A Global Citizen: Three Doctors, Three Empires, and One Subcontinent*
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Modern Asian Studies , () pp. –. © The Author(s), . Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/./), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work. doi:./SX First published online November To Be or Not To Be … a Global Citizen: Three doctors, three empires, and one subcontinent* MARGRET FRENZ University of Stuttgart Email: [email protected] Abstract This article investigates the circular intra- and transimperial movements of medical experts from colonial India in three imperial settings. The analysis of the trajectories of José Camillo Lisboa, Paramananda Mariadassou, and Mary Poonen Lukose highlights, first, how crucial freedom of movement—not only between parts of the same empire, but also across empire borders and between their metropoles as well as their colonies—was for individuals; secondly, how questions of citizenship, the recognition of degrees and certificates, and notions of gender, race, class, and place of origin played a role in enabling or preventing Indians living in Portuguese, French, or British India from studying or working elsewhere; and thirdly, how this in turn had an effect on their potential social mobility, which depended on the historical contingency of time and place, and the opportunities and limitations in these contexts. The article argues that through their chosen careers and their sociopolitical activities they expanded conventional notions of citizenship and lived as global citizens. * Acknowledgements: I am particularly grateful to John Darwin, Festo Mkenda, Claire Phillips, Gopinath Ravindran, and MAS’s anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions. Earlier versions of this article were presented during my fellowship at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Nantes and at one of my Historikertag sections. My sincere thanks go to staff members at the consulted libraries and archives across India, Portugal, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany for their generous help and support. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.39.219, on 04 Oct 2021 at 01:38:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X20000256 MARGRET FRENZ Introduction Studies abound on how European colonial powers influenced and shaped the regions of India they colonized. Some also include the relationship between the metropolis and the colony. Rarely, however, do they take into account comparative perspectives of how Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, and British regulations allowed or hindered exchange or movement between the variously governed many—not one!—colonial Indias.1 Thus, much research and analysis have gone into understanding and interpreting intra-imperial relationships, whereas transimperial connections and social, economic, political, and cultural joint ventures across empire borders have received less attention. Many Indians, though, continued to move across the subcontinent, despite regulations that channelled, and sometimes restricted, their movements between different regions controlled by the Portuguese, French, or British in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 Movement within the Indian subcontinent remained significant, despite the tendency of the colonial states to emphasize the links between the metropolis and the colony, and the barriers being established between Portuguese, French, and British territories and the semi-autonomous princely states of the subcontinent. Analysing the trajectories of individuals and families, I argue, highlights how vital personal, professional, and geopolitical entanglements (dis-) connecting Portuguese, French, British, and princely India were, despite the often-cited competition and rivalry between the European powers striving for domination. Transformations of interdependencies and impediments over time are reflected in the ways in which state policies and measures impacted on people’s lives. My interest is in examining 1 One of the few exceptions is B. Moore (ed.), Colonial Empires Compared. Britain and the Netherlands, –, Ashgate, Aldershot, . A more general, chronological overview of empires is provided by J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, , which also includes notes on empires active on the Indian subcontinent. Recent comparative perspectives have included work on empires in different world regions, such as M. B. Jerónimo and A. C. Pinto (eds), The Ends of European Colonial Empires: Cases and Comparisons, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, ; R. Gardella and J. Perry, Classical Roman and Chinese Empires Compared: Parallel Worlds, Routledge, London, . Sanjay Subrahmanyam writes of the many Asias: S. Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia, or Many?’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. , no. , , pp. –. 2 See Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia, or Many?’, pp. and , where he emphasizes that ‘Not everything was connected, and not all of the time.’ Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.39.219, on 04 Oct 2021 at 01:38:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X20000256 THREE DOCTORS, THREE EMPIRES how individuals were able to move with ease along connective arteries and/or how they negotiated restrictions that threatened their aspirations in life. To what extent were their experiences of ‘sailing through’ or being impeded related to questions of gender, race, class, and caste? What actions did they take to circumvent or overcome hurdles in their paths? By exploring the intersections of empire, profession, and citizenship, I reflect on the opportunities and challenges encountered by medically trained Indians across three imperial settings on the subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What unifies their trajectories over time and space is their ambiguous position in imperial societies as neither entirely privileged nor entirely marginalized. Rather, I contend, they were part of a subaltern elite, like Indian lawyers, engineers, or scribes, who had access to a certain range of benefits such as education, but only to some extent and only up to a certain point.3 They were frequently quite firmly ‘shown their place’ when it came to specific positions or promotions. Nevertheless, many of them stood their ground professionally and stretched confines imposed by colonial governments through enacting citizenship in creative ways. This article investigates the circular intra- and transimperial movements of three individuals hailing from different parts of the subcontinent. All three desired to study and practise medicine, and they shared a passion for their profession, though they did so in different spaces at different times. They also shared an ‘affirmative articulation of public subjectivity’4 through their sociopolitical activities. The analysis of their trajectories sheds light, first, on how freedom of movement was crucial for aspiring individuals—not only between parts of one and the same empire, but also across empire borders and between their metropoles as well as their colonies; secondly, how questions of citizenship, the recognition of degrees and certificates, and issues of race and origin played a role in enabling or preventing Indians living in Portuguese, French, or British India from studying or working in the locality of their choice; thirdly, how this in turn had an effect on their ability to practise medicine, on their potential social mobility, and, finally, on how they enacted citizenship as sociopolitical pursuit. All of these factors were interrelated. They depended on the historical contingency 3 For a discussion of the concept of subaltern elites, see M. Frenz, Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World. The Goan Experience, c. –, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, , esp. pp. –. 4 R. Asen, ‘A Discourse Theory of Citizenship’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. , no. , pp. –,p.. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.39.219, on 04 Oct 2021 at 01:38:01, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X20000256 MARGRET FRENZ of time and place as well as the opportunities and limitations in these— intersecting—local, regional, and global contexts. The comparative setting of this article shows that processes of professionalization in the colonies worked in similar ways across empires, even though details and individual trajectories might have differed significantly. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such processes of professionalization occurred across imperial boundaries and led to increasingly standardized training in the professions, including engineering, the law, and medicine.5 Professionals were supposed to have absorbed whatever they needed to know about their métier, to be autonomous, and to take the idea of service seriously.6 In British India and the princely states, debates on the medical profession in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were characterized by controversies as to whether so-called