Inlaks Research and Travel Grantees 2022: Preethi Mariam George and Pritam Majumdar
The Inlaks Research and Travel Grantees of 2022 are Preethi Mariam George and Pritam Majumdar.
Preethi is a PhD student at Indian Institute of Technology Madras where she is conducting research on the emergence of nursing in South India during the colonial period.
Pritam is pursuing a PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. His research looks at the oral performance tradition of Manasa Palagaan in the Dinajpur region.
Preethi Mariam George
I am a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. My research aims to address a very significant lacuna in the history of colonial medicine in India - the emergence of nursing as a profession, focusing particularly on the Madras Presidency, and the princely states of Travancore and Cochin. The colonial government, native rulers and Christian missionaries were the major players involved in this process. Their varying attitudes and motivations, and the power dynamics in their interactions will be analysed in the context of nursing.
Apart from the political aspects, I attempt to write a social history of nursing by examining the gender, religious, and caste background of those who became nurses and their experiences within the institutionalized set-up of western medicine. By considering institutions of health care as social spaces, the position of nurses in the medical occupational-hierarchy, and the nature of their interaction with various categories of people visiting the health-care institutions can be observed as a reflection of the social order of the period. The local responses to nursing as a western, Christianized and feminized sphere of activity, as well as the impact of nursing on the society at large will be explored.
The Inlaks Research and Travel Grant will help me to visit the United Kingdom to access important archival materials from British Library, School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), Wellcome Collection, Royal College of Nursing Archives (Edinburgh), Cadbury Research Library (University of Birmingham) etc. The available archival materials include India Office Records, private paper, photographs, oral history collections, medical mission records, nurses’ diaries and newspaper reports regarding nursing in India. I believe this visit will truly enrich my research and present me with many learning experiences to cherish.
Pritam Majumdar
I come from a ‘refugee family’ that, in the aftermath of partition, settled in the bordering district of Dakshin Dinajpur in West Bengal. As a first-generation university student, I did my master’s in English Studies from Indian Institute of Technology Madras and am currently pursuing my PhD in performance studies in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. My choice of researching the marginalized performance tradition of Mansa Palagaan is informed by my lived experience of traversing the margins of a porous and precarious borderland.
As part of my doctoral project, I have been studying the oral performances and ritual practices associated with the performance tradition of Manasa Palagaan in the Dinajpur region, spreading across both India and Bangladesh, through the conceptual lenses of performance and gender. Manasa Palagaan is a performance-ritual associated with the scriptural tradition of Manasamangal, which belongs to the medieval Bengali literary category of Mangalkavyas. My project lies at the intersection of the scribal traditions of Manasamangal within the oral-literate cultures in medieval Bengal and the contemporary performance tradition of Manasa Palagaan in the Dinajpur region.
I shall undertake both archival and ethnographic methods to situate the scriptural tradition of Mangalkavya within the contemporary performative context of Palagaan to bring out the dialectical relationship between the textual (manuscripts) culture of Mangalkavya and the performance tradition of Manasa Palgaan. Hence, I shall utilize the Inlaks Research and Travel Grant 2022 to fund my visit to the archives and libraries in Dhaka, Rajshahi and Dinajpur region in Bangladesh in order to collect manuscripts and chapbooks of Mansamangal (circulated and collected from the Dinajpur region), old and rare books, rare periodicals and documents on the folk theatrical traditions in Bangladesh. I thank the Inlaks Foundation for extending this generous grant to me.
