Writing the Bombay Plague: Illness and Gendered Vulnerability in Lakshmibai Tilak’s Smritichitre

Author Information

Ananya Chatterjee, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India
Aratrika Das, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India

Abstract

The Bombay plague outbreak of 1896 in colonial India marks a pivotal point in South Asian socio-political and medical history. As administrative interventions increasingly associated disease management with surveillance, segregation and quarantine of colonised Indians (Arnold, 2022), the nationalist politics, body autonomy and public health converged and intersected in complex ways. This article situates Lakshmibai Tilak’s autobiography Smritichitre (1936, tr. 2017) against this backdrop to highlight how life writing provides critical insights into epidemic experience. Drawing on the theoretical framework of critical medical humanities (Viney et al., 2015), which recognises the complex distribution of illness across clinical and extra clinical spaces, the article foregrounds how contextualising the lived experience of plague within the domestic space highlights the gendered vulnerabilities induced by the disease. Lakshmibai’s autobiography becomes a meaning-making medium as she vividly recounts the instances of epidemic governance through descriptions of house-to-house visitations, railway inspections, forceful removals and her stay in the plague camp. The narrative becomes an affective register of her negotiations with medical authorities, fear of the disease and acts of care. Smritichitre textualises embodied moments of profound crisis of an individual suffering the plague, that disrupts everyday life. By situating disease within a social worldview, life writing reconfigures the epistemic framework through which the plague outbreak has been historically understood, foregrounding dimensions of disease experience which are otherwise muted in colonial public health historiography.

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• Category: Literature/Literary Studies

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