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Chronic Constitutions: Experts, Disease Risks and Remaking Indian Bodies in Post Colonial India (1940-70s)
This talk is located in a post-colonial setting of urbanization and industrial modernization between the 1940-70s in India, when experts and publics began to remake knowledge regarding the bodies of workers and vulnerable citizens. This talk offers a framing to better understand post-colonial governmentality and health in Asia, specifically its symbolism, promise and limits for urban citizens. It argues that thinking about these modern, urban and industrial pathologies and diseases was narrowly focused on precarious metabolisms and unstable behaviors; and on questions of mental fitness, bodily stress and adaptability. At the same time this new metabolic thinking and studies led by Indian medical and social experts left out surrounding social risks and stressors. How did understandings of infection, immunity and risk get interpreted socially and epidemiologically, based on the needs of national productivity and morale, and what does it tell us about how knowledge of infectious and chronic diseases has emerged together rather than apart in India’s health history and lifecourse.
Dr Kavita Sivaramakrishnan is Ronald H Lauterstein Associate Professor at Columbia University. She is Co-Director of the Center for the History of Public Health at the Mailman School of Public Health. Her research focuses on history of medicine and health in modern South Asia, global health history and the relationships between disease outbreaks, the politics of medical expertise and care in late colonial and post-colonial South Asia. She is the author of, As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2018), and Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous medicine in colonial Punjab (Orient Longman, 2006); and has two forthcoming books. A recently completed book manuscript on the politics of cardiology as a new and self-reliant technology of Indian modernity (co-authored with David Jones, Harvard University); and on the inescapable and pervasive remaking of new and chronic metabolisms in post-colonial India (supported by a grant the National Science Foundation). She is also working on a project on how resilience and coping amongst older populations has been understood and challenged as a lifecourse; and on a comparative, international history of consultants and expertise.
Date:
16 February 2026, 16:00
Venue:
Radcliffe Observatory
Venue Details:
Room 00.063 (ground floor), Schwarzman Centre
Speaker:
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Columbia)
Organising department:
Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Part of:
Oxford Centre for the History of Science Medicine & Technology (OCHSMT) Seminars and Events
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Members of the University only
Editor:
Belinda Clark
