Women’s health in colonial assam: print, medicine, and indigenous practices

The advent of colonialism in Assam was followed with its putative benefits - print and western biomedicine being the major subjects in this article. That is not to say that there was no "literacy awareness," (Stark 13) reading practice, or indigenous medical practices before colonial powers set their feet in Assam, or that these were completely abandoned due to colonialism. In fact, colonialism and indigenous practices existed simultaneously. This paper looks at the intersectionality of gender, medicine and print in colonial Assam with reference to 'masculine' writings available in print. The focus is on onerous (and equally ambivalent) theories with regard to women's bodies, the consequent misreadings regarding their health and prescriptions for health and hygiene, as well as an insistence on the necessity of care towards women in a few of these writings. With the introduction of western biomedical practices and subsequent funds and scholarships, inequities in healthcare were visible and detectable. The paper analyses the literature of the time as alternative strategies to deal with women's health, given that healthcare facilities were not available to a large section of the population which sanctioned the popularity of manuals, primers, and essays catering to the subject of women's health. With specific sections devoted to the intersectionality of colonialism with gender, medical culture, and print, these texts are analysed in the light of perspectives ranging from medical misogyny to literary merit.