Title: Menstruating Women in a Man’s Wor(l)d: Print, Gender, and Women’s Health in Colonial Assam
Description: When print made its entry into colonial Assam in the nineteenth century, it became the medium for creative engagements as well as non-belletristic writings. This talk looks at the intersectionality of gender, medicine, and print in colonial Assam with reference to ‘masculine’ (and I use the term here as an epistemological category) writings available in print. In this setting, as in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century west, women’s health was a reference to her reproductive health. The prevailing taboos regarding women’s bodies mutated into medical lore and menstruation became the frontier for most of these writers to exercise their “wisdom”. My focus is on onerous (and equally ambivalent) theories with regard to women’s bodies, perpetuation and lauding of women’s seclusion, prescriptions for health and hygiene, and simultaneous insistence in some on the necessity of care towards women. The literature of the time also emerged as alternative strategies to deal with women’s health owing to inequitable distribution of medical facilities. It is not surprising then that this group of writings also included certain creative accomplishments such as a manual for pregnant women translated into verse from a Bengali prose-text for easy retention by a listener-audience constituted by women.
Bio: Raktima Bhuyan teaches at the Department of English, Tezpur University. Her co-authored monograph Print Modernity in Colonial Assam (2023) is with Lexington Books. Her research interests are: visual culture, gender and medicine, and book history.
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