Leprosy is a neglected topic in the burgeoning field of the history of medicine and the colonized body. Leprosy in Colonial South India is not only a history of an intriguing and dramatic endemic disease, it is a history of colonial power in nineteenth-century British India as seen through the lens of British medical and legal encounters with leprosy and its sufferers in south India. Leprosy in Colonial South India offers a detailed examination of the contribution of leprosy treatment and legislative measures to negotiated relationships between indigenous and British medicine and the colonial impact on indigenous class formation, while asserting the agency of the poor and vagrant leprous classes in their own history.

British medical treatment similarly was contingent on the leprosy sufferer's co-operation. Confronted with leprosy, law was as weak a 'tool of empire' as medicine. Even the poorest and weakest of the empire had the power to resist."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawing on solid ethnographic fieldwork as well as many hours of interviews, Leprosy and a Life in South India: Journeys with a Tamil Brahmin tells the life story of Das, a Tamil Brahmin born in the newly post-colonial India of the early 1950s. After being diagnosed with leprosy, Das spent over a decade on the streets of Bombay and Madras, learning to survive as an unofficial station porter, hotel bellhop, and sometimes tourist guide. He won and lost fortunes on horses, he gambled, and he learned firsthand of the pleasures to be had in Bombay’s red light district. But for all the joy that comes through so vividly in his account, Das’s story unfolds against a backdrop of everyday violence and hardship. Re-investigated through the prism of an individual life, what are often presented as the rigid social categories of caste, religion and kinship come to be seen in fresh new ways. Through this life history account, Leprosy in South India captures all this in ways conventional accounts do not, offering a unique take on what it is to be an Indian in contemporary India.

Peculiar People, Amazing Lives sets out to challenge the widely held and deeply ingrained perception that people affected by leprosy are victims of the most terrible scourge imaginable. The experiences of those living in Bethany a self-established leprosy community in South India tell rather different, more nuanced, stories about what it is like to have leprosy at the onset of the twenty-first century. In this richly ethnographic portrait of Bethany people s lives whether at home in the leprosy colony, away begging in Mumbai or representing their histories through drama performance James Staples explores how this apparently powerless group appropriates, embodies and redefines dominant ideas about caste, religion, the human body and Indian ways of knowing and being-in-the-world. They do so, as the book also reveals, against the various backdrops of colonialism, missionary endeavour, vernacular Christianity and Hinduism, medical practices, development and the State. At a time when the World Health Organisation (WHO) is declaring that leprosy as a public health problem has been globally eliminated, the narratives of those whose lives remain intricately affected by the disease are more than ever in need of telling. The people at the centre of this book are seeing their right to define their identities in relation to a particular disease and to gain certain advantages from those identities being slowly but forcefully eroded. They emerge not as victims but as a group ready to challenge existing power structures in order to represent themselves as a group with particular rights.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject History - Asia, grade: 1,3, University of Göttingen (Centre for Modern Indian Studies), course: Health and Medicine in South Asia: A Historical Perspective, 1750-1950, language: English, abstract: Even to modern scientists, certain aspects of leprosy such as its exact mode of transmission and point of onset remain a matter of research. How much greater the confusion in regard to leprosy must have been in colonial times, when Western medicine as we know it today was just beginning to evolve, is easily understood by looking at the many different, even contradictory attitudes towards the disease and the ways of dealing with its sufferers in British India. Using the example of the main institutions designated for the housing and the care of India’s “lepers“, the leprosy asylums, the many different motives and ideologies partaking in the medical, public and political discourse on this ancient disease shall be identified and discussed, seeking to show the many interconnections between colonial interests, public pressure, medical perspectives and missionary agenda. Did colonial intervention root in medical or rather pragmatic considerations? What religious ideologies nurtured the wish for the confinement of “lepers“? How much influence did Indian public opinion exert on the way leprosy was dealt with? This paper thus attempts to reveal the inner workings of the colonial state by looking at the many agents taking part in public health decisions and policies.