Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (review)

The word “symptoms” in Ishita Pande’s Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire points to the layers of meaning that constitute the book’s central objectives. “Symptom” signifies what accompanies and acts as evidence of something else. A symptom also departs from the normal and often signals the presence of disease or pathology. Interestingly, though, a symptom might not always indicate a malady. Empire, medicine, race, liberalism, and their relationships have been explored in an engaging manner, both analytically and empirically. Pande argues that while the liberal Empire was based on and justified by an ideology under which the colonized could be civilized into modern individuals, from the outset such a project assumed that the natives lacked the basic qualities of modernity. The colony therefore was always already a symptom of the Empire, an evidence of a deeper ailment. Even if not necessarily a malady, the colony was always a potential symptom of a malfunction. What makes Pande’s book analytically valuable is the role that she attributes to medicine in effecting two colonial-liberal practices at the same time. On the one hand, medicine became the vehicle for disciplining the colonized. On the other, it became a major influence in the constitution of colonized Bengali subjectivities.

Medicine, Race and Liberalism brings together history of medicine, debates in postcolonial studies, and gender history in an excitingly productive relationship. Pande’s critical contribution is in her departure from much of the existing scholarship on the medical history of colonial India, which focuses on medicine as part of the project of the colonial state. Though the issue of anti-colonial resistance to the arrogant state imposition of medicine on the colonized population has been debated critically, such analysis has seldom entered the homes of the colonized, where the issue of resistance becomes murkier in conjunction with the self-formation and disciplining of the colonized as modern individuals.

Pande’s book makes an extremely valuable contribution to history of medicine scholarship with her analysis of race as one of the fundamental factors in the birth of modern medicine, especially in its grounding and development in the Empire. No less important is her demonstration that “the question of ‘race’ . . . is fundamental to the operation of biopower” in the colonial state (7). So for example, the figure of the “black Aryan” was not determined by European race science (23); rather, it helped constitute race science as a modern scientific knowledge.

Pande’s book is significant in its alignment with recent critical theorizations of some of Michel Foucault’s ideas about the links between liberalism, biopower, and governmentality. Pande focuses on two characteristics of liberalism, self-government and self-improvement, the quintessential maneuvers of a liberal-imperial government that translated modern racialized medicine into a motor of both the control and subjectification of Bengalis in the nineteenth century.

Medicine, Race and Liberalism also contributes to the so-called new imperial history. Though Pande does not explicitly align with this area of research, her book reflects some of its positions, particularly when, in her characterization of modern medicine, she erases the distinction between nineteenth-century medicine in the Empire and in the metropole, the particular and the universal. She argues that the imperial career of medicine was in fact a constitutive part of modern medicine. Through this particular argument Pande reaffirms the main position that new imperial historians such as Catherine Hall, Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha, and Ann Stoler have put forth. They have argued for the influence of culture in parallel with economic and political relationships in the making and consolidation of the Empire as well as in the formation of the metropole. This has enormous implications given that orthodox British historians have continued to discredit the ideas that British people and culture were formed in and through imperial ideas and practice, and that ordinary British citizens were knowledgeable about Britain’s...