Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890–1940: Contagions of Feeling by Srirupa Prasad (review)

Srirupa Prasad's Contagions of Feeling contributes original and compelling research to a body of work in which hygiene is engaged as a historical genealogy. Late colonial Bengal provides the circumstances for this exploration of the meaning and role of hygiene in India, which Prasad argues was catalyzed at the crossroads of colonial governance, anticolonial struggles, cultural nationalism, and early twentieth-century feminism. It is both a study in the production of hygiene and of the development of hygiene and public health as a socio-cultural project. Prasad demonstrates that the emergence and materialization of hygiene as ideology, knowledge, and practice occurred within domestic and national realms. In so doing, she delineates an analysis that posits objects/commodities/things and affect/feeling as co-produced and mutually reinforcing. Prasad's work therefore contributes a new approach to a genealogy of hygiene whereby the frontier of existing scholarship on hygiene is moved toward an understanding of certain objects and commodities as meaningful cultural productions that embody affect/feeling.

Contagions of Feeling explores hygiene and public health as vehicles for, and embodiments of, certain ideas and practices in late colonial Bengal. Prasad demonstrates that genealogies of hygiene were produced within the contested and co-constituted nature of late colonial Bengal, given the shifting nature of ideas and feelings about the empire, national belonging, cultural identity, and economic self-sustenance. Debates on the British Empire, Indian nationalism, and political self-rule in India became the background for the production of hygiene as a discourse and a set of practices. So, hygiene simultaneously was constituted by medical ideologies, political goals, social organization, and cultural metaphors. Moreover, a genealogy of hygiene revealed gendered tensions regarding patriarchy and care, particularly within educated, middle-class female musings on domesticity, cleanliness, and well-being. Exploring hygiene and public health as a socio-cultural project, Prasad focuses her analysis on particular processes that shaped hygiene and public health in late colonial Bengal—namely, medicine and hygiene as commodities in a plural market; empire and notions of self-rule and national belonging; gender and patriarchy; and medical consumerism and socio-political institutionalism.

Prasad's approach to hygiene and public health is to refocus the debate onto affect or emotion. She identifies the presence and influence of emotion within a corpus of historical literature and research on hygiene and public health. Affect or emotion is the site upon which trajectories of hygiene can be studied. It is the corpus of myths, metaphor, rhetoric, and convention that lend cultural and social meaning to disease, health, and medicine, moreover impacting the unfolding of epidemics, hygiene practices, and notions of public health, order, and cleanliness. Anxiety is particularly relevant, galvanizing moral elitism and justifying social boundaries of class, gender, caste and nation. It is within the various personal narratives, ephemera, and medical and administrative records that Prasad identifies affect as not merely a representation of contagion but as a contagion in itself. The broader aim of Prasad's work is therefore to demonstrate that certain objects, institutions, and practices in hygiene and public health reflected particular emotions and feelings, imagined and constructed particularly in opposition to colonial rule. For example, Prasad highlights the recurrent trope of anxiety and the idea that the Bengali body (both social and national) was at risk of ruination. Particular anxieties about ruination or, more specifically, disease catalyzed political interventions such as Gandhi's commitment to "cleanliness" in the 1930s. In so doing, Prasad simultaneously demonstrates that hygiene was not merely medical intervention by colonial ruler and patriarchy but, moreover, a means by which notions of national belonging, economic self-sustenance, and, to an extent, a gendered ethic of care were articulated, co-constituted, and represented. This is an important contribution to scholarship on late colonial Bengal, which has tended to belabor the colonized/colonizer paradigm.

Given the importance of affect studies to the work, one might critique the extent to which Prasad adequately defines...