Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative on child rape in India

Pande, Ishita

doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750453

Cited by 21 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…As further corroborated by the works of Agnes (2005), Mitra and Satish (2014), Mitra et al. (2018), and Pande (2013, 2020) these masculine forensics were unsuitable for and hostile to women.…”

Section: Forensics Mythologies and Bodies In Colonial Indiamentioning

confidence: 74%

Forensics, body and state power in South Asia: Recent interventions and their importance

Singh

2021

History Compass

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Forensics were introduced in South Asia during the colonial rule as “scientific” practices to procure “reliable” forms of evidence. Their ostensible goal was to protect innocents and to punish wrong‐doers. In the recent decades, however, forensics have become notorious for their repressive character. Is there something wrong with forensics? Is there some problem with the practice or there is a fundamental problem in the manner in which forensics were conceptualized and introduced during the colonial rule. With a critical reading of the recent historiography of forensics, where it has been suggested that forensics had devastating impact on the lives of colonial subjects, this article explores the relationship between forensics, bodies, and state‐power. The article suggests that repression is embedded in the idea of forensics, and the history of forensics is a story of abuse, violence, and repression.

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Section: Forensics Mythologies and Bodies In Colonial Indiamentioning

confidence: 74%

Forensics, body and state power in South Asia: Recent interventions and their importance

Singh

2021

History Compass

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“…A body of literature has highlighted the sexual tone that undergirded the evolving national debates on the child-bride, child-rape, and the legal status of this social group through an exploration of the contentious colonial era child-marriage legislation in India (Kolsky, 2010;Pande, 2003Pande, , 2012Pande, , 2013Pande, , 2020Sankar, 2000;Tambe, 2019). This scholarship on the girl-child reveals that sexual innocence, vulnerability, incapacity, and emotional underdevelopment became the key line of demarcation around those not-yet-quite woman.…”

Section: The Historiography Of the Undisciplined Youthmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Undisciplined Youth and a Moral Panic in Independent India, Circa 1947‐1964

Wilkinson

2022

J Historical Sociology

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The undisciplined youth is one figure that is key to understanding the 1950s and 1960s in India.Politicians, officials, academics, youth leaders, and journalists developed and spread a discourse that imagined the collective behaviour of Indian youths as falling well below adult expectations of them in independent India. The imagery of the youth lacking in discipline was tied up with cycles of student unrest and the idea that the methods of protest used during the pre-independence period had wrongly continued into the post-independence period, but this discursive formation was often extended to include all Indian youths and it became translated into a long-term anxiety about the future of the newly established nation-state. These tropes about the undisciplined Indian youth became a symbol of the country's unresolved future. Unless the crisis of youth could be remedied, the narrative went, then the potentiality of Indian independence and its first generation of citizens could never be realised. This discourse took on a novel and distinctive shape during the initial years following Indian independence in 1947, it crystallised during the early 1950s, and there was a continued build-up of public concern that lasted throughout the 1960s.The undisciplined youth is one figure that is key to understanding the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s in India. Politicians, officials, academics, youth leaders, and journalists developed and spread a discourse that imagined the collective behaviour of Indian youths as falling well below adult expectations of them in independent India. The imagery of the youth lacking in discipline was tied up with cycles of student unrest and the idea that the methods of protest used during the pre-independence period had wrongly continued into the post-independence period, but this discursive formation was often extended to include all Indian youths and it became translated into a long-term anxiety about

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“…The narrative works, Pande writes, "not so much by arousing selfless compassion for a distant stranger, but by provoking the very opposite sentiment:" distancing the victim and 'othering' them as someone in need of special protection by a more powerful social group. 61 Whilst Pande is examining the nineteenth-century colonial context, this uneasy pairing of sympathy and disdain can be seen in some of the coverage surrounding broken rib cases in Britain, including that in the medical press. The Lancet, condemning the violent treatment of asylum patients in 1870, nevertheless described such patients as "unpleasant."…”

Section: The Role Of the Inquestmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bone

Wallis

2017

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum

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In ‘Bone’ Wallis shows how late-Victorian asylum doctors discussed and investigated bone fracture among asylum patients. Recounting the key contemporary explanations offered for such injuries, including violence by asylum attendants and the behaviour of patients themselves, this chapter goes on to explore how bones became the object of pathological investigation. It discusses the role of the coroner’s inquest and the post-mortem, as well as the role of new technologies that aimed to quantify the strength of bones. This chapter demonstrates that many asylum doctors found it difficult to conclusively prove that the bodies of asylum patients were fundamentally different to those of other people. The attention given to fractures in the asylum, though, is shown to have had practical effects on asylum care and administration.

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Phulmoni's body: the autopsy, the inquest and the humanitarian narrative on child rape in India

Cited by 21 publications

References 14 publications

Forensics, body and state power in South Asia: Recent interventions and their importance

Forensics, body and state power in South Asia: Recent interventions and their importance

The Undisciplined Youth and a Moral Panic in Independent India, Circa 1947‐1964

Bone

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