Disciplining a ‘Pathological Province’? Orissa, Smallpox and Colonial Order

Abstract

A massive corpus of historical scholarship has been produced in the last few decades exploring specificities underlying the triad of disease, health and medicine. The present work explores the linkages between medical knowledge and colonial power drawing resources from the medical archive. The focus of this essay pertains to the study of disease and medicine in relation to their extent of influence on colonial policy and the colonising process and on those who were colonised in the context of a specific locality or a region. It seeks to delineate the career of vaccination as it shaped up through a web of complexities in the context of Orissa including the attendant response of people to such interventions during the colonial rule. The colonial strategy to address the issue of smallpox epidemic and vaccination not only provides an understanding of the acutely limited nature of preventive medicine but also how a ‘political’ reading of the disease took precedence over its overt medical implications. The study further attempts to illustrate the specificities associated with the processes of colonial medical interventions to discipline a region like Orissa which the colonial authorities saw as a ‘pathological province’.