Jane Buckingham

Writing Histories of Disability in India: Strategies of Inclusion.

Existing historical understandings of disability are dominated by European and American experience and tend to assume Judeo‐Christian ideas of stigma and exclusion are universal norms. This paper emphasises the unique experience of disability in India and the role of poverty, gender, caste and community in compounding the marginalisation felt by people with disabilities. It argues, with Kudlick, that ‘disability’ is as important as ‘race’ or ‘gender’ as an analytic tool in the historical understanding of oppression and disempowerment. Moreover, the paper sees reclaiming history and insisting on inclusion of the experience of disability in the writing of Indian history as a critical factor in affirming the right of Indians with disabilities to full social and economic participation. Finally it emphasises the need for ‘disability history’ to look beyond colonial and post‐colonial welfare paradigms and to investigate disability as an aspect of rights based history.

Common Good Leadership in Business Management: An Ethical Model from the Indian Tradition

While dominant management thinking is steered by profit maximisation, this paper proposes that sustained organisational growth can best be stimulated by attention to the common good and the capacity of corporate leaders to create commitment to the common good. The leadership thinking of Kautilya and Ashoka embodies this principle. Both offer a common good approach, emphasising the leaders moral and legal responsibility for peoples welfare, the robust interaction between the business community and the state, and the importance of moral training of leaders in identifying and promoting the common good. We argue that the complex process of re‐orientating corporate priorities towards the common good requires alertness and concerted effort if both business and society are to truly benefit. As Ashoka said: ‘A good deed is a difficult thing’.

The Pacific Leprosy Foundation Archive and Oral Histories of Leprosy in the South Pacific

In November 1998 the Pacific Leprosy Foundation, an organisation dedicated to the eradication of leprosy and the assistance of those affected in the Pacific region, deposited their archival material in the Macmillan Brown Library, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. The materials include minutes, correspondence, photographs, a few interviews with members of the organisation and official proceedings of the Pacific Leprosy Foundation. The materials can be consulted with written permission from the Pacific Leprosy Foundation, New Zealand. The Pacific Leprosy Foundation Archive is an essential source for the study of leprosy and, more broadly, the development of 20th-century public health strategies in the West and South Pacific regions. Most academic historical research into leprosy in the Pacific has focused on the Hawaiian experience and the iconic figure of father Damien, who lived in exile with leprosy sufferers of Moloka’i Island. Apart from technical papers by the South Pacific Commission, memoirs and biographies of prominent figures in leprosy care, and a few institutional and personal histories, such as Sister Mary Stella’s Makogai: image of hope, little has been published on leprosy in the South Pacific. There is still much research to be done on the experience of the disease, community attitudes and understandings, the role of dedicated volunteers from New Zealand, and the cooperative engagement of New Zealand charitable organisations with the New Zealand and Fijian governments in caring for those afflicted and in controlling the disease. This paper first offers a brief history of leprosy in the South Pacific, in particular the beginnings of the Pacific Leprosy Foundation’s role in leprosy treatment and care in the 1920s, then describes the recent development of a new oral history archive to add to the existing Pacific Leprosy Foundation materials. The Pacific Leprosy Foundation remains a key player in the history of leprosy management and treatment in the Pacific. The Foundation began with the initiative of New Zealanders Benjamin Pratt and Pat Twomey, later known in New Zealand as ‘the leper man’, who worked together during the 1920s to bring material comforts, entertainment and friendship to leprosy sufferers held in isolation on Quail Island in Lyttleton Harbour in New Zealand’s South Island. From as early as 1851 Quail Island

On the etiology and transmission of leprosy in nineteenth century Madras, India.

Thanks to the Norwegian physician Gerhard Hansen, we knew of Mycobacterium leprae (Actinobacteria: Actinomycetales: Mycobacteriaceae) and much of the etiology of leprosy (Hansen’s disease) by 1873.[1] Although the subtle biological details of M. leprae were known only in the late 19th century, the Madras Presidency in British India was a particular focus of leprosy treatment and research in the early nineteenth century. The present paper focuses on the local British medical efforts to understand leprosy in early nineteenth-century Madras, particularly those detailed in the little known paper by the Madras surgeon William Judson van-Someren, published in the Madras Quarterly Journal of Medical Science in 1861.[2] The Madras Leper Hospital (MLH) was established as an institution separate from the Madras Native Infirmary (MNI) in 1814, because both medical authorities and patients at the MNI had become increasingly concerned that contact with the leprosy patients would spread the disease.[2,3] van-Someren, as superintendent of MNI, took the opportunity of a growing patient cluster at MLH to learn about a disease, which caused so much personal suffering and to critique current theories of disease transmission.

Indenture and the Indian Experience of Leprosy on Makogai Island, Fiji

ABSTRACT The Central Leprosy Hospital on the Fijian Island of Makogai received patients of many ethnicities and from many localities across the British southwest Pacific. Yet, during the years of the hospital’s operation from 1911 to 1969, Indians comprised the largest single ethnic group. They were almost all indentured labourers, brought to Fiji to work on sugar plantations, or the descendants of those who remained after their contracts expired. Drawing on archival records, this paper explores Indian identity on Makogai. On one hand, the experience of Indian patients was shaped by an ambiguous connection to place formed partly through both the stigma and the mechanisms of indenture. On the other, they shared with fellow patients on Makogai the stigma of leprosy and the experience of the disease and isolation.

Histories of Leprosy: Subjectivities, Community and Pacific Worlds

ABSTRACT Leprosy (or Hansens disease) was a problem in the colonial Pacific. To control the disease, administrations there and elsewhere tried to isolate so-called ‘lepers’. After a cure became available from the 1940s, this policy of segregation gave way; and by 2000 the World Health Organizations goal of ‘eliminating’ leprosy as a global health burden was declared met. Yet leprosy remains a challenge in many parts of the Pacific and the world. In the Pacific, the historiography of leprosy also raises questions. This article compares the extent of the published research and public awareness of the histories of leprosy relating to the Hawaiian island of Molokai and the Fijian island of Makogai. We further note contrasts between colonial and postcolonial perceptions of the disease. We scope the recent historiography of leprosy, which provides a context for the new research on leprosy in the southwest Pacific collected here. This new research addresses the themes of community formation in places of isolation and the subjective experiences of those affected by the disease. Finally, we offer readers two messages: the first of connection, the second, of humanity.

Patient or Prisoner? Leprosy Sufferers in British Institutional Care

Since the publication of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1975), leprosy, poverty, criminality and insanity have tended to be understood less as discrete conditions and more as characteristics which unite those living ‘in the margins of the community’ and mark them out for exclusion.1 In nineteenth-century colonial south India, the leprosy sufferer carried not only the ancient stigma of leprosy but also, to varying degrees, the nineteenth-century stigmas of vagrancy, poverty and criminality. Although leprosy affected all races and socio-economic groups, throughout the nineteenth century it was the poor and vagrant leprosy sufferers, the vast majority of whom were Indian and Eurasian, who were the focus of British attention and were subject to the imposition of British legal and medical authority. Even so, the leprosy sufferer was by no means a passive subject of British power. The leprosy sufferer’s capacity to resist confinement and to contribute to the different levels of British medical, legal and government authority was far greater than that admitted by Foucault.

Leprosy Research and the Development of Colonial Medical Science

In the first half of the nineteenth century, investigation and research into the disease of leprosy and the search for leprosy remedies in the Madras presidency were pursued primarily by interested individual medical officers with some regulation by the Madras Medical Board and presidency government. Government attention was, at most, spasmodic, since care of leprosy sufferers and the incorporation of leprosy remedies into the British medical system in India were not a government priority. From the 1860s until the close of the 1870s, during the period of expansion and consolidation of crown rule in India, the attention of British government and Home medical authorities was drawn to leprosy in the empire. The investigation of leprosy in India developed in the wider context of British concern for the welfare of the empire and the culture of scientific enquiry burgeoning in Europe.

Leprosy Treatment: Indigenous and British Approaches

In the British medical tradition leprosy was believed to be incurable and, despite the promise of gurjon oil and other late-nineteenthcentury treatments, it remained so until the discovery of Dapsone in the 1940s. The lack of any specific British treatment for leprosy was, particularly prior to the publication of Danielssen and Boeck’s findings in 1848, partly due to uncertainty as to what actually constituted the disease, and, until Hansen’s discovery of the leprosy bacillus in 1875, partly to ignorance of its true cause. In the Siddha tradition, however, some forms of leprosy were regarded as curable, probably because some of the diseases classified as leprosy were not forms of leprosy at all and were responsive to Siddha treatments. The Kaṉmakāṇṭam, attributed to Agastyar, advised the leprosy sufferer that if he or she ‘listens to the doctor and does all that he says, death can be averted’. According to the Citta maruttuvam, ten forms of leprosy were incurable, while ‘the rest may be cured with proper treatment, medication and the disciplining of body and mind’.1

Confining Leprosy Sufferers: the Lepers Act

If the initiation of the Leprosy Commission was a reflection of both British admiration for Fr Damien and fear of the disease, then the Government of India’s March 1889 decision to employ ‘special legislation’ was also as much a reflection of fear as of the change in viceroys in December 1888 from Dufferin to Lansdowne. On 15 June 1889, ‘a Bill to make provision for the isolation of lepers and the amelioration of their condition’ was circulated for comment to all local government and administrative authorities in India.1