Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Jerome Whitington, Asia Research Institute and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

My talk examines the relationship between animal cruelty, diet, and disease in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal to analyze the impact it had on the history of Calcutta’s urban spaces. More specifically, it explores how slaughterhouse emerged as a site of tension among British public health officers, humane society, and the bhadralok (Bengali middle class) as they were enmeshed in an interlocking relationship and debated the regulation of Calcutta’s urban space. Concern for slaughterhouses surfaced fast with the expansion of the city. In the twentieth century however, new notions of social hygiene emerged which insisted on the removal of the abattoirs to the city margins. Against this backdrop, the contests over appropriate measures for controlling animal disease became part of wider debates surrounding environmental ethics, slaughterhouse horrors, vegetarianism, and the politics of class that reconfigured boundaries between the colonized and colonizer, “humans” and “animals.” My paper traces these shifting discourses and demonstrates how by the early twentieth century, animal disease profoundly affected the culture and politics of diet, space and sanitary science in Bengal. Cattle plague (rinderpest) transformed the issue of diseased meat into the political agenda and quickly rekindled bhadralok debates on sanitation and public health. At a theoretical level, through a close examination of this discourse on epizootics, I demonstrate how the Bengali bhadralok in their understanding of diet and germs, often mediated the language of modern ‘science’ and imagined it in their own cultural contexts.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Samiparna Samanta is an Assistant Professor of History at Georgia College and State University, Milledgeville, Georgia, USA. As part of her own research, Samiparna focuses on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia, predominantly in the areas of history of science and medicine, socio-cultural, environmental history; colonialism, British Empire, human-animal interactions. She received her Ph.D. from Florida State University (FSU) in summer 2012, and an MA in History of Science and Medicine from FSU in 2008. Samiparna grew up in Kolkata, India where she received her Bachelor’s degree from Presidency College and Master’s degree in History from the University of Calcutta. She worked as a Junior Research Fellow in Calcutta for a year before she moved to the United States to pursue her doctoral studies. Apart from research, Samiparna also enjoys teaching and lectures on a wide variety of topics including Modern South Asia, History of Science and Medicine, Islam Across the Indian Ocean, Global History. She is currently working on her book project that uses the lens of animal cruelty/protection to write a social history of Bengal from 1850 to 1920. Samiparna lives in Atlanta with her husband.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg