Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 129
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781351399654
ISBN-13 : 1351399659
Rating : 4/5 (659 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal by : Arabinda Samanta

Download or read book Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal written by Arabinda Samanta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-08-09 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to understand the functions of health experiences, distribution of illness, prevention of sickness, social relations of therapeutic intervention and employment of pluralistic medical systems, the book interrogates the social construction of medical knowledge, politics of science, and the changing paradigm of relationship between health of the individual and the prerogatives of larger colonial economic formations. Smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria which visited colonial Bengal with epidemic vengeance, caught the people unaware, killed them in thousands, and changed the society and its demographic structures. The book shows how sometimes through mutual adaptation but more often by cultural contestation, people pulled on with their microbial fellow travellers, and how illness became metaphor for the social dangers of improper code of conduct, to be corrected only through personal expropriation of the sin committed, or by community worship of the deity supposedly responsible for it. As a result, Western medical science was often relegated to the background, and elaborate rites and rituals, supposedly having curative values, came to the forefront and were observed with much community fanfare. Epidemics were also interpreted as outcome of politically incorrect moves made by the ruling power. To right the wrongs, people very often resorted to social protest. The protest by the literati went sometimes muted when its members seem to be beneficiaries of the colonial government, but it turned out to be all the more violent when the people, who had no private axe to grind, took up the cudgel to fight it out.

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal Related Books

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal
Language: en
Pages: 129
Authors: Arabinda Samanta
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-08-09 - Publisher: Routledge

GET EBOOK

Making epidemics in colonial Bengal as its entry point and drawing heavily on social, cultural and linguistic anthropology to understand the functions of health
Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal
Language: en
Pages: 422
Authors: Suranjan Das
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-06-21 - Publisher: Primus Books

GET EBOOK

Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal is the third volume produced under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust (London) funded documentation project 'Western Medicine
Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal
Language: en
Pages: 178
Authors:
Categories:
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017 - Publisher:

GET EBOOK

Malarial Subjects
Language: en
Pages: 349
Authors: Rohan Deb Roy
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2017-09-14 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

GET EBOOK

This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also ava
Epidemic Encounters, Communities, and Practices in the Colonial World
Language: en
Pages: 381
Authors: Poonam Bala
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2023-01-24 - Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

GET EBOOK

The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian