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SUMMARY:Imperial and Postcolonial Regimes of Expertise: Medicine\, Develop
 ment\, and Environmental Limits - Sudarshana Banerjee (University of St An
 drews)\, Rishabh Bajoria (National University of Singapore)
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20260311T140000Z
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20260311T153000Z
UID:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2369f8f7-2fd2-462e-9b78-fa4fda234296/
DESCRIPTION:Sudarshana Banerjee (University of St Andrews)\, Incorporation
  and Marginalization: Medical Knowledge-Making\, Power\, and the Politics 
 of Knowledge Circulation during the Company Era\n\nThis paper examines the
  contested nature of scientific and medical knowledge-making in colonial s
 paces and the complex politics of knowledge transmission beyond the coloni
 al borders in the early nineteenth-century by focusing on the activities o
 f George Playfair (1782–1846)\, an East India Company official and membe
 r of the Indian Medical Service. Playfair’s medical career in India\, sp
 anning from 1805 to 1842\, was marked by active engagement with indigenous
  remedies and medical texts and efforts to incorporate them into Western m
 edical practices. Recent scholarship on the transnational circulation of k
 nowledge has emphasized the need to recognize the barriers to knowledge tr
 ansmission. While earlier studies have focused on the movement of knowledg
 e\, they have often overlooked the role of the State and institutional str
 uctures in shaping what knowledge was allowed to circulate. Playfair’s c
 areer offers a lens through which to explore these frictions in medical kn
 owledge circulation during the Company era. This paper analyzes two key mo
 ments: Playfair's attempt to introduce Mudar (powdered form of a plant abu
 ndantly found in various regions of India and utilized by native healers) 
 into Western medicine as a remedy for various disruptive diseases like lep
 rosy\, and his English translation of the Taleef Shereef\, an eighteenth-c
 entury Unani medical text (Playfair’s translation was published by the C
 alcutta Medical and Physical Society in 1833). I will contrast and interro
 gate the enthusiasm with which knowledge of Mudar was circulated and recei
 ved in the British medical press with the relative silence surrounding the
  Taleef. I will demonstrate that while early nineteenth-century knowledge-
 making by Company officials within the Indian subcontinent was characteriz
 ed simultaneously by processes of collaboration (albeit marked by asymmetr
 ical relations of power) and erasure\, the circulation and reception of th
 is knowledge within the metropole and broader Empire were further shaped b
 y concerns of imperial utility\, commercial profitability and racial preju
 dice. Operating both at the level of the Company-State and metropolitan me
 dical press these concerns ensured selective\, calculated incorporation an
 d systemic marginalization of indigenous medical knowledge.\n\nRishabh Baj
 oria (National University of Singapore)\, High Developmentalism and Stubbo
 rn Ecologies: A Pre-History of the Indus Waters Treaty\, 1948-54\n\nThis p
 aper focuses on attempts by diplomatic elites to decontextualise the Indus
  rivers from the territory over which they flow—the disputed region of K
 ashmir. The most pronounced of such attempts was by David Lilienthal in 19
 51. Lilienthal was the former Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority
 —an ambitious dam-building project designed to be the centrepiece of US 
 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US South—and his
  intervention reflected the same ‘high developmentalist’ ideal. I show
  how Lilienthal changed the future of Kashmir and the Indus waters by argu
 ing that harnessing the waters for India and Pakistan’s postcolonial dev
 elopment required setting aside Kashmiri demands for self-determination. L
 ilienthal’s 1951 piece for Collier’s magazine set the agenda for World
  Bank-led negotiations between India and Pakistan during 1951-54. The pape
 r draws on diplomatic archives from the US\, UK\, and India to trace how L
 ilienthal’s proposal to set up a Tennessee Valley Authority [‘TVA’] 
 for the Indus could not be realised because even while the territory of Ka
 shmir could be abstracted from the Indus waters in legal and political dis
 course\, the ecology of Kashmir could not be disappeared from riparian pol
 itics altogether. Thus\, it explores how the inability of regional and glo
 bal elites to align recalcitrant ecologies with their developmental agenda
 s opened up political possibilities for subalterns to assert self-determin
 ation over Kashmiri territory and waters. Six decades on\, dams constructe
 d under the Treaty continue to cause flooding in Kashmir\, placing the env
 ironmental costs of New Delhi and Karachi’s development onto Kashmiris.\
 nSpeakers:\nSudarshana Banerjee (University of St Andrews)\, Rishabh Bajor
 ia (National University of Singapore)
LOCATION:Room 20.402\, The Schwarzman Centre
TZID:Europe/London
URL:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/2369f8f7-2fd2-462e-9b78-fa4fda234296/
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DESCRIPTION:Talk:Imperial and Postcolonial Regimes of Expertise: Medicine\
 , Development\, and Environmental Limits - Sudarshana Banerjee (University
  of St Andrews)\, Rishabh Bajoria (National University of Singapore)
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