Paul Winther. Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895. Lexington Books, 2003. 448. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7391-0584-9; $42.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7391-1274-8.
Reviewed by Pratik Chakrabarti (Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2004)
The Empire of Trade and the Morality of Science
Trade and science have been the two most important components of European imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The search for fresh territories of revenue engendered an encounter with new forms of knowledge and new concerns for morality. This book is a contribution to such researches on the history of science, imperialism, and culture. The context here is the India-China opium trade and the focus is on the 1893-1895 Royal Commission on Opium and the debates around it. In the face of growing missionary and liberal opposition to the trade, the main question for the Commission was whether the growing and selling of poppy should be prohibited, "except for medical purposes" in colonial India. According to Winther, here the moral issue became a scientific one. Even the Society for the Suppression of Opium Trade (SSOT) demanded that opium production and consumption should be restricted to legitimate medical purposes (p. 135). Within these parameters of judgment the medical and therapeutic virtues of opium became crucial.
Winther's critical examination of the scientific validation (that opium prevented and cured malaria) provided in the report runs parallel to his analysis of the political and economic contours of the debate, both of which he suggests ultimately led the Commission to defend the Indian government's promotion of the drug. He stresses how the conclusions of the Report were based on some "archaic" and prejudiced assumptions of uniqueness of the Indian subcontinent in terms of health and environment.
Winther's story is rich and multifarious. The debate was essentially moral, about Christian evangelists and missionaries in India and China and their moral critic of trade and opium consumption. It was also political, about the debates between the British parliament and the Government of India. And it was about science, about the alkaloids of Papaver Somniferum Linn, known as narcotine during the nineteenth century. Underlying these was the issue of imperialism. The debate between the anti-opium and the pro-trade camps was essentially about "whose version of imperialism would prevail in the subcontinent" (p. 323). Winther's arguments appear more nuanced than those of John F. Richards, who describes only the assumptions of the anti-opium lobby as "cultural Imperialism," while that of the supporters reflected the position of "most of the people of India."[1] Richards's argument that, "the Government of India prevailed, not because of chicanery or force, but because its position was consistent with that of most of the people of India," does tend to put a lot of faith on the report as reflective of popular opinion and it conclusions to be logical to its findings. Winther's study is more critical of the assumptions of the Commission. "The Government of India's preference for an analysis based on fading paradigms and a selective interpretation of data was not accidental. The predilection protected British hegemony and guaranteed increased revenue from poppy cultivation in South Asia" (p. 26).
Having said that, the book does not attempt to situate the report within the larger social and cultural milieu of colonial India. This is a concern because one important aim of the book is to highlight the contrast between the practice of science in the metropolis ("Anglo-European," in Winther's definition) and the periphery (British India, in this case). He argues that "the content of prevailing medical theory and practice concerning malaria and its prevention and cure in one region of the periphery during the 1890s differed radically from dominant ideas evolving in the metropolis" (p. 26). It is not clear how Winther proposes to write a radical understanding of peripheral scientific practice based on the Opium Commission itself, apart from parliamentary and official papers, and other medical texts by European surgeons. As almost the entire reading of the debate and the critique of the report are from the report itself, the discussions on the science and morality of opium in the periphery outside the official documents remain unexplored. The book gathers no reflection from the rhetoric in the vernacular press centering on the popular debates around opium and medicine in India, which had informed the medical discourses. Such an analysis might have made Winther's suggestions of predilection in the report more textured. Questions remain, like if the report did misrepresent public opinion, what was that opinion? How did the new moral codes regarding opium emanating from Europe inform the Indian practitioners, particularly the elites who were questioned by the Commission? What was the nature of debate and discourse around opium as a medicinal drug among practitioners in India in this period? What were their attitudes towards such an important Commission?
While the missionaries and British surgeons are well-etched characters the Indian medical professionals questioned by the Commission remain outsiders to the plot. This is most evident in chapters 5, 6 and, to some extent, 7 which examine the report in detail. The book suffers from a lack of cross-reference to either Indian medical (both Western and indigenous) or popular opinion regarding malaria, opium, and febrifuges. For example, where in the elite-popular dichotomies of emerging Indian nationalism do we situate Dr. Nil Ratan Sircar's views of "popular" medicine? How did Ram Moy Roy come to declare the Commission's purpose as one "to establish opium as a kind of food" (p. 175)?
The other problem of the book is its reliance on the report for its details and analysis, which limits the narrative. What was the nature of engagement of the missionaries and European doctors with the "native" practitioners and their practices? How far did they reflect "native" uses of opium? A typical example is when, from only the biographical details provided in the report, Winther assumes that Reverend M. B. Kirkpatrick's experiences of two years in Burma, "enabled this medical missionary for the American Baptist to discern different patterns of opium use" (p. 164). Elsewhere Winther tends to derive meanings from the examinations of the report, which might not be evident, particularly when dismissing the use of opium as a febrifuge. Discussing Surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel T. H. Hendley's description of the faith of local people of Bihar in opium as a febrifuge, Winther writes, "he [Hendley] then claimed the Indians about whom he spoke believed opium's status as an anodyne qualified it as a febrifuge. This statement suggested that natives considered the alleviation of the sensation was tantamount to curing the affliction (emphasis added, p. 170). Dr. Juggo Bundo Bose, a retired government officer, made the comment that the poor take "the small doses of opium to keep off the effects of malarial diseases" (p. 171). Winther's analysis of the statement runs like this: "The wording is significant; although Bose believed the drug had much value, he realised that the destitute distinguished between a symptom and a disease. This suggested that the uneducated, the malnourished, the ill-clothed and poorly sheltered population of Calcutta and adjacent locales consumed the drug to suppress the overt signs of suffering from a serious illness. They knew the sickness would run its course, and that the malady could not be quickly eradicated. In other words, they cannot purge themselves of 'malaria,' but they might avoid unmitigated suffering from its consequences. Eating opium offered psychological well-being and physical comfort" (p. 171).
On other instances Winther is far less generous about the implications of the evidences. When Johnstone claimed that in Burma people used opium to check malaria, Winther simply comments, "Johnstone, and perhaps Burmese citizens, made no distinction between an anodyne versus a 'cure' for 'malarial fever'; relief from the pain of a disease and curing a disease were the same thing" (pp. 171-172). On another occasion Winther concludes that Surgeons-Major D. F. Barry recommended opium to poor Indian natives (one wonders if this terminology is from the report itself) only because there was nothing else available, without recourse to any evidence for the same (p. 216). Winther tends to be less critical when the surgeons' point of view are against opium being a febrifuge, like when he unproblematically accepts Reverend Wilkie's opinion that, "even with opium in their hands they [the Indians] prefer quinine for fever when they get it" (p. 182).
The book also does not refer to the related issue of cannabis and marijuana which involved similar concerns of medicine and morality as exposed in the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-94 (Simla, India: Government Central Printing House, 1894, 7 vols.) held simultaneous to the Opium Commission.[2] One interesting fact evident from that report is that several of the doctors who supported opium, like Kailas Chundra Bose, were also in favor of the medical use of cannabis.
The book sets up an ambitious project of integrating science, morality, and trade. While it succeeds in portraying the limitations inherent in the Commission and its links with the economic imperatives of the colonial government, it fails to critically examine the larger contours of the debate around opium as medicine in the periphery.
Notes
[1]. John Richards, "Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895," Modern Asian Studies, 36, no. 2 (2002), p. 420.
[2]. Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893-94, 7 vols. (Simla, India: Government Central Printing House, 1894).
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Citation:
Pratik Chakrabarti. Review of Winther, Paul, Anglo-European Science and the Rhetoric of Empire: Malaria, Opium, and British Rule in India, 1756-1895.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9508
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