selves in Hiding”, in E.C. Jelinek edited. Women’s Autobiography:
Essays in Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
237 Smith, Sidonie. 1987. A Poetics o f Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions o f Self-
Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
148
the major criticism that was leveled against such positions was that this focus on
“experience” essentialized women.
In the wake of these critical evaluations, two texts, one by Nancy Miller, the other
by Domna Stanton sought to rectify gender essentialism that characterized the first wave.
Domna Stanton’s edited volume The Female Autograph (1984) mapped the range of
women’s autobiographical writings, both historically as well as geographically. In the
Preface she says, “An anthology and a work of criticism, The Female Autograph is, more
accurately, a collage of pieces representing different disciplines and fields, different
cultures and eras, different “genres” or narrative modes’ (Stanton 1984: vii).238 She
engages very much in an archival move to undo the chronology that traditional
autobiographical criticism had set for the autobiographies as a literary genre. She writes,
“The search for primary sources, revealed the existence of important but unexplored
autogynographies, contemporary to or even predating the earliest productions of men
canonized by literary history. Scholars who claimed, for example that English
autobiography developed in the eighteenth century neglected the works of Laetitia
Pilkington, Teresia Constantia Phillips, and Frances Anne Vane, which privileged
confessions of feeling and influenced the content and form of both autobiographies and
novels” (Stanton 1984: 6). “Autogynography” was the new nomenclature, which while
highlighting women’s writings, at the same time brought it out of the paradigm of “bios”,
which always presumed a certain narrative style as well as content.
Nancy Miller critiqued the universal maleness of the literary canon and called for
a gendered reading of the genre. Commenting on Miller’s seminal essay, “Towards a
Dialectic of Difference”, Smith and Watson write, “Refusing the “fiction” of a
238 Stanton, Domna. 1984. The Female Autograph. Chicago: University o f Chicago Press.
149
degendered reading, she urged critics to “read for difference”, in a “diacritical gesture,”
and argued for reading as “a movement of oscillation which locates difference in the
negotiation between writer and reader” (Smith & Watson 1998: 10-11).
The volume titled, Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal
Narratives (1989) by the Personal Narratives Group included a wide variety of women’s
personal narratives drawn from everyday life situations and also from a wide range of
geographical and political contexts. The theoretical focus of this volume was towards a
new feminist vocabulary itself, one that would harp on “narrative forms” rather than
“autobiography”. Narrative forms were supposed to highlight the complexity and
differences within the paradigm of women’s writings, at the same time stress the absolute
role of gender within social life.
Sidonie Smith’s ^ Poetics o f Women’s Autobiography (Smith 1987) was
considered another landmark text of this period. She writes, “Autobiography critics
whose readings derive either from indifference to relationship between writing and sexual
difference or from conventional conceptualizations of that relationship fail to
acknowledge that “the maxims that pass for the truth of human experience, and the
encoding of that experience in literature, are organizations, when they are not fantasies,
of the dominant culture .. .perhaps, the absence of women’s texts from the texts of
autobiographical criticism, as well as the distorted readings or cavalier dismissals of their
texts when they are included in the obligatory chapter or aside, speaks to a fundamental
resistance to valuing women’s experience and vision” (Smith 1987: 16).239 Smith asserted
that any theory of female textuality must recognize how patriarchal culture has
239 Smith, Sidonie. 1987. A Poetics o f Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
150
fictionalized “woman” and how, in response women autobiographers had challenged the
gender ideologies surrounding them in order to script their life narratives.
Laura Marcus summarizes in a helpful way some of the burdens that feminists
have addressed over the years in defining and legitimizing a field of women’s writings
worthy of scholarly scrutiny (Marcus 1984).240 Being over-determined by seminal
autobiographies, mentors and models invoked in autobiographical criticism (model of a
text in other words is a model of life), the notion of truth and intention behind an
autobiographical act (the truth of the self), inner compulsion of the self to be made
available to the world, the concept of genius that informs any evaluation of personal
writings, the greatness of an autobiography should ideally flow from an “insider” quality,
and lastly that of “introspection”, which problematizes the issue of consciousness and the
act of expressing that consciousness through writing, which is considered to be
temporally coexisting but in fact are temporally two distinct processes.
Some of the concepts and ideas, which have been at the forefront of feminist
critiques of autobiography, and have been cast and recast in feminist theories on
autobiographies/women’s personal narratives are subject and subjectivity, and the related
notion of self. The first two concepts have both been explored within the context of the
concept of “experience” and its relation both with the narrator as well as her writing
process. The notion of the subject has been directly related to the “I” of the narrator, who
records certain details about the past and rejects others. The concept of self points to the
individual core of a person, her or his essence in a way. This concept has particularly
come under attack as critics (both from post structuralism as well as psychoanalysis) have
240 Marcus, Laura. 1994. Auto-biographical discourses: Theory, criticism, practice. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
151
debated the notion of a unified, essential self. Feminist scholars have reacted variously to
such new moves. For example, Domna Stanton deletes bio or the real life and opens up
two other alternatives- “autography” and “autogynography”- a call to women to write as
they please without any burden of truth or essence. Liz Stanley for example in her book,
The Autobiographical I: Theory and Practice o f Feminist Autobiography (Stanley 1992),
argues that it is no longer the problematic question of a coherent “I” of the narrative.
According to her, the self is no longer a self that can be understood as an “inside”, the
self has been made and remade over and over again in several layers by external forces.
The narrative self therefore is all the time moving between the “inside” as well as the
“outside”.241 In a further aspect of rethinking about autobiography and subjectivity, the
“inner” dimension is being seen more as a performance, than an outflow of that inner
self. This again brought back the issue, not only of a multi-layered self but also that of an
audience. This move was most notably influenced by Judith Butler’s explication of the
performance of the self as the constitutive mechanism through which the self is made
over and over again. These new directions in feminist autobiographical criticism arose
out of an increasing focus on the text and the conditions under which the text was
produced.
This critical move towards textuality has been informed therefore by a notion of
an interrelated set of ideas that signified a presence of an audience/others/social.
Historical contexts or social conditions under which women wrote and produced their
narratives gained an important significance. Not only was the narrator a crucial agent in
this act, so were the ways and situations under which the narrator interacted with others,
241 Coslett, Tess, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield. Edited. 2000. Feminism and Autobiography: Texts,
Theories, Methods. London: Routledge.
Watson, Martine.B and Allison B. Kimmich. 1999. Women and Autobiography. Wilmington: S R Books.
152
which conditioned the production of the text. The intellectual appreciation of
intersubjectivity within the genre of women’s writings has been strengthened by more
recent developments within this genre. One of the most profound moments has been the
reclaiming of this genre by “women of color”, who have argued for the cultural
production of writings and subjectivities by virtue of race or ethnicity. For example,
Nellie McKay’s essay in Women, Autobiography, Theory argues for an appreciation of
African American women’s writings at the “interface of gender and race.” Further, slave
narratives in the nineteenth century were distinct from those of middle class white
women and even African American men.242 Contending that there is no monolithic
“black” identity, she argues that in the twentieth century, such narratives valorized the
membership to a “black” identity. Similarly Shirley Geok-lin Lim pointed to the
importance of “multiple marginalities”, “of gender, ethnicity, nationality, and linguistic
community that continue to characterize Asian women writer’s cultural status” (Lin
1998).243 For her the “self’ is as important as the “bio” that includes history, society,
gender, race, class, ethnicity, language and geography. Therefore, not only “woman” as a
category but also the relation of a “woman” to her writing was problematized, neither of
which were straightforward, obvious and unilinear. Subjectivity was appreciated in terms
of its variations and differences. Questions of who can speak and under what cultural
conditions were important queries to be answered, especially in talking about the
subjective identities that subjugated at many levels. To this end, scholars like Regenia
242 McKay, Nellie. 1998. “The Narrative Self: Race, Politics, and Culture in Black American Women’s
Autobiography”, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson edited Women, Autobiography, Theory. Madison:
University o f Wisconsin Press.
243 Lin, Shirley. 1998. “Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into the Subject o f the
Contemporary Asian Woman Writer”, in Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson edited Women, Autobiography,
Theory. Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press.
153
Gagnier have spoken o f histories o f subjectivities, rather than the conception of a neat
and clear self. She talks about the different levels in and through which the subject has
been constituted and each with its specific history- from the subject as a subject to itself
or the “I”, subject as a subject and of others, subject being a subject of knowledge,
subject through the ownership of a body, and lastly through acts of writing, the subject is
subject to the language and culture in which she or he is writing (Gagnier 1991).244
Displacing some of the norms of autobiographical authorship and evaluation of
the texts themselves, has been accompanied by a shift from the “unique” to a focus on
ordinary and common world of mundane activities, which have been a reality for
majority of women and have formed a fundamental aspect of their subjectivities.
Everyday forms of writing of the personal self in diaries or journals have brought out the
multi-layered material world of women and the role of such lives in their writings. It has
led to an appreciation not only of the different forms of self expressions that women
achieve through these activities, but also valuing the activities themselves as central to
notions and practice o f self. For example, feminist scholars have argued how writing of
personal forms contradicts assumed forms of normative femininity. Everyday
constructions of experience within household spaces or everyday bodily activities have
constituted the new move towards reading all kinds of cultural productions as textual and
political. The 1996 edited book, Getting a Life: Everyday Uses o f Autobiography
precisely builds on the notion of “everyday” and how it becomes the “authenticators” of
people’s lives around. Both the editors Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson talk about the
postmodern context and argue how individuals move through different social institutions
244 Gagnier,Regenia. 1991. Subjectivities: A History o f Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920. New

York: Oxford University Press.
154
and participate in “specific, yet different, narrative practices through which we become
subjects in and of our lives” (Smith & Watson 1996: 10).245 Everyday narratives,
according to the contributors to the volume, are also ways to subvert and resist everyday
forms of appropriation by institutions and practices. These editors and the contributors
collectively evoke Michel de Certeau’s theoretical primacy given to the “everyday”
within late capitalism in locating the myriad of “tactics” using which individuals manage
their lives caught up in the “nets of discipline”.246
The notion of “everyday” has informed and inspired recent feminist history on
issues of women, domesticity, and subjectivity within the context of early and late
colonial India. This notion of “everyday” figures in these texts in and through a number
of issues, which have framed the lives and designed the subjective beings of women.
These autobiographical narratives have been analyzed by feminist historians most notably
within the paradigm of “home”, “house”, or “family life,” in other words the world of
domesticity and its attendant institutions and practices. These autobiographical criticisms
have focused on the ordeals of educated middle class women in India, who had partaken
(or attempted to partake) in various projects of colonial and nationalist modernity as
agents, interlocutors, and authors. Their struggles to break out from the several layers of
confinement (real as well as perceived, such as home, family, patriarchy or the nascent
nation), could be read off their scripts, which were a testimony to both the meanings that
245 Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson edited. 1996. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses o f Autobiography.
Minneapolis: University o f Minnesota Press.
246 For example, Gillian Rose in her article, “Women and Everyday Spaces” shows how women’s everyday
negotiations o f a diverse range o f practices and meanings in defined spaces are at the same time a move to
conquer and alter the meanings o f those spaces as well as push their significance beyond the boundaries o f
those spaces. Rose, Gillian. 1999. “Women and Everyday Spaces”, in Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick
edited Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. New York: Routledge.
155
9 47
their lives had and the ones they aspired towards. Here I mention in particular three
texts, which have been influential in further consolidating this move within feminist
autobiographical criticism within Indian historiography.
One of these are the memoirs of Dr Haimabati Sen, a child widow who strove to
become a medical practitioner, eventually defying all constraints of a staunchly
patriarchal system of late colonial Bengal to pursue her desires for higher education. This
text chronicles her life and its ordeals under the different institutions that governed her
life and against which she fought ardently, the patriarchal family, and the medical system
that was an outrightl man’s domain. Edited by Geraldine Forbes and Tapan
Raychaudhuri, Haimabati’s memoir chronicles complex tensions between women’s
public roles and the constraints of patriarchal family structure that were in place.
According to the editors, the distinctiveness of the memoirs lies in the way of narration of
women’s lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Bengal/India. Her career as a
western-trained medical doctor spanned the period of social reform in the 19th century to
nationalism and its gendered aspirations in the 20th. The memoir is more about her
difficulties as a professional woman in a male dominated world than about the medical
problems of her patients. She was severely constrained by the different levels of male
authority within the profession from the real to the symbolic. This memoir written mostly
in the 1920s, therefore reiterated a common trope within the autobiographical genre of
that period, which voiced a desire of the narrator to enter a world, traditionally denied to
247 Harish, Ranjana. 1993. Indian Women’s Autobiographies. New Delhi: Arnold; Karlekar, Malavika.
1993. Voice from Within: Early Personal Narratives o f Bengali Women. Delhi: Oxford University Press;
Burton, Antoinette. 2003. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late
Colonial India. New York: OUP; Forbes, Geraldine and Tapan Raychaudhuri. 2000. the memoirs o f Dr
Haimabati Sen: from child widow to lady doctor. New Delhi: Roli Books; and Sarkar, Tanika. 1999. Words
to Win: The Making o f Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
156
women, education and professional qualifications. The editors write, “This is a
remarkable memoir by a remarkable woman.. .However, what we do not know, and in
fact, cannot know about any event in history, is what really happened. This is a memoir
with Hem at center stage- with only one figure above her- God... In modem terms, she
“breaks the silence” and speaks of those things about which women loyal to the
948
patriarchy and loyal to their cultures do not speak” (Forbes & Raychaudhuri 1999: 45).
Another of these texts is Tanika Sarkar attempt to chronicle the making of the first
full-length autobiography that was printed in the Bengali language (Sarkar 1999).249
According to the translator and the editor, the power of the text lies in its obvious
chronicle of the “deeply transgressive departure” that marks the life of Rashsundari Devi,
an uneducated, but upper caste housewife from a strongly conservative rural household
who delved into a journey to self-education in utter secrecy. Sarkar argues, “the book
offers a reading of the text as a history of modem times in colonial Bengal. It attempts to
explain why a rural housewife would have desired forbidden learning and what made it
possible for her to attain it. In the process, it frames the autobiography within the history
of Rashsundari’s class, caste, religion, and localities” (Ibid. 1999). Sarkar comments
upon is the remarkable divine quality of Rashsundari’s memoir. Sarkar’s reading of Amar
Jiban (AI) shows that for Rashsundari, her words were an outcome of God’s divine
miracle that let out the words that lay confined within her. “Her life was meant to be read
as if it was enclosed within a divine purpose, as almost an extension of God’s own life”
(Ibid. 1999: 4).
248 Forbes, Geraldine and Tapan Raychaudhuri. 1999. The memoirs o f Dr Haimabati Sen. New Delhi: Roli
Books.
249 Sarkar, Tanika. 1999. Words to Win: The Making o f Amar Jiban : A Modern Autobiography. New
Delhi: Kali for Women.
157
While Rashsundari’s autobiography and Haimabati’s memoir both in a sense
chronicled the ordeal and the tribulations that both these women underwent in the pursuit
of education, Antoinette Burton extends her analysis to a close reading of the narratives
of three well-educated and socially visible women, presented in the form of their memoir,
novel, and an autobiography (all these three women wrote in English). Through a
compelling analysis, Burton analyzes how the memories of “home” that are captured in
the narratives of Janaki Penelope Majumdar {Family History), Attia Hosain {Sunlight on
a Broken Column), and Cornelia Sorabji {India Calling), are in fact themselves
“archives”, out of which, the reader can construct a “variety of counterhistories of
colonial modernity” (Burton 2003: 5).250 She reads these narrative forms to shed light on
the ways in which Hosain, Majumdar, and Sorabji transform “home” and the “house”
into “durable archives” and thereby not only save domesticity from “the oblivion of
history” but also rescue “History itself’ from the “triumphalist representations that
dominant imperialist and nationalist discourses had been producing about house and
home since the Victorian period” (Ibid. 2003: 5).
What all these three feminist historians have sought to recover are the varied
personal trajectories through which women gave voice to distinct journeys of their
distinct lives, which were constrained by a number of obvious and less obvious
ideologies. For Sarkar and Forbes and Raychaudhuri as well as Burton, the real challenge
has been to forward the case for considering histories of representation (memoir,
autobiography and other personal narrative forms) as truly historical documents, worthy
of historical investigation. While the domestic was the ultimate obsession that both the
nationalists and the colonialists harbored in their respective modernist aspirations, the
250 Burton, Antoinette. 2003. Dwelling in the Archive. New York: Oxford University Press.
158
domestic was also the “other” of that aspiring imperial or nationalist “self’ that captured
in its memories and material spaces the contradictions, tensions, and ambiguities of both.
I situate my argument within this body of literature and argue that the inclusion of
women’s narratives in the form of autobiographies, letters, diaries, memoirs, and personal
journals provides a testimony to discourses through which women, gender, and the
domestic became the most valuable “object” of knowledge in bourgeois modernist
projects of both colonialists and nationalists. It also exhibited the possibilities as well as
the boundaries of the early twentieth century feminist movements in Bengal or India.
WOMEN’S WRITINGS IN BENGAL, INDIA, AND THE FEMINIST AGENDA
While in the 1830s, the British had introduced Western medical education for
Indians, it was not until fifty years later that Indian women and their health conditions
became the interests of British men and women- colonial administrators, women
philanthropists and missionaries, and Indian men as well. The Countess of Dufferin’s
Fund, popularly known as the Dufferin Fund was established in 1885 marking the first
formal attempt on the part of the Raj to extend medical assistance to Indian women. This
was one of the founding moments where the zenana, which stood for everything that was
decadent, regressive, and conservative about the gender system in India became open to
medical reform (Forbes 1994). 251 As Maneesha Lai rightly asserts, “Established in 1885
by Lady Dufferin, wife o f the new viceroy of India, the Dufferin Fund constituted the
single most important institutionalization of gender in the history of colonial medicine in
India” (Lai 1994: 30). This new fund was established with the explicit objective of
251 Forbes, Geraldine, “Medical Careers and Health Care for Indian Women: patterns o f control”, in
Women’s History Review, 1994, Vol. 3 (4): 515-530. Lai, Maneesha, “The Politics o f Gender and Medicine
in Colonial India: The Countess o f Dufferin’s Fund, 1885-1888”, in Bulletin fo r History o f Medicine, 1994,
68: 29-66.
159
extending medical care for Indian women, to build hospitals and encourage women to
study medicine. It was more a philanthropic passion pursued by Chrisitian women
missionaries from Britain and the United States rather than a direct concern of the
colonial state. The last objective was particularly daunting given the fact that medicine
was a stringently male dominated profession and women who dared to study medicine
had to endure stiff social pressures from the family and the community. It was not until
1916, that an exclusively women’s medical college- Lady Hardinge Medical College was
opened in Delhi. For example, Meera Kosambi illustrates the life of Anandibai Joshee
and the tribulations she had to undergo. Anandibai came from an orthodox Brahmin
family who became the first Indian doctor to qualify as a medical practitioner, and
received her medical degree in the United States.
Similarly Malavika Karlekar chronicles the life of Kadambini Ganguly, who was
the first female graduate and the first female medical practitioner of Bengal. In 1886, she
was awarded the Graduate of Bengal Medical College and was given the permission to
practice western medicine in Bengal, much to the ire of the conservative Bengali Hindus
who launched a slander campaign against her. Haimabati Sen’s memoir similarly
records the journey she undertook to pursue a career in medicine that was fraught with
similar social hindrances. Even when medicine was increasingly becoming an accepted
field of work that women could dare to venture into, professional employment gave
bhadramahila (educated middle class urban women), direct experience of frustration at
252 Karlekar, Malavika, “Kadambini and the Bhadralok: Early Debates over Women’s Education in
Bengal”, in Economic and Political Weekly, 1986, Volume XXI (17): 25-31.
Deb, Chitra. 1998. Mahila Daktar: Bhin Graher Bashinda (Women Doctors: Inhabitants o f a Different
Planet). Kolkata: Ananda Publishers.
160
the discriminatory policies of the colonial government (Borthwick 1984).253 Besides,
English women doctors were able to take advantage of the racial discrimination of
colonial power to monopolize all available position, thereby considerably hampering the
advancement of Indian women doctors.
As Meredith Borthwick writes, “Indian women doctors were left to labor under
the oppressive effects of dual discrimination on grounds of both sex and race” (Ibid.
1984: 326). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the demand for medical
professionals was increasing (Mukherjee 1995).254 According to historians like Geraldine
Forbes, this demand was the result of an increasing appreciation of curative
institutionalized western medicine by middle class Indian women who regarded it as
modem. Such demands also came from the manufacturing sector which provided medical
aid to their servicemen, and last but certainly not the least, the Government who from the
late nineteenth century onwards had pursued an aggressive policy of “civilizing” the
society they ruled by setting up a network of hospitals, medical schools, and dispensaries
(Forbes 2000: 164).255
While medicine had become a respectable profession for educated middle class
Indian women (despite the ideological and structural problems that women faced),
midwifery was a profession, which perhaps bore the heaviest burden as a field of
knowledge that was misused and was deemed to be in urgent need of reform, both by
colonial authorities as well as the nationalists. Midwifery, like the zenana had become a
253 Borthwick, Meredith. 1984. The Changing Role o f Women in Bengal 1849-1905. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
254 Mukherjee, Mukul. 1995. “Women’s Work in Bengal, 1880-1930: A Historical Analysis”, in, Bharati
Ray edited From the Seams o f History. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
255 Forbes, Geraldine. 2000. Women in Modern India. Volume IV.2 .Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
161
symbol of the degenerate state of women in India. Childbirth was by definition a
women’s domain- the majority of women both in rural and urban India depended on
midwives during childbirth. Midwifery was an occupation that was a “hereditary
occupation” and midwives usually came from lower caste and class backgrounds.
Midwives were popular among women for several reasons- most notably familiarity, easy
accessibility, affordability, and a shared knowledge of cultural practices around childbirth
and motherhood. Yet midwifery became a tool of colonial and nationalist intervention, in
view of the fact that it was the most shameful instance of the “domestic troubles of
women in India”.
In attempts to ameliorate the situation, the Victoria Memorial Scholarship Fund
was established in 1901-2 with the specific objectives of “training a superior class of
midwives” and “to impart a certain amount of practical knowledge to the indigenous
midwives (daisy\ 257 The lack of success in these programs was usually explained by the
colonial and missionaries by attributing it to the ignorance of midwives and their
resistance modernizing themselves, and partly structural inadequacies of these programs-
for example, lack of funds, dearth of exclusively secluded wards that could attract upper
caste women, and lack of medical expertise.
Along with a highly charged concern with midwifery and the “degradable”
practices o f ignorant local midwives, by the early years of the twentieth century, the ills
of irresponsible and ignorant midwives were also accompanied by concerns around child
health and development, with the result that The Lady Chelmsford All India League for
Maternity and Child Welfare was created It was oriented towards creating an awareness
256 Twenty Third Annual Report o f The National Association for Supplying Female Medical Aid to the
Women o f India. Calcutta 1908.
257 Ibid.
162
towards the issue of child health, training of health visitors, educating women at home,
and creating a body of health inspectors, who visited schools to evaluate the standards of
hygiene practiced within schools (Balfour 1929).
This was because, from the late nineteenth century onwards, rising infant
mortality had captured the attention of imperial authorities, both in India and back in
England.. This “vast” problem was attributed to the dais or the local midwives who were
illiterate as far as the lessons in maternal and child care were concerned. For example,
The Association of Medical Women in India by the 1920s became vocal about the need
to address the problem of infant mortality, calling it the “the most sensitive index of
social welfare and o f sanitary administration, especially under urban conditions”
(Desivilliar 1920).259
In the early years of the twentieth century, issues of motherhood and child health
were the new apologies for the empire. It was argued that the situation regarding infant
mortality was particularly dismal in Bengal. Though the working class had come under
scrutiny with regard to infant mortality, the reality for the Bengali middle class was
equally bleak. For example, the 1921 Census showed that the even among the bhadralok,
the rate of infant mortality was double the corresponding figure in Europe (Mukherjee
2001).260 In the popular imperial vocabulary, therefore, motherhood and childhood
became the twin centerpieces of debate that revolved around the future of the nation.
258 Balfour, Margaret Ida, Ruth Young. 1929. The Work o f Medical Women in India. London: Oxford
University Press.
259 Desivilliar, R.C. Lecture delivered on “Child Welfare and Infant Mortality”. He was the editor o f the
Local S elf Government Gazzette. This lecture was published in the Journal ofAssociation o f Medical
Women in India. 1920, No 3. p. 5-11.
260 Mukherjee, Sujata. 2001. “Discplining the Body? Health care for Women and Children in Early
Twentieth Century Bengal”, in Deepak Kumar edited Disease and Medicine in India. New Delhi: Tulika
163
While on the one hand the zeal of women Christian missionaries and physicians
sought to reform Indian women to perfect mothers, such concerns actively framed early
twentieth century Indian feminism as well. Women’s political activism like the “vote”
was equally committed to the cause of women’s health and physical culture. It was not
insignificant that Dr Kadambini Ganguly (the first woman medical practitioner from
Bengal) and Swamakumari Devi (credited with the founding of a women’s organization
called Sakhi Samiti (an association of female friends, which was designed to facilitate
cooperation among women whose lives were confined to the private sphere, by providing
financial support to poor, unmarried and widowed women) were two of the delegates to
the 1889 session of the Indian Congress in Bombay.
Saraladevi Chaudhurani, Swamakumari’s daughter, another enthusiast for
women’s rights, founded the Bharat Stri Mahamandal, considered as the first all India
women’s organization in 1901. She had established Bharat Stri Sikhsha Sadan in
Calcutta and introduced games with batons and swords among women, which encouraged
a strong ethic of physical culture for women. The rationale behind the full fledged
induction of women into the political realm was premised on the fact that women were
integrally linked to the future of the nation, by their indispensable role as mothers (Ray
2001).261
Health and family welfare activities were a central concern of women’s
organizations like the All India Women’s Conference (AIWC). The Women’s Indian
Association ( WIA) under Annie Besant had inaugurated maternity welfare activities from
around the 1920s. “This was taken up by the Baby Welcome Centres which were leading
261 Ray, Bharati. 2001. “Women, Politics and Identity in Colonial Bengal, 1900-1947”, in Bharati Ray and
David Taylor edited, Politics and Identity in South Asia. Kolkata: K.P.Bagchi and Company.
164
the way in the work of maternity and child welfare, the end in view being that the local
authorities should ultimately take up this duty of educating parents and providing a
262
suitable environment for the coming generation” (Basu & Ray 1990: 80). Health and
hygiene, defined with the parameters of motherhood and childcare became feminist
issues, which became part of a broader modernist agenda, in which, “domesticity and its
practical forms came under even more intense surveillance in late colonial India, where
the evidence that home housed was critical to debates about how modernity could and
should be played out” (Burton 2003: 8-9).
WOMEN WRITING HOME AND HYGIENE
In this section I use Michel Certeau’s notion of “tactic” to argue that women’s
writings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be labeled as a “tactics”
that sought to retrieve knowledge of the domestic that had become a domain of male
public expertise, by writing about it. Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century
discourses on health and hygiene emerged as a body of knowledge that became the focus
of the modernizing aspirations of both colonialists and nationalists.
Therefore in this modernizing zeal, the “women’s question” had brought under its
overarching frame, a number of problems- health was one of the most fundamental in
them, that came under intense examination. In these discourses women had become the
object o f medical, therapeutic, and a set ofphilanthropic discourses. Writing was thus a
double-maneuvered tactic. On the one hand, it was a move that signified an act o f
retrieval on the part of these women authors- retrieval of knowledge, which was about
them and their bodies, yet they were the objects and not its subjects. On the other, this act
262 Basu, Apama and Bharati Ray. 1990. Women’s Struggle: A History o f the All India Women’s
Conference 1927-1990. Delhi: Manohar Books.
165
of writing was also an effort on the part of these women writers to partake in the public
realm of knowledge formation around issues of health, hygiene, and well-being. These
writings therefore marked the emergence of these women as subjects of the domestic- a
domain to which they were naturalized and therefore made non agents.
Michel Certeau elaborates the notion of “tactic” in his exploration of the “practice
of everyday life” and the ways in which consumers in late capitalist societies make “use
o f ’ or “manipulate” of consumer products. He lists practices like “readers’ practices,
practices related to urban spaces, utilizations of everyday rituals, re-uses and functions of
the memory (Certeau 1984). 263 As opposed to “strategy”, for Certeau, “tactic” “is a
calculus which cannot count on a “proper” spatial or institutional localization, nor thus on
a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality.. ..Many everyday practices
(talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc)are tactical in character. And so
are, more generally, many “ways of operating”: victories of the “weak” over the “strong”
(whether the strength be that of powerful people of the violence of things or of an
imposed order, etc.)” (Ibid. 1984: xix). Though I use this concept to explore a very
different historically and socially different context, I find the notion of “tactic” useful to
signify the possibilities that it provided for these women writers to maneuver their
everyday lives and everyday forms of knowledge.
Women’s personal narratives in the form of diaries, memoirs, and autobiographies
addressed the transitions that early twentieth century social feminism was going through.
It also marked the possibilities and the contradictions that a feminist agenda had created
for many urban, middle class, educated women, who were faced with the contradictions
between their domestic identities and their increasing political and public aspirations. In
263 Certeau, Michel de. 1984. The Practice o f Everyday Life. Berkeley: University o f California Press.
166
this section I analyze writings by educated, middle class Bengali women in a number of
genres- autobiographical, short stories, non-fictional writings, and educational literature.
More specifically I look at writings on health, hygiene, childbirth, and motherhood.
Though essays in popular journals, educational literature, or short stories might not be
“autobiographical” or “personal” in the conventional sense, I label them as
autobiographical because these writings were not only certain representational forms that
reflected the material and ideological realities which framed their lives.
These writings constituted autobiographical tactics, by which these women
constituted their every day lives and negotiated them. These were the acts, through which
these women bridged the multiple selves they found themselves the authors of. These
were the concrete practices through which they negotiated the public and the private and
made themselves a part of the public and intellectual sphere as well. Therefore I label all
these genres as autobiographical in and through which women partook in the formation
of knowledge that concerned them and their activities within the domestic sphere but
their significance lay far beyond the walls of the domestic. Explicitly or implicitly these
writings were a projection of the “self’ onto the more overtly public and political realm.
As Tanika Sarkar has stated, from around the middle of the nineteenth century, a
social category was bom in Bengal, along with a new world that named it: lekhika or the
female author. These writings, translated for the first time from the Bengali, are by
women who were amongst the earliest to receive a modem education and become
members of the reading and writing public. Women wrote on a wide variety of concerns,
in the many journals that had come into being because of the tremendous growth of
vernacular print culture. These were often edited by women, for example, Bharat Mahila,
167
Bharati Balak, Antahpur, Mahila, and Bharati, to mention just a few. The writers’
contributions helped build the image of the new educated woman, self-confident,
opinionated, and transgressive.
This section therefore explores writings by Radharani Devi, Sukhalata Rao,
Priyabala Gupta, and Saratkumari Chaudhurani. Writings of the first three women have
been recently compiled by the Women’s Studies Departure, Jadavpur University,
Calcutta, India, who have undertaken an important project in reprinting and compiling
writings by Bengali women from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Diverse in
genres, from memoirs to short stories, these collections have been compiled with a view
to retrieve women’s writings from this period in order to explore what that period meant
for women, the challenges they faced and the spirit with which they attempted to
overcome some of those challenges.
These volumes usually have a biography of the author and a selection of her
writings. While some of these women became intellectually visible, others did not.
Instead they pursued apparently silent lives during the course of which, they waged their
struggles against social institutions and forms of subjection that they themselves were
part of. According to the founder-director of the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur
University, Jashodhara Bagchi, who also writes the Preface to Priyabala’s memoir says,
“these autobiographies are a testimony of the imprint of a gendered social structure on the
lives and psyche of these women. These are not only an expression of deprivation, but
their capabilities as well” (Bagchi 1999: 8).264
264 Bagchi, Jasodhara. 1999. Preface, “The light o f your life”, in, Ranjan Gupta edited Smritimanjusha.
Kolkata: D ey’s Publishing.
168
Priyabala Gupta’s (1899-) writings have been compiled in a book called,
Smritimanjusha (The Treasure House o f Memories). Bagchi writes, “Priyabala Gupta
never became famous. Though she was revered within her family and her village for her
knowledge and humanitarianism.. .her childhood was spent moving between places-
Bhagalpur, Konnagar, Calcutta, and Cuttack. Her happiest moments were those of her
childhood, when she could pursue her education. In no phase of her life, one sees
expressions of such exuberance. The school signified an expanding world of knowledge
despite the thousand barriers.. .her father’s traveling career caused her anxieties. But one
sees the black clouds of her life, when she became of the marriageable age.
Education of daughters never figured in the list of responsibilities that parents
had, in a rigid and patriarchal society. For Priyabala, the biggest tragedy of her life was
when her education was discontinued, in consideration of her marriage prospects. She
harbored deep a hurt all her life against her father, who once had encouraged her to study
and develop her poetic abilities, but changed completely once she was of the
marriageable age... For Priyabala, the fundamental cause behind all ills in society was
the upper caste and upper class Hindu conservatism. Though the codes (achar) of
domesticity had put hold on her desire externally, she worked all her life to keep her
desire for freedom alive inside herself. Her poetic accomplishments, promotion of
education for women, her dedication towards helping and educating women in learning
the right ways of maternal care within the material and ideological constraints of her
everyday life- made her exceptional.
Lack of literacy within her village and the lack of sanitary health conditions
troubled her. Added to that was the horror of aturghar (the conditions of the traditional
169
birthing room for women). She self educated herself to work as a midwife. The death rate
of infants in her village had come down, thanks to her service. She did not discriminate
between Hindus and Muslims when she visited crisis stricken pregnancy cases. Even
after partition, she stayed back in East Pakistan in service of the school she had built”
(Ibid. 1999: 10-13).
In her memoirs, among other things, Priyabala dwells extensively on her
activities, helping out women who had just given birth or were nearing child deliveries.
Reminiscing about her childhood, she says that she used to read up all kinds of books.
She would devour books on domestic health, though she would not understand most of
what she read at that age. Her memoir elaborates some of the tensions that “daktari”
(English doctor’s medicine) medicine brought with it, when it made inroads into rural
Bengal. She cites an instance when one day in her in-laws place, she was acutely sick
with stomach ache. All the “traditional” (faith healers) treatments were done to provide
relief, but to no avail. She ultimately requested and pleaded with her mother-in-law to
call the physician in the village who was trained in “western” medicine. The event
created such a furor that her father-in-law ultimately called the physician, but was so
angered by this invitation to an “outcaste” (since trained in western medicine) doctor, that
he left the house and waited in the nearby fields, till the doctor left.
She also chronicles the impediments, which she faced when she was bringing up
her child. There were strict restrictions (spiritual/climactic/therapeutic) about how to
secure the health of a child during those times. These incidents repeatedly express her ire
that she felt towards what she considered acutely backward and conservative mentalities
as far as medical knowledge was concerned. Her zeal to undertake midwifery services,
170
were really encouraged by what she considered almost a horror, when it came to birthing
activities of women and rituals of motherhood. She writes, “When I think of those days
when I myself had to undergo those terrible experiences when my children were bom, I
wonder how I ever had the strength to bear all that pain” (Gupta 1999: 89).265
The event, which marked her entry into midwifery was the day she went to attend
a delivery alone. Since then, she attended many complicated deliveries that that
jeopardized lives of the women of the village. The upper caste and upper class
background of her affine family and its stringent patriarchal values created a series of
barriers for her to carry on such activities. Priyabala is explicitly critical of “traditional
dais”, who had no education and no knowledge in hygiene. For her it was a system,
which had existed since time immemorial and therefore resistant to any transformation. A
large section of her memoir therefore dwells on her experiences of becoming a self-
trained midwife, helping out women in distress during childbirth.
While she is openly critical of untrained local midwifes and espouses new training
methods that were made part of licensed medical institutions in Bengal and India, when it
came to choosing between the different therapeutic systems, she did not favor allopathic
medicines, instead practiced homeopathic medicine and administered them free of cost to
villagers, mostly women. Wherever she would go, she would carry a standard book on
homeopathy and a box of medicines. Priyabala was therefore neither a qualified medical
practitioner, nor a licensed midwife, and never practiced medicine as part o f a full
fledged profession, yet in the course of her married life she labored to stop the loss of
lives that pregnancy and childbirth often led to. Her memoir actively records the stages
265 Gupta, Priyabala. 1999. “Smritimanjusha”, in, Gupta Ranjan edited Smritimanjusha. Kolkata: D ey’s
Publishing.
171
through which she progressed and made treating expectant and new mothers her religion
as well as passion.
Radharani Devi (1903-1989) was a child widow who became a well known
literary figure in Bengal and a prolific writer of poetry, novels, and short stories. Her
second husband Narendranath Dev was also a poet, who translated poetic works from
Sanskrit into Bengali. Radharani compiled a number of poetry anthologies in Bengali.
She was praised for her writings, which according to many critics captured “the spirit of
the age”. Both she and her second husband were well known among the literary elite in
early twentieth century Bengal. Some of her literary works have been compiled in a
volume, titled, Radharani Debir Rachana Sankalan (Collected Writings of Radharani
Devi, Volumes I and II published successively in 1999 and 2000), some selections of
which I analyze (Sen & Bhaduri 1999).
Her daughter Nabanita Dev Sen, herself a literary figure introduces her mother,
“the literary life of the young and brave Radharani was never easy. She had to pay a price
as a child widow from an upper middle class family in order to survive in society. The
O f\f*
female characters in her stories precisely resemble that” (Deb Sen 1999: 8).
Radharani’s short stories with the centrality of female characters were framed within the
emotional paradigm of “motherhood” as the most fundamental expression of
womanhood, which she labels as the “calling of the heart” (Gupta 1999). For her
maternal emotion is not about giving birth only. It is about sacrifice and selfless love. Her
stories have been imagined within a moral and cultural geography, in which Bengali girls
were married off at the age of twelve or thirteen. The same girl who at night she would
266 Deb Sen, Nabanita. 1999. “Radharani Dutta, Radharani Devi, aar Amra” [Radharani Dutta, Radharani
Devi and Us], in, The Collected Writings o f Radharani Devi, Vol. 1, edited by Abhijit Sen & Anindita
Bhaduri. Kolkata: D ey’s Publishing.
172
knit gloves, make pickles, design an album, suddenly break into an excited dance hearing
some music and read some book in secrecy would also be the one who would very soon
completely master the art of selfless care for others.
These two pillars of her identity- the one existing for self and the one for others
very often merged according to Radharani. Through her female characters, who were
confronted with the death of, and separation from others, Radharani tries to portray a
certain kind of “romanticism” that Bengali life carried and which gave a quality of
“morbidity” to such existence . Here, I analyze a story by Radharani, called, “Mashi”
(Maternal Aunt), written in 1926, about a young widow for whom there is no distinction
between taking care of others in everyday life and her higher calling. For her meaning of
life lies therefore in “giving”. Hence there is no distinction between the “biological
mother” and the “aunt”. But precisely that is the center of a social contradiction- while
love unites both the mother and aunt, there is no social right that an aunt has, precisely
because she is not the biological mother.
Radharani therefore precisely raises a voice, where the biological act of birthing
and mothering becomes the moral cornerstone of social rights as well. This story is about
a young widow, who returns to her paternal home after her husband dies. There are three
members in the family, the central character, Minu, the protagonist, her widowed mother,
and her elder sister’s (who has passed away) young son, Ajit. The story revolves around
the relationship between Minu and Ajit and the tragic outcomes, which follow when Ajit
marries. One of the situations in this narrative is where Ajit is seriously ill and Minu
relentlessly stays by his bedside, taking care of the ailing Ajit.
173
For Minu, it is the calling of her life and for the author Radharani,
pain/sickness/separation/death are indispensable for the realization and expression of
love/care/desire. And this not only becomes a defining moment in the short story, it is the
emotional sub-terrain of Bengali social and moral life according to Radharani. She
describes how, “Minu dedicated herself with the accuracy of a machine to caring for Ajit.
She fixed her life with the hands of the clock during those days. She would wash Ajit,
give him medicine, prepare his diet (pathya), feed him, massage him, measure his body
temperature with the thermometer, change his bed, keep the room clean and dry, maintain
an accurate chart of his bodily activities, keep up all night, and talk to him, and read him
stories when he is awake. Quietly but fiercely she took care of him like a true care giver,
like the true mother” (Ibid. 1999: 190).
In a detailed manner, Radharani describes the sick room at night as a powerful
way to convey the space within which the relationship between care and disease is
forged. It conveys in a powerful way how the materialities of the room, its things become
the means through which both the states of disease and sacrifice gain meaning. They
become indispensable in a way for the “emotional” to find a way out into the open. She
writes, “It is past two at night. The table lamp glows mellow under a blue silk lamp
shade, creating a shadow around. The small time piece on the table breaks the silence of
the house. A number o f things are arranged neatly on the table covered with a white
linen- medicine bottles, a measuring cup glass, a big cup, fruits, a thermometer, a feeding
cup, thermoflask, and a hotwater bag (Ibid. 1999: 191). Radharani’s emotional economy
is therefore explained through these concrete moments of caring for the sick in its most
mundane details.
174
Saratkumari Chaudhurani’s (1861-1920) short stories and novels exhibit that
genre of women’s writings that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, which dwelt on the trivia of everyday domesticity. These trivia became the
idiom through, which writers like Saratkumari explored and dealt with the realities and
constraints in their personal lives. Her fiction was primarily concerned with women’s
lives, but not necessarily about their humiliations. The everyday became the leveling
ground of sorts, through which these women mediated the positions they occupied in
society and the desires they harbored. Saratkumari was brought up far from Bengal, in
Punjab. She grew up in a family that valued female education.
Saratkumari went to an English school but at the age of nine, she was married off
to a very successful attorney at the Calcutta High Court, who had also earned fame for his
poetic abilities. Akshay Chandra Chaudhuri, her husband continued her education after
their marriage by having an Englishwoman come over at their home. Both Sarat and
Akshay were ardent supporters of female education and espoused distinctly modernist
conceptions on issues of conjugality for instance. In her personal life, Saratkumari shared
a companionate relationship with her husband Akshay and in her fictions on domesticity
one can easily read that level of satisfaction that Sarat experienced in her married life
(Murshid 1983).267
But at the same time, there are moments of outright objection that she articulates
through the characters she develops in her stories. The violence of a strictly gendered
system therefore starkly disturbs the apparent cohesion of Bengali domestic life. Instead
of looking at women as creatures touched by ill luck, authors like Saratkumari have been
267 Murshid, Gulam. 1983. Reluctant Debutante: Responses o f Bengali to Modernisation, 1849-1905.
Rajshahi: Sahitya Samsad, Rajshahi University.
175
direct in her representations of women as victimized by the patriarchal system even
within the apparent bliss of married life. Saratkumari’s views on well being therefore
occur at the heart of discourses on domesticity. In this section, I analyze some of her non-
fictional writings, especially on the subject of women, who Saratkumari argued were to
be made the agents of modernity too. These essays mostly discuss Saratkumari’s views
on Hindu girls’ education, women’s role in domestic health and well-being (Chaudhurani
968
2000). To her, women have been inattentive to their own needs, and the time has come
for women to take notice of their own selves.
She comments how women have never learnt to look after their personal bodies
and well-being. “It is not because of poverty or lack of time. We simply do not cast a
proper look” (Ibid. 2000: 274). Saratkumari expresses her belief that the “new woman”
can indeed fulfill duties of both the home and the world. She says, “in order to learn how
to keep oneself clean, one need not go to school. Women can practice hygiene within her
own home”. For her hygiene is couched in ideas around “dirt”, the Bengali word for
which is “dhul or dhula She espouses personal cleanliness and hygiene, a vocabulary
that had substantial currency within medical discourses of late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
Sukhalata Rao (1886-1969) was a prolific writer. She tried her hands at every
form- novels, short stories, children’s literature, songs, and non-fictional essays on a wide
range of topics. She was a painter as well. In this section I explore some of her writings
that she specifically wrote for children. I illustrate how she presented and discussed the
topic of health and hygiene as a set of lessons that could be taught to young children.
268 Bandyopadhyaya, Brajendranath and Sajanikanta Das. Edited. 2000. Collected Works o f Saratkumari
Chaudhurani. Kolkata: Bangiya Sahitya Parishat.
176
These were a set of writings under the title of, Swasthya (Health, published in 1922),
which was published as a book for primary level school children. Physician Dr Ajit
Kumar Basu, who was the Director and Professor of The Department of Surgery, Institute
of Post-Graduate Medical Education and Research, Calcutta wrote a Preface,
recommending it highly as an important book for children’s education.
Swasthya is an illustrated exposition on the basic tenets of health and hygiene- the
goodness of early rising, value of taking bath everyday, meanings of hygiene, food and
nutrition, necessity of physical exercise, and cleanliness of one’s home and surroundings.
These issues have been presented in the form of a conversation between a mother, father,
and their two children. Marked by linguistic simplicity, this didactic text was primarily
instructive in nature. Through these lessons, Sukhalata defines health and hygiene as a set
of practical habits, and also inducts children into possible agents of such a domain of
practices.
The writings that I analyze above are not instances of outright subversion, either
of patriarchal domesticity or existent western medical discourses of late colonial
Bengal/India. What we see rather are ways in which Bengali women dealt with questions
of health, hygiene, and well-being. These issues are written as a set of agendas that were
about “practicing” them in everyday domestic life. While for Priyabala Gupta is it about a
journey in her personal life to better the lot o f village women who were uneducated in the
modem knowledge of motherhood. For her, intervention is affected through her personal
philanthropy. For Radharani Devi on the other hand, health and well-being gain meaning
within the emotional framework of intimate social relations where in particular, women
play a dominant part in the moral economy of disease and illness.
177
Sukhalata Rao’s writings are a more direct expression of a bourgeois modernism
that linked hygiene, health organically to a liberal notion of familial life. And for
Saratkumari on the other hand, domesticity meant the basic pursuit of health and well
being. Both well-being and domesticity are premised on a shared practice of order. So the
art of good domesticity is a guarantee for personal well-being. What I have attempted to
show in this chapter is therefore forms of representations as possible tropes of practice of
health and hygiene within middle class Bengali, Hindu domesticity. I contend that these
writings were not simply mirrors of medical knowledge produced in the public domain.
These were attempts at bringing them close to household practices and personal
biographies as well.
178
CONCLUSION
My dissertation focuses on the embodiment of anti-colonialism nationalism in
colonial Bengal between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It shows that nationalistic
imaginings (through their engagement with issues of health and well-being) of Indian
citizens were inseparable from concerns over the body. More specifically, my dissertation
analyzes one particular aspect of this broader process of embodiment- the conception of
hygiene and the ways in which it led to a re-organization of social and cultural life of
Bengal in the late colonial period. Hygiene meant a number of things within Bengali
middle class discourses.
At a very obvious level, it implied a pursuit of personal-bodily cleanliness and
salubriousness. It also influenced other aspects of collective-bodily practices- diet,
childcare, maternal health, sanitary organization of household spaces, or using new
hygiene commodities preventively or curatively. At another and deeper level, hygiene
signified a sanitized state of the community as well. I argue that the “ordering” of bodies
in certain spaces (household, community, or nation) was intrinsically connected to
“securing” them in time (History). An intricate aspect of this “ordering” was also moral,
which, as Michel Foucault rightly described, was brought about under the name of health
Of\Q
in modem times. However, as Bryan Turner argued, “the control of bodies is
essentially the control of female bodies [or feminized bodies, emphasis mine]” (Turner
77fi
1984: 249). Following such an argument my dissertation has shown, that the
“production” of bodies was fundamentally gendered in late colonial Bengal.
269 Foucault, M. 1979. Discipline and Punish (New York. Vintage)

270 Turner, B. 1984. The Body and Society. (Oxford. Basil Blackwell).
179
My dissertation is an attempt to answer who gets to speak about health and
hygiene and under what specific historical conditions. I have analyzed how and within
which institutional locations a privileged group of social actors, mainly the Bengali
Hindu middle class, became authorized to speak about health and well-being. I looked at
discourses of both men and women who occupied this particular class position and
analyzed some of the disjunctions in their respective positions and the historical forces
which produced them. While male physicians, intellectuals, social reformers, journalists,
nationalist political leaders occupied a position of “expertise” legitimized by their public
roles, middle class Bengali women on the other hand, occupied a more complex and
truncated position when it came to their pronouncements on hygiene or health. Their
practices were located within a more dispersed realm of household activities, their newly
emerging roles within the modem public sphere, and their curious location as
representatives of both nature and culture. Despite differences in their location, they were
united by the claims to self rule and subjectivity.
As for the institutional site, where parallel discourses (to the public-colonial ones)
on health, hygiene, and well-being emerged- it was the household, family, or the
community. Here the household implied more than merely the physical space of home; it
also signified another notion of space that was set in opposition to the more public realm
of colonial institutions. Therefore the way in which the domestic became the ultimate site
of an ideal standard of hygienic well-being was also a phenomenon through which a
particular social and moral culture was constituted.
The consolidation of the domestic as a paradigmatic site in the supervision and
maintenance of health and hygiene within the Bengali middle class discourses took place
180
in relation to a number of factors. First, perceptually- in relation to developments in germ
theory/bacteriology, an increasing allegiance to environmentalist doctrine of health, a
general skepticism of British medical institutions, especially hospitals, existence and
propagation of natural home remedies,, homeopathy finding an increasing favor among
urban Bengalis; and second, theoretically, in relation to Ayurvedic medicine of the
Sanskrit classic texts, popular culture medicine that emerged with capitalist production
and advertising, and folk medicine such as bone setters or supernatural curers. My
dissertation has explored some of these translations; for example, translation of hygiene
and medicine from being a colonial knowledge to the practical realm of Bengali domestic
practice.
My dissertation has therefore treated “hygiene” as a tool of personal, communal,
and national regeneration, and the “domestic” as a site where “hygiene” was used by
Bengali middle class social actors to create and promote new class, caste, and gendered
identities in late colonial Bengal. My work therefore makes use of a variety of archival
sources, which illustrated the connections between health, hygiene, and domesticity as
ways of understanding historical processes in late colonial Bengal- colonialism and
nationalism. My primary objective in researching this archive was to understand how
medical knowledge (ideologies of preventive medicine and personal hygiene) emerged
out of discourses on domesticity and, in turn, actively influenced discourses on
domesticity. I have contended that the symbiotic relationship between “hygiene” and
“domesticity” became particularly distinct during the period when both anti-colonial
cultural nationalism and the early Indian women’s movement (and creation of a modem
discourse on gender relations) had gained grounds.
181
Medical texts (both by medical experts as well as lay scholars) in Bengali on a
variety of topics, domestic hygiene, food and nutrition, home remedies for common
ailments, Bengali journals and magazines on a variety of issues related to health and
hygiene, advertisings on health and hygiene in Bengali and English newspapers,
autobiographies of women (which) explored many issues around the household and
domesticity- all these texts illustrated the relationships between colonialism, nationalism,
domesticity, and health. They also reflected the social, economic, political, and moral
positions of the authors who wrote these texts. While the texts in Bengali highlighted the
role language played in the cultural nationalism in Bengal in the late colonial period, I
collected colonial records and reports on the administration of health and medicine in
English that highlighted the decisive role that health and sanitation played in colonial
governance. It also illustrated the tensions that issues around public health created
between several layers of colonial versus nationalist interests.
My dissertation has analyzed different aspects of the relationship between
hygiene, health, and nationalist-cultural identity formation in late colonial Bengal. In the
first chapter I have analyzed how hygiene became an important social and political
ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Bengal. The question it raised is how
were certain social identities (around class, caste, and gender) created around the question
of hygiene? The first chapter argues that it was in the hegemonic aspirations of the
Bengali middle class (to become the most powerful cultural authorities of a future nation)
that this class articulated its discourses on hygiene, which were not only a set of practices
around cleanliness and order, but it was ultimately an ideology of social control that
182
sought to demarcate and discipline other “lower” classes and castes and define the
bhadraoR's sense of self.
This cultural maneuver of the Bengali middle class bhadralok took place at the
height of anti-colonial nationalism in late colonial Bengal. The nationalist aspirations of
the bhadralok as the future heirs of the Indian nation appropriated “hygiene” as both an
ideology and set of practices not only of bodily and physical cleanliness but social
disciplining of the broader Bengali society as well. The space of the household or
domestic realm was the ultimate physical and moral space that could secure the ideals of
cleanliness both as a set of bodily practices as well as an ideology of social cleansing.
The second chapter analyzes the cultural formation of urban, Hindu, Bengali
middle class through its discourses on food, diet, and consumption. In particular, it
analyzes the role of a culture of food and culinary practices in the nationalist self-
construction of the middle class Hindu bhadralok. Situated within a broader process of
cultural self-fashioning, gastronomy became one of the primary sites for the construction
and presentation of the Hindu Bengali middle class in late colonial India. Based on
analysis of popular journals as well as books on food and nutrition, this chapter focuses
on hegemonic aspirations of this class in its zeal to become the cultural gatekeepers of a
future nation.
The third chapter shows how discourses on hygiene emerged in conjunction with
discourses on upper caste, middle class Hindu domesticity. Bengal in the late colonial
period witnessed an emergence and strengthening of ideologies around the reform of the
household or more appropriately the Bengali home. Such a reformist move involved on
the one hand, working out the relations between the genders within the household. On the
183
other, it also meant protecting the family from external influences (of lower castes or
classes). Both of these moves were guided by principles of upper caste Hinduism. The
creation of boundaries both internally as well as externally defined the nature, ideologies,
and functioning of the late colonial Hindu family. Hygiene and health became highly
scrutinized and debated issues during this period. While public health programs were
important colonial administrative priorities, ideas around personal and domestic hygiene
became important elements in a vocabulary around preventive medicine. The household
became the ultimate physical space that could secure the ideals of early twentieth century
preventive medicine.
In chapter four I have studied the relationship between hygiene, preventive
medicine and capitalism. Through an analysis of advertisements for hygienic and
therapeutics products, this chapter argues that hygiene became a broader social, cultural,
and political ideology by securing the domain of consumption in and through the sign of
the household or the family. Domesticity became a fundamental strategy of these
advertisements as well as their main target, providing a new class of consumers among
women.
In the last chapter I have analyzed were by middle class, educated Bengali
women, from urban Calcutta primarily in the early 20th century. My aim has been to
explore their writings published in popular Bengali journals and magazines in order to
understand to what extent notions of health in particular and well-being and happiness
more widely, were framed within the paradigm of Hindu domesticity. I highlighted the
contested ideological role that domesticity played as one of the central frameworks that
sought to define and make meaningful Hindu-bourgeois nationalist conceptions of
184
personal and social being. One discourse on domesticity was a specifically middle “class”
and “gendered” discourse that was fundamental as a site of an anti-colonial nationalist re
construction. This marked its ascendancy from around the second half of the 19th century-
the phase of cultural nationalism.
In the realm of health and hygiene, it under-girded writings on midwifery and
motherhood. Women’s writings on bodily and psychological well being in contrast
represented a discourse that marked the possibility of a political and moral community
that exemplified a “feminist” consciousness, and not simply as a nationalistic imperative.
This specifically found expression in discourses around the concept of care, sympathy,
and social responsibility that underlay most writings on questions of health and well
being. The emergence of this discourse has to be read in the context of the emergence of
an early 20th century feminist consciousness that gained legitimacy through the work of
women’s organization and women’s engagement with the concept of social
responsibility. Domesticity was therefore not an ideological and political constant that
marked its ascendancy since from the middle of the 19th century. It underwent certain
shifts and performed different functions even within the same social formation- the
Bengali middle class or the bhadralok.
185
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194
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME: Srirupa Prasad
OFFICE: Department of Medical History & Bioethics

1415, Medical Sciences Center
1300 University Avenue
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53706-1532
Email: [email protected]
Phone: 608-262-9140
HOME: 113 North Spooner Street

Madison, WI 53726
EDUCATION:
Ph.D. August 2005. Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dissertation Committee: Jan Nederveen-Pieterse (chair), Winifred Poster,
Antoinette Burton, Moon-Kie Jung, Maneesha Lai
M.Phil. 1995-97. Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India.
M.A. 1993-95.Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India.
B.A. (Honors). 1990-93. Sociology, Presidency College, Calcutta, India.
DISSERTATION:
“Social Production of Hygiene: Domesticity, Gender, and Nationalism in Late
Colonial Bengal and India”.
CURRENT POSITION:
Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Medical History & Bioethics,
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
AREAS OF RESEARCH & TEACHING INTEREST:
• Medical Sociology
• Women’s and Gender Studies
• Sociology of Culture
• Historical Sociology
• Sociology of Postcolonial Societies
• Social Theory
• Transnational Sociology
FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS:
Gender and Women’s Studies Program’s Feminist Scholarship, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, December 2003.
195
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Individual Research Grant,
November 2001.
American Instititute for Indian Studies, October 2001. Declined because period of
utilization coincided with the WennerGren Grant.
University Grants’ Commission, Eligibility for Lectureship in Indian Universities,

1995.
M.S. A. Rao. Scholarship obtained after the completion of 1st year of the Master’s
Program, Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi
University, India, 1994.
Recipient of National Scholarship, which partly funded my Master’s Study in the

Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, 1993-95.
PUBLICATIONS:
1. “Work Family Relations in Transnational Perspective: A View from High-Tech Firms

in India and the United States” in Social Problems, 2005, 52 (1) (co-authored
with Winifred Poster).
2. “Gender, Hygiene, and Health in Bengal/India, 1885-1935”, Wellcome History, Spring
2005, No. 28.
3. “Sanitizing the Domestic: Hygiene and Gender in Late Colonial Bengal,” (revised and
resubmitted for Social History o f Medicine).
4. “Crisis and Construction: The Cultural Politics of Taste, Consumption, and the
Bengali/Indian Hindu Domestic,” (accepted with revisions for Journal o f
Historical Sociology).
BOOK REVIEWS:
1. Review of Bent Flyvbjerg’s Making Social Science Matter, in Science, Technology,

and Society, 2004, 9 (1).
2. Review of Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi De, Eds. Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in
the Globalization o f South and Southeast Asia in Comparative Studies o f South
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2004, 24 (1).
3. Review of Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael Mann, Eds. Colonialism as Civilizing
Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India in Journal o f Colonialism and
Colonial History, 2005 6 (1).
WORK IN PROGRESS:
1. “Writing Home and Hygiene: Women’s Self-Representation, Domesticity, and the

Nation,” (for a volume edited by Martha Selby).
196
CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS & INVITED TALKS:
1. “Popularizing Hygiene: Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India,”
Center for Print Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March 1, 2006.
2. “Social Production of Hygiene in Colonial India,” Department of Anthropology,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, February 6, 2006.
3. “Writing Home and Hygiene: Women’s Writings, Self-Representation, and the
Nation,” Center for South Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
November 17, 2005.
4. “Timing the Domestic, Timing History: Temporality, Domesticity, and Well-Being in
Early Twentieth Century Bengal,” Annual Conference on South Asia, Wisconsin-
Madison, October 14-17, 2004.
5. “Cleanliness and Care in Nationalist Discourses in Early Twentieth Century Bengal,”
American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, San Francisco, August 14-
17, 2004.
6. “Sanitizing the Domestic,” American Association for the History of Medicine Annual
Meeting, Wisconsin-Madison, April 29-30, 2004.
7. “Time, Domesticity, and Well-Being in Late Colonial Bengal,” Women and Gender
History Symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 11-
12, 2004.
8. “Crisis and the Domestic: The Cultural Politics Food, Consumption and the Bengali
Hindu Middle Class,” Brown Bag Seminar Series, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, March 2, 2004.
9. “Spatializing and Sanitizing the Nationalist Imaginary: Notions of Space in Discourses
on Health and Hygiene in Early Twentieth Century Bengal,” Annual
Transnational Workshop, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, May 2003.
10. “Unraveling the nature of the “Transnational” in the Late Colonial Medical
Experience of Bengal, India,” Annual Transnational Workshop, Department of
Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 2001.
11. “Work and Family,” Midwest Sociological Association, Annual Meeting, April 2001
(Co-authored with Winifred Poster.
12. “The Challenge of Work-Family Policy for Global Organizations: Lessons from
Multinationals in India and the United States,” American Sociological
Association, Annual Meeting, August 1999 (Co-authored with Winifred Poster).
13. “Ideology and Practice in the Naxalite Movement, Bengal and India,” Annual
Cultural Studies Workshop organized by the Center for Studies in Social Science
Research, Bhopal India, January 1998.
TEACHING AND RESEARCH EXPERIENCE:
Independent Instructor, Sociology/Women’ Studies 221, Gender in a Transnational

Perspective, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Spring 2003, Fall 2003, Spring 2004, Fall 2004, and Spring 2005.
197
Co-Instructor, Sociology 396, Power and Empowerment with Professor Jan Nederveen
Pieterse, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2004.
Research Assistant, Professor Winifred Poster, Department of Sociology, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spring 2001 & Fall 2000.
Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Sociology, Department of Sociology, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Spring 2000 & Fall 1999.
Research Assistant, Professor Winifred Poster, Department of Sociology, University of

Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Spring 1999 & Fall 1998.
Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Presidency College, Calcutta University, Calcutta,

India, 1998.
Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Burdwan University, West Bengal, India, 1997-98.
FIELD RESEARCH EXPERIENCE:
Field Investigator for a project titled, “A study of the Impact of Literacy Campaigns on
Mental Health, in Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi.” Carried out between Sept-
Oct, 1996, under supervision of Dr. Alexander Cohen, Harvard Medical School, Harvard
University.
Field Investigator for “Social Science and Immunization Project: Country Study India”
from 1997 to 1998. This project was supported by the governments of Denmark and
Netherlands, and was carried out under the aegis of the Center for Development
Economics, Delhi School Economics, Delhi University, India.
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE:
Undergraduate Advisor, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, June-August 1999, May-August 2000, May-August 2001.
MEMBERSHIPS:
American Sociological Association

American Association for the History of Medicine
198

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SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE: DOMESTICITY, GENDER, AND

NATIONALISM IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL AND INDIA

B.A., University of Calcutta, 1993

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

ProQuest Information and Learning Company

University o f Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

We hereby recommend that the thesis by:

Be accepted in partial fulfillment o f the requirements fo r the degree of:

Committee on Final Examination*

Chairperson rveen Pieterse Committee Member - Moon-Kie Jung

Committee Member - AntoifStte Burton Committee'Member - Maneesha Lai

Committee Member - Winifred Poster Committee Member -

* Required for doctoral degree but not for master’s degree

My dissertation explores the ordering of modem domestic life through the

of the emerging citizens.

My dissertation shows how hygiene became a powerful cultural mechanism and

through which hygiene became an object of knowledge and an important force in

order, reproduction, regeneration, restraint, and regulation. It is important to note here

medical-scientific discourse of modem and public colonial institutions in India.

CHAPTER ONE: SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF HYGIENE........................................16

CHAPTER TWO: CULTURAL POLITICS OF TASTE, CONSUMPTION AND

CHAPTER THREE: HYGIENE AND GENDER IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL

CHAPTER FOUR: HEALTH AND HYGIENE IN THE MARKETPLACE 115

A d v e r t is in g , R e p r e s e n t a t io n , and C o n s t r u c t io n of the S o c i a l .................................1 3 4

CHAPTER 5: WOMEN’S WRITINGS, SELF-REPRESENTATION, AND THE

W om en W r it in g H ome and H y g i e n e .....................................................................................................1 6 5

My dissertation explores the ordering of modem domestic life through the

My dissertation shows how hygiene became a powerful cultural mechanism and

through which hygiene became an object of knowledge and an important force in

order, reproduction, regeneration, restraint, and regulation. It is important to note here

medical-scientific discourse of modem and public colonial institutions in India.

To clarify at the outset, my dissertation does not aim to point to “alternative”

institutional intermediaries. Rather, it seeks to show that hygiene was as much a

118-125).1 A thoroughly pluralistic market that consisted of a plethora of curative

of a anti-contagionist and sanitarianist-environmentalist approach for public health (not to

elsewhere in India, which was articulated in the terminology of progress, led to a

proliferation of writings on health, hygiene, and medicine. My focus on Bengal was

medicine was first initiated.

MEDICINE, ARCHIVE, AND LANGUAGE

It would not be an understatement to contend that a thriving world of printing

centuries. Despite obvious limitations of Benedict Anderson’s argument that “print

capitalism” consolidated the idea of antiquity so fundamental to the “subjective idea of

circulation of printed texts that the discourses of modernity [were] disseminated in

government to put in place effective machinery for surveillance of Bengali publications.

It is to be noted that “literature” comprising of Bengali poetry, dramas, prose, and

“tales”, constituted the largest percentage of Bengali publications. Titles in medicine

appropriation of new knowledge presented to them through colonial institutions and on

the other an insistence on the production of a “distinctly Indian form of modem

knowledge” (Chatterjee 1995: 15).8

in the colonial educational institutions was ultimately a mode of colonial governance

(Pennycook 1998).9 For Gyan Prakash “translation meant a realignment of power”,

“significantly, Western-educated intellectuals themselves approached translation as an

the pressure and agency of subaltern languages” (Ibid. 1999: 51).

increased government funding in developing educational institutions apart from the

notices a consolidated effort by well-off and educated Bengalis to staunchly encourage

and hygiene in Bengali.11

representation and dissemination therefore characterized publication of Bengali texts on

as knowledge/s that had to be disseminated and popularized. A very detailed survey of

Bengali books, monographs, and periodicals on health, hygiene, and medicine is to be

found in Benoybhushan Roy’s Uneesh Shatake Deshiya Bhashay Chikitsha Bigyan

My dissertation consists of five chapters, elaborating different aspects of the co