Nationalizing the Body examines the different meanings of modern medicine that were employed in colonial South Asia, and explores the different discourses that were constructed around modernity.
The "cholera cloud" is one of the most persistent presences in the archives of nineteenth-century cholera in the "British World." Yet it has seldom received anything more than a passing acknowledgment from historians of cholera. Tracing the history of the cholera cloud as an object promises to open up a new dimension of the historically contingent experience of cholera, as well as make a significant contribution to the emergent literature on "thing theory." By conceptualizing the cholera cloud as an object-without-an-essence, this article demonstrates how global cholera pandemics in the nineteenth century produced globalized objects in which a near-universal recognizability and an utterly context-specific set of meanings, visions, and realities could ironically cohabit.
A serendipitous encounter during the Great War left a brilliant Polish–Jewish scientist and his wife stranded at a Greek outpost with a small contingent of British and French Imperial troops. This chance encounter led to the birth not only of a new branch of science, that is, sero-anthropology, but also a novel theory about the origin of the blood group ‘B’ in India. In the following decades, this theory evolved and metamorphosed within British India through transnational scientific conversations as well as its resonances with South Asian identity politics. As the meanings of the isohaemagglutinin B morphed, the transnational meanings of race were repeatedly tripped up. In due course vernacularized Indian sero-anthropology produced a range of serosocial identities located as much in blood sera as in embedded socialities. After 1960, however, these serosocial identities were gradually overcome by purely sanguinary identities whose truth was located exclusively in the blood devoid of any sociality.
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