The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940

Medical History · 1 author, 1 centre

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The methodology combines social history of medicine with Dalit and Alcohol Studies, focusing on the hybrid form of these journals that blended medical, scientific, and Biblical language.

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The methodology combines social history of medicine with Dalit and Alcohol Studies, focusing on the hybrid form of these journals that blended medical, scientific, and Biblical language. The central finding is that medical temperance writings presented as universal scientific knowledge about alcohol's toxicity and poor nutrition often carried subtle or explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack, associating them with Dalit and non-Dalit marginalized communities.

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epidemiology

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ORIGINAL PAPER

PMC10593978

The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940

Medical History

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ABSTRACT

Abstract This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women’s missionary journal, Vivekavathi , deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages. This stigma was conjured through medical narratives of marginalised castes as lacking in the knowledge of alcohol’s relation to digestion, toddy’s role in ruining maternal and child nutrition, the unhygienic environment of arrack shops and their propensity to ‘alcoholism’. However, this article also traces counter-caste voices who too invoked ‘the power of the universal’ to dispel caste stigma against marginalised castes. While both sets of voices deployed medical ‘enslavement’ to alcohol as an interpretive move, they differed in their social imperatives and political imaginaries, defined in caste terms. This article explores a third set of implications of the term ‘universal’ by analysing global medico-missionary narratives of alcohol in two other Telugu journals. On a methodological plane, this article also pushes for a hybrid reading of what counts for ‘scientific instruction’, where hymns, catechisms, parables and allegories are considered alongside conventional scientific experiments. In that sense, it upholds vernacular missionary publications as an invaluable resource for the social history of medicine. Keywords: missionary, medical discourses, alcohol, caste, Telugu, toddy, arrack

CITATION EXPORT

Tarangini Sriraman. The power of the ‘universal’: caste and missionary medical discourses of alcoholism in the Telugu print sphere, 1900–1940. Medical History. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2023.30

AUTHORS

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Tarangini Sriraman

1Goldsmiths University of London, History, 8 Lewisham Way, London