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To come where we did with this project, we used varied tools and resources, linking the analogue and the digital, the word and the code. Here is the list of the resources that helped us with this task:

 Annotated Bibliography

  • Allender, Tim. “Reconfiguring Women and Empire: Sex, Race and Femininity in British India, 1785–1922.” “Femininity” and the History of Women’s Education, edited by Tim Allender and Stephanie Spencer, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 201–30, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-54233-7_9. 

This chapter examines changing colonial mentalities concerning women and their femininity in colonial India. It looks at their sexual bodies, trafficked and diseased bodies, classrooms and dispensaries, hospitals, and surgeries. The chapter sees statecraft as directing a strongly shifting scene of exclusion and inclusion for women within the colonial ambit, which was primarily capricious and self-serving.

  • Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. University of California Press, 1993.

In this book about the history of colonialism and medicine in India, David Arnold draws a picture of the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, paying attention to the particular phenomenon of the era (the turn of XIX and XX centuries): the colonized body as an object of the conquest by colonialism, but also by modern medicine, society, state and economy. Drawing from Foucault’s ideas around the disciplined body and developing them, Arnold attempts to provide a contemporary take on the body in the colonial context.

  • Ayonrinde, Oyedeji A. “Cannabis and Psychosis: Revisiting a Nineteenth Century Study of ‘Indian Hemp and Insanity’ in Colonial British India.” Psychological Medicine, vol. 50, no. 7, 2020, pp. 1164–72, doi:10.1017/S0033291719001077. 

In nineteenth-century British India, concern regarding large numbers of asylum patients with ‘Indian Hemp Insanity’ led to the establishment of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. The exotic cannabis plant was widely used in pharmacopoeia and a source of government revenue. The Commission was tasked with determining the public health risks of cannabis use, particularly mental illness. This analysis of the Commission report seeks to highlight the status of 1892 cannabis research and compare it with current evidence for medical and recreational cannabis use. A detailed historiographic review of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1892) presents that in 1892, heavy cannabis use was considered to have been associated with severe mental illness (7.3% of asylum patients; 12.6% of patients with diagnoses). About two-thirds were children and young adults with higher relapse rates. Risk increased with early cannabis use and a family history of mental illness. Cannabis psychosis was found to have a shorter trajectory and better prognosis than other mental illnesses in the asylums. Different cannabis potency and modes of consumption had different effects. Occasional cannabis use was felt to have medicinal benefits for some. Appendices provided symptoms and demographic characteristics of cannabis-induced mental illness. This critical nineteenth-century study observed the frequency and dose-related effects of cannabis on mental health, particularly psychotic symptoms in young people with a previous or hereditary risk of mental illness. Pathophysiological observations were consistent with current knowledge. As one of the most systematic and detailed studies of the effects of cannabis of the time, it foreshadowed contemporary cannabis issues.

  • Bhattacharyya, Anouska. Indian Insanes: Lunacy in the “Native” Asylums of Colonial India,   1858–1912. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013.

This article looks into the impact of the 1858 Lunacy Act in India and the following treatment of patients in ‘lunatic asylums’. It focuses on the constraints and inexperience of officers that shaped the treatment of psychiatry. It further examines the role of the local community in managing these asylums.

  • Buswell, Robert E., and Donald S. Lopez. The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Course Book, Princeton University Press, 2013, doi: 10.1515/9781400848058.

With over 5,000 entries totalling over a million words, this is the most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary of Buddhism produced in English. It is also the first to cover terms from all canonical Buddhist languages and traditions: Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Unlike reference works that focus on a single Buddhist language or school, The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism bridges the major Buddhist traditions to provide encyclopedic coverage of the most important terms, concepts, texts, authors, deities, schools, monasteries, and geographical sites from across the history of Buddhism. The main entries offer a brief definition and a substantial short essay on the broader meaning and significance of the term covered. Extensive cross-references allow readers to find related terms and concepts. An appendix of Buddhist lists (for example, the four noble truths and the thirty-two marks of the Buddha), a timeline, six maps, and two diagrams are also included. Written and edited by two of today’s most eminent scholars of Buddhism and more than a decade in the making, this landmark work is an essential reference for every student, scholar, or practitioner of Buddhism and anyone else interested in Asian religion, history, or philosophy. The most comprehensive dictionary of Buddhism ever produced in English More than 5,000 entries totalling over a million words. The first dictionary to cover terms from all of the canonical Buddhist languages and traditions—Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, and Detailed Korean entries on the most important terms, concepts, texts, authors, deities, schools, monasteries, and geographical sites in the history of Buddhism Cross-references and appendixes that allow readers to find related terms and lookup equivalent terms in multiple Buddhist languages Includes a list of Buddhist lists, a timeline. The maps also contain Thai, Burmese, Vietnamese, Lao, Khmer, Sinhalese, Newar, and Mongolian selected terms and names.

  • Cooper, Frederick, and Ann L. Stoler. “Introduction Tensions of Empire: Colonial Control and Visions of Rule.” American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 4, 1989, pp. 609–21, www.jstor.org/stable/645112. 

In this paper, Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler employ a global perspective while probing the more intimate reaches of colonial power relations. They strive to combine metropole with the colony, bringing them into a single analytic field and overcoming the tendency of the one to go out of focus as the other comes in. They demonstrate that colonisers are encountered the rising anxiety lest tensions among themselves over class, gender, and competing visions of colonialism. Notably, the colonial authority can be either secured or undermined. In this case, the conflicting visions of rule within colonial regimes could also open up space within which colonised people could find chances to challenge parts of the colonial edifice to see its cracks and its underlying structure. 

  • Engels, Dagmar. “The Politics of Childbirth: British and Bengali Women in Contest, 1890-1930.” Society and Ideology: Essays in South Asian History Presented to Professor K.A. Ballhatchet, edited by Robb, Peter, et al., Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 222-46.

In this essay on the politics behind the childbirth practises in society, Dagmar Engels investigates the Bengali society in colonial times, drawing comparisons between the British and Bengali regarding labour and midwifery. Engels underlines the political dimension of healthcare and politicization of midwifery and obstetrics concerning the vital aspect of the human condition: reproduction.

  • Ernst, Waltraud. “Colonial Psychiatry, Magic and Religion. The Case of Mesmerism in British India.” History of Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 1, 2004, pp. 57–71, doi: 10.1177/0957154X04039344.

This article is concerned with the development of early nineteenth-century Western medicine and psychiatry in relation to religion and magic during British colonial rule in India. The mesmerism case illustrates that ‘colonial medicine/psychiatry in India’ itself was plural in nature, being made up of a variety of different, at times competing, strands. Religious connotations and references to spiritual enlightenment increasingly posed a peculiar problem to emerging Western science-based medicine in the nineteenth century. Mesmerism was met with as much hostility by an emerging Western medical orthodoxy as indigenous medical systems. The affiliation of mesmerism with Indian magical practices and religious customs contributed to its marginalization – despite or, rather, because of its popularity among members of the Indian nobility and middle classes, Indian patients and practitioners. The case of mesmerism also shows that awareness both of the absolute power of a gradually emerging medical ‘imagined’ mainstream and an analysis of the complex challenges faced by heterodoxy (as much as by orthodoxy) facilitate a more critical understanding of the development of colonial medicine and psychiatry in the East as well as, arguably, of medicine and psychiatry in Britain itself.

  • Ernst, Waltraud. Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry: The Development of an Indian Mental Hospital in British India, c. 1925-1940. NBN International, 2013.

Psychiatry in India during the nineteenth century has hitherto been represented as an essentially ‘colonial’ psychiatry, permanently and intrinsically linked with the British civilising mission and British control over India. This book is the first comprehensive case study of an early twentieth-century Indian mental hospital headed by an Indian rather than a British superintendent. The work explores how the institution was run, its patient profile, the circumstances of its staff and the treatments administered, all with the regional socio-cultural and political context, the broader medical and colonial setting in South Asia, and contemporary global developments in psychiatry. Themes covered in work include gender, culture, race and plural clinical practices within the context of medical standardisation. ‘Colonialism and Transnational Psychiatry’ offers an unprecedented look at the local and global factors that had such a strong bearing on hospital management and psychiatric treatment at this institution. This study of Ranchi sets a standard against which future scholarship will judge the impact of local affairs and transnational connections on a broader range of institutions in and exchanges between South Asia, the West and other parts of the world.

  • Ernst, Waltraud. “Crossing the Boundaries of ‘Colonial Psychiatry’. Reflections on the Development of Psychiatry in British India, c. 1870–1940.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, vol. 35, no. 4, 2011, pp. 536–45, doi: 10.1007/s11013-011-9233-z.

This article explores the development of psychiatric institutions within British colonial rule in India, particularly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Existing scholarship on ‘colonial medicine’ has tended to focus on colonial power and hegemony and the British endeavour to ‘colonize the Indian body’ during the nineteenth century. It is suggested here that reference to ‘colonial’ medicine and psychiatry tends to reify the ideology of colonialism and neglect other vital dimensions, such as the role of international scientific networks and the mental hospital as the locus of care and medicalization. From the later period of British colonial engagement in south Asia, people’s rights and entitlement to medical care and the colonial state’s obligation to provide institutional treatment facilities increased attention. As the early twentieth-century case of an Indian hospital superintendent shows, practitioners’ professional ambitions went beyond the confines of ‘colonial psychiatry’. He practised in his institution science-based psychiatry, drawing on models and treatment paradigms that were then prevalent in various countries around the globe.

  • Forbes, Geraldine. “Managing Midwifery in India.” Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, edited by Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks. British Academic Press, 1994, pp. 152-72.

Forbes’s essay on midwifery practices in India around colonial times brings a short but comprehensive account of the history of care for pregnant and birthing women. It brings an account of traditional practices surrounding childbearing and labour in different layers of Indian society. 

  • Guha, Supriya. “Midwifery in Colonial India: the Role of Traditional Birth Attendants in Colonial India”. Wellcome History, 2005, pp. 1-24, eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/64259/.

This short article about midwifery in colonial India draws a picture of practices regarding pregnancy care and assistance to birthing women in British India. While the author tries to depict the situation of pregnant women and their access to pregnancy care in colonial times from different angles, there is a certain tendency in this essay to treat indigenous labour assistants (dais) with a dose of scepticism, owing to it perhaps to the fact that opinions about dais, both in the scholarship and journalism are very varied.

  • Hodges, Sarah. ‘“Looting” the Lock Hospital in Colonial Madras during the Famine Years of the 1870s’. Social History of Medicine, vol. 18, no. 3, Dec. 2005, pp. 379–98. Silverchair, doi: 10.1093/shm/hki051.

Hodges provides a history of the Madras government’s locked hospitals, with a specific focus on the famine years of the 1870s. Although the lock hospitals were a primarily coercive and punitive system, as a result of famine, the hospitals’ functioning became reconfigured in different ways, for destitute women used them as a refuge site.

  • Jiloha, R. “Lunatic Asylums: A Business of Profit During the Colonial Empire in India.” Indian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 63, no. 1, 2021, pp. 84–87, doi: 10.4103/psychiatry.IndianJPsychiatry_589_19.

The knowledge about “maladies of the mind” was in the early stages of development and far from being considered a medical condition till the mid-19th century. Around this period, the British began to establish “Native-Only” lunatic asylums in India, particularly in the Bengal Presidency of their colonial empire. These institutions were primarily meant to provide custodial care and rehabilitate those creating nuisances, particularly the wanderers and vagrants. However, these facilities turned into forced labour houses producing goods for the British Empire in the name of treatment. As traders, the British amassed India’s wealth in several ways, and the establishment of lunatic asylums for the natives was one of the profit-making businesses. Undercover Victorian morality, medical treatment reports had evolved into profit margin data. This article explores some of the obscure facts of British colonial rule regarding mental health.

  • Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature, vol. 85, no. 4, 2013, pp. 661–88, doi: 10.1215/00029831-2367310.  

Klein argues that gaps, or silences, within the archive are prevalent, even in digital spaces, by the nature of the material they record. To meet this challenge of silence in the archive, she exemplifies how data visualisation and more detailed reading can illuminate these places of silence and make the stories of those such as James Hemings visible. Thus, she shows how archives depend on the interconnectedness of multiple disciplines and, through this work, can help us realise the limits of our knowledge and the spaces of silence that can be filled with those voices that are not present in the historical record.

  • Kumar, Mukesh. “Disciplining the ‘Mind’: Indian Inmates in Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth Century India.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, vol. 71, Indian History Congress, 2010, pp. 861–73.

Mukesh Kumar’s article outlines how Western medicine was used as a tool of colonial expansion and provided legitimacy and credibility for the British rule to establish their superiority. He highlights the influence that British psychiatry had on the mental asylums in India, which primarily affected the treatment reformations that occurred during British rule. Kumar also hones in on the racial segregation upheld by the mental asylums and outlines the disparity of treatments and conditions offered to native Indian and European patients. The shocking methods of treatment administered to Indian natives are described in detail, further emphasising the colonial urgency to establish dominance over individuals through coercive and often violent methods. Kumar argues that the colonial form of psychiatry made powerful attempts to homogenise a plural culture of healing in India and focused its attention on forcing a disciplined way of life. The writer of this article finally concludes with some doubts about the historical accuracy of such medical records and astutely questions the motivations for the inclusion and exclusion of information in colonial records.

  • Lal, M. “The Politics of Gender and Medicine in Colonial India: The Countess of Dufferin’s Fund, 1885-1888.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 68, no. 1, 1994, pp. 29–66, www.jstor.org/stable/44451545. 

In recent decades, scholars have reevaluated the benefits of Western medicine, questioned the presumed beneficial effects of colonialism on India’s women, and reassessed the role of Western women in promoting colonial rule. By focusing on the first three years of the Dufferin Fund, when it was led by Lady Dufferin, this article explores gender and health in colonial ideology and politics.  It argues that, although the Dufferin Fund appeared inactive to the colonial administration’s lack of interest in female medicine, it benefited British female physician’s training and working ideologically and practically, and that, although its role was limited in reality, touching a few Indian women, the Dufferin Fund was still the essential institution in the field of women’s health, and its policies influenced subsequent efforts.

Lang recounts the Dufferin Fund, an aristocratic initiative supported by Queen Victoria to improve medical conditions, particularly in childbirth, for Indian women in the late 19th century. When her husband was Viceroy of India, Lady Dufferin had set up the National Association for the Supply of Female Medical Aid to the Women of India, generally known as the Dufferin Fund. As its name suggested, the Fund, which was still operating, supplied female doctors and midwives to work in women’s hospitals in India. The Fund was always about more than just medicine; it played a significant political role at a highly delicate stage in developing British rule in India.

  • Levine, Philippa. “Rereading the 1890s: Venereal Disease as ‘Constitutional Crisis’ in Britain and British India.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 3, 1996, pp. 585–612, doi: 10.2307/2646447. 

Philippa Levine argues that in the 1890s, venereal disease was a constitutional crisis not only among British people but also in British colonial India. Levine considers various possible elements which contribute to the spread of venereal disease in British India, particularly emphasising the detrimental roles military campaigns and commercial trade play in the crisis of sexual disease. By establishing a dialogue between political historians and historians of sexuality and gender, the paper explores how the issue ushered by unruly sexual behaviours effectively impacted the colonial political rules. Levine claims that historians in different fields, such as the political historian, the historian of sexuality, the medical historian, and the military historian, make different contributions to demonstrating the relationship between colonialism, gender and sexuality. In this paper, Levine employs the perspective of a feminist historian to reconfigure how colonialism influence the spread of venereal disease in both Britain and British India.

  • Levine, Philippa. “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 4, no. 4, 1994, pp. 579–602, www.jstor.org/stable/4617154. 

Levine Philippa argues that venereal disease is a historical subject but has received little attention from modern historians. In the paper, she examines the legislation on venereal disease in British India, which was loosely allied to the acts passed in Britain but typically more coercive and colonial. As scholarships claim that sex can secure or undermine the colonial authority, Philippa holds that the enactments aiming at controlling the female prostitutes and curbing venereal disease among the British troops seem to be another symbol of colonisation. It is not uncommon to see the attempts to control the health of soldiers through the control of the women with whom they had intercourse in British India, and legislators used the legislation against venereal disease to impose oppression and restriction on indigenous women. This constitutional crisis about the spread of venereal disease was full of whiteness and European-ness, which aggravated the burden of marginalised colonised people.

  • Marks, Andrea. “The Evolution of Our Understanding and Treatment of Eating Disorders over the Past 50 Years.” Journal of Clinical Psychology, vol. 75, no. 8, 2019, pp. 1380–91,  doi: 10.1002/jclp.22782.

This article aims to collect and analyse the research surrounding eating disorders dating from the 1960s to the 21st century. It provides context on a number of key developments in this field of research. It concludes that there still needs to be more understanding of eating disorders, from both scientists and clinicians, and society as a whole.

  • McGregor, R. S. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1993.

The online version of R. S. McGregor’s The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary covers both coloquial and literary vocabulary in its over 36,000 headwords. It provides etymologies of Hindi words as well as English translations.

In this article, Tara McPherson asks the very pertinent question, ‘Why are the digital humanities so white?’, considering the histories of race and computation. McPherson argues for a dialogic relationship between these histories, identifying parallels between them; she focuses initially on the 1960s within the US, which saw the creation of operating systems such as MULTICS and subsequently UNIX, which coincided with the civil rights movement. Despite the seeming lack of interrelatedness between the two histories, McPherson argues how they intertwine with and co-constitute one another. Essentially, McPherson conveys how the racial organising principles that governed social relations in the United States at this time are reflected at the level of the technological organisation of knowledge. McPherson uses ‘lenticular logic’ as an analogy for the racial paradigms in the post-war era, delineating a lenticular way of organising the world; ‘A lenticular logic is a covert racial logic, a logic for the post-civil rights era’. McPherson subsequently relates this to the design philosophies and cultures of computation noted in operating systems such as UNIX. This structure for coding mimics the essential elements of the lenticular approach to the world, working to break a system into varying degrees of interdependence and hide the complexity of each part behind abstraction and interface (much like covert racism). By analysing the designs of our technological systems that emerged in post-World War II, McPherson can consider how this computational culture has affected the shape of our discussions surrounding race.

  • Mills, James H. “Cannabis in the Commons: Colonial Networks, Missionary Politics and the Origins of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893-4.” Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History, vol. 6, no. 1, 2005, doi: 10.1353/cch.2005.0012.

James Mills considers the origins of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission (IHDC) and the role of the House of Commons in forcing the issue of cannabis use in India to the political forefront in the 1890s. After an outline of the key figures and events in the campaign that resulted in the commission’s creation, the article considers where the information informing this decision originated. Mills shows that the origins of the committee were part of a wider attack on the Indian drug trade and the imperial government in India.

  • Mills, James H., “Modern Psychiatry in India: The British Role in Establishing an Asian System, 1858-1947.” International Review of Psychiatry (Abingdon, England), vol. 18, no. 4, Informa UK Ltd, 2006, pp. 333–43, doi: 10.1080/09540260600813271.

In this article, Jim Mills argues that the system of modern psychiatry in India stems directly from the actions taken by the British to incarcerate those considered ‘insane’ in purpose-built asylum buildings. They outline some of the purported causes and types of insanity in this period and trace four stages of development during and after British rule in India. They further show the exponential growth in the number of Indians incarcerated in asylums throughout the late 1800s and attribute this growth to the influence of British ideas about care for the mentally ill. While this article does not much consider the ‘othering’ of those considered insane in this society, it summarises well the developments in mental health care in India during this period and includes beneficial primary source extracts.

  • Mills, James H., and Satadru. Sen. Confronting the Body: the Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. Anthem, 2004.

The human body in modern South Asia is a continuous political enterprise. The body was central to the project of British colonialism, as well as to the Indian response to colonial rule. By constructing British bodies as normative and disciplined, and Indian bodies as deviant and undisciplined, the British could construct an ideology of their own fitness for political power and defence of colonialism itself. The politics of physicality then manifested in reverse in many ways, not least through Gandhi’s use of his body as a public experiment in discipline, as well as becoming a living rejection of British rule and norms of physicality. In the post-colonial period, the politics of physicality became more public. Bodies and their symbolic meanings were deployed not only against the European ‘other’ but, increasingly, against other Indian bodies – be it the representation of political aspiration, beauty pageants and the representation of nationalism on the world stage, the furtherance of feminist issues or the moral issues of sexual images of women in the media. In this challenging and wide-ranging new collection, the editors have assembled some of the best new writing on physicality in modern India. Providing a balance of materials from colonial and post-colonial India, Confronting the Body includes new research by established and up-and-coming writers in the social sciences and humanities.

  • Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Toward a Critical Black Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, p. 27–35, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctvg251hk.5. 

The article points out the problems hidden in digital humanities development, particularly demonstrating that digital humanities lack critical thoughts and still have bias over racial issues. The paper argues that digital humanities can alienate Black people from participating in their work because of its silences and refusals to address the social issues as intersecting dimensions of policy, economics, and intersectional racial and gender oppression. Thus, there is more to do to enhance digital humanities’ functional role in realizing its decolonization,  neo-liberation, and a shared future.

  • Peers, Douglas M. ‘Soldiers, Surgeons and the Campaigns to Combat Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Colonial India, 1805–1860’. Medical History, vol. 42, no. 2, Apr. 1998, pp. 137–60, doi:10.1017/S0025727300063651.

Peers discusses how the locked hospitals in British India became a strategic and medical imperative, extending the government’s powers of surveillance. Peers focuses on the notion of masculinity and how this became an essential prism through which colonial societies could be observed and carried a symbolic weight that assisted the British in distinguishing between themselves and Indians. It was also used to justify the actions and attitudes of the soldiers concerning the spread of venereal diseases.

  • Pinto, Sarah Ann. “The ‘Common-Sense’ Treatment of Indian Insanity.” Lunatic Asylums in Colonial Bombay, Springer International Publishing, 2018, pp. 93–125, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-94244-5_4.

This chapter analyses the failure of the colonial asylum system through a study of its treatment methods. Superintendents in Bombay adopted the ‘common-sense’ treatment of Indian insanity that entailed hybrid treatment methods. In Bombay, treatment methods from 1793 to 1921 essentially revolved around clothing, feeding, and occupying patients. The chapter argues that such treatment methods based on preconceived notions of Indians were often culturally insensitive. These treatment practices often led to greater abuse of patients, since there were no boundaries regarding what constituted moral treatment.

  • Riquin, Elise, et al. “Is the Severity of the Clinical Expression of Anorexia Nervosa Influenced by an Anxiety, Depressive, or Obsessive-Compulsive Comorbidity Over a Lifetime?” Frontiers in Psychiatry, vol. 12, 2021, pp. 658416–658416, doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.658416.

This article aims to evaluate the relationship between anorexia nervosa and other psychiatric conditons, mainly major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, and social phobia. It concludes that there was a notable link found between the severity of the symptoms of an individual’s eating disorder if they suffered from both major depressive disorder and generalised anxiety disorder at some point in their life.

  • Roberts, Daniel Sanjiv. “‘Merely Birds of Passage’: Lady Hariot Dufferin’s Travel Writings and Medical Work in India, 1884-1888.” Women’s History Review, vol. 15, no. 3, 2006, pp. 443–57, doi:10.1080/09612020500530307. 

This article examines the travel writings and medical work in India of Lady Hariot Dufferin, Vicereine of India, between 1884 and 1888. Lady Dufferin accompanied her husband, the Viceroy Lord Dufferin, through various social and political engagements in India and carved her niche in colonial and post-colonial history as a pioneer in the medical training of women in India. The article examines her travel writings on India and explores the nature of her complicity in the Raj and the gendered nature of the separate public role she created for herself concerning her ‘zenana work’ in providing medical care for the women of India. The author suggests that, through her work, Lady Dufferin challenges and extends the theoretical paradigms of post-colonialist and feminist critiques of empire.

  • Roopika Risam. “Colonial Violence and the Postcolonial Digital Archive.” New Digital Worlds, Northwestern University Press, 2018, pp. 47–64.

While the link between material archives and colonial power has been well established, Risam highlights how digital archives contain traces of colonial violence despite the promises of open access and the democratisation of knowledge. Risam foregrounds the issue of representation within institutional archives and highlights some of the different forms of colonial violence. Ultimately, Risam argues for creating new digital archives and design methods that help create new forms of knowledge production by making a space for both counter-narratives and correctives and bolstering black and indigenous voices.

The Association of Medical Women in India (AMWI) called on the state to abandon attempts to emulate the British voluntary hospital system and invest more directly in medical care for Indian women. Officials privately conceded that medical philanthropy had failed to finance medical care in India and admitted that some state investment was necessary given the colonial state’s expectation of providing public medical care. Publicly the state continued to insist that government resources could not bear the burden of financing medical care for Indians. The AMWI’s strategy of exposing the Indian government’s failure to provide for the medical needs of ‘dumb’ Indian women patients generated pressure from British public opinion. This pressure led to the formation of a state-funded Women’s Medical Service in India. In India, the Women’s Medical Service would later be at the heart of initiatives to improve infant and maternal health. This chapter shows the colonial state’s reluctance to be financially responsible for improving the medical service for Indian women and how AMWI and the Dufferin Fund interact under the circumstances.

  • Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies : Research and Indigenous Peoples. Second edition., Zed Books, 2012.

Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes from her unique perspective about how legacies of colonialism can and should interact with scholarship across numerous fields. She focuses distinctly on the experience of the colonised individual and the implications that research can have on their representation and the collective memory of their exploitation. Her book was well received and continues to influence the decolonisation of academia and research. This edition also draws on movements to decolonise curriculums in schools and universities, indicating its continuing relevance. It also includes examples of work from indigenous scholars showing how the methods outlined in the book can be applied in practice to research projects.

  • Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “Research through Imperial Eyes, The Cultural Dormations of Western Research and Intersections of Race and Gender.” Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, edited by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Second edition., Zed Books, 2012, pp. 92-116. 

Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book sections Research through Imperial Eyes, The Cultural Formations of Western Research and Intersections of Race and Gender each explore the unavoidable impact of colonisation and imperialism on indigenous discourse and the content of digital archives. Tuhiwai Smith argues that research is inextricably linked to European Imperialism and colonialism in a way that there can be no separation or detachment from the colonial language that shapes how researchers and societies internalise and share historical knowledge. The author highlights the methods of practice that perpetuate how knowledge is ‘collected, classified and then represented’ to societies in the Western world and those who have been colonised. She emphasises the maintained oppressive structure because of the inextricable relationship between the Other’s scholarly and imaginative contraptions. Delving into the scholarly constructions supported essentially by corporate institutions and the imaginative narrative of anecdotal stories of the Other, Tuhiwai Smith presents the systems of power that uphold the Westernisation of knowledge and archiving methods. Furthermore, Tuhiwai Smith outlines the systems of classification and representation that enable and disable different traditions to be contextualised as narratives that play into systems of power and have real consequences for colonised societies. Tuhiwai Smith concludes with a discussion of the intersections of race and gender, essentially arguing that the two are ultimately determined by Judaeo-Christian beliefs that influence social institutions of marriage, gendered relationships and ideals relating to female identity. She hones in on the language that has become the dictator of inequality in indigenous tribes, such as the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand. Using this particular tribe as an astute example of the consequences of Westernised translation, Tuhiwai Smith emphasises the unreliable and problematic communication methods that perpetuate the gendered distinctions that lead to gender inequality in both colonised societies and within the societies of the colonisers themselves. Overall, Tuhiwai Smith argues that with each set of ideas and discourses, there ‘are systems of classification and representation’, which are formed in such a way as to uphold and perpetuate the colonised language in which both indigenous and western societies communicate historical knowledge. As a result, a cultural force field has been created that can silence any competing discourse.

  • Soman, Krishna. “Women, Medicine and Politics of Gender: Institution of Traditional Midwives in Twentieth Century Bengal”. Occasional Paper 32, November 2011, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, idsk.edu.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/OP-32.pdf

Krishna Soman’s paper provides a thorough analysis of the institution of the indigenous Indian dais, giving a broad perspective of the tradition and practice of this occupation, both in the historic times, as well as in modern India. Providing a feminist, holistic and favourable dais perspective Soman’s account tries to re-establish the balance in the narrative of the tradition of the dais, while the author highlights the popular biases against this group. 

Ted Underwood’s article outlines the relationship between close and distant reading, emphasising the advantages of utilising new methods of distant reading in the analysis of large sets of data. Underwood reflects on the challenges digital humanists face in their use of distant reading methods in contrast with the literary tradition of looking at texts directly, without the assistance of digital tools. He points to the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of distant reading as an innovative and necessary tool to analyse and understand large bodies of work and emphasises the importance of exploring new techniques that can link multiple fields of interest. Underwood ultimately argues that collaboration between sociologists, humanists and statistical analysts can lead to a more fruitful and fresh perspective on data becoming more accessible and richer in content. 

  • Vaidyanathan, Sivapriya, et al. “Eating Disorders: An Overview of Indian Research.” Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, vol. 41, no. 4, 2019, pp. 311–17, doi: 10.4103/IJPSYM.IJPSYM_461_18.

This article provides a brief overview of the history of eating disorders and situates this within the context of India. It then goes on to collect and analyse Indian research on eating disorders. It concludes that with the current growth in this area of research, there needs to be more consideration of the cultural context with respect to eating disorders.

  • Ward, Megan and Adrian S. Wisnicki. “The Archive after Theory.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, p. 200–05, muse.jhu.edu/chapter/2293542. 

This paper introduces the developments and debates of the postcolonial digital archive. The early digital archive took root in colonialism and imperialism as political and interpretive tools. In the post-colonial age, scholars try to construct a new form of a digital archive by repairing the past and imagining a new future both technologically and theoretically. Several methods are used to decolonize and deconstruct the imperial past, including recollecting, remediating, and resisting. Recent research, however, emphasizes establishing the liberatory archive as a site of futurity rather than remaining as a producer of past data. The multiple temporalities of the digital archive can cause continuous intersectional theories, and it is equally important to see what the digital archive is after as what is coming to it.

 

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