Last Updated: 02/12/2025
The Art of Colonial Medicine: Visual Cultures of Malaria in India, 1890-1940
Objectives
This project will investigate images (drawings, illustrations, and photographs) as central to scientific research into causes of the disease and the mechanisms of its spread in British India between 1890 and 1940. Despite Ronald Ross’ own emphasis that his experiments on malaria were visual revelations, visual representations of malaria have remained neglected in historiography so far.
This project intends to explore how images informed research on malaria and influenced future inquiries into the development of tropical medicine and the processes of its institutionalisation. This project enriches the scholarship on malaria in colonial India by bringing into focus the importance of visuality in knowledge-making. This will facilitate an exploration of the power of images in strengthening, as well as shaping resistance to British imperialism, and also how medical visual culture gave meaning to human-animal relationships within an imperial context. In so doing, beginning with scientific images produced in the laboratory, I move into the domains of British administration and that of the vernacular reception, translation, and appropriation of the malarial iconography. By examining the interactions between the fields of arts and medical science, this project will be a major contribution to the historiographies of British colonial medicine and modern South Asia.
Aug 2021 — Dec 2024
$204,894
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