A Crisis of Health: Health Planning and Urban Public Health in early Postcolonial India, 1947-1960

Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Science and Medicine

First Advisor

Rogers, Naomi

Abstract

This dissertation sits in between the national and the local scales of public health governance, and explores the emergence of local and national health policy, the discourses and practices of public health, and traces lived experiences of the urban poor and refugees with housing, food and diseases in India in the 1950s. Nested across different scales, this dissertation navigates early postcolonial approaches to national health within the broader context of developmentalism and Cold War politics, to the local and quotidian questions of state interventions in the lives of the marginalized in urban India. At the scale of the nation-state, it begins with the national and transnational collaborations, and explores the contexts and implications of early postcolonial policymaking. At the local scale, it examines the urban public health history of Calcutta. The dissertation explores how existing norms of class, morality and citizenship shaped emerging policies around health and hygiene in the city. At the same time, it traces how those whom the urban municipal government attempted to manage and control negotiated and resisted top-down public health interventions. Given its geographic proximity to East Pakistan that absorbed hundreds of thousands of East Bengali Hindus, Calcutta remains a key site to study both the formation of middle-class dominated policy-making in post-independence India, as well as to explore local and quotidian engagements between refugees and the state. This research bridges historical literatures on global health, public health, and modern South Asia, adding to theoretical debates on refugees and the encounter between refugees and the postcolonial developmentalist state in South Asia. There are three themes running through the dissertation: Firstly, this dissertation answers Warwick Anderson’s question of where is postcolonial health and medicine. Secondly, it approaches urban governance and policymaking in public health as generated through middle-class anxieties around the bodies of urban poor, and refugees. Urban health governance shows us that a history of public health is often a story of remaking and reimagining disease and epidemics as social crises. Finally, it also explores the history of bodies of partition refugees and the urban poor to fill the gaps in literature about the changing nature of belonging and citizenship, and its contestations and resistance in early postcolonial India.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS