Politics of Health in Post-partition Calcutta: The Refugees, the Left Movements and the Question of Life in the City

This chapter investigates how the presence of the refugees from East Bengal within the city of Calcutta shaped the discourses and the practices of public health of the city in the post-partition decades. The refugees in the city laid bare the fault lines in the ‘social’ discourse of public health of the time which is reflected in the peculiar pathological figuration of the displaced population in the contemporary municipal debates. Further, focusing on the struggles of the refugee squatters in ensuring healthcare facilities, the chapter shows how the question of public health could produce different forms of alliances and solidarity networks within the colony and beyond its confines. Public health practices in the colonies assembled many different actors, not all of them were residents of the colonies. A close investigation of these networks then problematizes the standard historiographical tradition of casting the history of refugee rehabilitation into a neat binary between charity and self-reliance. Finally, linking the above discussion with the healthcare movement organized by the left in the decades under consideration, this chapter argues that all of these point towards alternative ideals of protection and care. They hinted towards a newly emerging politics of life in the city, which would be reflected in the populist rhetoric of the left in the years to follow. This politics of life imagined the citizen as a bio-social entity and the state as the ultimate protector of their bio-social life.