Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Nationalizing the Body
- Introduction
- Chapter I Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers
- Chapter II Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of DaktariMedicine
- Chapter III Contagious Nationalism: Contagion and the Actualization of the Nation
- Chapter IV Political Plague: Diagnosing a Neo-Hindu Modernity
- Chapter V Endemic Commerce: Cholera and the Medical Market
- Chapter VI Dhatu Dourbalya: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Weakness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter II - Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of DaktariMedicine
from Nationalizing the Body
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Nationalizing the Body
- Introduction
- Chapter I Healers in Context: Forgotten Pioneers
- Chapter II Daktari Prints: The World of Bengali Printing and the Multiple Inscriptions of DaktariMedicine
- Chapter III Contagious Nationalism: Contagion and the Actualization of the Nation
- Chapter IV Political Plague: Diagnosing a Neo-Hindu Modernity
- Chapter V Endemic Commerce: Cholera and the Medical Market
- Chapter VI Dhatu Dourbalya: Diagnosing the Rhizoid Pathologies of Weakness
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The major debates in the history of printing in Bengal until recently have revolved around the early typefaces and the contribution of Bengalis in making these. The actual impact of printing on Bengali life and culture, by contrast, was assumed to be fairly straightforward. The impact of printing in this straightforward narrative was assumed to have been formative of the wide-ranging cultural phenomena commonly dubbed as the ‘Bengal Renaissance’—a cultural ferment usually framed as one that sought to replace the traditional Bengali cultural milieu based on orality by a textually grounded and rationalized set of cultural practices. Anindita Ghosh's fascinating recent study, however, has challenged this linear account of the relationship between print and cultural transformation. Ghosh argues that the impact of print was much more pluralised and multivalent than has hitherto been acknowledged. Its relationship with precolonial worlds of oral culture was not necessarily one of opposition, and the high literary texts of the Bengal Renaissance were not necessarily the only new cultural trend which took advantage of the new printing technology. Ghosh's work has provided a long-awaited critical framework within which to approach the vibrant plurality of Bengali printing that had already been noticed by a previous generation of historians, such as Tapti Roy and Ramakanta Chakrabarty, and some amateur enthusiasts such as Nikhil Sarkar (better known as ‘Sripantha’). The reformist high literature was only a small component of the entire print output.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nationalizing the BodyThe Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, pp. 75 - 110Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009
- 3
- Cited by