Communication, Disability, and Scientific Interventions in South Asia, c. 1860-1970

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 history of science, medicine, and technology, the dissertation employs recent ideas from dysfluency and disability studies to present a rich and wide-ranging account of communication and the formation of ideas that surrounded it. It critically assesses how processes of medicalisation occurred in South Asia, shedding light onto the construction of new speech-language disabilities and the ideal of fluency.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Parkinson, Thomas

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sivasundaram, Sujit

• Communication
• Disability
• Disability History
• History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
• South Asian History

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4926574d-b54f-4bb8-97fc-b9169f6808b0/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.122917

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/392041