Ishita Pande is ambitious. She answers paradoxes involving “colonizer's ‘tool of othering’” on three medical-political fronts. She 1) critiques “racialized medicine” interrogating liberal colonial doctors and administrators who sought cures for “primitive” pathologies; 2) shows how race-based “modern” medicine defined “normal and the production of norms by liberal reforms” of racialized subjects in biopolitical realms of education, sanitation and law; and 3) exposes “native” self-regulating regimes that shaped “the modern Bengali subject in the last decades of the nineteenth century” (p. 16). She proceeds with subtle word study, formidable theoretical posturing, and plundering of colonial archives. Bhadralok (respectable gentry), less “the passive object of medical and ethnological gaze,” used the very tools of colonial medical outreach and grew self-critically to explain their own “degeneration” as a plague of modernity (pp. 16–17). Pande's ambitions largely succeed, even while leaving the reader wanting slightly more.
Before examining “race and place”—followed by “blood and morals,” “city and citizenship,” and “sex and public”—Pande introduces her subject evocatively. We read about Foucault's clinics, Arnold's colonized bodies, and Said's orientalism, along with women and children as “others,” colonial “problems of difference,” and even anecdotes about a self-critical Bengali masturbator who, in 1885, was publicly seeking self-improvement from his “sinful” affliction. Beginning with late-Foucault's theories on knowledge, power, bodies and self-technologies, she asks important, if familiar, questions about medicine as symptom of empire, as fundamental to imperial liberalism. “What is colonial about colonial medicine?” “[How do] people and populations negotiate with, respond to or resist this kind of power?” (p. 4) Biopower is subsumed in “universalized difference” that includes colonial objectification and “native” subjectification of norming medical regimes. This is a step beyond tired disembodied inquiries into colonial state medicine. She presents under-utilized categories of race as having been “a scientific idea” (p. 8) and shows how colonial medical analyses became public medical-political tools regulating health, sanitation and legal practices. In regenerating “the silenced term of race” (p. 9), she questions colonial “‘scale of civilizations’ that divided the world into those…ready for citizenship and those who had to be made ready for it” (p. 13).
In analyzing “race and place” Pande points to colonial contradictions involved in racial theories that “scientifically” scaled difference while simultaneously denouncing racism. She summons archives revealing how production of categorized difference—skull size, etc.—begat stereotypical notions like the “black Aryan” (p. 23) that both affirmed Indo-European British and Indian sameness and affirmed notions of “degeneration” used to justify imperial improvement of “native” pathologies. Pande focuses on the colonial fascination with Rammohun Roy (the black Aryan) and the British medical and ethnological production of Hindu constitution as linked with effeminizing, debasing and degenerating tropical climates (with Roy as the exception to the rule). She links colonial notions of Hindu race and place that outlined “the Hindu type” found particularly in degenerating tropical Bengal. Curious lacunae are left, however, that become more apparent as she proceeds: where are the Muslims and the colonial medical-political notions of the Muslim subject? If Rammohun Roy, why not Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan?
In “blood and morals” Pande maintains a focus on Hindus in colonial medical-political agendas, especially in the activities of Calcutta Medical College. Not just the object of British medical gaze anymore, creation of “black doctors” was sought to overcome “superstitious” Hindu aversion to corpses and propel beyond “primitive” Ayurvedic medicine…and to overcome caste difference and civilizational degeneration. Though not dwelling long enough on reception of Sanskritic healing traditions, and only just mentioning Unani systems—here again, where are the Muslims?—Pande shows great colonial hope in the social and cultural effects of “native” fingers touching corpses and performing surgeries. “By touching the corpse, the native would lie outside the system of caste that defined his world, and would be ready to be reformed” (p. 83).
Pande's most convincing work remains her section on “city and citizenship” insofar as she connects oft-analyzed colonial medical-political agendas with subjective Bengali appropriations of modern regimes of the self. Not just colonial policy, it is the “sanitary subject” negotiating with regimes of power that pushed toward bodily and social freedoms. Citizens were created that disrupted the paradox of colonial racism. “The hygienization of the city created a particular vision of self-government, which involved a new way of behaving in relation to the self and the city” (p. 128). The Bengali modern was taking shape under the colonial regimes of education, health, and law. The once-colonized nation was moving beyond diagnoses of degeneration into realizations that the real pathology was colonial medical-political biopower.
Pande succeeds with an ambitious agenda, even if the reader might want a little more. The book, most suitable for upper-level undergraduates, graduate students and specialists in the field, stakes out new ground in combining both objective colonial medical accounts with subjective appropriations on the part of Bengali subjects. It is worth interrogating on that account.
