British medical treatment similarly was contingent on the leprosy sufferer's co-operation. Confronted with leprosy, law was as weak a 'tool of empire' as medicine. Even the poorest and weakest of the empire had the power to resist."--BOOK JACKET.

Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.

Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the pleasures to be had in Bombay’s red light district. But for all the joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das’s story unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship. Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is to be an Indian in contemporary India.

Peculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained perception that people affected by leprosy are victims of the most terrible scourge imaginable. The experiences of those living in Bethany a self-established leprosy community in South India tell rather different, more nuanced, stories about what it is like to have leprosy at the onset of the twenty-first century. In this richly ethnographic portrait of Bethany people s lives whether at home in the leprosy colony, away begging in Mumbai or representing their histories through drama performance James Staples explores how this apparently powerless group appropriates, embodies and redefines dominant ideas about caste, religion, the human body and Indian ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. They do so, as the book also reveals, against the various backdrops of colonialism, missionary endeavour, vernacular Christianity and Hinduism, medical practices, development and the State. At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is declaring that leprosy as a public health problem has been globally eliminated, the narratives of those whose lives remain intricately affected by the disease are more than ever in need of telling. The people at the centre of this book are seeing their right to define their identities in relation to a particular disease and to gain certain advantages from those identities being slowly but forcefully eroded. They emerge not as victims but as a group ready to challenge existing power structures in order to represent themselves as a group with particular rights.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject History - Asia, grade: 1,3, University of Gottingen (Centre for Modern Indian Studies), course: Health and Medicine in South Asia: A Historical Perspective, 1750-1950, language: English, abstract: Even to modern scientists, certain aspects of leprosy such as its exact mode of transmission and point of onset remain a matter of research. How much greater the confusion in regard to leprosy must have been in colonial times, when Western medicine as we know it today was just beginning to evolve, is easily understood by looking at the many different, even contradictory attitudes towards the disease and the ways of dealing with its sufferers in British India. Using the example of the main institutions designated for the housing and the care of India's "lepers," the leprosy asylums, the many different motives and ideologies partaking in the medical, public and political discourse on this ancient disease shall be identified and discussed, seeking to show the many interconnections between colonial interests, public pressure, medical perspectives and missionary agenda. Did colonial intervention root in medical or rather pragmatic considerations? What religious ideologies nurtured the wish for the confinement of "lepers"? How much influence did Indian public opinion exert on the way leprosy was dealt with? This paper thus attempts to reveal the inner workings of the colonial state by looking at the many agents taking part in public health decisions and policies.

Leprosy, widely mentioned in different religious texts and ancient scriptures, is the oldest scourge of humankind. Cases of leprosy continue to be found across the world as the most crucial health problem, especially in India and Brazil. There are a few maladies that eventually turn into social disquiets, and leprosy is undoubtedly one of them. This book traces the dynamics of the interface between colonial policy on leprosy and religion, science and society in Bengal from the mid-nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth centuries. It explores how the idea of ‘degeneration’ and the ‘desolates’ shaped the colonial legality of segregating ‘lepers’ in Indian society. The author also delves into the treatments of leprosy that were often transfigured from ‘original’ English texts, written by American or British medical professionals, into Bengali. Rich in archival resources, this book is an essential read for scholars and researchers of history, Indian history, public health, social history, medical humanities, medical history and colonial history.

An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in 'colonies', often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony.