Book Review Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (University of California Press, 1993 & Delhi, OUP) by Aaron Joshua John. In the post-colonial India, one thing that you can hear time and again in relation to the British Empire is that colonizers left India in 1947 but colonialism hasn’t yet. The post-colonial India struggled in coming to terms with the traces of colonial rule that British forgot to take with them. It’s easier said than done. If we look around us today at the Indian state, its institutional framework such as the Banking system, the railways, the bureaucracy, we could see that very little changed with these institutions in the post-colonial India. Since early 1960s, as the fascination of historians with analyzing the nationalist movement died down a little, we saw that new kinds of historical studies emerged in the study of British rule in India. The post-colonial studies and the subaltern studies are two most important that are important for the purpose of this review. The term ‘subaltern’ refers to the peasants who had not been integrated into the industrial capitalist system. The term was given by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci features in the last chapter of David Arnold’s book as he engages with the term ‘hegemony’ in relation to how Colonial policies worked to create an aura of superiority by manipulating the existing value system prevalent in the Indian society. Subaltern studies’ main focus is on drafting a new narrative. These new narrative may emerge from a fresh interpretation of the old archival materials. In some sense, this school of history seeks to give agency to the masses who were seen as the passive agents at the hands of political conscious elites. David Arnold belongs to the subaltern studies school of history. The new historiographies that emerge out with such fresh approaches to history also tells us a lot about the works done by earlier historians. Historians are often evaluated by what they write; at the same time, it’s also critical to look at what they don’t write about, the silences in their histories. The newer domains of history-writing in India owe their work to their focus on these silences. In colonial historiography, scholars weren’t interested in studying colonial medicine or the impact of British rule on the field of medicine in India in the early years. It is very late that it got scholarly attention. Mark Harrison with his book ‘Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1815-1914´ and David Arnold’s ‘Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in 19th-Century India’ were the first major works which looked at the intervention of British in the field of medicine in India. In this review, I’ll be discussing Arnold’s work who has, apart from the book under review, contributed more scholarly articles on the state of Science and Medicine during British rule. Arnold’s book is located at a point in the history of British Empire where India was consistently struck with natural calamities such as drought, and also famines. Diseases such as Cholera, Plague, and Smallpox were a norm and every year, a huge chunk of Indian population would perish to the attack of such diseases. The book deals in detail with the evolution of Colonial Medicine in India from its early years till the First World War. In this study, he aims to show us that how British intervention in the field of medicine was a monopolistic project and it came at the cost of dismissing, ignoring, and delegitimizing the existing native knowledge around medicine. There can be a parallel draw at ease with the Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature as well. Wherein with the coming of male physicians and usage of scientific methods in attaining the reproduction, it was mid-wives who felt threatened and a sense of loss of control over one’s body prevailed. The traditional roles of mid-wives that were instrumental were undermined with such advent. That being said, it’s also important to point out the colonial medicine was different from how medicine had been practiced in Europe that time. The evolution of medicine in colonial India was impacted heavily by the local processes such as caste, class, religion, beliefs etc. This monopolistic intervention led to strengthening of British stereotypes on India and its people. Such stereotypes were also readily shared by the Indian elites. Arnold also looks at how this transformation was resisted by the people, and through discussions on the colonial experience around its vaccination project, looks at how this resisted became a part of the wider anti-colonial movement against British rule in India. The book is divided into 6 chapters. Three chapters, i.e. chapter 3, 4, and 5 specifically deals with three diseases, i.e. Cholera, Plague and Smallpox. In the first chapters, Arnold lays out the book by talking how body became a space for contestation between the natives and the British. Such contestations for the British were tools in their project of dominance over their native subjects. In the second chapter, Arnold focuses on the army and jails. In the early phase of colonial medicine in India, due to resistance by the wider population against the western medicine, these two places became the sites where western medicine could be tried and experimented with. Army is an interesting site in this regard. In the pre-colonial India, the issues such as health, sanitation, a diet discipline weren’t considered to maintain the health of the army. In the colonial project in India, Army was one of the most important institution. Not only it served in extending British territories across the India, but at the same time, the recruitment of native Indians in the army with their special regiments meant that British were actively pushing to make a part of Indian population its royal subjects. The early colonial medicine flourished in enclaves such as Army and Jails. At both these sites, British struggled, particularly with reference to diets and operation, whether they should keep in mind the caste and community beliefs. In chapter 5, Arnold discusses the spread of plague disease throughout India. Plague held an important place in the European sensibilities at that time. This was the time when plague killed thousands all over Europe and this disease was etched in the memory of the Europeans. They remembered it as the Black Death. That could be one reason why British treated Plague differently and were more active in controlling the spread of the disease even in the general population, something which wasn’t witnessed in the earlier cases of Smallpox and Cholera. As we know in chapter 3 and chapter 4, in the early British experience with the native population, they also had to deal with the prevailing caste and community considerations that decide what people do in relation to their health. This can also be one of the reasons why colonial intervention in the legal apparatus wasn’t resisted as much as the medical field. The colonial state wanted to control the native bodies but it was resisted. Caste and community considerations became important factors which led to such a resistance. We learn from Arnold’s book that colonial regime employed its full apparatus to curb the menace of Plague. For example, Army actively started conducting Body searches which also left a terrible imprint on the natives as not only their spaces were invaded but, women also faced assault at the hands of colonial army officers. They didn’t treat small pox and Cholera in a similar fashion. With respect to Small pox, British were fascinated by the different notions around disease. For natives, smallpox was a divine power. They worship of smallpox as a Devi was an Indian phenomenon and British were, quite obviously, taken aback with that. This was the time when British were only interested in protecting the royal Army and British cantonment. The feelings of astonishment with the native medicinal practices was preceded by a healthy interaction where British employed these practices to cure themselves when they couldn’t take the brunt of a totally new and alien land. What see in three chapters, each reserved for one specific disease, namely Cholera, Smallpox and Plague, is how British view evolved over the years as they saw the scope of extended their control and authority to the field of medicine. Medicine can’t be taken in isolation here. That would be a mistake and Arnold, at times, does this in his book. If he’s arguing that British efforts to monopolize the field of medicine by delegitimizing the native view of health and medicine is a part of wider colonial project, the correlations with other such projects in other fields are not apparent in the book. It’s a missed opportunity in some regards. As far as the wider colonial project is concerned, the second half of the 19th century is the time when British rule penetrated itself to deeper roots of the Indian society. For instance, Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil, in their work on the historic transformations witnessed by the Indian Forestry during colonial rule shows us how different Forest laws were enacted in India to extend British control over forest lands which were earlier controlled by the native tribal population which resided near such forests. The traditional idea about forestry, conservation, and forest property rights were dismantled by the British. The natives were dismissed as naïve and their ways of living harmful to the overall health of the Forests. British always showed that they were driven by a concern to conserve the forests. In reality, their chief and only concern was to maximize the profit. Such transformation happened at a time when at the height of railway expansion in India, and British war efforts around the world, the demand for the raw material Timber has arisen amidst the depleting regions where Timber could be found. In such a scenario, in the garb of scientific forestry, the revenue department aligned to the Forest department, made it a point to use the Indian forests for similar purposes. Similarly, the British interest in the field of medicine was driven by their immediate socio-political benefits. It was a hegemonic project. Its manifestation in the minds of Indian people would mean that the authority of the Empire would be further strengthened. Such discourses weren’t shared by British alone. The Indian elite, who in fair and balanced accounts, were so removed in reality that they preferred to be Indian mimics of the western style rather than look like the people of their own country, borrowed stereotypes from British and helped greatly in this hegemonic project. Their knowledge around Indian medicine comes from the British worldview. The institutional apparatus produced such fools every year. If you are from an Indian village where nearest hospital is still 30 KMs away, you would know that Arnold exaggerated certain claims that he makes in his book. In such villages, allopathic medicine, although, is there, but it doesn’t hold a dominant position. It lies somewhere in the wider bowl of alternative medicinal practices which includes Ayurvedic medicine, Homeopathic medicine and cures by local gurus. I have seen doctors who argue that Ayurvedic medicine is better than the Allopathic because latter does the work of your immune system which is unhealthy in the long run. The impact of Indian professional medical elite through Medical Council of India and other similar institutions in crafting the hegemony of the colonial powers is limited to urban spaces. In that regard, Arnold does exaggerate, to an extent, the impact of colonial medicine in India, and how it transformed the exiting knowledge. It was the death of my grandmother previous week that urged me to to opt for this text. She like the select few belonged to the Vaidyan family of Kerala. Her iteration of rants on ‘English medicine’ did not make much sense then but certainly along with the void she created, those rants now seem to be prophetic. That being said, this is a detailed account of the colonial intervention in India in the field of medicine, and as it’s one of the first few texts, it’s important that scholars follow up on Arnold’s work and make this field richer with their contributions.