Author
Biswamoy Pati
Other affiliations: University of Calcutta
Bio: Biswamoy Pati is an academic researcher from University of Delhi. The author has contributed to research in topic(s): Colonialism & Social history. The author has an hindex of 8, co-authored 37 publication(s) receiving 250 citation(s). Previous affiliations of Biswamoy Pati include University of Calcutta.
Topics: Colonialism, Social history, Communalism, Empire, Subaltern Studies
Papers
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05 May 2006
45 citations
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30 May 2011
TL;DR: This chapter discusses British-Indian Sanitary Strategies in Central Asia, 1897-1907 and racial Pathologies in British India, 1770-1850, as well as medical and Colonial Power in Nineteenth Century Bengal.
Abstract: 1. Ranald Martin's Medical Topography [1837]: The Emergence of Public Health in Calcutta Partho Datta 2. The Haj Pilgrimage and Issues of Health Saurabh Mishra 3. Subordinate Negotiations: The Indigenous Staff, Colonial State and Public Health Amna Khalid 4. Plague, Quarantine and Empire: British-Indian Sanitary Strategies in Central Asia, 1897-1907 Sanchari Dutta 5. Medical Research and Control of Disease: Kala-azar in British India Achintya Kumar Dutta 6. The Leprosy Patient and Society: Colonial Orissa, 1870s-1940s Chandi P. Nanda and Biswamoy Pati 7. Medical and Colonial Power: The Case of the Mentally Ill in Nineteenth Century Bengal Waltraud Ernst 8. Prejudices Clung to by the Natives: Ethnicity in the Indian Army and Hospitals for Sepoys, c.1870s-90s Samiksha Sehrawat 9. Racial Pathologies: Morbid Anatomy in British India, 1770-1850 Mark Harrison 10. Pharmacology, Indigenous Knowledge, Nationalism: Few Words from the Epitaph of Subaltern Science Projit B. Mukharji 11. Creating a Medical Consumer: An Analytical Study of Advertisements Madhuri Sharma 12. Opium as a Household Remedy in Nineteenth Century Western India? Amar Farooqui
38 citations
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the relationship between power and legitimacy in the Princely States of Jammu and Kashmir and discuss the role of women's status in Islam in the case of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam.
Abstract: 1. People, Princes and Colonialism Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati 2. Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography and the Princely States: Relations of Power and Rituals of Legitimation Hira Singh 3. 'Cruel, Oriental Despots': Representations in Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Fiction, 1858-1900 Indrani Sen 4. Narcotrafficking, Princely Ingenuity and the Raj: The Subjugation of the Sindia State, c. 1843-44 Amar Farooqui 5. The Agrarian System of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir: A Study of Colonial Settlement Policies, 1860-1905 Shakti Kak 6. The Order of Legitimacy: Princely Orissa, 1850-1920 Biswamoy Pati 7. Loyal Feudatories or Depraved Despots? The Deposition of Princes in the Central India Agency, c. 1880-1947 Fiona Groenhout 8. 'Hostages in our Camp': Military Collaboration between Princely India and the British Raj, c. 1880-1920 Samiksha Sehrawat 9. Historicising Debates over Women's Status in Islam: The Case of Nawab Sultan Jahan Begam of Bhopal Siobhan Lambert-Hurley 10. The Maharana and the Bhils: The Eki Movement in Mewar, 1921-22 Hari Sen 11. Women's Hospitals and Midwives in Mysore, 1870-1920: Princely or Colonial Medicine Barbara Ramusack 12. Public Health Administration in Princely Mysore: Tackling the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 T.V. Sekher 13. Border Incidents, Internal Disorder and the Nizam's Claim for an Independent Hyderabad Manjiri Kamat
30 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors present new interpretations of Indian economic history under colonial rule, particularly with reference to R.C. Dutt's emphasis on Indo-British economic relations which excluded India's commercial links with Asia and Africa, the drain theory of the nationalists and the implications of the external Iiabilities of colonial India when translated into domestic liabilities.
Abstract: as a response to the nationalist arguments, thereby raising many new questions and issues. We get a glimpse of new interpretations which challenge some of the older and accepted tenets of Indian economic history under colonial rule, particularly with reference to R.C. Dutt's emphasis on Indo-British economic relations which excluded India's commercial links with Asia and Africa, the drain theory of the nationalists and the implications of the external Iiabilities of colonial India when translated into domestic liabilities. An important question that arises from the revisionist critique is whether they have underestimated the significance of India's subordinate political position and de-emphasized the importance of its exclusion from policy making. These and other issues have been highlighted in this volume which brings to readers the current research in this field. One wishes that the volume could have included essays relating to an earlier period of colonialism, during the early nineteenth century, a time when the Indian economy played a vital role in sustaining Britain's world-wide trade. Nevertheless, the volume adequately sums up the present state of historical knowledge of the period selected. The volume is useful for both students and scholars as well as general readers interested in colonial economic history.
20 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, Biswamoy Pati and Shashank S. Sinha discuss the role of women in the 1857 rebellion of Adivasis of Chotanagpur.
Abstract: 1. Introduction: The Great Rebellion, Biswamoy Pati 2. 1857 and the Adivasis of Chotanagpur, Shashank S. Sinha 3. Remembering Gonoo: The Profile of an Adivasi Rebel of 1857, Sanjukta Dasgupta 4. Beyond Colonial Mapping: Common People, Fuzzy Boundaries and the Rebellion of 1857, Biswamoy Pati 5. Forests on Fire: The 1857 Rebellion in Tribal Andhra, B. Rama Chandra Reddy 6. Contested sites: The Prison, Penal Laws and the 1857 Revolt, Madhurima Sen 7. Courtesans and the 1857 Revolt: The Role of Azeezun in Kanpur, Lata Singh 8. Discourses of 'Gendered Loyalty': Constructing Indian Women in 'Mutiny' Fiction of the Nineteenth century, Indrani Sen 9. The 'Disposable' Brethren: European Marginals in Eastern India during the Great Rebellion, Sarmsitha De 10. Sanitizing Indigenous Memory: 1857 and Mughal Exile, Amar Farooqui 11. Ideas, Memories and Meanings: Adi Dravida Interpretations of the Impact of the 1857 Rebellion, Raj Shekhar Basu
14 citations
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TL;DR: The purpose is to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned and to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective.
Abstract: The emergence of global history has been one of the more notable features of academic history over the past three decades. Although historians of disease were among the pioneers of one of its earlier incarnations—world history—the recent “global turn” has made relatively little impact on histories of health, disease, and medicine. Most continue to be framed by familiar entities such as the colony or nation-state or are confined to particular medical “traditions.” This article aims to show what can be gained from taking a broader perspective. Its purpose is not to replace other ways of seeing or to write a new “grand narrative” but to show how transnational and transimperial approaches are vital to understanding some of the key issues with which historians of health, disease, and medicine are concerned. Moving on from an analysis of earlier periods of integration, the article offers some reflections on our own era of globalization and on the emerging field of global health.
850 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the applications of governmentality tend to privilege technologies of power and pay insufficient attention to the role of affect, emotions, and embodied practices in shaping human subjectivities.
Abstract: How do humans come to care for their environment and what turns them into conservationists are central questions in environmental politics. Recent scholars have turned to Foucault’s ideas of “governmentality” to understand how technologies of power intersect with technologies of the self to create “environmental subjects,” that is, people who display a sense of commitment to the conservation of the environment. In this article, I argue that the applications of governmentality tend to privilege technologies of power and pay insufficient attention to the role of affect, emotions, and embodied practices in shaping human subjectivities. I draw on Spinoza’s framework of affects and Hardt and Negri’s idea of “affective labor” to bring attention to the processes through which human beings make themselves and the role of affect and environmental care practices in shaping subjectivity. Using the example of community-based forest conservation efforts in Odisha, India, I argue that we need to look beyond economic and political rationalities to explain human action and behavior. I suggest that villagers’ efforts to regenerate degraded forests involve affective labor in which mind and body, reason and passion, intellect and feeling are all employed together. Through the daily practices of caring for the forest and helping the forests grow, villagers not only transform natural landscapes but also transform their individual and collective subjectivities. I conclude by elaborating on the “biopower from below” of these environmental care practices.
118 citations
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TL;DR: Although the "cultural authority" and hegemony of biomedicine over indigenous science and knowledge were initiated by the colonial state, they were extended by the mainstream national leaderships and national governments with far more extensive and profound implications and less resistance.
Abstract: While accepting medical “pluralism” as a historical reality, as an intrinsic value inherent in any medical system, and as an ideal or desired goal that any multicultural society ought to achieve, this paper argues the need to go beyond the liberal pluralist tendencies that have dominated the debate so far. It holds that while documenting or dealing with the “co-existence” of varied medical traditions and practices, we must not ignore or underplay issues of power, domination and hegemony and must locate our work in a larger historical, social and political context. With this perspective, and based essentially on Assembly proceedings, private papers, official documents and archival materials from the first half of the 20th-century, this paper identifies three major streams in the nationalist discourse in India: conformity, defiance and the quest for an alternative. It shows that while the elements of conformity to biomedicine and its dominance remained more pronounced and emphatic, those of defiance were conversely weak and at times even apologetic. The quest for alternatives, on the other hand, although powerful and able to build trenchant civilizational and institutional critique of modern science and medicine, could never find adequate space in the national agenda for social change. The paper further holds that although the “cultural authority” and hegemony of biomedicine over indigenous science and knowledge were initiated by the colonial state, they were extended by the mainstream national leaderships and national governments with far more extensive and profound implications and less resistance. In light of the growing global networking of “traditional”, “complementary” and “alternative” health systems on the one hand and the hegemonic and homogenizing role and presence of multilateral organizations (such as the World Bank and IMF) in shaping national health policies on the other, such insights from history become extraordinarily important.
83 citations
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TL;DR: It is concluded that notions of pluralism, so often espoused by global health organisations, may conceal important forms of social inequality and cultural divides, and that sociologists should play a critical role in highlighting these issues.
Abstract: India has an eclectic health system that incorporates biomedical as well as traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) Our understanding of the co-existence of these therapeutic modalities in this diverse, postcolonial and developing nation is extremely limited, and in the context of cancer care, to our knowledge no sociological work has been carried out Contemporary Indian oncology represents a fascinating site for examining the interplay and articulation of forms of tradition/modernity, economic progress/structural constraint and individual beliefs/cultural norms In a context of an increase in the prevalence and impact of cancer in an ageing Indian population, this paper reports on a qualitative investigation of a group of oncology clinicians' accounts of 'pluralism' in India The results illustrate the embeddedness of patient disease and therapeutic trajectories in vast social inequalities and, indeed, the intermingling of therapeutic pluralism and the politics of social value We conclude that notions of pluralism, so often espoused by global health organisations, may conceal important forms of social inequality and cultural divides, and that sociologists should play a critical role in highlighting these issues
73 citations
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TL;DR: In this article, a case study of the Indian garment industry and its gendered sweatshop regime is presented, which illustrates how commodification and exploitation interplay in factory and home-based realms, and discusses how an approach on class premised on social reproduction changes the social perimeters of what we understand as labour 'unfreedom' and labour struggles.
Abstract: Drawing on approaches to class emphasising the multiplicity of labour relations at work under capitalism, and from feminist insights on oppression and social reproduction, this paper illustrates the interconnection between processes of class formation and patriarchal norms in globalised production circuits. The analysis emphasises the nexus between the commodification and exploitation of women’s labour, and how it structures gendered wage differentials, labour control and the high ‘disposability’ of women’s work. The analysis develops these arguments by exploring the case of the Indian garment industry and its gendered sweatshop regime. It illustrates how commodification and exploitation interplay in factory and home-based realms, and discusses how an approach on class premised on social reproduction changes the social perimeters of what we understand as labour ‘unfreedom’ and labour struggles.
65 citations