Sudarshana Banerjee (University of St Andrews), Incorporation and Marginalization: Medical Knowledge-Making, Power, and the Politics of Knowledge Circulation during the Company Era

This paper examines the contested nature of scientific and medical knowledge-making in colonial spaces and the complex politics of knowledge transmission beyond the colonial borders in the early nineteenth-century by focusing on the activities of George Playfair (1782–1846), an East India Company official and member of the Indian Medical Service. Playfair’s medical career in India, spanning from 1805 to 1842, was marked by active engagement with indigenous remedies and medical texts and efforts to incorporate them into Western medical practices. Recent scholarship on the transnational circulation of knowledge has emphasized the need to recognize the barriers to knowledge transmission. While earlier studies have focused on the movement of knowledge, 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 healers) into Western medicine as a remedy for various disruptive diseases like leprosy, and his English translation of the Taleef Shereef, an eighteenth-century Unani medical text (Playfair’s translation was published by the Calcutta Medical and Physical Society in 1833). I will contrast and interrogate the enthusiasm with which knowledge of Mudar was circulated and received 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 characterized simultaneously by processes of collaboration (albeit marked by asymmetrical relations of power) and erasure, the circulation and reception of this knowledge within the metropole and broader Empire were further shaped by concerns of imperial utility, commercial profitability and racial prejudice. 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.

Rishabh Bajoria (National University of Singapore), High Developmentalism and Stubborn Ecologies: A Pre-History of the Indus Waters Treaty, 1948-54

This paper focuses on attempts by diplomatic elites to decontextualise the Indus rivers from the territory over which they flow—the disputed region of Kashmir. The most pronounced of such attempts was by David Lilienthal in 1951. 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 arguing that harnessing the waters for India and Pakistan’s postcolonial development required setting aside Kashmiri demands for self-determination. Lilienthal’s 1951 piece for Collier’s magazine set the agenda for World Bank-led negotiations between India and Pakistan during 1951-54. The paper draws on diplomatic archives from the US, UK, and India to trace how 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 political discourse, the ecology of Kashmir could not be disappeared from riparian politics altogether. Thus, it explores how the inability of regional and global elites to align recalcitrant ecologies with their developmental agendas opened up political possibilities for subalterns to assert self-determination over Kashmiri territory and waters. Six decades on, dams constructed under the Treaty continue to cause flooding in Kashmir, placing the environmental costs of New Delhi and Karachi’s development onto Kashmiris.