The Bombay plague outbreak of 1896 in colonial India marks a pivotal point in South Asian socio-political and medical history. As administrative interventions increasingly associated disease management with the corporeal regulation of colonized Indians (Arnold 2022), the discourses of nationalist politics, body autonomy and public health converged and intersected in complex ways. This paper situates Lakshmibai Tilak’s autobiography Smritichitre (1936, tr. 2017), against this backdrop to highlight how life writing provides critical insights into epidemic experience. Drawing on theoretical framework of critical medical humanities (Viney et al. 2015), which recognizes the complex distribution of illness across clinical and extra clinical spaces, the paper foregrounds how contextualizing the lived experience of plague within the domestic space highlights the gendered vulnerabilities induced by the disease. Tilak’s autobiography becomes a meaning making medium as she vividly recounts the instances of epidemic governance through descriptions of house to house visitations, railway inspections, forceful removals and her stay in the plague camp. The narrative becomes an affective register of her negotiations with medical authorities, fear of the disease and acts of care. In doing so, the plague appears as embodied moments of profound crisis that disrupt everyday life rather than as a statistical public health abstraction. Smritichitre, as an embodied life writing text, reconfigures the epistemic framework through which the plague outbreak has been historically understood, foregrounding dimensions of disease experience otherwise muted in colonial public health historiography.

Authors:
Ananya Chatterjee, Indian Institute of Technology, India

About the Presenter(s)
Ms. Ananya Chatterjee is a research scholar in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Indore

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ananya-chatterjee-india

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