Communication, Disability, and Scientific Interventions in South Asia, c. 1860-1970
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation explores how historical actors devised new methods for treating and understanding speech and hearing in South Asia from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It argues that instructors, specialists and medical practitioners envisaged diverse solutions to what they considered to be the ‘problem’ of disabled language. These groups broached the issue of dysfluency and impaired hearing by appealing to scientific methodologies, ‘oralist’ pedagogies, and speech-therapeutic techniques. The thesis traces a social, cultural, and intellectual history of how physicians, pedagogues, and pathologists studied, medicated, and politicised the voice and communication. It identifies several key institutions, such as the Calcutta Deaf and Dumb School (f. 1893), and the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing in Mysore (f. 1966), to illustrate how the emergence of centres for ‘managing’ and ‘correcting’ variations in speech and hearing was rooted in local and global processes of political, cultural, and epistemological change. Foregrounding the papers, letters, and speeches of South Asian educators, therapists, and ‘logopedicians’, the dissertation explores how the relationship between language, the mind, and the body was worked out and negotiated in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Highlighting particular strands of colonial-medical knowledge, it examines how debates in allopathic institutions about ‘cerebral localisation’ raised to prominence the question of whether the speech function could be neuroanatomically mapped. Elucidating how Bengali ‘deaf educators’ politicised speech and hearing, and mounted calls for the democratisation of technologies for ‘emancipating’ the voice, the thesis illuminates how conceptions of communication and disability took on the vocabulary of nationalist rhetoric and anticolonial critique. Plotting a novel course through the interstices of South Asian history, disability history, the history of education, and the hi…
abstract: This dissertation explores how historical actors devised new methods for treating and understanding speech and hearing in South Asia from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. It argues that instructors, specialists and medical practitioners envisaged diverse solutions to what they considered to be the ‘problem’ of disabled language. These groups broached the issue of dysfluency and impaired hearing by appealing to scientific methodologies, ‘oralist’ pedagogies, and speech-therapeutic techniques. The thesis traces a social, cultural, and intellectual history of how physicians, pedagogues, and pathologists studied, medicated, and politicised the voice and communication. It identifies several key institutions, such as the Calcutta Deaf and Dumb School (f. 1893), and the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing in Mysore (f. 1966), to illustrate how the emergence of centres for ‘managing’ and ‘correcting’ variations in speech and hearing was rooted in local and global processes of political, cultural, and epistemological change. Foregrounding the papers, letters, and speeches of South Asian educators, therapists, and ‘logopedicians’, the dissertation explores how the relationship between language, the mind, and the body was worked out and negotiated in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. Highlighting particular strands of colonial-medical knowledge, it examines how debates in allopathic institutions about ‘cerebral localisation’ raised to prominence the question of whether the speech function could be neuroanatomically mapped. Elucidating how Bengali ‘deaf educators’ politicised speech and hearing, and mounted calls for the democratisation of technologies for ‘emancipating’ the voice, the thesis illuminates how conceptions of communication and disability took on the vocabulary of nationalist rhetoric and anticolonial critique. Plotting a novel course through the interstices of South Asian history, disability history, the history of education, and the hi…
author: Parkinson, Thomas
language: eng
keywords: Communication, Disability, Disability History, History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, South Asian History
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4926574d-b54f-4bb8-97fc-b9169f6808b0/download
license: http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved
date published: 2025-06-19
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:27Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.122917