‘Towards a modern history of Gondwanaland’

Gondwanaland was a southern mega-continent that began to break up 180 million years ago. This article explores Gondwanaland’s modern history, its unexpected political and cultural purchase since the 1880s. Originating with geological and palaeontological research in the Gond region of Central India, ‘Gondwana’ has become recognisable and useful, especially in settler colonial contexts. This prospectus sets out a program for a highly unusual ‘transnational’ project, involving scholars of India, Australia, Antarctica, southern Africa and South America. Unpredictably across the five continents of former Gondwanaland, the term itself signals depth of time and place across the spectrum of Indigenous land politics, coal-based extractive politics, and, paradoxically, nationalist environmental politics. All kinds of once-living Gondwanaland biota deliver us fossil fuels today – the ‘gifts of Gondwana’ some geologists call southern hemisphere coal, gas, petroleum – and so the modern history of Gondwanaland is also a substantive history of the Anthropocene

“Signs of the Times”: Medicine and Nationhood in British India

Medical practice and research in colonial India historically had been an imperial preserve, dominated by the elite members of the Indian Medical Service. This was contested from the 1900s on by the emerging Indian nationalism. This essay studies debates about the establishment of a medical research institution and how actors imposed the political identities of nationalism on British colonial practices of medical science. At the same time, Indian nationalism was also drawing from other emerging ideas around health and social welfare. The Indian nationalists and doctors sought to build the identities of the new nation and its medicine around their own ideas of its geography, people, and welfare

Curing Cholera: Pathogens, Places and Poverty in South Asia

In this paper I will seek to provide a new understanding of endemicity of disease in India. Through a study of cholera research in the twentieth century I will argue that disease and its endemicity has to be understood in biological factors as well as within a wider social and economic context. I will discuss the medical efforts at locating the causality of cholera from the nineteenth century in Indian climate, water bodies and human anatomy to show that cholera is no more a biological phenomena than water is an ecological or environmental problem. Both are essentially political and economic questions

‘“Neither of meate nor drinke, but what the Doctor alloweth”: Medicine amidst War and Commerce in Eighteenth Century Madras’

Madras in the eighteenth century was a site of continuous warfare sparked mostly by trading interests. This paper studies how these influences of hostility and commerce shaped the medical establishment of the English East India Company. It begins by analyzing the struggle of the medical establishment to cope with military and logistical requirements; it then shows how the Coromandel trade provided a peculiar dynamic to the practice of medicine in Madras. By aligning the history of medicine with that of trade, the paper traces the parallel trajectories of intellectual and material wealth. The development of modern medicine is seen as a process of adjusting to and engaging with diverse ideas and items—sometimes co-opting them, sometimes realigning them in new modes of production

Bacteriology in British India; Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics

Bacteriology transformed colonial medicine from a focus on public health and hygiene to unlimited possibilities for the eradication of diseases. It also fiercely engaged public discourse on the ethics of animal and human experimentation. Bacteriology in British India is the first book to provide a social and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating it at the confluence of colonial medical practices, institutionalization, and social movements. Bacteriology was established in India through a complex process of conflict and alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. This led to divergences and tensions within bacteriology as practiced in Europe and the tropical colonies: in ideas of climate and potency of vaccines, in laboratory methods, in the ethical principles of experimentations, and in the discourses of racial immunity and endemicity of diseases. Scientists like Semple, Haffkine, Cunningham, Brunton, Simond, and Lustig worked in the several Indian Pasteur Institutes and the Central Research Institute, established from 1900, on vaccines for rabies, plague, typhoid, cholera, and snake venom. They conducted vaccinations in Indian cantonments, cities, hospitals, slums, jails, railway stations, villages and pilgrim sites. The book describes how in the process India became a vast experimental field for bacteriology. By investigating a vast array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and literary sources, the book links colonial medical research with issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and attitudes towards tropical climate and wildlife. It contributes to a wide field of scholarship like imperial and South Asian history, history of science and medicine, sociology of science, and cultural history