Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 1, Page 85-108, February 2023.
Health defines the nation—since the nineteenth century, the liberal democratic states in the West had been compulsive about the nation’s health, albeit, at the same time, they were much repulsive towards the health of the colonies, except the white enclaves where sanitary improvement was prioritized more than that of native towns. It was only after the germination of germ theory that colonial states took the health of the ‘colonized’ into account on a serious note. Nevertheless, these whirling ideas, debates, approaches and colonial encounters regarding health and hygiene shaped Gandhi’s perception on body, sanitation and nationalism. The Gandhian way of equating Swaraj with the cleanliness of mind, body and soul, i.e., ‘Constructive Programme’, was in contrast to the ‘Obstructive Programme’ like civil disobedience. To Gandhi, a nation could truly attain Swaraj by cleansing the self and the ‘others’. The bodies, previously ‘colonized’, were now ‘nationalized’ through the Constructive Programme and health directives. This article seeks to explore those Gandhian narratives on sanitation and health and the way in which the notion of Swaraj was enmeshed with the emerging health education.

Studies in History, Volume 39, Issue 1, Page 71-84, February 2023.
The advent of Western modernity in India, as a by-product of British colonialism, brought about considerable strain within Indian medical traditions. Indigenous medical traditions which were operating within the broad humoral theory of disease causation came to be subjected to the logic of biomedicine. By the late nineteenth century, as the British in India consolidated their state systems and the princely states modelled their administrative structures in accordance with the British state, there was an increased acceptance of biomedical standards against indigenous medical norms. This was further accentuated by the fear of epidemics, which suggested that diseases spread from person to person and could affect large geographic areas bringing death and suffering in its wake. Disease control and management had, therefore, become a major concern for both the state systems in the British presidencies and in the princely states. The prevalence of contagious diseases offered a challenge to reorganize the public health systems of the states, yet they also provided an opportunity to legitimize state sovereignty over the bodies of its subjects. Diseases that were previously seen as localized and situated within culturally specific locales were now increasingly subjected to the governing mechanisms of the state. This paper examines how the medical bureaucratization of Travancore, in the south-western part of the Indian subcontinent, affected local healthcare traditions in the face of expanding fear of epidemics, ultimately led to the reshaping of indigenous medical systems.