‘They Shall See His Face’: Blindness in British India, 1850–1950
نویسنده
چکیده
This paper explores the social, medical, institutional and enumerative histories of blindness in British India from 1850 to 1950. It begins by tracing the contours and causes of blindness using census records, and then outlines how colonial physicians and observers ascribed both infectious aetiologies and social pathologies to blindness. Blindness was often interpreted as the inevitable consequence of South Asian ignorance, superstition and backwardness. This paper also explores the social worlds of the Blind, with a particular focus on the figure of the blind beggar. This paper further interrogates missionary discourse on 'Indian' blindness and outlines how blindness was a metaphor for the perceived civilisational inferiority and religious failings of South Asian peoples. This paper also describes the introduction of institutions for the Blind in addition to the introduction of Braille and Moon technologies.
منابع مشابه
MDH volume 62 Issue 2 Cover and Front matter
‘They Shall See His Face’: Blindness in British India, 1850–1950 Aparna Nair 181 Interweaving Ideas and Patchwork Programmes: Nutrition Projects in Colonial Fiji, 1945–60 Sarah Clare Hartley 200 Lunatic Asylum in the Workhouse: St Peter’s Hospital, Bristol, 1698–1861 Leonard Smith 225 Surviving the Lunacy Act of 1890: English Psychiatrists and Professional Development during the Early Twentieth...
متن کاملTexts and Politics: Postcolonial Revaluations of two British Classics
The major argument of this essay is that Kipling treats the colonial subject as the "other," and Forster proves to be almost as pro-Empire as writers like Kipling. Nevertheless, A Passage to India is eloquent in rejecting British values and introducing Indian voices. This novel records a shift in attitude in terms of exposing the bitter realities about and attitudes of British imperialists. Des...
متن کاملA history of alcoholism
Jean-Charles Sournia is both an eminent French historian and Vice President of the French government's Commission on Alcohol. A history of alcoholism is the English translation of his ambitious attempt to chronicle how attitudes towards the excessive consumption of alcohol have changed through time. Both the structure of this book and its point of view reflect the author's dual perspective. Whi...
متن کاملFilm Reviews
canr t0 woman who, he knows, is intending to th? ate him, all this is part of the now familiar ^nie of the pompous and omniscient psychiatrist ?Se fall, at any rate, resembles Lucifer's. But it is not only that the doctor was too clever, that his knowledge of the workings of his heart and mind were not matched by his power to control those workings ; running through the film there seems to be a...
متن کامل