Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

Biswamoy Pati, Mark Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351262187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule.

The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia's experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India's place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

1 The sentencing of assisted suicide in the Nizamut Adawlut, 1810–1829

Religion, health and gender in the formation of British Indian criminal law

Jane Buckingham

In early nineteenth-century north India, suicide offered a culturally legitimate alternative to a life of social and ritual abandonment for those marginalized by widowhood or illness. In such cases suicide, typically by burning or burial alive, was resorted to both as a way of ending present suffering and a response to the ritual consequences of their condition. Such forms of suicide typically required the help of others and this chapter focuses on the differences in British approaches to sentencing of those who assisted at such traditional forms of suicide. In Hindu textual shastric tradition the suicide of leprosy sufferers and of widows was linked, and this connection between these forms of suicide became a key legal reference point for British understanding of the Hindu law of suicide. However, differences in sentencing show that while assistance at the suicide of the Hindu widow was typically perceived in cases brought before the Nizamut Adawlut (the superior criminal court in Bengal) as approximating homicide, assisting the leprosy sufferer to die was more often understood as euthanasia. This chapter argues that sentencing of assistants at suicides exemplified the tension between Islamic, Hindu and British legal traditions embedded in British legal practice in India and that the religious associations of both those committing suicide and their assistants contributed substantially to the sentences received. Further, this chapter suggests that the health and gender of the person committing suicide contributed to the development of a differential British legal response to forms of suicide by widows and the infirm despite reference to their linkage in shastric tradition as a precedent in judgement.

The culpability of those who assist others to commit suicide is still a point of debate in the Indian Penal Code,¹ and this chapter contributes to contextualization of contemporary Indian discussion on the decriminalization of suicide and the ethics and law of euthanasia² within the historical framework of British legal intervention in India. Foundational work on the complex nature of colonial Indian law by Derrett, Fisch, the Rudolphs and Cohn³ has been augmented by specific work on criminal law including Yang’s edited volume on crime and criminality and, more recently, Sen’s study of convict society and Radhakrishna’s analysis of criminalization of communities under the Criminal Tribes Act.⁴ The gendering of crime is a relatively recent investigation with Singha considering the colonial construction of legal capacity in female children and Anagol the nexus of early widowhood and the colonial development of the ‘infanticidal woman’ as ‘female criminal’.⁵ The focus of historiographical work on women and crime has previously been on the figure of the sati, the widow as victim and site of tradition and on the event of sati as negotiated territory for the expression of gendered power relations.⁶ The focus of this chapter on the sentencing of those assisting a widow to commit suicide marks a new contribution to the already voluminous literature on the practice and its attempted abolition during the British colonial period.⁷

The suicide of leprosy sufferers, by contrast, has attracted little attention from contemporaries or historians, even though the practice is positioned in the British Parliamentary Papers alongside sati as an equivalent legal dilemma for British colonial authorities. The most substantial recent work on leprosy suicide is Shubhada Pandya’s ‘Very savage rites’ which records instances of suicides by leprosy sufferers and analyzes them as examples of traditional forms of suicide ‘tolerated’ by the British colonial legislators.⁸ It does not, however, develop an analysis of the sentencing of assistants at the suicides. Nor does it develop the relationship between these forms of suicide and sati as contributing to the development of British law in India. Similarly, in comparison with the massive current historiography on British ideas of and legal intervention in the practice of sati by Hindu widows, there is little published on colonial legal engagement with leprosy in India.⁹ Although cases of assisted suicide by both widows and leprosy sufferers were often discussed concurrently in British debates on legal regulation, this chapter is the first to employ this juxtaposition as a means of investigating early nineteenth-century colonial legal engagement with India.

Forms of assisted suicide

Both the suicide of leprosy sufferers and of widows could be performed by fire or by burial alive, though immolation was more commonly performed by widows and burial alive by leprosy sufferers. In the cases of suicide by leprosy sufferers brought before the Nizamut Adawlut in the first part of the nineteenth century, only that of Government vs Sohawun combined burial alive with burning. In this instance the fire was lit in a pit into which the leprosy sufferer threw himself, later being covered over by his son. The case of Government vs Sohawun cites extensively Hindu legal opinion and textual authorities representing the entering of fire as a means of ‘promoting … spiritual welfare’.¹⁰

In practice, however, most instances of leprosy suicide were by burial alive and more consistent with the model of death for the outcaste leprosy sufferer offered by the Bhawishya Purana than that of purification by fire. Widows of the jogee community similarly practised burial alive which strengthens the association of burial with being outside caste.¹¹ Out-casting of leprosy sufferers from family and community depended more on their economic status than on their illness.¹² However, the Bhawishya Purana stipulates a certain level of physical degradation as grounds for limiting the funeral rights for the leprosy sufferer, in particular refusing cremation of the body:

that leper is most vile in respect of all religious acts, who is afflicted with ulcers on all his limbs, especially on his temples, forehead and nose;

When he dies, let his corpse be cast near a sacred river or other holy place, or at the root of a sacred tree; let not a funeral cake or libation of water be offered, nor his corpse be burnt, nor obsequies be celebrated:¹³

The Bhawishya Purana cautions that even assistance at the cremation of a leprosy sufferer caused ritual pollution which had to be removed by the appropriate actions.

Should a man, through affection burn the corpse of a leper, who has been six or even three months, infected with the disease, that man must perform the lunar penance of an anchoret.¹⁴

In judging cases of assisted suicide of leprosy sufferers, the British gave considerable weight to the shastric endorsement of such suicides and the belief in their efficacy in removing the taint of leprosy from the family. The Judge of the Circuit Court in the Goruckpore sessions noted in his recommendation for the unconditional release of Sohawan, charged with homicide for assisting his father Akbar to burn himself alive:

It is supposed that the leprosy is a visitation of Providence for some offence or other, and that the souls of the victims are purified by fire from the taint of the disease, and exempted from passing into impure bodies after death. There is also a popular notion that by this self-devotion the disease is rooted out of the family.¹⁵

However, the karmic benefits to the family of association with the leprosy sufferer’s suicide could not outweigh the shame of the disease. By contrast the act of burning alive by a sati and assistance at her death were propitious events bringing karmic benefits to all involved. The woman who became a ‘sati’ was elevated in status, saved her husband’s spirit from the underworld and lived with him in bliss. As the Hindu law giver Brihispati explained: ‘In the same manner as a snake-catcher drags a snake from his hole, so does a woman who burns herself draw her husband out of hell; and she afterwards resides with him in heaven.’¹⁶ Unlike the leprosy sufferer, the sati was venerated as one touched with divine power.¹⁷

The changing position of assisted suicide in British Indian criminal law

In their conceptualization of criminal law in India, the British recognized a relationship between assisted suicide by widows and leprosy sufferers far beyond the occasional parallel in technique of immolation or burial alive practised by widow and leprosy sufferer alike.¹⁸ In early cases brought before the Nizamut Adawlut, ‘the ceremony of Suttee’ and ‘suicide committed by Hindoos in cases of extreme sickness’ were linked as specific forms of assisted suicide under Resolution 25 June 1817.¹⁹ Though regarded with abhorrence as contrary to both British law and Christian culture,²⁰ colonial legislators identified suicide by widows and leprosy sufferers as forms of suicide permitted, though not enjoined, by shastric tradition.²¹ Since the Brahmanic legal textual tradition provided the dominant model for British legal identification, appropriation and interpretation of Indian ‘traditional’ legal ideas and practice,²² the sanction of these forms of suicide in the shastra had the force of precedent in the early British efforts to develop a new criminal law for India.²³ Consequently, such forms of suicide were to be tolerated and those participating in the practice were not necessarily to be subject to the law of homicide as it existed at the time. A further ground for viewing assistance at such suicides with lenience was that these particular forms of suicide were regarded by British legal and government authorities as having some dimension of honour and self-sacrifice and thus were seen as possessing a moral and ethical value. Despite official revulsion for suicide, the judges of the Nizamut Adawlut, Harrington, Rees and Turnbull recorded the court’s opinion that both the suicide of a widow and a leprosy sufferer represented forms of sacrificial devotion, the former to her husband and the latter to the family which was popularly believed to be freed from the disease by the sufferer’s suicide.²⁴

The legal position on assisted suicide shifted considerably from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries and reflected an increasing dependence on the Hindu textual tradition in framing and legitimizing British legal policy and practice in India. In 1799, the Bengal Regulations ordered the sentence of death to those assisting in suicides but allowed some scope for discretion in ordering capital punishment. The Bengal Regulation, Nizamut Adawlut Section 3, Regulation VIII, 1799, directed the sentence of death in cases ‘where one puts to death another at the desire of the sufferer’ but only where the Nizamut Adawlut could find no circumstances to ask for mercy.²⁵ B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figure and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The sentencing of assisted suicide in the Nizamut Adawlut, 1810–1829: religion, health and gender in the formation of British Indian criminal law
• 2 The great shift: cholera theory and sanitary policy in British India, 1867–1879
• 3 Hakims and Haiza: unani medicine and cholera in late Colonial India
• 4 Of cholera, colonialism and pilgrimage sites: rethinking popular responses to state sanitation, c.1867–1900
• 5 Western science, indigenous medicine and the princely states: the case of Ayurvedic reorganization in Travancore, 1870–1940
• 6 Christian missionary women’s hospitals in Mysore state, c.1880–1930
• 7 The epidemiological, health and medical aspects of famine: views from the Madras Presidency (1876–78)
• 8 Gender and insanity: situating asylums in nineteenth-century Bengal
• 9 Confining ‘lunatics’: the Cuttack Asylum, c.1864–1906
• 10 What did the ‘wise men’ say? Gender, sexuality and women’s health in nineteenth-century Bengal
• 11 Feminizing empire: the Association of Medical Women in India and the campaign for a Women’s Medical Service
• 12 Indian physicians and public health challenges: Bombay Presidency, 1896–1920
• 13 Tracking kala-azar: the East Indian experience and experiments
• Index