"The ignorance of women is the house of illness": Gender, nationalism, and health reform in colonial north India

Medicine and Colonial Identity

Volumn , Issue , 2003, Pages 14-40

  Lal, Maneesha ^a  

^a Columbia University Institute for Scholars ^*  (France)

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EID: 27944507746     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203522318     Document Type: Chapter

References (125)

1. Doctor Shrikant Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], Stri Darpan 29:6 (June 1923): 648, 651. All translations from the Hindi are my own. "National crime" was written in English.
2. [Rameshwari Nehru], "Prānāyām aur Deśī Kasrat" [Pranayam and National Exercise], Stri Darpan 20:2 (Feb. 1919): 61.
3. Dominik Wujastyk, "Indian Medicine," in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, eds W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 767, 770-1;
4. Kenneth G. Zysk, Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991);
5. M. N. Pearson, "The Thin End of the Wedge: Medical Relativities as a Paradigm of Early Modern Indian-European Relations," Modern Asian Studies 29:1 (1995): 168-9;
6. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7.
7. See Dominik Wujastyk, The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical Writings (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998), for an accessible introduction to classical Ayurvedic thought. An Ayurvedic physician is known as a vaid or vaidya. A hakãm is a physician who practices Unani medicine.
8. This is not to ascribe a monolithic homogeneity to European identity or to Western medicine, but to acknowledge that historical actors themselves constructed such correlations. In practice, as Megan Vaughan has argued with reference to literature on healing in Africa, scientific medicine needs to be examined in its various forms and with greater attention to detail and historical context, not "reduced to its theory of itself" and placed in opposition to non Western healing practices. See Megan Vaughan, "Healing and Curing: Issues in the Social History and Anthropology of Medicine in Africa," Social History of Medicine 7 (1994): 283-95.
9. See, for example, Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 244;
10. Harrison, Public Health in British India, 1;
11. Radhika Ramasubban, "Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900," in Disease, Medicine, and Empire, eds, Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (London: Routledge, 1988), 38-60.
12. Arnold argues, however, that Western medicine did gain increasing influence over the thoughts and behaviors of Indians, especially after 1914.
13. For recent work which takes up this task, see Deepak Kumar, "Unequal Contenders, Uneven Ground: Medical Encounters in British India, 1820-1920," in Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge, eds, Andrew Cunningham and Bridie Andrews (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 172-90;
14. several of the essays in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison, eds, Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001).
15. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1991 [orig. 1983]);
16. E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
17. Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990);
18. Stuart Hall, "Cultural Identity and Diaspora," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 392-403;
19. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction: From the Moment of Social History to the Work of Cultural Representation," in Becoming National: A Reader, eds, Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6-8. The Eley and Suny reader provides an excellent introduction to the vast scholarship on nationalism.
20. Vir Bharat Talwar, "Feminist Consciousness in Women's Journals in Hindi: 1910-1920," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 222-3;
21. Francesca Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond: Hindi Women's Journals in the Early Twentieth Century," South Asia Research 19:2 (1999): 138.
22. Purdah, literally "curtain" or "screen," is a shorthand term that has referred generally to the varied set of cultural practices, including the customs of veiling and seclusion, which aim to enforce high standards of female modesty and regulate relations between the sexes in many parts of South Asia. See Hanna Papanek and Gail Minault, "Foreword," in Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia, eds, Hanna Papanek and Gail Minault (Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1982), vii-viii;
23. Hanna Papanek, "Purdah: Separate Worlds and Symbolic Shelter," in Separate Worlds, 3-53.
24. Gail Minault, "Urdu Women's Magazines in the Early Twentieth Century," Manushi 48 (Sept.-Oct. 1988): 2-9;
25. Gail Minault, Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 110-22.
26. Addressed to Master Joe, Jawaharlal's nickname at the time, the letter was instead delivered to the school's headmaster (also named Joe), who, shocked at its seditious tone, sent a warning letter to Jawaharlal's father. Upon learning that it was Rameshwari who had written it, he wrote back, "I am intensely amused to hear that it was a charming young lady who defied the British Raj! Give her my kind regards, and say that I hope some day, when she knows us better, she will like us more!" Joseph Wood to M. Nehru, quoted in Om Prakash Paliwal, Rameshwari Nehru: Patriot and Internationalist (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1986), pages between 10 and 11;
27. B. R. Nanda, The Nehrus, Motilal and Jawaharlal (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962), 83-4.
28. In 1923, Stri Darpan moved to Kanpur, to be edited by Sumati Devi and Phulkumari Mehrotra. See Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond," 145.
29. See the fond description of Rameshwari bhabhi by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, in her The Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir (New York: Crown, 1979), 31; bhābhī is the Hindi kin term to refer to one's elder brother's (or cousin brother's) wife. The quotation, "Rameshwari was my ideal of Indian womanhood," is attributed to Kulsum Sayani, an educational activist and Gandhian nationalist, who is quoted in Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 201;
30. see also Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Inner Recesses, Outer Spaces: Memoirs (New Delhi: Navrang, 1986), 143. For references to Rameshwari Nehru's range of activities, which included association with the Delhi Women's League, an influential role in the national Women's India Association (WIA), which advocated female suffrage, and later involvement in peace and nuclear disarmament efforts
31. see Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, 61-2;
32. Forbes, Women in Modern India, 87, 106, 206;
33. Paliwal, Rameshwari Nehru; Aparna Basu, "The Role of Women in the Indian Struggle for Freedom," in Indian Women: From Purdah to Modernity, ed., B. R. Nanda (New Delhi: Radiant, 1990 [orig. 1976]), 22; and her obituary in Times of India (Nov. 9, 1966), 1.
34. Talwar, "Feminist Consciousness," 204.
35. Pandit, The Scope of Happiness, 31.
36. Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond," 145.
37. See Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond," 145.
38. Quoted in Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond," 143-4. The quote was from a banner under the journal's title.
39. Talwar, "Feminist Consciousness," 208. For further analysis of Gandhi's attitudes concerning women
40. see Madhu Kishwar, "Women and Gandhi," Economic and Political Weekly 20 (Oct. 5 and Oct. 12, 1985): 1691-702, 17538;
41. Sujata Patel, "Construction and Reconstruction of Woman in Gandhi," Economic and Political Weekly 23 (Feb. 20, 1988): 377-87. The extent of Stri Darpan's circulation is unclear, although Francesca Orsini argues that it remained relatively small, never more than 1,000 copies. While this may be true, there is considerable evidence that Indian newspapers and journals circulated much more widely, by, for example, being passed around to friends and relations or being read aloud in public, than their official figures would suggest.
42. Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India, 1800-1990 (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1993), 1.
43. Kumar, The History of Doing, 1.
44. The leading exponent of this view is Partha Chatterjee, "The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 233-54.
45. See Sonal Shukla, "Cultivating Minds: 19th Century Gujarati Women's Journals," Economic and Political Weekly 26:43 (Oct. 26, 1991): WS63-6;
46. Orsini, "Domesticity and Beyond," 137-60.
47. Tharu and Lalita, Women Writing in India, 167.
48. Rosalind O'Hanlon, A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994), 38.
49. See also Sumanta Banerjee, "Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal," in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, eds, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 127-79;
50. Tharu and Lalita, Women Writing in India;
51. Minault, "Urdu Women's Magazines."
52. This and the following three paragraphs are synthesized from R. S. McGregor, Hindi Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974);
53. Peter Gaeffke, Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978);
54. David Lelyveld, "The Fate of Hindustani: Colonial Knowledge and the Project of a National Language," in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, eds, Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 189-214;
55. Krishna Kumar, "Quest for Self-Identity: Cultural Consciousness and Education in the Hindi Region, 1880-1950," Economic and Political Weekly 25:23 (June 9, 1990): 1247-9, 1251-5;
56. Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1994);
57. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996);
58. Francesca Orsini, "What Did They Mean by 'Public'? Language, Literature and the Politics of Nationalism," Economic and Political Weekly 34:7 (Feb. 13, 1999): 409-16.
59. During the period from 1856-1910, almost 400 literary works, including plays, novels, essays, poems, and autobiographies, were written by almost 200 Bengali women authors. Twenty-one Bengali periodicals were edited by women and concerned themselves primarily with women's issues. See Banerjee, "Marginalization of Women's Popular Culture," 160. Meredith Borthwick has carefully detailed the importance attached to matters of hygiene and reformed childbirth and medical practices in this genre of Bengali literature. See Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-1905 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
60. Talwar, "Feminist Consciousness," 210.
61. See Eley and Suny, "Introduction," in Becoming National, 7.
62. Shrimati Prem Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [How to Eat Food Properly], Stri Darpan 27:2 (Aug. 1922): 67;
63. Shri Jagannath Shukla, "Dharmasàstra aur ârogyatà" [Dharmashastras and Health] Stri Darpan 27:2 (Aug. 1922): 72.
64. [Nehru], "Prānāyām aur Deśī Kasrat" [Pranayam and National Exercise], 61.
65. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [How to Eat Food Properly], 67-9;
66. Shriyut B. K. Mitra, "AjrnPranayam and National Exercise" [Indigestion], Stri Darpan 16:5 (May 1917): 264.
67. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [How to Eat Food Properly], 67-9.
68. See Francis Zimmermann, "Rtu-Satmya: The Seasonal Cycle and the Principle of Appropriateness," Social Science and Medicine 14B (1980): 99-106.
69. Asoj (or Āśvin) and Kārttik, corresponding to 15 September-15 October and 15 October-15 November, respectively, are the seventh and eighth months of the Hindu lunar calendar. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [How to Eat Food Properly], 69.
70. Cf. G. J. Meulenbeld, The Madhavanidana and Its Chief Commentary (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 449-50;
71. S. K. Ramachandra Rao, ed., Encyclopaedia of Indian Medicine, vol. 2 (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1987), 186-7.
72. Shriyut B. K. Mitra, "Kosth Vaddhatā yā Qabz" [Constipation (or Contraction of Stomach)], Stri Darpan 16:6 (June 1917): 321-6;
73. Mitra, "Ajrn" [Indigestion], 262-7;
74. Cf. Wujastyk, The Roots of Ayurveda, 5.
75. Mitra, "Kosth Vaddhatā yā Qabz" [Constipation (or Contraction of Stomach)], 321-2.
76. See Sudhir Kakar, Shamans, Mystics, and Doctors: A Psychological Inquiry into India and Its Healing Traditions (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1982);
77. Francis Zimmermann, The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
78. Shukla, "Dharmaśāstra aur Ārogyatā" [Dharmashastras and Health], 72-5.
79. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [How to Eat Food Properly], 69;
80. Mitra, "Ajrn" [Indigestion], 262-7;
81. Shukla, "Dharmaśāstra aur Ārogyatā" [Dharmashastras and Health], 72.
82. [Nehru], "Pustak Paricay" [Book Conversation], 602.
83. "National crime" was written in English. See Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙ " [Why Do Children Die?], 648, 651.
84. "Struggle for existence" and "Red Indians" were written in English; Shriyut Mukandilal, B.A. (Oxon.), Bar-at-Law, "Siśu Pālan" [Childcare], Stri Darpan 23:3 (Sept. 1920): 117-20.
85. Prasadilal Jha, L.M.S., "Acchī Dāiyom˙ kī Āvaśyaktā" [The Need for Good Midwives], Stri Darpan 29:3 (Sept. 1923): 476-8;
86. Mukandilal, "Śiśu Pālan" [Childcare], 117-20;
87. Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], 647-51.
88. Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], 651.
89. The allusion Tripathi used to describe the plight of the trapped man, that of the character Abhimanyu in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, is particularly illuminating. Abhimanyu, son of the second Pandava brother Arjuna and his wife Subhadra, becomes trapped in the great war in a lotus configuration formed by the enemy Kauravas from which, despite fighting heroically, he is unable to escape. Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], 650.
90. Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], 650.
91. Jha, "Acchī Dāiyom˙m kī Āvaśyaktā" [The Need for Good Midwives], 477-8.
92. Janakdulari Gurtu, "Tandurustī yānī Ārogyatā" [Health or Absence of Illness], Stri Darpan 19:4 (Oct. 1918): 214.
93. [Nehru], "Gan˙gājal se Svāsthya kī Hāni" [Harm to Health from Ganges Water], Stri Darpan 20:1 (Jan. 1919): 6. The Hindi word used for "germ" was kçmi, which means "worm" or sometimes "small insect." It appears that kçmi was a term that was later infused with notions derived from the germ theory of disease of Western medicine, although this is a supposition that needs to be confirmed by further research. I gratefully acknowledge Dominik Wujastyk's discussions with me on this matter.
94. Jha, "Acchī Dāiyom˙m kī Āvaśyaktā" [The Need for Good Midwives], 476-8.
95. Tripathi, "Bacce Kyom˙ Marte Haim˙" [Why Do Children Die?], 649;
96. Jha, "Acchī Dāiyom˙ kī Āvaśyaktā" [The Need for Good Midwives], 476-8.
97. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [Food and Its Proper Method], 67-8.
98. Sundarimohan Das, "Resurrection of Motherhood and Fatherhood," Modern Review 26:2 (Aug. 1919): 189-92; excerpted, translated, and reprinted as "Mātā kā Navjīvan" [New Life for Mother] in Stri Darpan 21:5 (Nov. 1919): 239-41.
99. Occasionally hamār jāti (our community, subcaste) or hamārā yahām˙ (literally "our here, place") were also used. See Mukandilal, "Śiśu Pālan" [Childcare], 118-20;
100. Vishvanath Prasad Mishra, "Śiśu Pālan Rahasya" [Secrets of Childcare], Stri Darpan 27:5 (Nov. 1922): 242-5;
101. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [Food and its Proper Method], 67-9;
102. Jha, "Acchī Dāiyom˙ kī Āvaśyaktā" [Need for Good Midwives], 476-8.
103. Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Difference/Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal," History Workshop 36 (1993): 6.
104. Dulari, "Khānā aur Uskā Tarīqā" [Food and its Proper Method], 68.
105. [Nehru], "Pustak Paricay" [Book Conversation], 602.
106. "Śiśu Pālan mem˙ Kuch Zaūrī Bātem˙" [Some Necessary Points Concerning Childcare], Stri Darpan 29:2 (Aug. 1923): 396-7. In this article, doctors and vaids were classed as equivalent medical authorities.
107. See also Mukandilal, "Śiśu Pālan" [Childcare], 117-20.
108. Chatterjee, "Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question," 240-9.
109. Mitra, "Kosth Vaddhatā yā Qabz" [Constipation (or Contraction of Stomach)], 321-6.
110. Shri Mukutvihari Lal Dar, "Bhārat mem Ksay Rog aur Striyām" [Tuberculosis and Women in India], Stri Darpan 22:1 (Jan. 1920): 29.
111. Doctor Mahendralal Garg, "Acchā Putr Pāne kā Upāy" [Means to Obtain a Good Son], Stri Darpan 21:3 (Sept. 1919): 143-4. The Puranas are sacred texts of Hinduism that consist of religious instruction as well as genealogies and legends of gods and royal dynasties. The Matsya Purana (matsya, literally fish, refers to one of the avatars of Vishnu) is considered one of the eighteen major Puranas.
112. Mitra, "Ajrn" [Indigestion], 262.
113. Jha, "Acchī Dāiyom˙ kī Āvaśyaktā" [Need for Good Midwives], 476.
114. For reference to healing practice among Muslim women that was denigrated by reformers promoting a revitalized Unani medical tradition, see Barbara Metcalf, Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf'Ali Thanawi's "Bihisti Zewar": Partial Translation and Commentary (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 10. However, it would be unwise to romanticize women's access to and control of medical and healing knowledge in earlier times. Ayurvedic medicine, for instance, offered no place to women healers; in Dominik Wujastyk's words, its "gaze remain[ed] unwaveringly male." See Wujastyk, Roots of Ayurveda, 23. Nevertheless, Wujastyk has stressed in personal communication that Ayurvedic literature did contain "quite a lot of instruction and description . . . about women's bodies and the treatment of female conditions."
115. Gurtu, "Tandurustī yānī Ārogyatā" [Health or Absence of Illness], 214.
116. For more detailed analysis of the medical research linking purdah to disease and its circulation in wider social contexts, see my article, "Purdah as Pathology: Gender and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Late Colonial India," forthcoming in Rocking the Cradle: Essays in India's Reproductive History, ed. Sarah Hodges (New Delhi: Permanent Black).
117. Dar, "Bhārat mem˙: Ks˙ay Rog aur Striyām" [Tuberculosis and Women in India], 25-31.
118. Shrimati Vidyavati Khanna, "Bāl Vivāh aur Usse Jātī kā Hāniyām˙" [Child Marriage and its Harmfulness to Society], Stri Darpan 22:5 (May 1920): 276.
119. K. N. Tandon, "Ārogyatā" [Health], Stri Darpan 17:4 (Oct. 1917): 198-9.
120. Chakrabarty, "Difference/Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity";
121. Samita Sen, "Motherhood and Mothercraft: Gender and Nationalism in Bengal," Gender and History 5:2 (1993): 231-43;
122. Madhu Kishwar, "Arya Samaj and Women's Education: Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Jalandhar," Economic and Political Weekly 21:17 (Apr. 26, 1986): WS9-WS24.
123. Chakrabarty, "Difference/Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity."
124. Cf., for example, Sen, "Motherhood and Mothercraft."
125. Cf. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). It is likely no accident that Stri Darpan promoted Ayurveda, long associated with Hinduism, rather than Unani medicine, associated with Islam, for its revitalization project.