Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Srirupa Prasad
(Associate Professor, University of Missouri-Columbia)
Will be presenting a paper on
Gandhi’s Moral Politics and Plague in South Africa
Date & Time: February 8th, 2018 (Thursday), 3.00 pm
Venue: CSSS Committee Room, SSS-II
Abstract: This paper argues that Gandhi’s involvement in the bubonic plague in early twentieth century South Africa (both in the relief work he organized and participated in as well as through his writings) was a critical phase in his political career. It highlighted the deep ambiguity of Gandhi’s opinion about the racist South African colonial state. The plague epidemic in South Africa also revealed some of the paradoxes in Gandhi’s politics of race and respectability as the author argues in this paper. While Gandhi was emphatic about the respect, which Indians deserved from their white rulers, he justified it on the ground that Indians were a superior people when seen in comparison to Africans.
Bio: Dr. Srirupa Prasad teaches at the Department of Women's & Gender Studies and Sociology, University of Missouri-Columbia. Her primary research interests are culture and politics of contagion, hygiene, body, and infectious diseases. She is also interested in issues of critical feminist pedagogy and teaching. She teaches courses on women’s health and globalization; feminist theories and methodologies; sociology of health; body and society, and gender in India. Her first book, Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890-1940: Contagions of Feelings was published from Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. It investigates genealogies of contagion in colonial India and highlights the dynamic and contested passages between contagion as a microbe and contagion as an affect. She is currently working on a new project studying the history and contemporary politics of tuberculosis and care work in India.