The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Volume 60, Issue 3, Page 365-367, July–September 2023.
Aditya Pratap Deo, Kings, Spirits and Memory in Central India: Enchanting the State. Routledge, 2022, 197 pp.
Book review: Blain Auer, In the Mirror of Persian Kings: The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India
The Indian Economic & Social History Review, Volume 60, Issue 3, Page 368-371, July–September 2023.
Blain Auer, In the Mirror of Persian Kings: The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 232 pp.
Blain Auer, In the Mirror of Persian Kings: The Origins of Perso-Islamic Courts and Empires in India. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 232 pp.
Cheating ‘Jack Tar’: seafarers’ wages in Britain’s Royal Navy, 1754–1767
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The Bhasa of History—an essay for Dipesh Chakrabarty
“Insides-Outsides”: Northeast Indian Anglophone Literature
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Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India
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“The Story of Our Shame”: Confronting the Silenced ‘Bihari’ Other in Mahmud Rahman’s “Kerosene”
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Tagore and Androgyny: The Politics of an Accommodative India
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Death and Life in the Bordersand: On the Queer Remembrance of Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand
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Is Medical Tourism Transcultural Hypogamy?
Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 1, Page 109-124, February 2023.
This article attempts to make a set of interrelated arguments. It claims that the epithet ‘medical tourism’, which is of recent provenance, tacitly subscribes to a particular and narrow understanding of ‘medicine’, namely, the Anglo-American variant of biomedicine. This variant, unlike its Continental European counterpart, does not countenance the spa (Kur, Kuur, Termas, etc.) as ‘medical’ therapy, a therapy that is part of orthodox biomedicine on the continent, albeit on its fringe and one where pleasure and therapy often coexist. The Anglo-American variant leads to an exclusive focus on what may be called organ-based therapy with an emphasis on surgical and technological intervention, where uninsured and under-insured ‘middle-class’ patients travel from the White world to wog-land. This is a reversal of older forms of medical travel where rich wogs travelled from wog-land to the White world for medical treatment. The reversal results in a binary of White vampires and wog victims and is responsible, in part, for the moral tension of the oxymoron called ‘medical tourism’, with the other part of the oxymoron being constituted by the contradiction between pleasure and therapy. The vampire-victim binary in turn often mutes the mediating virtuosos— doctors, hospitals, medical travel operators, firms, companies, websites and most importantly, medical expertise and technology—in the analytical and explanatory canvas. In light of this, the article not only suggests that the epithet ‘medical tourism’ requires careful scrutiny and needs to be situated as part of a longer genealogy and larger canvas to include all kinds of transnational, transcultural and transregional medical travel, but it also makes a plea for re-examining the kind of morality play that the epithet engenders by asking, among other things, if vampires could also be victims, and what happens to this binary when the biomedical fringe (the Continental spa/Kur/Kuur/Termas) and alternative systems of medicine (e.g., Ayurveda and host of other therapies) are brought into play, or when doctors and therapists undertake travel for medical/therapeutic expertise.
This article attempts to make a set of interrelated arguments. It claims that the epithet ‘medical tourism’, which is of recent provenance, tacitly subscribes to a particular and narrow understanding of ‘medicine’, namely, the Anglo-American variant of biomedicine. This variant, unlike its Continental European counterpart, does not countenance the spa (Kur, Kuur, Termas, etc.) as ‘medical’ therapy, a therapy that is part of orthodox biomedicine on the continent, albeit on its fringe and one where pleasure and therapy often coexist. The Anglo-American variant leads to an exclusive focus on what may be called organ-based therapy with an emphasis on surgical and technological intervention, where uninsured and under-insured ‘middle-class’ patients travel from the White world to wog-land. This is a reversal of older forms of medical travel where rich wogs travelled from wog-land to the White world for medical treatment. The reversal results in a binary of White vampires and wog victims and is responsible, in part, for the moral tension of the oxymoron called ‘medical tourism’, with the other part of the oxymoron being constituted by the contradiction between pleasure and therapy. The vampire-victim binary in turn often mutes the mediating virtuosos— doctors, hospitals, medical travel operators, firms, companies, websites and most importantly, medical expertise and technology—in the analytical and explanatory canvas. In light of this, the article not only suggests that the epithet ‘medical tourism’ requires careful scrutiny and needs to be situated as part of a longer genealogy and larger canvas to include all kinds of transnational, transcultural and transregional medical travel, but it also makes a plea for re-examining the kind of morality play that the epithet engenders by asking, among other things, if vampires could also be victims, and what happens to this binary when the biomedical fringe (the Continental spa/Kur/Kuur/Termas) and alternative systems of medicine (e.g., Ayurveda and host of other therapies) are brought into play, or when doctors and therapists undertake travel for medical/therapeutic expertise.