Treacherous minds, submissive bodies: corporeal technologies and human experimentation in colonial India

Whilst historians have extensively explored how hospitals, asylums or sanitation projects in British India reflected colonial ideas of racial difference, we know rather less about the influence of racial theories and stereotypes on technologies such as fingerprinting, evolved incolonial Bengal as an administrative tool but found applicable across the world, or, at the other extreme, “mesmeric surgery,” discarded in the metropole but experiencing a brief second life in colonial Bengal. Exploring these contrasting projects, both grounded in British theories about the nature of the bodies and minds of “natives,” the chapter suggests that the historiography of colonial medicine needs to expand its scope to include issues related to governmentality, corporeal technologies and knowledge-transfer within and beyond the British Empire

Between emulation and innovation: Upendrakishore Ray and the ambiguities of colonial modernity

Using the example of Upendrakishore Ray (1863-1915), a well-known Bengali artist, writer, technologist and publisher, this essay critiques prevalent theories that portray colonial Indian modernity as a largely derivative discourse. Addressing Ray’s globally-recognized contributions to the refinement of technologies for the printing of photographs and paintings, the paper shows howRay’s relative lack of resources could not obstruct his innovative approach and investigates why, in spite of his originality, his Western recognition was no more than transient. Turning then to Ray’s views on pictorial art, the essay shows how in this area, he merely followed the precepts of Western ‘academic’ art and failed to attain any originality. Indian engagements with modernity, the essay concludes, were neither exclusively original nor invariably imitative, and we need new theoretical approaches that can accommodate this diversity and unpredictability

Glandular politics: experimental biology, clinical medicine, and homosexual emancipation in fin-de-siecle central Europe

Focusing on the work of the physiologist Eugen Steinach and the clinician and activist Magnus Hirschfeld, this essay explores the complex interplay of experimental biology and medical discourse in the construction of a male homosexual identity in early twentieth-century Central Europe. Hirschfeld's collaboration with Steinach, the essay demonstrates, was not simply an instance of the imposition of a biomedical model of sexuality on the homosexual community by a hegemonic medical profession. Hirschfeld, a physician who was also a leader of the German movement for homosexual emancipation, used Steinach's theory to anchor a new biological model of homosexuality, claiming that male homosexuals were neither diseased nor depraved but formed a distinct, autonomous group of organically feminized men. The redefinition of homosexuality resulting from Steinach's and Hirschfeld's research, the essay argues, was not related exclusively to the specific politics of homosexual emancipation but also to more general debates, anxieties, and contestations over the cultural meanings of masculinity and femininity

"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work