Books by Nandini Bhattacharya
Disparate Remedies:Making Medicines in Modern India, 2023
The Indian pharmaceutical industry at present is a leading producer and distribute of generic med... more The Indian pharmaceutical industry at present is a leading producer and distribute of generic medicines globally. Disparate Remedies traces the genealogy of this development and examines the trajectories of industrial drugs manufacture and marketing from the late nineteenth century to the Nehruvian years. It argues that medicines were transformed epistemically and materially in colonial India as it confronted Indian modernity and the emerging cultures of collection, marketing, prescriptions, and the consumption of drugs and therapeutic products.
Disparate Remedies is the first book to engage simultaneously with the cultures of consumption and productions of therapeutic commodities in modern India. It begins with a discussion of the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India, when British-owned firms extended their sales in distant provincial towns. There was simultaneous production of a heterodox mixture of ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ drugs by laboratory-based Indian pharmaceutical companies. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs co-existed and competed with the so-called bazaar drugs, a motley collection of traditional street-remedies. Disparate Remedies argues that the heterogeneous character of the Indian drugs market and medical culture took shape through competition among disparate producers and sellers of drugs. Therapeutic and commercial competition was articulated in the public sphere through the binary tropes of adulteration and purity and the popular demand for legislation and standardisation. This book demonstrates that disparate and multiple therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little.
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Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India, 2023
Disparate Remedies examines the transformations in the medical market and the production of drugs... more Disparate Remedies examines the transformations in the medical market and the production of drugs in the Indian subcontinent between 1870 and 1960. It uniquely examines western and indigenous drugs together and suggests that ‘indigenous’ and ‘western’ medicines appeared as distinct political and marketing terms but that their content was often similar and competed in an eclectic medical market.
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Papers by Nandini Bhattacharya
Medical Cultures in Modern India, 2023
Blog on Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India
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Contagion and Enclaves, 2012
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Contagion and Enclaves, 2012
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Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia, 2021
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Social History of Medicine, 2017
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Economic and Political Weekly, 2018
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Contagion and Enclaves, 2012
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Urban History, 2013
ABSTRACT:This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial ur... more ABSTRACT:This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy ‘other’ of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the ‘despoiling’ or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic an...
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Medical History, 2011
This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the t... more This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of ‘location’ emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the ‘local’ emerged as both a prerequisite of colonial governance as well as a significant component of malaria research in the field. Despite the ambiguities that such a project entailed, tropical medicine was enriched from a diverse understanding of local ecology, habitation, and structural modes of production. Nevertheless, the locality itself did not benefit from anti-malarial policy undertaken either by medical experts or the colonial state. This article suggests that there was a disjuncture between ‘tropical medicine’ and its ‘field’ that could not be accommodated within the colonial plantation system.
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Studies in History
This article traces the transformation of liquor and industrial alcohol into a commercial product... more This article traces the transformation of liquor and industrial alcohol into a commercial product in twentieth-century colonial India. Liquor (alcoholic beverages for human consumption) remained prominent in political discourse and in the public sphere in this period. Temperance activists, Gandhian nationalists and medical authorities critiqued government revenue extraction from consumable liquors and advocated either partial or total prohibition. On the other hand, industrial alcohol emerged as an unchallenged and untampered commodity while it became essential to Indian industrialization, a process that accelerated between the wars. This article moves beyond cultural explanations of transformation of commodities and instead focuses on the temporal and political lives of liquor and alcohol in colonial India.
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Economic and Political Weekly, Jul 20, 2012
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History Compass, 2016
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The British Journal For the History of Science, 2011
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The British Journal for the History of Science, 2011
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This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the t... more This article explores the scientific and entrepreneurial incentives for malaria research in the tea plantations of north Bengal in colonial India. In the process it highlights how the logic of ‘location’ emerged as the central trope through which medical experts, as well as colonial administrators and planters, defined malaria research in the region. The paper argues that the ‘local’ emerged as both a prerequisite of colonial governance as well as a significant component of malaria research in the field. Despite the ambiguities that such a project entailed, tropical medicine was enriched from a diverse understanding of local ecology, habitation, and structural modes of production. Nevertheless, the locality itself did not benefit from anti-malarial policy undertaken either by medical experts or the colonial state. This article suggests that there was a disjuncture between ‘tropical medicine’ and its ‘field’ that could not be accommodated within the colonial plantation system.
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This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. I... more This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy ‘other’ of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the ‘despoiling’ or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout.
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Books by Nandini Bhattacharya
Disparate Remedies is the first book to engage simultaneously with the cultures of consumption and productions of therapeutic commodities in modern India. It begins with a discussion of the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India, when British-owned firms extended their sales in distant provincial towns. There was simultaneous production of a heterodox mixture of ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ drugs by laboratory-based Indian pharmaceutical companies. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs co-existed and competed with the so-called bazaar drugs, a motley collection of traditional street-remedies. Disparate Remedies argues that the heterogeneous character of the Indian drugs market and medical culture took shape through competition among disparate producers and sellers of drugs. Therapeutic and commercial competition was articulated in the public sphere through the binary tropes of adulteration and purity and the popular demand for legislation and standardisation. This book demonstrates that disparate and multiple therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little.
Papers by Nandini Bhattacharya
Disparate Remedies is the first book to engage simultaneously with the cultures of consumption and productions of therapeutic commodities in modern India. It begins with a discussion of the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India, when British-owned firms extended their sales in distant provincial towns. There was simultaneous production of a heterodox mixture of ‘Western’ and ‘Indian’ drugs by laboratory-based Indian pharmaceutical companies. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs co-existed and competed with the so-called bazaar drugs, a motley collection of traditional street-remedies. Disparate Remedies argues that the heterogeneous character of the Indian drugs market and medical culture took shape through competition among disparate producers and sellers of drugs. Therapeutic and commercial competition was articulated in the public sphere through the binary tropes of adulteration and purity and the popular demand for legislation and standardisation. This book demonstrates that disparate and multiple therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little.