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

In the Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, Srirupa Prasad sets out to identify the part played in the nationalist discourse of late-colonial India by “affect,” a term she equates with emotion and feeling. Drawing on affect theory, she develops this concept in the four themes that underpin her narrative. In the first of these, focusing on “alimentary anxieties,” her discussion ranges over issues of nationhood, nutrition, and hunger, passing from everyday concerns about food adulteration to the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1943, before turning in the following chapter to Gandhi’s notions of bodily purity and corporeal self-regulation. A third chapter considers “the ethic of care” (p. 71), expressed through a range of women’s autobiographical writings in their reflections on domesticity and well-being, while a fourth assesses the visual culture of medical advertising and its promise of the “enchantments” of empire and nation. Through these topics the book seeks to explore “ideas, emotions, objects/commodities, and people” in relation to an understanding of “contagion” that embraces “medical ideologies, political goals, social organization, and cultural metaphors” (p. 114). In practice, contagion is presented as being much about anxiety than any actual transmission of disease. Further, while recognizing that hygiene can be understood as “a set of practices for the establishment . . . of health” (p. 25), Prasad’s concern is more centrally with hygiene as metaphor and as a means of disciplining the social body. Although the book is situated in a time of colonial rule and emergent nation, she journeys well beyond that era to address “the present neoliberal time” (p. 20) and to bring a contemporary perspective to the Bengal famine, observing that hunger continues to “stir and move the public imagination in India today” (p. 25), or to reinterpret women’s writing from the 1920s and 1930s in a postcolonial, feminist light. Aside from the rather incongruous chapter on Gandhi, Cultural Politics of Hygiene deals exclusively with Bengal, thus leaving unexplored the extent to which sentiments felt by, or attributed to, the Bengali middle class can be generalized across India or throughout Bengal. Is affect solely the preserve of an articulate middle class? Although the book eschews archival sources in the conventional sense, its strength lies in its use of Bengali sources that provide a clearer sense of how affect actively informs “cultural politics.” In discussing the Bengal famine, Prasad shows not so much the depth of feeling engendered at the time as how the images of that catastrophe resonate into more recent times and she interestingly reflects on the difficulty in giving meaningful representation to scenes of almost unspeakable and uncommunicable horror. In perhaps the most original and effective chapter, Prasad makes telling uses of three Bengali autobiographies to demonstrate the complex emotions of women denied education and opportunity or stricken by their sense of untimely family loss. Particularly effective is the way in which Shukhalata Rao’s personal verse narrative is read alongside her didactic tract on children’s hygiene, the two combining to build a powerful sense of how affect and affliction intercept and reinforce each another.

Overall, though, this is an unsatisfying book. In seeking to explore the role of emotion in medical ideas and health practices, it has an important and timely theme. But affect, emotion, and feeling, are terms too general and nonspecific to provide an adequate basis for theorizing across such a wide gamut of issues or for substantiating claims about such a diversity of objects, experiences, and subjectivities. Thus, in writing about advertising, Prasad observes that cumulatively advertisements “evoked deep sentiments among people” (p. 110); but she offers no evidence for how such seemingly powerful messages were received, let alone acted upon, by would-be consumers. The chapter on Gandhi adds little to the existing literature and, since no connection is made between the Mahatma and the Bengali middle class, it distracts the reader from a more...