ABSTRACT

Let us return one last time to the Bengali’s self-conscious reflection on his sarir or body. In analyzing the image of the masturbator’s quest for self-discipline, this book has tried to contextualize his bodily anxieties in the light of the development of racialized medicine as an ideology and practice of empire. A racialized medicine, created through a dialogue between doctors and colonial administrators, was at the core of the definition of the normal and the production of norms by liberal reform in colonial Calcutta. The disciplines and norms of the body disseminated through the technologies of modern government and a racialized medicine were embraced as a self-regulating regime and a “tactic of resistance” by the Bengali expert. In this light, it is clear that the misogyny of vernacular medicine traced in the last chapter was not a symptom of the archaic that Orientalist writing on India so often emphasized as part of its strategy of “othering” in order to locate India on the lower rungs of a persistent “ladder of civilization.” The misogyny articulated by the bhadralok in the idiom of debility, degeneration and protoeugenic concerns in the late nineteenth century was rather a mode of self-expression entrenched in biopolitical concerns that linked the intimate behavior of individuals to the health of the population. In other words, this rejuvenated misogyny was a symptom of modernity. I have turned to the concepts of power/ knowledge, biopolitics, and governmentality to understand a shared space of modernity, the difference (or not) of colonial modernity, and the idea of race, which did double duty as a strategy of modern government and a tactic of resistance to it.