SAC Presents: Shrimoy Roychowdhary

 In this talk, Roychowdhary seeks to tease out a tension in the claims made by existing historical literature on medicine in British India. While historians agree on the limited scope of operation of state medicine in India, they admit that it left a deep imprint in the ways nationalists came to conceive governance of the health of the population. He shall argue that one of the dominant targets of state medicine was the abjectness of the indigenous population. He shall explore the construction of the figure of ‘sick poor’ as the eponymous Indian through programs of medical relief and ‘tropicalization’ of medicine.