Social History of Epidemics in the Colonial Punjab

Social History of Epidemics in the Colonial Punjab
Author: Sasha
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2014-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1482836211

Since the earliest times, epidemics have broken out at regular intervals killing a large number of people. They have presented peculiar problems both to the state and to the society. The colonial India in general and the Punjab in particular were affected intermittently by epidemics. The Punjab was one of the worst affected provinces of the colonial India in which several lakhs of people fell prey to the deadly epidemics. Punjab was the wheat basket of the British empire and the leading recruitment centre for military service in British Indian army. Due to its strategic and military importance, the British handled the epidemics with great vigour. However, in their attempt to contain the epidemic, the British impinged on the privacy and religious susceptibilites of the natives. The present work discusses the role of the state in handling the epidemics and the response of the society to such measures. Sasha: The author is currently working as an Assistant Professor at Panjab University, Chandigah.She did her doctorate in the faculty of Arts under UGC fellowship from the Panjab University. She has to her credit several publications both in international and national journals on the issues of health, medicine and society in the colonial period.

Malaria in Colonial South Asia

Malaria in Colonial South Asia
Author: Sheila Zurbrigg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000691454

This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.

Epidemics and Ideas

Epidemics and Ideas
Author: Terence Ranger
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521558310

From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab
Author: Sheila Zurbrigg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2018-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429758766

This book documents the primary role of acute hunger (semi- and frank starvation) in the ‘fulminant’ malaria epidemics that repeatedly afflicted the northwest plains of British India through the first half of colonial rule. Using Punjab vital registration data and regression analysis it also tracks the marked decline in annual malaria mortality after 1908 with the control of famine, despite continuing post-monsoonal malaria transmission across the province. The study establishes a time-series of annual malaria mortality estimates for each of the 23 plains districts of colonial Punjab province between 1868 and 1947 and for the early post-Independence years (1948-60) in (East) Punjab State. It goes on to investigate the political imperatives motivating malaria policy shifts on the part of the British Raj. This work reclaims the role of hunger in Punjab malaria mortality history and, in turn, raises larger epistemic questions regarding the adequacy of modern concepts of nutrition and epidemic causation in historical and demographic analysis. Part of The Social History of Health and Medicine in South Asia series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of colonial history, modern history, social medicine, social anthropology and public health.

Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare

Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare
Author: James L. Hevia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2018-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 022656228X

Until well into the twentieth century, pack animals were the primary mode of transport for supplying armies in the field. The British Indian Army was no exception. In the late nineteenth century, for example, it forcibly pressed into service thousands of camels of the Indus River basin to move supplies into and out of contested areas—a system that wreaked havoc on the delicately balanced multispecies environment of humans, animals, plants, and microbes living in this region of Northwest India. In Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare, James Hevia examines the use of camels, mules, and donkeys in colonial campaigns of conquest and pacification, starting with the Second Afghan War—during which an astonishing 50,000 to 60,000 camels perished—and ending in the early twentieth century. Hevia explains how during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new set of human-animal relations were created as European powers and the United States expanded their colonial possessions and attempted to put both local economies and ecologies in the service of resource extraction. The results were devastating to animals and human communities alike, disrupting centuries-old ecological and economic relationships. And those effects were lasting: Hevia shows how a number of the key issues faced by the postcolonial nation-state of Pakistan—such as shortages of clean water for agriculture, humans, and animals, and limited resources for dealing with infectious diseases—can be directly traced to decisions made in the colonial past. An innovative study of an underexplored historical moment, Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare opens up the animal studies to non-Western contexts and provides an empirically rich contribution to the emerging field of multispecies historical ecology.

Colonizing the Body

Colonizing the Body
Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 370
Release: 1993-08-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520082953

In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers. Focusing on three major epidemic diseases—smallpox, cholera, and plague—Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions. By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.

Contextualizing Indian Experiences of Covid-19

Contextualizing Indian Experiences of Covid-19
Author: Rajesh Kharat
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2024-08-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1040044719

This volume captures the social, political, psychological, administrative, and policy dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indian context. The book is divided into four parts. Part I highlights social narratives from underprivileged workers, ASHA workers, the LGBTIQ+ community, and sanitary workers. It documents their struggles to develop mitigation, adaptation, and resilience strategies. Part II includes case studies and stories of self-management, the mental health of students from rural and urban Maharashtra, and of caregivers. It unveils the path of transformation of self to deal with the issues of anxiety and emotional turmoil caused during and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Part III consists of resilience, philosophical hope, and solidarity, which reflect the contribution of seva by the Sikh community. It also highlights the contribution of government organizations like Indian Railways, Air India, and the Employee Provident Fund Organization to provide relief to both the people of India and Indians residing abroad to bring people back to the country during the unprecedented times. Part IV discusses the responses of various states of India to the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of policies by the government of India during those times. Based on empirical research work, this book will be useful for students, teachers, researchers, behavioral scientists, and practitioners of psychology, sociology, human geography, mental health, political science, public health, and public policy. This book will also be of interest to policymakers and the general public to understand the intricacies involved and the essential propositions with regard to pandemics.

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India
Author: Biswamoy Pati
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2018-02-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351262181

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.

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal

Living with Epidemics in Colonial Bengal
Author: Arabinda Samanta
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2017-08-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351399659

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.