Sacred histories of public health: leper asylums, patient protest and the twentieth-century medical–evangelical state in British India

How did the histories of biomedicine and Christianity coalesce during the heydays of bacteriology and tropical medicine in the early twentieth century? How can the focus on relatively underexplored sites in the historiography of scientific knowledge add to our insights about the links between the histories of imperialism, disciplinary institutions and scientific experiments? How does one conceptualize the presence and agency of captive patients in the colonized context? This article argues that a renewed focus on the colonial leper asylums in British India allows us simultaneously to raise these fundamental questions, which resonate with the newly emergent histories of global and colonial science and medicine. In addressing these questions, this article establishes these leper asylums as a unique site where colonized diseased subalterns encountered, suffered, engaged with and defied different strands of British power that were concurrently imperial, biomedical and Christian.