Missionary hospitals in India are ubiquitously stamped with the mark of their Western founders discursively, spatially and commemoratively. This article critically examines the work and place of Indian women doctors in mission hospitals to argue that they were crucial in the provision of healthcare to Indian women, and therefore to India's claim to independence from British colonisation. I focus on Christian Medical College, Vellore, South India. The hospital and college grounds prominently feature the founder, Ida Scudder, eliding numerous Indian women who furthered the aims of the institution because they could negotiate the mission mandate (proselytisation) and the nationalist imperative (Independence and improving the status of rural Indian women), where Scudder could not. Women doctors like Hilda Lazarus, Kamala Vythilingam and Mary Verghese were instrumental in ensuring that CMC Vellore adapted to shifting political tides of nationalism and anti-colonial organising in the late colonial era, and its continued success.
Rabindranath Tagore's (1861-1941) critique of the political and urban civilisation of the West as opposed to the spiritually oriented civilisation of the East consolidated the materiality/spirituality binary in the Manichean world of colonial Bengal. This dichotomy is codified in Tagore's commentary on cultivated leisure, establishing the nebulous idea of taste through negating the 'thingness' of subject-object relations. Complicating such absolute discursive divisions, this paper proposes materiality as a method to read Tagore's 1929 novel, Relationships (originally published in Bengali in 1929 as Yog & amacr;yog). Contextualising the ambiguities of 'thing theory' within the colonial context of Bengal, this paper examines Tagore's navigation of modernity and its conflictual materialities beyond an overdetermined rejection of the corporeal. Informed by Tagore's writings on material culture, it locates interruptions in the novel's metaphysical mode, disturbing the 'humility of things' to reveal implicit materialities that mark the leisured spaces of retreat from the colonial praxis.
Bicycles were initially a mode of transport that represented the upper classes. However, by the 1920s, bicycles, along with rickshaws, tongas and pedestrians, symbolised subaltern mobility in India. This association with subalternity transformed the cyclist into a nuisance for civic authorities. In the colonial and postcolonial state's vision of modernity, controlling mobility in urban spaces was essential for capital accumulation and thus fast-moving motor transport was privileged. In this context, slow-moving cyclists, especially those from the working classes or poorer classes, appeared as obstructions. Analysing the dichotomous relationship between freedom and obstruction of movement on modern Indian roads and street spaces explains the complex experience of technological modernity in South Asia, often associated with the freedom of movement brought about by the railways and motor cars. The article contends that roads and street spaces were also marked by restrictions on movement imposed by the state's ideas of public order.
This article explores the social lives of the bicycle under the British Raj by bringing together the history of technology with cultural history and gender history. It first examines the discursive dimension of the bicycle and cycling in India, demonstrating that the new mobility technology was celebrated as an emblem of techno-modernity and, by extension, European superiority. The second part concentrates on analysing the practical uses of the 'steel horse' by the imperial establishment. It enhanced the reach of administrators, soldiers, police and missionaries, and thus helped stabilise imperial power. The third part turns to South Asian engagements with the bicycle, tracing how different groups resisted, appropriated and reworked the technology. Taken together, they reveal that the diffusion of the bicycle in colonial India was far from a straightforward instance of Western technological imposition. Rather, it constituted a dynamic, interactional process shaped by friction and the continual renegotiation of power.1
This article examines Dube ji ki Chitthi (1924-44), a satirical epistolary column by Vishwambharnath Sharma 'Kaushik', to explore the political power of vernacular humour in colonial Hindi print culture. Written in the guise of a rotund, bhang-loving Brahman, Dube ji's public letters deployed conversational rhythm, earthy idioms and performative satire to critique the rigidities of Sanatani Hinduism and Brahmanical pretensions. These letters blurred the boundaries between entertainment and dissent, offering a form of civic pedagogy rooted in folk logic and cultural embeddedness. At once conservative and progressive, complicit and critical, they reflected the ambivalences of inter-War Hindi literati and their limited radicalism. This essay argues that Kaushik's use of satire forged a vernacular ethics of dissent, where laughter became a mode of survival and critique within an increasingly censored and polarised public sphere.
Through a historical and ethnographic approach grounded in the rice-growing, low-lying region of Kuttanad in Kerala, this article traces threads of continuity between reclamation projects initiated in the British colonial period and the postcolonial construction of the Thanneermukkom bund in 1974. I argue that ideologies of agrarian settlement and technocratic intervention, set into motion under colonial capitalism, continue to confine the geography and ecology of Kuttanad's water-saturated landscape, even as farmers and fisherfolk rely upon small-scale, collectivist techniques that emerge from the bottom up. When the history of agrarian cultivation and the flow of rivers is understood as mobile and dynamic rather than permanently settled or fixed, then solutions for climate adaptation in riverine ecosystems may seek to embrace principles of flexibility over control, aligning with-rather than seeking to master-the recurrence of seasons and cycles, such as the necessarily overflowing floods of the annual monsoons.
This article examines Islamic modernism in colonial South Asia through the lens of Urdu print culture, focusing on the magazine Nig & amacr;r (1922-63), edited by Niyaz Fatehpuri. Situating Nig & amacr;r within the expansion of Urdu print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the article analyses how Fatehpuri used the magazine as a platform to articulate a rationalist reinterpretation of Islam grounded in ethical reform and naturalist reasoning. Drawing on close readings of editorials, polemical essays, and reader correspondence published in Nig & amacr;r during the 1930s and 1940s, the article reconstructs debates over religious authority, reason and public life within an emerging Muslim vernacular public sphere. Rather than treating Nig & amacr;r as a neutral forum, the article argues that the magazine functioned as an editor-driven intervention that actively shaped intellectual contestation and forms of Muslim public reasoning in late colonial North India.
Since the 1980s, coastal Bangladesh has witnessed profound ecolog-ical and socio-economic transformations due to the rapid expansion of shrimp aquaculture. Incentivised through state policies and inter-national funding, this 'Blue Revolution' promised jobs and food secu-rity. Instead, it brought ecological destruction, immiseration and widespread violence, prompting local resistances by communities. This paper explores the prehistory, makings and afterlife of an act of peasant resistance that, after the murder of a protestor and in the context of the 1990 national pro-democracy movement, ignited into a mass movement. It highlights how the threat of a subsistence cri-sis articulated with contemporary developmental/political contexts to enable new modes of political actions and alliances. This micro-history of the 1990 anti-shrimp movement of Polder 22-fore-grounding both peasant organisation as well as larger developmental and socio-political structures-shows the makings of an agrarian peasant politics that complicates developmentalist narratives about coastal Bangladesh's pasts, presents and possible futures.
Over the past four decades, proponents of social constructivism and the cultural turn in bicycle histories have called for the abandonment of perspectives rooted in narratives of technological determinism, scientific innovations and commercial ventures. Inspired by this historiographical turn, this paper interrogates the social lives of bicycles in the colonial Bengal presidency between the 1890s and the 1920s. Employing the analytical frame of vernacularisation, it examines the translation, adaptation and appropriation of bicycles-the quintessential emblem of global techno-modernity-into a distinctly localised object, filled with culture-specific symbols, meanings, identities and attitudes. Analysing a host of previously unnoticed representations of bicycles-both as a cultural metaphor and a material artefact-that surfaced in Bengali print, I argue that the vernacular reconceptualisation(s) of two-wheelers were indeed chequered and ambiguous-one that resists simplistic binaries of pure categories such as global/local or foreign/indigenous.
This article examines how the bicycle functioned as a cultural and visual catalyst for imagining women's mobility in mid twentieth century India. Through readings of Hindi and Tamil film songs and advertisements, I argue that cycling served as a symbolic site where femininity, youth and modern aspirations were negotiated. Even when few women cycled, these representations opened a small imaginative space for thinking about women in motion.
In South Asia, cycling has long been intertwined with labour, as reflected in the wide range of rickshaws on its streets-from cycle-rickshaws and rickshaw-vans to a growing number of electric three-wheelers. The rickshaw has been closely associated with the embodied experience of working-class men and hegemonic ideals of the 'male breadwinner'. However, in Bangladesh, the electrification of this mode of transport is also bringing in more diverse bodies and people, including women and workers with disabilities. Building on ethnographic fieldwork on the cycle-rickshaw industry in Dhaka, this paper interrogates how the advent of the electric rickshaw is changing the embodied and gendered nature of rickshaw labour. By drawing in the perspectives of elderly workers, women and rickshaw pullers with disabilities, it nuances normative ideals of the male breadwinner and contributes to a more diverse understanding of the gendered forms of earning and provisioning that rickshaw work affords.
This article attempts to understand the presence of anger in clinical settings. In the paper, I analyse the anger I felt when a child was denied admission into the paediatric ICU of a public teaching hospital in North India. Building on insights from the anthropology of emotions and from analyses by social scientists on civic engagement in India, I use anger to examine the practice of anthropology and postcolonial citizenship in a room created by the state for the practice of paediatrics. I ask, when seen through the lens of anger, what is the image of ethnography and citizenship that emerges in this room? I find that the intersectional nature of public hospitals in India-as spaces of biomedicine, citizenship, kinship, education and class-makes them a site upon which affective dilemmas are lodged. These dilemmas are at times expressed in these institutions as fraught and hostile emotions.
This paper examines the theoretical intersections of Affect Studies and translation to explore how narratives of embodied experience deepen our understanding of the human condition. Drawing on P. Lankesh's Gunamukha (Towards Healing, 1993) and its forthcoming English translation by this author, this research engages with the interplay of governance, affect, corporeality and language. By charting the 'affective textures' of pain, sickness, anger and irritation, the play constructs culturally specific registers of speech that illuminate the symbiotic relationships between society, body and mind. Through translation, these affective nuances are not merely carried across linguistic boundaries but are reimagined to retain their evocative intensity. This paper frames translation as a transformative practice linking asignifying intensities and cultural signifiers, addressing the theoretical lacuna that Brian Massumi describes as an absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, and demonstrates how affective translation, grounded in socio-political contexts, enriches embodied expression and performance studies.
The Indian subcontinent witnessed recurring famines during the second half of the nineteenth century. The British colonial state refused to intervene in grain trade, as per its famine relief policy while doing so in the labour market. This article examines popular action on relief works by famine labourers, comprising mostly marginalised castes. It contends that the state's utilitarian response to famines, which guaranteed neither wages nor food, led to popular action after state relief provisions were put into place. Moreover, the article reveals how popular action uncovered tensions between different levels of administration, particularly for local officials. In doing so, the article contributes to historiographies on famine relief in India by examining the response of labourers on relief works to the famine relief policy and the administrative complexities involved in its management. It explores the moral economy of the labouring poor and the limits of the colonial state's relief response in alleviating distress.
Kanpur's European industrialists were among the first in India to design large-scale urban spaces using publicly expropriated land, including railway sidings and industrial housing. This article asks how they got involved with urban planning, how they justified their involvement and how their designs impacted both the habitability of the city and the colonial state's understanding of what constituted 'public interest'. I argue that Kanpur's unhealthy aesthetics in the early twentieth century were a direct reflection of the corporate greed of its European industrialists. Through intensive lobbying efforts, industrialists like H.D. Allen and Alexander MacRobert successfully lobbied the government to acquire land on their behalf using the 1894 Land Acquisitions Act. They then proceeded to design spaces that enhanced their own profits while fragmenting the city and exacerbating its insanitary character.
This article demonstrates how government files are objects imbued with affects that reflect the electoral tensions which Delhi's bureaucrats navigate. With files as its key instrument, affect becomes a central technology of governmentality that supports a state logic which is more often concerned with electoral outcomes than with clinical ones. This article traces two ethnographic cases. First, I outline the pathway of my own research permissions file within Delhi's health bureaucracy to demonstrate the affective load of files. Second, I draw comparisons to other types of files within Delhi's health bureaucracy to show how the lack of signatures on files has systemic effects on Delhi's healthcare system. Delays in the movement of files lead to delays in patients accessing healthcare services and limits healthcare availability. This article contributes to studies of medical anthropology and the state by conceptualising the affect of electoral politics as a technology of biopolitics.
This article examines acceptance as a central, yet under-theorised, dimension of autism care in Bengaluru. Rather than treating acceptance as a private emotional experience, it approaches it as an analytic object that reveals how mothers navigate institutional demands across clinical and therapeutic contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the article identifies three situated orientations of maternal acceptance-tempered, radical and relational-shaped by mothers' biographies and by the moral contradictions and shifting temporalities they encounter. Following mothers across diagnostic encounters, early intervention centres and special-school counselling, the article shows how clinical and domestic worlds form a continuum in which categories circulate between households and institutions. Within these interstitial spaces, acceptance emerges as an embodied form of engagement and an institutional bricolage, making care workable amid scarce support and enduring uncertainty. Acceptance is thus shown to be a situated, ongoing relational practice that illuminates the emotional politics of care in contemporary India.
This article argues that seemingly secular expressions of postcolonial nuclear nationalism in India actually reflect a Hindu nationalist understanding of India as a civilisational entity with a moral claim to nuclear power. Such an understanding echoes American invocations of Christian mythology to justify its divine right to nuclear power and global dominance. This intervention operationalises the above through analysing Anushakthi Amma (Atomic Mother, 2004), a protest play by anti-nuclear activist S.P. Udayakumar, written during the anti-nuclear protests at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in southern India. By examining how this play reveals the fundamentalist Hindu religious foundations beneath the outwardly secular pursuit of a 'United States of India' by Indian nuclear scientists, this article highlights the play's emphasis on the experiences of irradiated populations, underscoring the urgent need to acknowledge the severe human costs and the potential disintegration of the nation's social and democratic fabric that such a pursuit entails.
By tracing the growth and expansion of a clinic in a small Dalit and Adivasi community in rural Rajasthan, this paper describes the felt incongruences of developmental progress. It engages critical social science literatures about development's linear narrative form and its potential for technological depoliticisation, to show that even as institutions grow, politics persist around what a developed health system should do. It tracks suspicion as a durable affective infrastructure alongside the clinic's changing material one to trace the politics, promises and demands for development among India's rural poor. It argues that state affects and infrastructures provide an important perspective on development in South Asia and shows how a politics of population care is experienced and enacted by those imagined as the governed. It provides a lens on the everyday entanglement of caste, gender and indigeneity in development politics.
Clinical encounters in India are often marked by suspicion between patients and practitioners. Against this backdrop, this paper explores the affective environments of clinics run by unlicensed medical practitioners-or daktars (doctors)-in Delhi, outlining 'conviviality' as a feature of care in these settings. Dismissed as 'quacks' by elites, daktars are popular sources of healthcare for the city's poor, with whom they are entangled in neighbourly relations. Drawing on ethnographic research, the paper examines how conviviality in the clinic is shaped by material conditions and relational effort. It highlights how conviviality attenuates tensions underpinning clinical encounters, while acknowledging its limits. Analysing daktars' practices, it posits conviviality as both an affective outcome of their clinical work and the condition of possibility for emotions like trust to emerge. Moving beyond negative framings of 'mistrust' within clinical settings in India, the paper foregrounds conviviality as a key aspect of daktars' healthcare provision.
