Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890-1940

Contagions of Feeling

Srirupa Prasad

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137520722
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book examines genealogies of contagion in between contagion as microbe and contagion as affect. It analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within the colonialist, anti-colonial, as well as modernist discourses.

1

Introduction: Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene

Hygiene is back in the headlines. In slightly more than a decade, the SARS outbreak, the swine flu, and more recently the avian flu have created panic across the globe, forcing people to take notice of contagions that could turn deadly and infect scores of people in a relatively short time. The world suddenly became a shared landscape of closely linked contact zones that are teeming with hundreds of potent microbes, which do not care about national or cultural boundaries.

This shift, understandably, has resulted in a spate of writings on the precariousness of the global population. Experts and non-experts alike have emphasized our alarming susceptibility to new forms of microbial infections. Science writers and journalists, notably Richard Preston, Laurie Garrett, Barry and David Zimmerman, and David Quammen, have published sensational and dramatic titles on the topic. And some of these, for example, The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story; The Demon in the Freezer; The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance; and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health have became best sellers and are being taught in courses on public and global health and international security.¹ These writings, highlighting the dangers of new and tougher microbes, discuss covert laboratory projects in the United States, and rogue nations storing deadly microbes that could be used against that and other nations, and they argue for freezing viruses that could come handy in times of war.

Even seminal medical journals such as The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine have adopted a distinct tone of urgency in discussing illnesses like the common flu and the role of viruses that are mutating into newer forms and becoming more formidable each day. The US-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention now publishes a journal called Emerging Infectious Diseases. This growing body of articles, books, media reports, and policy guidelines on global preparedness in the face of new infectious diseases reflects the emergence of an important debate and a major governmental endeavor in health and medicine that has global reach.

India has zealously joined this new endeavor. The call for better hygiene has brought together a number of forces and institutions in the management of sanitation in India. The Indian government, along with non-governmental Indian organizations, international and national academic institutions, multinational companies, and global philanthropic enterprises such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have embarked upon what are termed public–private initiatives to promote public health. Since 2006, the Global Hygiene Council, an organization funded by Reckitt Benckiser (famous for its antiseptic product, Dettol), has, for example, undertaken a campaign to bring together private and public initiatives to promote awareness of hygiene and personal sanitation, especially among the economically weaker sections of the population. This initiative has marked a new phase in the current public health agenda in India. It has mobilized public and private entities and resources to ameliorate the poor state of institutional capacity and sought to direct its focus on improvements in the teaching, research, and policy of public health. One of its campaigns, the Dettol Surakshit Parivar (Dettol Protected Family), was designed to educate new mothers, students, and hospital workers about one of the most important aspects of personal and collective hygiene – washing hands to prevent infection by germs.

Another influential entity in this enterprise, The Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), was launched in 2006 as ‘a response to redress the limited institutional capacity in India for strengthening training, research and policy development in the area of Public Health’.²

Structured as an independent foundation, PHFI adopts a broad, integrative approach to public health, tailoring its endeavours to Indian conditions and bearing relevance to countries facing similar challenges and concerns. The PHFI focuses on broad dimensions of public health that encompass promotive, preventive and therapeutic services, many of which are frequently lost sight of in policy planning as well as in popular understanding.³

Hygiene has undoubtedly attracted a lot of attention in India, as in the rest of the world, as being the cornerstone for a robust program in public health for the twenty-first century. It has become a sociologically significant phenomenon in which global concerns are being managed by simultaneously roping in a number of actors and institutions, ranging from the nation-state to the family. New microbes, novel pandemics, and their global movements that have forcefully reinstated the efficacy of hygiene have also reinvigorated global academic interest in the genealogies of hygienic practices.

This book analyzes one such genealogy of hygiene in the context of late colonial Bengal. It argues that the meaning and role of hygiene in India were catalyzed on the crossroads of colonial governance, anti-colonial struggles, cultural nationalism, and early twentieth-century feminism. As a consequence of a variety of historical processes – political, economic, social, and cultural – engagement with hygiene not only shifted public health discourse in the early twentieth century, it also produced hygiene as a set of practices that guided gendered domestic agendas in Bengal. These domestic agendas included guidelines for preparation of food, care of sick patients, childcare, and patterns of domestic consumption of drugs and beauty products.

Spencer Harcourt Butler, a member of the Department of Education in the Governor General’s Council, highlighted these issues while presiding over the second All India Sanitary Conference, which opened its session at the Council Chamber, Fort St. George, Madras, in November 1912. The need for a broader partnership and persistent efforts at better hygiene was also not lost on Butler:

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 … You, I know, will not fail, gentlemen, when the call for the expert resounds throughout this ancient land. 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)

In fact, by the early years of the twentieth century, colonial governance showed a degree of urgency with regard to sanitation that was unprecedented. The first All India Annual Sanitary Conference started in 1911, and by 1912, despite some differences of opinion, one thing was unanimously agreed upon – sanitary reform was the most important agenda facing the colonial Indian government at that time. The language that was used to express this concern left little doubt about the importance that the colonial rulers of India attached to the cause of sanitation. The phrase ‘sanitary awakening’ not only referred to a state of governance within which the cause of sanitation was given a fresh lease of colonial urgency, but also to a new form of ‘consciousness’, a new moral-political realization, which could bring about a very different order of social transformation and become another element of the civilizing mission. Not surprisingly, sanitation, for colonial officials, was equal in standing to, if not more important than, medical research as a means for progress in medicine and health.⁴

The Cultural Politics of Hygiene is a study of the emergence of hygiene as a socially and medically useful knowledge and practice in India and its intertwined relationship with cultural and social transformation in colonial Bengal. It shows how hygiene emerged from within the colonial governance and political engagements of the Bengali middle class, and through a focus on the formation of modern and cultured subjectivities.

The book analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within colonialist, anti-colonial, and modernist discourses. In particular, it investigates how the emergence of hygiene as a powerful ideology, knowledge, and practice redefined and reconfigured two of the most influential realms of social life in early twentieth-century Bengal – the household and the nation. It argues that hygiene emerged and materialized within the domestic and the national realm around two intertwined and mutually reinforcing axes: the emergence and arrangement of objects, commodities, and things; and affect.

The emergence of hygiene took place through the accelerated production, availability, and visibility of a wide range of commodities and things. Medicines, cosmetics, household goods, and food items opened up a whole new way of imagining and practicing hygiene. The history of hygiene will remain incomplete if this dense realm of commodities and things is not taken into account in the very active sense of producing the meaning and values of modern hygiene. New ideas and practices about cleanliness, nursing, and nutrition emerged, for example, in specific relation to a flourishing market of commodities.

Affect, feeling, and sentiment were, however, no less important in the production of the knowledge and practices of hygiene. Hygiene as a modern discourse, as I show in this book, not only produced emotions, it was also constituted through them. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that hygiene worked effectively by attributing emotions to a range of practices, involving both the individual (citizen, householder, neighbor) and the collective (social, cultural, and national) body. Disgust, fear, anxiety, and pain, for example, were (and continue to be) important markers in defining health and wellbeing.

Hygiene, colonialism, and affective histories

Can there be an affective history of hygiene? In other words, is it possible to read into the narrative of modern hygiene active and animated tropes of emotion, affect, and feeling? In what ways can such a reading of archives on hygiene and public health offer us a more complex and layered understanding of the paradoxical and conflicted ways in which this ‘tool of empire’ functioned?

In this book, I argue that affect was indispensable and integral to chronicles of public health and hygiene in late colonial India. Affect, emotion, and feelings produced an impressive template for cleanliness, care, and order for the modern Indian nation, society, and household. Such a template, I further argue, is not merely a glaze on the more serious content of the public health and sanitary documents of the British Empire; it constitutes the very basis of this colossal archive and the ideas and practices it mandated. The archives of hygiene in colonial India direct us to the depths and ‘hidden forces’ of, to borrow a phrase from Ann Laura Stoler, and the ‘epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense’ that guided public health endeavors in colonial India. That is, these archives present ‘a display of sentiments that evinced more powerful mystic and mental states’.⁵

A focus on affective tropes of hygiene opens up a ‘moving’ history of the Empire and its huge apparatus, which churned out countless ideas, documents, and aspirations.⁶ By ‘moving’ I mean the trials, shifts, failures, frustrations, and fears that characterized the gestation, deliberation, administration, and documentation of hygiene, public health, and sanitation in late colonial India. I use the term ‘moving’ also to highlight the dynamic relationship of the prescriptions of health and hygiene with the sensibilities of their prescribers. Modern hygiene was thus as much a set of instructions for bodily health, moral sanctions, and cultural prescriptions for individuals and society, as it was an embodiment of the intellectual, emotional, and imaginative sensibilities of those who professed and wrote about them.

Contagions of Feeling excavates the moving history of modern hygiene by exploring the affective trajectories of public health as they were defined, designed, appropriated, and manipulated for the needs of the British Empire in late colonial India. Indians did not blindly follow the sensibilities and goals of the colonial rulers, however. They, in particular educated Indians, vigorously discoursed about health and hygiene and tied these concerns in with nationalism, self-rule, and modernity.

‘Contagion’ and ‘feeling’ are central elements in the moving history of hygiene in colonial India that I present in this book. I focus on contagion to signify the interconnected impact of a wide range of activities that encapsulated public health and sanitation in colonial India. The narratives of public health in colonial India were surely not all about infectious diseases, quarantine, and emergency sanitary administration. Public health was equally about non-emergency, yet essential activities, such as policing market places, maintaining vital statistics of populations, and quality control of food and water. These domains of hygiene and public health were entwined in their concern with transmission, and, consequently, infection and pestilence caused by contagions. The concept of contagion was thus significant in a number of ways.

Public health in colonial India can be traced back to the primary concern, as historians of medicine have convincingly shown, with the health and safety of British troops in India.⁷ Over time and with the further consolidation of the British Empire, medicine diversified into a wide range of colonial activities that spanned research, teaching, and other organizational work, epitomized by the highly colonial-bureaucratic Indian Medical Service (IMS), for example.⁸ Yet it would not be an exaggeration to argue that infection and contagion always loomed as a menace that could erupt anytime unless vigilantly kept under control. The colonial state had to keep in mind that infectious diseases such as cholera, plague, and smallpox were huge financial burdens and these, at extreme moments, could grind the entire administration to a halt as experiences during the worst epidemics had shown.

In addition, and no less important, was another worry that was voiced urgently at the international sanitary conferences – how international trade was badly impacted by epidemics and the resultant quarantines. Contagion thus remained the shadowy but real threat that was at the heart of colonial sanitary administration during the entire tenure of the British Empire in India. If one reflects on the more recent history of public health globally, one cannot fail to notice how rapid disease transmission, the affliction of large populations, and the impact of these on global economy and trade still remain the major concern for the global public health community.

Priscilla Wald, for example, provides a fascinating account of the dominant ‘outbreak narrative’ that ensues when an infectious disease breaks out in the post-HIV world. She shows that this particular narrative trope gained prominence in the post-HIV era through a predictable combination of ‘particular characters, images, and story lines – of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes’.⁹ Tracing this ‘outbreak narrative’ to ‘U.S. economic and political dominance in the institutionalization of ideas about global health worldwide’, Wald argues that its ‘circulation across genres and media makes it at once the reflection and the structuring principle of scientific and journalistic accounts, novelistic and cinematic depictions of communicable-disease outbreaks, and even the contemporary proliferation of historical studies of the central role of communicable disease in human history’.¹⁰ I find Wald’s idea of ‘outbreak narratives’ very useful, especially the way she deploys it to excavate the cultural terrain of twentieth-century America. She shows convincingly how science and myth are inseparable, the social and the biological are interlinked, and how fiction and other cultural productions are the sources of some of the most authoritative scientific narratives of our times.

I present contagion as an analytical centerpiece also by drawing upon the scholarship in history of medicine in the context of colonial India. Medicine, for colonial officials such as Butler, whose ideas of sanitary awakening I briefly discussed earlier, was a means for social change and therefore could not be realized if it was pursued only within the walls of medical laboratories. Medicine was to be ably served by scientists and doctors as much as by administrators such as Butler or Lukis (the Surgeon General at that time). The concern for these colonial officers was not simply the therapeutic and curative implic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Contagion and Cultural Politics of Hygiene
• 2. Alimentary Anxieties: Affect in Food and Hunger
• 3. Body, Hygiene, and the Affective Politics of Gandhi’s Swaraj
• 4. Imagining the Social Body: Competing Moralities of Care and Contagion
• 5. Affective Remedies: Advertisements and Cultural Politics of Hygiene
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index