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Abstracts 2006-2007
1. Priya Babu, Chennai. Performance and Worship in the Aravani (Transgender) Community in Tamilnadu
Aravanis, called Hijrahs in north India, have existed in Tamilnadu for several centuries. Though born biologically as males, they closely identify themselves as girl/woman. By doing so, they undergo a lot of suffering due to the great psychological pressure exerted by different social forces that prevail. Because of lack of understanding among the general public and the society, those who do not behave like boys are often discrimination and even face violence from their own family members. Hence they are forced to leave their family members and later join the Aravani community, which accepts them and provides support.
This research will study and document the Tamilnadu Aravani community’s varied musical (household, ceremonial, ritualistic and popular)
performance forms as well as their theatrical (theru koothu) tradition. It will try to understand different sects and their hierarchies with a focus on interrelations during public celebrations and private gatherings. In the process, the project will also document their worshipping places, their relation with the god Aravan and the story of how they became linked with mainstream society.
Priya Babu is a Chennai-based researcher, journalist and coordinator of the theatre group, ‘Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu’. She is herself a member of the Aravani community.
2. Dwaipayan Banerjee, Delhi. Towards A Postcolonial Code
Methodologically, one would hope to build on insights from science-tech studies and follow engineers (in case this programmers) and their
products (cryptographic code) through a process of innovation, use and institutionalisation. It is hoped that the end product for the Sarai
archive will be a well-researched paper on the cryptographic practices of programmers, the use of their code and governmental legislation.
Dwaipayan Banerjee is an MPhil student of sociology, with particular interests in the anthropology of science, political theory and literature.
3. Smita Banerjee, Delhi. Cinematic City: Kolkata, Modernity, Middle Class and the Urban Woman—A Study of 1950s and 1960s Popular Bangla Cinema
I propose to excavate a history of the relationship between popular cinema and the city through the narrative prism of some 1950s and 60s
popular Bangla cinema. I would like to focus on the emergence of a specific urban middle class aesthetic that is spatially and cinematically articulated through its location in the city of Kolkata. Films such as Saptapadi (1961), Harano Sur (1951), Saat Pake Bandha (1963), Uttar Phalguni (1966), Abhoyar Biye (1957), Teen Bhuboner Paare (1969), Trijama (1956), Sagarika (1956), Pathey Holo Deri (1957), Agnipariksha (1954), Bipasha (1962), Chaoa Paoa (1959), Deya Neya (1963), Bicharak (1959), etc. negotiate a complex relationship of middle class characters to the city through a narrative investment in foregrounding the themes of work, profession, intercaste, interracial love, interpersonal conflicts, choice of career and new and different focus on the working woman and her identity.
I will attempt to show how this cinematic engagement with the urban city and modernity and the woman is not only a fashioning but a self–fashioning of the urban middle class Bengali identity. Through a foregrounding of the representation of the city in cinema, I will attempt to recover a history of the spatial negotiations that help these middle class characters to map, appropriate and articulate their lived experience in urban Kolkata of the 1950s and 60s. I will also attempt to historicise this cinematic articulation as a document/archive of the lived city which can be used to formulate (a) thesis of a specific self fashioning of the Bengali middle class, (b) to locate the imaginary of this of this cinema within the emergence of a new popular engaged in mapping a feminine subjectivity in the modern city.
Smita Banerjee is a senior lecturer in English at the Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, Delhi University.
4. Julius Basaiawmoit & Renee C. Lulam, Shillong. The Changing Faces of Democratic Spaces in Urban Cosmopolitan Shillong
What is ‘cosmopolitan’ about a small city, hub of the Northeast, with a layered history of having been a colonial capital, then that of undivided Assam in post-independent India, and later, in 1972, the capital of a hill state carved out of Assam?
With spurts of communal violence since 1979, the dynamics of public spaces within Shillong have subtly shifted. Violence has been targeted
at specific communities, even as prejudices between and across communities continue.
Engagement with the past is intensely personal, and a resource for enhancing identity as well as explaining experience. Oral history’s potential for deeply evocative accounts creates innovative avenues for understanding personal events as profoundly social. This allows a broader perception of human interactions that have shaped the past and continue into the present.
With this backdrop, the project proposes to investigate if the urban spaces of Shillong truly express a cosmopolitan environment. Through
audio-recordings and an interpretative paper of oral testimonies from individuals of various backgrounds, the project enquires into the
central question of indigeneity versus the cosmopolitan in public spaces within the city of Shillong.
Julius specializes in sound for film and television. Renee works with independent research based projects. Both are from Shillong.
5. Mithun Narayan Bose, Kolkata. Tracing Life from the Stroke: Documenting the Rickshaw-Painting of Kolkata Streets
The paintings behind the rickshaws of the city of Calcutta are a unique example of an unnoticed urban folk-art, and the detailed study of the
paintings can be an alternative way to know about the life of these people. As most of the Calcutta Rickshaw-pullers have migrated to the
city from other places, the paintings’ style reflect the form/ style of art available at the rickshaw-puller’s place of origin. A unique heterogeneity is also observed due to its confluence with the urban style. Thematically, the rickshaw paintings of Calcutta-streets are of
different types (e.g. religious, landscape, portrait of near and dear ones, film star etc.). In this proposed project, the painting behind the
rickshaws will be documented with the help of both video recording and photography. The mode of presentation will be in the form of a
documentary film. It will be supplemented by an academic paper (which will include the interviews with the rickshaw-pullers, owners and painters). Some photographs of the paintings will also be submitted as a part of the archive.
Mithun Narayan Bose is a language teacher at a Kolkata school. He contributes regularly to several Kolkata little magazines, and his
interests include poetry, folklore, cultural anthropology, art and art criticism.
6. Pritham Chakravarty, Chennai. Urban Sabha Dramas
Theatre in Tamilnadu has a long and varied history, ever since Sankaradas Swamigal brought regularity into the running of professional
theatre with the Boys Companies. The Dravidian movement had a deep impact on the growth of Tamil theatre, with C. N. Annadurai and M.
Karunanidhi being its star writers. Sustaining these groups became financially nonviable after the late 50s with the emergence of cinema as the more popular medium of entertainment.
Family entertainment in Madras, now Chennai, in the 60s took a very interesting avatar. With the change in the local political scene and
Tamil cinema audience itself largely divided between two loyalties —that of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan— the urban public created a new form of
entertainment. In the 60s townships like T. Nagar, Mylapore, Triplicane, Nungambakkam and even the then suburb, Chromepet, with its very large middle-class population, sprang up with a number of Sabhas, which became the water-shed in the growth of art and culture.
By the early 70s, the audience had grown in other cities like Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta. Late 70s television with its weekend quota of films
and song-and-dance sequences lured the audience away from the sabhas. While for some time sabhas occupied themselves with bharathnatyam and carnatic music shows this could never promise the once regular members’ return to the halls. Post-Emergency also saw several contemporary theatre groups emerge in the city. Though these groups occasionally hired the sabhas for their performances, the audience was a niche group that could never fill the space. By the late 80s the sabhas were practically empty.
The research itself opts to concentrate on the growth of the sabhas and the amateur theatre groups, considering their impact on the larger
theatre audience. Many of the agents are still alive and are active elsewhere. Scripts of a few have been published. The audio and DVD
market for some of the plays have grown. But none of these have been archived. Reviews of most plays are non-existent. In fact many do not
know their plays were reviewed at all. While theatre in Maharashtra and Kolkata receive plenty of state patronage, in Tamilnadu only contemporary forms are able to draw state or corporate support. Thus a form of theatre that even emerged because of the sheer nature of this urban space is today left to die a slow death.
Pritham Chakravarthy is a performer and writer based in Chennai.
7. Arnab Chatterjee, Kolkata. Beyond Private and Public: New Perspectives on Personal and Personalist Social Work
The key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. A stream of
discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal dilemma, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through the cultural self
understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social
and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work denied to be absorbed in either the public (the governmental state) or the private ( resistance to publicity)].
This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial
Calcutta’s emerging civil society --energized by its claims to have generated modernity; a claim that continues to be examined even today.
Embodying a will to become an academic research paper using secondary sources, the study will accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society ( in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) and whose examples are drawn from contemporary Calcutta.
Arnab Chatterjee is Doctoral Fellow at the department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and on the visiting faculty of Ethics and
Human Values at the Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata.
8. Neelima Chauhan, Delhi. The Linked Mind of the Blogged Hindi Jati: A Hypertextual Study of Hindi Blogs
This research proposes to do an online study of Hindi hyper text on Hindi blogs. It will be an attempt to make a critical appreciation of Language and style of hypertextual prose as it flows through the terminals of Hindi Bloggers. It will be an online study which will take in account the existing blogs, Hindi Networks, Blog Archives, Comments etc. Narratives from the Hindi Online community will be collected. The
objective is to identify the construction of the grand narrative of 'Hindi Jati' (Hindi nationality) as described in Hindi literary criticism, especially that by Ram Vilas Sharma. This construction of Hindi Jati where geographical space seemingly becomes meaningless (or less important, at least) will be explored.
As the research will be an online study, its progress will be available to all interested in real time. Findings of the work will be shared through a Weblog Publication and will be presented at the final workshop.
Neelima's doctoral and Post doctoral work is in Post colonial Hindi Prose. She teaches Hindi at Delhi University's Zakir Husain Post Graduate Evening College.
9. Raman Jit Singh Chima, Bangalore. The Regulation of the Internet by the Indian State through Legal Structures and Mechanisms
Though considerable work has been done on exploring how the Internet is capable of being regulated, not much has been done to chart out the exact shape of such regulation of expression on the Internet in India. More importantly, the exact manner in which the Indian State has
regulated the Internet through all the structures and mechanisms at its disposal has not been studied, which is important since this affects the
flow of speech and expression.
In order to attempt to chart out the empirical aspects of Internet regulation in India and its linkages with normative frameworks, the
focus of this project is thus on the following two goals;Firstly, to track out and study the manner in which the Indian State regulates the Internet through legal structures and connected mechanism (both through formal legal rules as well as through informal measure
such as executive action). Secondly, to analyze how this regulatory framework relates to the constitutional safeguards with respect to the limitations on state action viz. free speech and expression and whether it respects these constraints.
The findings obtained from the proposed field work (which will track the form, extent and purported rationale of such regulation) will be
processed through the existing theoretical frameworks and the end result will be an paper which will present the manner in which the Indian State has regulated the Internet currently, along with a critical academic understanding of how this connects with constitutional safeguards with respect to freedom of speech and expression.
Raman Chima is pursuing the B.A.LL.B. (Hons) program at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and is currently in the 3rd year of this course.
10. Burton Cleetus, Delhi. Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity: The Rockefeller Foundation in Travancore
One of the most important interventions made by the “progressive” state of Travancore which later became part of the state of Kerala, was in the field of health care. The reorganization of the public health department with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States was
aimed at drafting a coherent health care policy for the state, primarily to cater to the needs of the emerging population in the urban centres.
The study seeks to argue that the process of reconstituting the health care policy by the princely state in the early twentieth century was a
political project of governance aimed at socio-cultural framing. A comparison between activities of the Rockefeller foundation in addressing the spread of Malaria and plague in the early twentieth century with the attempts made by the state of Kerala in tackling similar contagious diseases in recent times would enable to one understand the shifts in the frames of references of the nature of interventions of western medicine over the last century.
The study would fundamentally be based on the government documents from the Kerala state archives and on newspaper reports and clippings. The conclusions of the study would be presented as a research paper.
Burton Cleetus is a PhD scholar at the Center for Historical Studies, JNU. He did his post graduation and M Phil from JNU. His research on the
institutionalization of indigenous medicine in Kerala is an attempt to explore as to how esoteric cultural practices and localized healing
techniques were refashioned, revitalized and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda.
Aravanis, called Hijrahs in north India, have existed in Tamilnadu for several centuries. Though born biologically as males, they closely identify themselves as girl/woman. By doing so, they undergo a lot of suffering due to the great psychological pressure exerted by different social forces that prevail. Because of lack of understanding among the general public and the society, those who do not behave like boys are often discrimination and even face violence from their own family members. Hence they are forced to leave their family members and later join the Aravani community, which accepts them and provides support.
This research will study and document the Tamilnadu Aravani community’s varied musical (household, ceremonial, ritualistic and popular)
performance forms as well as their theatrical (theru koothu) tradition. It will try to understand different sects and their hierarchies with a focus on interrelations during public celebrations and private gatherings. In the process, the project will also document their worshipping places, their relation with the god Aravan and the story of how they became linked with mainstream society.
Priya Babu is a Chennai-based researcher, journalist and coordinator of the theatre group, ‘Kannadi Kalai Kuzhu’. She is herself a member of the Aravani community.
2. Dwaipayan Banerjee, Delhi. Towards A Postcolonial Code
Science and technology studies is a growing inter-disciplinary field of research and within it, the sub-discipline of postcolonial technoscience studies is fast gaining currency. Within this discipline I hope to look at programs and programmers of cryptographic code in India. There has been lot of talk (both commonsensical and specialist) about information as trans-national flow, about the liberating qualities of cyberspace. To provide some balance to these claims, even a cursory glance at recent IT legislation on cryptography provides sobering insights into how completely the State enables itself to control flow by decrypting every kind of communication at will. Cryptographic code and its use is then a
fertile area of study, as it emerges at the interstices of law, national security and citizen’s privacy.
fertile area of study, as it emerges at the interstices of law, national security and citizen’s privacy.
Methodologically, one would hope to build on insights from science-tech studies and follow engineers (in case this programmers) and their
products (cryptographic code) through a process of innovation, use and institutionalisation. It is hoped that the end product for the Sarai
archive will be a well-researched paper on the cryptographic practices of programmers, the use of their code and governmental legislation.
Dwaipayan Banerjee is an MPhil student of sociology, with particular interests in the anthropology of science, political theory and literature.
3. Smita Banerjee, Delhi. Cinematic City: Kolkata, Modernity, Middle Class and the Urban Woman—A Study of 1950s and 1960s Popular Bangla Cinema
I propose to excavate a history of the relationship between popular cinema and the city through the narrative prism of some 1950s and 60s
popular Bangla cinema. I would like to focus on the emergence of a specific urban middle class aesthetic that is spatially and cinematically articulated through its location in the city of Kolkata. Films such as Saptapadi (1961), Harano Sur (1951), Saat Pake Bandha (1963), Uttar Phalguni (1966), Abhoyar Biye (1957), Teen Bhuboner Paare (1969), Trijama (1956), Sagarika (1956), Pathey Holo Deri (1957), Agnipariksha (1954), Bipasha (1962), Chaoa Paoa (1959), Deya Neya (1963), Bicharak (1959), etc. negotiate a complex relationship of middle class characters to the city through a narrative investment in foregrounding the themes of work, profession, intercaste, interracial love, interpersonal conflicts, choice of career and new and different focus on the working woman and her identity.
I will attempt to show how this cinematic engagement with the urban city and modernity and the woman is not only a fashioning but a self–fashioning of the urban middle class Bengali identity. Through a foregrounding of the representation of the city in cinema, I will attempt to recover a history of the spatial negotiations that help these middle class characters to map, appropriate and articulate their lived experience in urban Kolkata of the 1950s and 60s. I will also attempt to historicise this cinematic articulation as a document/archive of the lived city which can be used to formulate (a) thesis of a specific self fashioning of the Bengali middle class, (b) to locate the imaginary of this of this cinema within the emergence of a new popular engaged in mapping a feminine subjectivity in the modern city.
Smita Banerjee is a senior lecturer in English at the Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, Delhi University.
4. Julius Basaiawmoit & Renee C. Lulam, Shillong. The Changing Faces of Democratic Spaces in Urban Cosmopolitan Shillong
What is ‘cosmopolitan’ about a small city, hub of the Northeast, with a layered history of having been a colonial capital, then that of undivided Assam in post-independent India, and later, in 1972, the capital of a hill state carved out of Assam?
With spurts of communal violence since 1979, the dynamics of public spaces within Shillong have subtly shifted. Violence has been targeted
at specific communities, even as prejudices between and across communities continue.
Engagement with the past is intensely personal, and a resource for enhancing identity as well as explaining experience. Oral history’s potential for deeply evocative accounts creates innovative avenues for understanding personal events as profoundly social. This allows a broader perception of human interactions that have shaped the past and continue into the present.
With this backdrop, the project proposes to investigate if the urban spaces of Shillong truly express a cosmopolitan environment. Through
audio-recordings and an interpretative paper of oral testimonies from individuals of various backgrounds, the project enquires into the
central question of indigeneity versus the cosmopolitan in public spaces within the city of Shillong.
Julius specializes in sound for film and television. Renee works with independent research based projects. Both are from Shillong.
5. Mithun Narayan Bose, Kolkata. Tracing Life from the Stroke: Documenting the Rickshaw-Painting of Kolkata Streets
The paintings behind the rickshaws of the city of Calcutta are a unique example of an unnoticed urban folk-art, and the detailed study of the
paintings can be an alternative way to know about the life of these people. As most of the Calcutta Rickshaw-pullers have migrated to the
city from other places, the paintings’ style reflect the form/ style of art available at the rickshaw-puller’s place of origin. A unique heterogeneity is also observed due to its confluence with the urban style. Thematically, the rickshaw paintings of Calcutta-streets are of
different types (e.g. religious, landscape, portrait of near and dear ones, film star etc.). In this proposed project, the painting behind the
rickshaws will be documented with the help of both video recording and photography. The mode of presentation will be in the form of a
documentary film. It will be supplemented by an academic paper (which will include the interviews with the rickshaw-pullers, owners and painters). Some photographs of the paintings will also be submitted as a part of the archive.
Mithun Narayan Bose is a language teacher at a Kolkata school. He contributes regularly to several Kolkata little magazines, and his
interests include poetry, folklore, cultural anthropology, art and art criticism.
6. Pritham Chakravarty, Chennai. Urban Sabha Dramas
Theatre in Tamilnadu has a long and varied history, ever since Sankaradas Swamigal brought regularity into the running of professional
theatre with the Boys Companies. The Dravidian movement had a deep impact on the growth of Tamil theatre, with C. N. Annadurai and M.
Karunanidhi being its star writers. Sustaining these groups became financially nonviable after the late 50s with the emergence of cinema as the more popular medium of entertainment.
Family entertainment in Madras, now Chennai, in the 60s took a very interesting avatar. With the change in the local political scene and
Tamil cinema audience itself largely divided between two loyalties —that of MGR and Sivaji Ganesan— the urban public created a new form of
entertainment. In the 60s townships like T. Nagar, Mylapore, Triplicane, Nungambakkam and even the then suburb, Chromepet, with its very large middle-class population, sprang up with a number of Sabhas, which became the water-shed in the growth of art and culture.
By the early 70s, the audience had grown in other cities like Bombay, Delhi, and Calcutta. Late 70s television with its weekend quota of films
and song-and-dance sequences lured the audience away from the sabhas. While for some time sabhas occupied themselves with bharathnatyam and carnatic music shows this could never promise the once regular members’ return to the halls. Post-Emergency also saw several contemporary theatre groups emerge in the city. Though these groups occasionally hired the sabhas for their performances, the audience was a niche group that could never fill the space. By the late 80s the sabhas were practically empty.
The research itself opts to concentrate on the growth of the sabhas and the amateur theatre groups, considering their impact on the larger
theatre audience. Many of the agents are still alive and are active elsewhere. Scripts of a few have been published. The audio and DVD
market for some of the plays have grown. But none of these have been archived. Reviews of most plays are non-existent. In fact many do not
know their plays were reviewed at all. While theatre in Maharashtra and Kolkata receive plenty of state patronage, in Tamilnadu only contemporary forms are able to draw state or corporate support. Thus a form of theatre that even emerged because of the sheer nature of this urban space is today left to die a slow death.
Pritham Chakravarthy is a performer and writer based in Chennai.
7. Arnab Chatterjee, Kolkata. Beyond Private and Public: New Perspectives on Personal and Personalist Social Work
The key to understanding modernity is the public/private divide and a corresponding failure to find a way beyond the binary. A stream of
discourses could be recalled which had proposed, in their desperate will to move beyond this liberal dilemma, alternative versions of the private and the public where the personal appeared as another version of the private. My work argues the personal as a beyond of private/public binary and distinguishes it from the private vis-à-vis the public. Having recuperated the personal as a suppressed narrative using historical and socio-theoretic tools, I interrupt it by thematizing the category ( though not limiting it) through the cultural self
understanding of particular communities and deploy it by using the registers of personalist social work. [Deriving its force from social
and psychotherapeutic case work, personalist social work denied to be absorbed in either the public (the governmental state) or the private ( resistance to publicity)].
This study will limit itself to exploring how the personal negotiates with the questions of publicity/mediation in the context of colonial
Calcutta’s emerging civil society --energized by its claims to have generated modernity; a claim that continues to be examined even today.
Embodying a will to become an academic research paper using secondary sources, the study will accumulate texts that range from the Calcutta Neo-Hegelian Hiralal Haldar’s debate with Mactaggart ( in the 1890’s) on whether the absolute or a school club has a personality (even if “the personality is a colony”) to how the personal or personalist social work may engender the first systematic critique of Partha Chatterjee’s revisionist notion of new Political Society ( in the wake of ‘welfare’ of the population) and whose examples are drawn from contemporary Calcutta.
Arnab Chatterjee is Doctoral Fellow at the department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and on the visiting faculty of Ethics and
Human Values at the Bengal Institute of Technology, Kolkata.
8. Neelima Chauhan, Delhi. The Linked Mind of the Blogged Hindi Jati: A Hypertextual Study of Hindi Blogs
This research proposes to do an online study of Hindi hyper text on Hindi blogs. It will be an attempt to make a critical appreciation of Language and style of hypertextual prose as it flows through the terminals of Hindi Bloggers. It will be an online study which will take in account the existing blogs, Hindi Networks, Blog Archives, Comments etc. Narratives from the Hindi Online community will be collected. The
objective is to identify the construction of the grand narrative of 'Hindi Jati' (Hindi nationality) as described in Hindi literary criticism, especially that by Ram Vilas Sharma. This construction of Hindi Jati where geographical space seemingly becomes meaningless (or less important, at least) will be explored.
As the research will be an online study, its progress will be available to all interested in real time. Findings of the work will be shared through a Weblog Publication and will be presented at the final workshop.
Neelima's doctoral and Post doctoral work is in Post colonial Hindi Prose. She teaches Hindi at Delhi University's Zakir Husain Post Graduate Evening College.
9. Raman Jit Singh Chima, Bangalore. The Regulation of the Internet by the Indian State through Legal Structures and Mechanisms
Though considerable work has been done on exploring how the Internet is capable of being regulated, not much has been done to chart out the exact shape of such regulation of expression on the Internet in India. More importantly, the exact manner in which the Indian State has
regulated the Internet through all the structures and mechanisms at its disposal has not been studied, which is important since this affects the
flow of speech and expression.
In order to attempt to chart out the empirical aspects of Internet regulation in India and its linkages with normative frameworks, the
focus of this project is thus on the following two goals;Firstly, to track out and study the manner in which the Indian State regulates the Internet through legal structures and connected mechanism (both through formal legal rules as well as through informal measure
such as executive action). Secondly, to analyze how this regulatory framework relates to the constitutional safeguards with respect to the limitations on state action viz. free speech and expression and whether it respects these constraints.
The findings obtained from the proposed field work (which will track the form, extent and purported rationale of such regulation) will be
processed through the existing theoretical frameworks and the end result will be an paper which will present the manner in which the Indian State has regulated the Internet currently, along with a critical academic understanding of how this connects with constitutional safeguards with respect to freedom of speech and expression.
Raman Chima is pursuing the B.A.LL.B. (Hons) program at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore and is currently in the 3rd year of this course.
10. Burton Cleetus, Delhi. Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity: The Rockefeller Foundation in Travancore
One of the most important interventions made by the “progressive” state of Travancore which later became part of the state of Kerala, was in the field of health care. The reorganization of the public health department with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States was
aimed at drafting a coherent health care policy for the state, primarily to cater to the needs of the emerging population in the urban centres.
The study seeks to argue that the process of reconstituting the health care policy by the princely state in the early twentieth century was a
political project of governance aimed at socio-cultural framing. A comparison between activities of the Rockefeller foundation in addressing the spread of Malaria and plague in the early twentieth century with the attempts made by the state of Kerala in tackling similar contagious diseases in recent times would enable to one understand the shifts in the frames of references of the nature of interventions of western medicine over the last century.
The study would fundamentally be based on the government documents from the Kerala state archives and on newspaper reports and clippings. The conclusions of the study would be presented as a research paper.
Burton Cleetus is a PhD scholar at the Center for Historical Studies, JNU. He did his post graduation and M Phil from JNU. His research on the
institutionalization of indigenous medicine in Kerala is an attempt to explore as to how esoteric cultural practices and localized healing
techniques were refashioned, revitalized and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda.
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