Tracks of Change
Tracks of Change

Author: Ritika Prasad

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-05-12

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1316033619

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From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, railways became increasingly important in the lives of a growing number of Indians. While allowing millions to collectively experience the endemic discomforts of third-class travel, the public opportunities for proximity and contact created by railways simultaneously compelled colonial society to confront questions about exclusion, difference, and community. It was not only passengers, however, who were affected by the transformations that railways wrought. Even without boarding a train, one could see railway tracks and embankments reshaping familiar landscapes, realise that train schedules represented new temporal structures, fear that spreading railway links increased the reach of contagion, and participate in new forms of popular politics focused around railway spaces. Tracks of Change explores how railway technology, travel, and infrastructure became increasingly woven into everyday life in colonial India, how people negotiated with the growing presence of railways, and how this process has shaped India's history.

Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence
Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence

Author: Saurabh Mishra

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-12-06

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0199088373

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The epicentre of the Muslim universe, Mecca attracts hundreds of thousands of believers every year. Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence studies the organization and meanings of the Haj from India during colonial times and analyses it from political, commercial, and medical perspectives between 1860, the year of the first outbreak of cholera epidemic in Mecca, and 1920, when the subject of holy places of Islam became a very powerful political symbol in the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to the general belief about colonial policy of non-intervention into religious subjects, the book argues that the state, in fact, kept a close watch on the pilgrimage. Saurabh Mishra examines the 'medicalization' of Mecca through cholera outbreaks and the intrusion of European medical regulations. He underscores how the Haj played an important role in shaping medical policies and practices, debates and disease definitions. The book explores how the Indian Hajis perceived, negotiated, and resisted colonial pilgrimage and medical policies in their quest of an intense spiritual experience. The author recovers the hitherto unexplored perspective of pilgrims' voices—in travelogues, memoirs, newspaper reports, and journals—to present a nuanced analysis of the interaction between religious faith and colonial public health policies during the age of steamships and empire.

Quarantine
Quarantine

Author: Alison Bashford

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2016-07-29

Total Pages: 427

ISBN-13: 1350307599

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Over five centuries, a global archipelago of quarantine stations came to connect the world's oceans from the Mediterranean to the South Pacific, from Atlantic coasts to the Red Sea. In the process, great new carceral structures materialised, many surviving into the present as magnificent ruins or as 5 star hotels with a dark tourism edge. This book offers new histories and geographies of quarantine islands and isolation hospitals across the world, bringing their local and global pasts and present into view. An international cast of leading experts examine the enduring historical problems of migration and mobility, segregation, prevention and protection by states with different interests in freedoms, health and commerce. With case studies from as far afield as the Red Sea, Hong Kong and New Zealand, and from the early modern period forward, this book provides an invaluable insight into the history of quarantine.