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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/546e334e-c259-4337-9fd2-b61a28663233/
DESCRIPTION:*Sudarshana Banerjee* (University of St Andrews)\n*Incorporati
 on and Marginalization: Medical Knowledge-Making\, Power\, and the Politic
 s of Knowledge Circulation during the Company Era*\n\nThis paper examines 
 the contested nature of scientific and medical knowledge-making in colonia
 l spaces and the complex politics of knowledge transmission beyond the col
 onial borders in the early nineteenth-century by focusing on the activitie
 s of George Playfair (1782–1846)\, an East India Company official and me
 mber of the Indian Medical Service. Playfair’s medical career in India\,
  spanning from 1805 to 1842\, was marked by active engagement with indigen
 ous remedies and medical texts and efforts to incorporate them into Wester
 n medical practices. Recent scholarship on the transnational circulation o
 f knowledge has emphasized the need to recognize the barriers to knowledge
  transmission. While earlier studies have focused on the movement of knowl
 edge\, they have often overlooked the role of the State and institutional 
 structures in shaping what knowledge was allowed to circulate. Playfair’
 s career offers a lens through which to explore these frictions in medical
  knowledge circulation during the Company era. This paper analyzes two key
  moments: Playfair's attempt to introduce Mudar (powdered form of a plant 
 abundantly found in various regions of India and utilized by native healer
 s) into Western medicine as a remedy for various disruptive diseases like 
 leprosy\, and his English translation of the Taleef Shereef\, an eighteent
 h-century Unani medical text (Playfair’s translation was published by th
 e Calcutta Medical and Physical Society in 1833). I will contrast and inte
 rrogate the enthusiasm with which knowledge of Mudar was circulated and re
 ceived in the British medical press with the relative silence surrounding 
 the Taleef. I will demonstrate that while early nineteenth-century knowled
 ge-making by Company officials within the Indian subcontinent was characte
 rized simultaneously by processes of collaboration (albeit marked by asymm
 etrical relations of power) and erasure\, the circulation and reception of
  this knowledge within the metropole and broader Empire were further shape
 d by concerns of imperial utility\, commercial profitability and racial pr
 ejudice. Operating both at the level of the Company-State and metropolitan
  medical press these concerns ensured selective\, calculated incorporation
  and systemic marginalization of indigenous medical knowledge.\n\n*Rishabh
  Bajoria* (National University of Singapore)\n*High Developmentalism and S
 tubborn Ecologies: A Pre-History of the Indus Waters Treaty\, 1948-54*\n\n
 This paper focuses on attempts by diplomatic elites to decontextualise the
  Indus rivers from the territory over which they flow—the disputed regio
 n of Kashmir. The most pronounced of such attempts was by David Lilienthal
  in 1951. Lilienthal was the former Chairman of the Tennessee Valley Autho
 rity—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 
 arguing that harnessing the waters for India and Pakistan’s postcolonial
  development required setting aside Kashmiri demands for self-determinatio
 n. Lilienthal’s 1951 piece for Collier’s magazine set the agenda for W
 orld Bank-led negotiations between India and Pakistan during 1951-54. The 
 paper draws on diplomatic archives from the US\, UK\, and India to trace h
 ow Lilienthal’s proposal to set up a Tennessee Valley Authority [‘TVA
 ’] for the Indus could not be realised because even while the territory 
 of Kashmir could be abstracted from the Indus waters in legal and politica
 l discourse\, the ecology of Kashmir could not be disappeared from riparia
 n politics altogether. Thus\, it explores how the inability of regional an
 d global elites to align recalcitrant ecologies with their developmental a
 gendas opened up political possibilities for subalterns to assert self-det
 ermination over Kashmiri territory and waters. Six decades on\, dams const
 ructed under the Treaty continue to cause flooding in Kashmir\, placing th
 e environmental costs of New Delhi and Karachi’s development onto Kashmi
 ris.\nSpeakers:\nSudarshana Banerjee (University of St Andrews)\, Rishabh 
 Bajoria (National University of Singapore)
LOCATION:Radcliffe Observatory (Room 20.402\, History Hub\, Schwarzman Cen
 tre)
TZID:Europe/London
URL:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/546e334e-c259-4337-9fd2-b61a28663233/
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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)
TRIGGER:-PT1H
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