Social Production of Hygiene: Domesticity, Gender, and Nationalism in Late Colonial Bengal and India
My dissertation shows how hygiene became a powerful cultural mechanism and was at the heart of nationalist imaginings of the domestic (family, community, and society at large). What is crucial to understand is not only how the emerging ideologies of a nation were intricately tied to health, well-being, or an imagined community, but also how this exercise laid bare the fragments and limitations of nationalism as an ideal, particularly along fissures of class, caste, region, and gender. The modalities in and through which hygiene became an object of knowledge and an important force in ordering domesticity, in the nationalist imagination, were based on discourses of purity, order, reproduction, regeneration, restraint, and regulation. It is important to note here that these modalities constituted a very different ordering mechanism as compared to the medical-scientific discourse of modern and public colonial institutions in India.
Sociology, Individual and Family Studies
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign