Ashok Malhotra

This article examines how Dr. Robert McCarrison’s goitre research
in British India in the early twentieth century established his credentials as a medical researcher. It argues that the recognition
that McCarrison achieved in this field had more to do with the
fact that his research was conducted in a colonial non-Western
locale. McCarrison resisted the Iodine Deficiency Disease explanation for goitre and critiqued successful public health initiatives
conducted in the USA and Switzerland that involved distributing
iodised salt or iodine supplements to populations to prevent
goitre outbreaks. Thus, he created a path dependency in British
India for himself and other British researchers, as well as his junior
and affiliated Indian researchers, which impeded effective public
health initiatives to prevent goitre outbreaks in India.

This article focuses on Mary Sherwood’s Christian catechetical narrative The Indian Pilgrim (1818). It proposes that the narrative needs to be contextualised in relation to the author’s involvement in Anglican Evangelical proselytising activities within the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century. A textual analysis of the narrative, combined with an investigation of the circumstances in which it was produced, reveals that the narrative aimed to condition Indian readers into being obedient Christian subjects who recognised their supposed dependence on their white sahibs or memsahibs. It also highlights the stratagems by which the author attempts to coerce them into accepting the primacy of the written text as the ultimate repository of spiritual truth. The argument demonstrates the ways in which Hinduism was viewed by evangelicals as a barbaric and pagan religion whose adherents were fanatically enthused. It also reveals the ambivalent stance that evangelicals in the early nineteenth century could adopt towards Islam, a doctrine which is presented as a necessary gateway religion from which Indians can gain access to Protestant Christianity. Furthermore, the article argues that the narrative was designed as an instrument that was intended to instantiate a transformation in the very mentalities of ‘heathens’, by displacing Hindu forms of religiosity and mental landscapes with Judeo-Christian text-based religious experience and imagery.

By 1928, Robert McCarrison’s laboratories in the South Indian hill
station of Coonoor had become recognised as the centre for
nutritional research in India. Five years earlier, however, his institute had faced closure. This article argues that the establishment
of McCarrison’s institute was based on his pitch to the Royal
Commission on Agriculture in India in 1926, in which he successfully aligned his research to satisfy the concerns of various members of the Commission. This discussion uses McCarrison’s
lobbying for his institute as a case study to examine the broader
political manoeuvrings that colonial scientists in the early twentieth century often had to undertake to establish their
research agendas.

Robert McCarrison’s Nutritional Research Laboratories in Coonoor, Tamil Nadu, had by 1928 become the centre for nutritional research in India. The question that this article seeks to address is how did McCarrison manage to secure the status of his institute and reputation in the field? I argue that his reputation was largely established through a set of experiments he performed between the years 1925–27, in which he fed different groups of rats diets that supposedly corresponded to the different “races” of India and to working-class Britons. This article argues that these experiments were crucial in attracting funding and attention from the colonial state principally because they tapped into contemporary British anxieties about the deleterious effects of modernisation on the lower classes, as well as racial theories pertaining to the martial races that were in vogue in colonial India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also aligned with the colonial state’s desire to increase male labouring power and the physical prowess of its military recruits.

Mary Sherwood’s children’s story "The History of Little Henry and his Bearer" (1814) obtained a broad readership in Britain and North America, where it ran to numerous editions. It was, however, disseminated and read in translated forms in non-western locales such as India, China, Burma, Malaysia, the Middle East, and Ceylon from the early to late nineteenth century. Previous scholars have engaged in textual analysis of this narrative to illuminate the missionary predicament in India or the shifting relationship between the colonizer and colonized during the early nineteenth century. This essay engages in a more historicist approach by correlating the text to Sherwood’s involvement with the evangelical circle in India and her own proselytizing activities whilst residing in the region. It consequently argues "Little Henry" was principally designed to make fundamental adjustments to the mentalities of “heathens” in the subcontinent and instantiate a moral transformation within these subjects. The argument, however, then goes on to illuminate the ways in which Protestant transnational and trans-regional networks ensured the text’s dissemination to various parts of Asia and the Middle East. Through focusing on its usage in two case studies, namely, missionary schools in Serampore, India, and Shanghai, China, I argue the main reasons that "Little Henry" was disseminated by missionaries so widely was its suitability as an educational primer to teach literacy and then teach English as a foreign language. The argument also proposes that the narrative, rather than subduing “heathen” subjects and reconciling them to their place, had the capacity to instantiate within them a desire for social mobility in some form.

This article focuses on Mary Sherwood’s Christian catechetical narrative The Indian Pilgrim (1818). It proposes that the narrative needs to be contextualised in relation to the author’s involvement in Anglican Evangelical proselytising activities within the subcontinent in the early nineteenth century. A textual analysis of the narrative, combined with an investigation of the circumstances in which it was produced, reveals that the narrative aimed to condition Indian readers into being obedient Christian subjects who recognised their supposed dependence on their white sahibs or memsahibs. It also highlights the stratagems by which the author attempts to coerce them into accepting the primacy of the written text as the ultimate repository of spiritual truth. The argument demonstrates the ways in which Hinduism was viewed by evangelicals as a barbaric and pagan religion whose adherents were fanatically enthused. It also reveals the ambivalent stance that evangelicals in the early nineteenth century could adopt towards Islam, a doctrine which is presented as a necessary gateway religion from which Indians can gain access to Protestant Christianity. Furthermore, the article argues that the narrative was designed as an instrument that was intended to instantiate a transformation in the very mentalities of ‘heathens’, by displacing Hindu forms of religiosity and mental landscapes with Judeo-Christian text-based religious experience and imagery.