Paper short abstract:

The analysis of sanitary actions for epidemic control in colonial Goa shows that beyond the tension between European biomedicine and South Asian systems/practices/beliefs, there were more nuanced ways in which sanitary order was fought & negotiated between different intervening social actors.

Paper long abstract:

The tension between European biomedicine and South Asian medical systems/practices/beliefs has a particularly rich stage for analysis in the nineteenth century outbursts of cholera, plague and smallpox. Those epidemics have often been depicted as sites of confrontation between colonial state politics, policies and police forces, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the resisting, resistant, relisient local population. Adding to recent works that have suggested a more complex and nuanced understanding of colonial interactions in the field of health and epidemics, this paper will analyse sanitary actions for the control and prevention of epidemics in 19th and early 20th century colonial Goa. Our purpose is to analyse the ways in which sanitary order is negotiated between the different intervening social actors, bound to multiple identities and to overlapping groups and relationships in which their actions are shaped and interpreted, often in conflicting ways: colonial agents, central government delegates, medical doctors and pharmacists trained in the Goa medical school, Christian clergy and practitioners, non-Christian religious leaders, local authorities, local health and religious agents, merchants, urban crowds, villagers.