Sandhya Shetty, Imperial Pharmakon: Writing and Medicine in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan: 2025) xiv + 448 pp. £95.50 eBook £119.99 Hb. ISBN: 978-3-031-90877-4 (eBook)
Sifting through an eclectic ensemble of writing, Imperial Pharmakon (2025) by Sandhya Shetty invites its readers into the colonial Indian landscape through the intertwined histories of writing and medicine in the long nineteenth century. A wide range of texts comprising Anandibai Joshi’s MD thesis, Kipling’s fiction, epistolary exchanges between Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson, and Gandhi’s autobiography, among others, orient the book’s genealogical interest in medicine’s colonial past. Looking across structural oppositions such as metropole/colony, history/fiction, and biology/culture, Shetty locates medicine not within the supposedly neutral empiricism of the sciences but amidst broader literary, legal, and eschatological discourses.
To this end, the book enlists Derrida’s pharmakon as its central conceptual hinge. The charged overlap between remedy and poison conveyed by the Greek word (roughly translating to ‘drug’) is thus extended to the domain of writing. Doing so obscures any stable distinction between pharmacological practice and the inscriptions that furthered its administration. Insofar as Shetty’s eponymous imperial pharmakon signals an ingenious double address. Imperial Pharmakon, the phrase as well as the book, conjoins object and method: recognising, ‘the entangled objects of medicine and writing and writing as medicine’ as well as the ‘heuristic’ of recognising―the entanglement―itself (9, emphasis in original). This approach is further scaffolded with a transimperial and longue durée perspective that allows the discerning of shifts and continuities across varying geographic and generic contexts.
Colonial medicine consequently emerges in this study as an assemblage of practices and knowledge divisions rather than a monolithic dispositif. In this regard, the ‘unexpected heterogeneities on both production and reception sides’ appear as the book’s key precepts (6). The diffuse intersection of writing and medicine emanating from the ‘colony’ is rendered at once reflective and generative of contemporary projects of imperial-liberalist-biopolitical worlding. In this view, Imperial Pharmakon presents a history of medicine that moves from its specific (colonial) scope towards reframing a broader understanding of its constituent scientific praxis and ethical premises, foregrounding hybridity, contingencies, non-linearity, and the non-human.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, Chemistries, charts the intertextual co-constitution of medicine and writing alongside a nineteenth-century zeitgeist of colonial natality. Part 2, Enmities, signals the widespread proliferation of performative discourse, of writing as medicine, towards eliciting hostile administrative responses to issues of public health around the interwar period. Part 3, Quackery, turns towards Gandhian thought and alternative ethics of medicine.
The strengths of Shetty’s expansive mode of research are perhaps best inferred from a microscopic point of view. Chapter 5, ‘Kipling’s Medicine: In Camp and Gynaeceum’, demonstrates how the book’s theoretical and historical concerns converge in moments of analysis. Although Rudyard Kipling appears to be an unlikely figure within medicine’s colonial past, Shetty’s application of medicine as a postcolonial critical lens draws out the performativity encoded in his reticence on contemporary medical interventions and their administrative affinities.
The chapter begins with Kipling’s 1888 poetic tribute to the Vicereine Dufferin, ‘The Song of Women’, which Shetty situates within a ‘cluster of texts’ she marks as the ‘gyn/ecology of colonial medicine’ (240). In her use, gyn/ecology is expertly pivoted from Mary Daly’s coinage into a referent for the transimperial ideological discourse that sought to govern women’s bodies and subjectivities – linking fin-de-siècle medical humanitarianism (such as the Lady Dufferin Fund), the emergence of the New Woman, and the archival traces of the same. Thus, Kipling’s poem while participating in the contemporary gyn/ecology is inadvertently conversant with the pharmakon as well. In another instance, following the gyn/ecological imprint of Pandita Ramabai―her writings on the ‘high caste Hindu woman’ and/in the zenana (gynaeceum)―Kipling is shown to further his own in co-authoring The Naulahka: The Story of the East and West with Wolcott Balestier in 1891.
Shetty’s analysis is at its close reading peak as it frames Kipling’s specific niche within the gyn/ecology from the prose of Naulahka. The novel follows Kate Sheriff, an aspiring American doctor who travels to colonial India for voluntary medical service only to return to domestic life upon realising the ineffectiveness of her interventions. The plotline resonates with Kipling’s broader belief that colonial service remained ‘men’s work’ (242), thereby registering a critique of the New Woman’s migratory and medical aspirations. Shetty’s multipronged reading of Kipling’s presentation of Sheriff’s hapless attempts at providing caring in the ‘vast warrens’ of the zenanas stands out (258). Placing The Naulahka alongside famines and epidemics in colonial India, she identifies in Kipling’s prose a phobia towards demographic excess and a distinctly Malthusian register. Insofar as the novel not only rhetorically reduces the women of the zenana to animality but also implies that their access to medical treatment and life itself is undeserved or futile. Here, Imperial Pharmakon compellingly reveals medicine’s ecological unconscious and the fraught fault lines separating the non-human from the ‘not-quite-human’ (34). As The Naulahka projects the ‘curelessness of all things Indian’ (241), Shetty’s work reveals an assemblage of medicine’s poesis and polemos that is simultaneously reinforced and displaced in writing.
As the book approaches its conclusion, Shetty confronts the question of whether medicine itself ultimately functions as a front for ‘human exceptionalism’ (405). In asking so, she recapitulates the inextricable modes of othering embedded in the (imperial/modern) praxis of medicine, which at best always only displace their objects of othering. With the foresight of these concerns, the book turns toward Gandhi’s ‘quackery’ and his critique of bodily health as prescribed through colonial modernity in its penultimate chapter. Gandhi’s dietetic asceticism and egalitarian nursing are consequently presented as alternatives to medicine’s violent exceptionalism.
This final movement, however, somewhat narrows the complexity of the archive that the earlier chapters so carefully sustain. Although Gandhi’s principles/practices represented convincing ethical alternatives to those implicated in modernity, they were coeval with his resistance to anti-caste movements – which in turn extend well beyond the question of untouchability.[1] This aspect of heterogeneity remains largely unaddressed in the book. More significantly, it overlooks instances in which Gandhi mobilised his own practices of non-violent care and cure toward coercive ends, such as the fast unto death surrounding the Poona Pact.[2] The Gandhian turn therefore risks eclipsing the book’s otherwise compelling insistence on the pharmakon’s irreducible ambivalence.
Despite this minor lapse, one should not take away from the myriad accomplishments of Imperial Pharmakon. At the least, the book adroitly converses with Derridean thought in a vitally renewed context. Tracing the echoes of this exchange one may recognise the book’s signal contribution as found in its opening epigraph: the pharmakon is never simply beneficial.
Arya Sarkar
References
Kumar, Aishwary. Radical Equality: Ambedkar Gandhi and the Risk of Democracy. Navayana Publishing, 2019.
Thorat, Sukhadeo. ‘Ambedkar’s Proposal to Safeguards Minorities Against Communal Majority in Democracy’. Journal of Social Inclusion Studies 5, no. 2 (2019): 113–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/2394481120913779.
[1] Aishwary Kumar, Radical Equality (2019), pp165-217.
[2] Sukhadeo Thorat, (2019)
