Rohan Deb Roy's book, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909, and Shinjini Das's volume, Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India: Family, Market and Homeopathy, set out to fill the scholarly vacuum in their respective subjects with an overlapping timeline, with Roy studying events in the long nineteenth century (1820–1909) and Das focusing his study on 1866–1941 but both telescoping their attention on the Bengal region.
Most of the scholarship on malaria has been dedicated either to diagnosing mortalities and analyzing events based on twentieth-century knowledge of malaria or to efforts to eradicate malaria. Roy, however, undertakes a study of the processes that led to the definition and redefinition of malaria in the nineteenth century. While the nineteenth century is known for its imperfect knowledge of malaria, Roy points out that its significance lies in the way the scientific knowledge of malaria changed its definition and yet was controlled by the British colonial government in furthering its interests. Roy's study is built on and inspired by the scholarship on the colonial empires of different geographic locales (Roy, pp. 3–4). Questioning the common understanding of the advancement of scientific knowledge production, Roy uncovers the histories of quinine, malaria, and mosquitoes as they intersect with each other in the interplay of European colonial powers, scientists, and a host of other groups, including colonial subjects.
In the early nineteenth century, malaria was understood as the cause of a host of maladies. Quinine, an extract from cinchona originally grown in the wilderness of South America, was used as a diagnostic medicine for these maladies. Roy explains the ways in which quinine helped the British restore the credibility they had lost during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 by showing their beneficial side through the dispensation of medical relief while also making a profit by selling it. One of the imperial discourses during this time, Roy argues, was anthropomorphism and dehumanization, such as the way the British used their involvement with the cinchona trade to praise cinchona as a delicate maid and to ridicule indigenous laborers in South America and India as low-grade humans.
Soon after the discovery of quinine, a vast amount of scholarship on the nature of malaria emerged in Europe. Commenting on one of the most detailed accounts of these works and their many editions, Roy observes how the association of malaria slowly shifted from romantic European locations where the rich lived in grandeur to hot, poverty-ridden European colonial locations with overcrowded populations (pp. 75–94). The necessity of shifting the association of malaria, Roy argues, was to justify colonial interference in salvaging colonies. As Roy demonstrates, the process of commodifying cinchona was highly complex, creating a web of interactions both across the world and within colonial India, with some Indians aiding the colonial apparatus as physicians, administrators, and middlemen and others working as migrant laborers.
In the 1870s, an epidemic erupted in the Burdwan division of Bengal Presidency in India. It came to be known as “Burdwan fever,” which the colonial government linked to malaria. Roy argues that the association of Burdwan fever with malaria is a case in point showing how a myriad of malaises were grouped as serial conditions of malaria lasting a long time only to serve imperial interests. For example, Burdwan fever provided an occasion for the British not only to dispense quinine to remote parts of India but also to categorize certain plants, such as sunflower, paddy, jute, and bamboo, as “undergrowth” (p. 154) and certain groups of indentured laborers, such as Santhals from the Chotanagpore region, as “crude and laborious racial constitutions” (p. 155).
Increasing awareness of the role of insects in spreading diseases at the beginning of the twentieth century culminated in hypothesizing the anopheles mosquito as the cause of malaria. This redefinition of malaria, Roy argues, did not deter the imperial government from continuing to sell quinine as medicine for all the maladies as though they stemmed from malaria. Tracing malaria to mosquitoes, Roy points out, gave one more reason for the imperial government to denigrate “primitives as parasite laden races” (p. 253).
Thus, Roy argues that nonhumans such as mosquitoes and objects like quinine and malaria became part of imperial designs as they substantiated their savior role. Locating the European, colonial, and vernacular sources in a “single analytic field,” Roy examines “predictable differences” as well as “overlaps between them” (p. 7). He skillfully brings out the complexity and messiness of the processes involved in defining and redefining malaria and the role of cinchona and the association with mosquitoes by consulting a vast variety of sources, including colonial state records, correspondence, and private papers; annual reports of dispersed cinchona plantations and quinine factories; medical journals and military manuals; Bengali vernacular literature and advertisements; and reports and memoirs of scientists and others within British India and beyond.
Das, on the other hand, pursues the relatively understudied heterodox Western medical tradition of homeopathy as it emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in India by asking how a German medical tradition deemed unscientific came to be vernacularized to suit Indian sensibilities and made legitimate in India. Drawing on different strands of scholarship (Das, pp. 6–9, 19–21, 23–29), Das explores the interactions between Calcutta-based homeopathic family firms, sporadically dispersed rural mofussil practitioners, the British colonial state, and the emergent nationalist governments to study the cultural production of homeopathy as a “vernacular science” in Bengal (p. 11). A lot of scholarship involving the Bengali elite (bhadralok) currently exists, but Das focuses on a distinct group of bhadralok who were entrepreneurs and left out of earlier studies. Using homeopathy as a matter of contention, Das tracks the processes of its vernacularization. In doing so, he unveils the strategies that family-based homeopathy firms used to retain their business, invoking nationalist sentiment to subvert the efforts of the colonial state, on the one hand, and using prevailing social biases to dominate marginalized groups such as suburban lower-middle-class or semiliterate practitioners, on the other.
Analyzing the biographies of homeopathy practitioners, Das points out how commerce, print capital, nationalist ideology, and medical knowledge projected Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann, the creator of homeopathy, as a Hindu son and reinforced networks of familiarities, including those of religions, class, kinship, and family (Das, p. 113). These efforts made homeopathy an integral part of Hindu culture, entrenched in Bengali rural areas. Reflecting on earlier scholarship on the nature of translations, Das comments that Hahnemann and his texts assumed much of their scientific status in the realm of popular print through processes of multiple translations into Bengali (Das, p. 154). These translations projected homeopathy as compatible with indigenous ways and yet also equipped with Western scientific credentials (Das, p. 198). The concept that homeopathy could be mastered at home just by reading and memorizing made the domestic arena an institution with the family as its focus. With an emphasis on the production and consumption of things “indigenous” to the home while maintaining frugality, Das states that homeopaths crafted politico-economic discourse exclusively in familial terms (Das, p. 198).
By the turn of the twentieth century, the Calcutta-based family firms, through their savviness, managed to establish relations with the state to sell pharmaceuticals. Besides, infiltrating the relevant decision-making committees helped these family firms gain official recognition through the nationalist ministry, but only after streamlining, institutionalizing, and redefining homeopathy. Throughout this process, the colonial government considered homeopathy to be a “necessary evil,” but one that had to be tolerated, considering its popularity, and to be regulated (Das, pp. 240–41). This toleration and regulation, according to Das, guided the postcolonial government's health policy—because of biomedicine's limited reach and access, traditional medicine and homeopathy were recognized in a subsidiary capacity to biomedicine only after standardizing, regularizing, and rationalizing their education and research (Das, p. 242).
Thus, Roy and Das share a somewhat similar analytical framework that supports “David Arnold's important caution against the problem of excessive reliance on ‘frameworks grounded in sharp western indigenous divides’” (Das, p. 24). Both Roy and Das engage Bengali vernacular sources, in addition to a host of others, to explore the processes of making, advertising, and selling medicines in colonial Bengal. For Roy, the medicine is quinine, and for Das, it is homeopathy. The histories of these two medical traditions were interwoven with the mechanisms of the colonial state, one (biomedicine) favored and the other (homeopathy) denigrated, and yet, as the two studies demonstrate, they highlight the colonial anxieties and biases. While this is the case, the intricacies were much more convoluted. The discursive strategies employed to sell these desperate medicines, as Roy and Das bring to our attention, involved revitalizing Bengali society through the reformation of Bengali families. By explaining the role of the Bengali elite (bhadralok) and their various rationales (some believed in the benefits of quinine and others in profiteering) for strengthening Hindu traditions and traditional family values, Roy demonstrates the ways in which native efforts helped the British colonial agenda, while Das shows the way that homeopathy, a Western tradition resisting colonial antipathy, was indigenized in Bengal and the rest of India. These processes, as the authors explain, bring out a complex phenomenon in which binaries such as Western/non-Western and colonial/colonized do not often hold.
