In Rudyard Kipling’s writing about colonial Indian disease and health, ’the camp’ and ’the gynaeceum’ mark the limits of medical intelligibility and biopolitical intervention. Focusing on his long and short fiction, this chapter discusses the representation of populations massed in these public and private sites impervious to rational calculation and intervention. Superfluous and disposable, women in the gynaeceum and children in famine camps register the logic of enmity that speaks to Kipling’s broad skepticism about medicine’s capacity to render the native more healthy, more disciplined, or more likeable as patient or object of care. Tied to farcically sketched figures such as the native vaccinator or apothecary, Western medicine, refracted through Kipling’s prose, appears to have lost its purchase in the colonial space of exception. The real or imagined intractability of the populace to public health measures justify sovereign action as an integral ingredient of the imperial pharmakon. I show how in the major tales, epidemics, famine, insanitation get rewritten as occasions for heroics rather than therapeutics or biopolitics. Lowly, lonely Anglo-Indian men emerge from these public ordeals as figures of sovereignty able to slay the dragons of disease and crime and to police more effectively than the colonial state entrammeled in the abstractions of liberal biopolitical governmentality. Strikingly, in Kipling’s late-century imagination, states of medico-political emergency not only beg for the operations of a sovereign, but also draw on the figure of the nonhuman animal. The beast in fact becomes central to a biopolitics structured by the logic of hostility. As the distinction between governing humans and animals collapses, a zoomorphic conceit puts surplus native bodies in distress or up in arms on the same continuum as the nonhuman animal. Vaccination campaigns strangely echo the drama of the shikar or hunt. But that is not all. In a parallel move, these surplus, not-quite-human bodies herded into camps or other enclosures are taken hold of by the Anglo-Indian sovereign who too coincides with or doubles as beast, sometimes mild (a goat), sometimes wild (a tiger). The complex entanglement of the figures of beast and sovereign in Kipling’s imagination of medico-political emergencies produces a textual ecology wherein animal death founds the preservation of human health.

Kipling’s Medicine: In Camp and Gynaeceum

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2025年

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Sandhya Shetty

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In Rudyard Kipling’s writing about colonial Indian disease and health, ’the camp’ and ’the gynaeceum’ mark the limits of medical intelligibility and biopolitical intervention. Focusing on his long and short fiction, this chapter discusses the representation of populations massed in these public and private sites impervious to rational calculation and intervention. Superfluous and disposable, women in the gynaeceum and children in famine camps register the logic of enmity that speaks to Kipling’s broad skepticism about medicine’s capacity to render the native more healthy, more disciplined, or more likeable as patient or object of care. Tied to farcically sketched figures such as the native vaccinator or apothecary, Western medicine, refracted through Kipling’s prose, appears to have lost its purchase in the colonial space of exception. The real or imagined intractability of the populace to public health measures justify sovereign action as an integral ingredient of the imperial pharmakon. I show how in the major tales, epidemics, famine, insanitation get rewritten as occasions for heroics rather than therapeutics or biopolitics. Lowly, lonely Anglo-Indian men emerge from these public ordeals as figures of sovereignty able to slay the dragons of disease and crime and to police more effectively than the colonial state entrammeled in the abstractions of liberal biopolitical governmentality. Strikingly, in Kipling’s late-century imagination, states of medico-political emergency not only beg for the operations of a sovereign, but also draw on the figure of the nonhuman animal. The beast in fact becomes central to a biopolitics structured by the logic of hostility. As the distinction between governing humans and animals collapses, a zoomorphic conceit puts surplus native bodies in distress or up in arms on the same continuum as the nonhuman animal. Vaccination campaigns strangely echo the drama of the shikar or hunt. But that is not all. In a parallel move, these surplus, not-quite-human bodies herded into camps or other enclosures are taken hold of by the Anglo-Indian sovereign who too coincides with or doubles as beast, sometimes mild (a goat), sometimes wild (a tiger). The complex entanglement of the figures of beast and sovereign in Kipling’s imagination of medico-political emergencies produces a textual ecology wherein animal death founds the preservation of human health.