MEDICAL SUPERVISION OF THE HOSTELS IN DHAKA DURING COLONIAL PERIOD: A MEDICOBUREAUCRATIC ANALYSIS

The dissemination of Western education in East Bengal commenced with the founding of Dhaka College in 1841. Over time, the number of these educational establishments grew. In the beginning, students hailing from areas outside Dhaka encountered difficulties in finding accommodation in Dhaka, so they resorted to creating messes. However, the government subsequently took the initiative to establish hostels for these educational institutions. Nevertheless, the messes managed to survive due to the limited space available in the hostels. The sanitary and medical conditions of these messes and hostels were precarious. While the government did not address the issue of the messes, it did take the proactive step of implementing medical supervision in the hostels. The paper aims to analyse the Medico-Bureaucratic process involved in the introduction of medical supervision of the hostels of Dacca College and its allied institutions in the years 1907 and 1908. In light of a conceptual framework crafted with medical discourse and the expansion of western medicine, the paper analyses quite a few official letters exchanged among the government officials of different departments that were found in a file preserved at the National Archives of Bangladesh. Drawing upon the analysis, it concludes that although the introduction of medical supervision was part of the government’s educational policy, it can also be interpreted by Arnold’s elements of medical discourse on the colonizing body which encompasses practises such as counting, disciplining and controlling. Again, though this was a goodwill gesture towards the people of East Bengal, it can also be interpreted from the point of view of the Civilization Mission. Keywords: Medico-Bureaucratic, Medical discourse, Western medicine, Dual city, Colonizing the body, Civilisation mission