Nandini Bhattacharya
Professor of South Asia & Medical History

Email: nsbhatta@central.uh.edu

Nandini Bhattacharya is Professor in South Asian history and history of medicine. She trained in JNU (Delhi) for her first degrees in History and completed her PhD at UCL, London. Her expertise is in the histories of colonial science and medicine, urban history, and modern histories of consumption, within the broader paradigm of modern South Asian history. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She teaches courses on history of medicine, colonial Indian history, and global history.

Research

Her research queries have focused on the intersection of the state, colonial society, and the politics of science and medicine in modern India. Her first monograph, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India (2012) was the first scholarly work to historicize hill stations and tea plantations as colonial enclaves in modern India. It highlighted how two different colonial habitations were entangled in medical, official, and entrepreneurial policy and praxis to fundamentally transform the ecology and society of the eastern Himalayas.

Her second monograph is based on this project and titled Disparate Remedies: Making Medicines in Modern India (2023). Disparate Remedies examines the public cultures of medicine in the Indian subcontinent between 1870 and 1960. The book begins by discussing the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India when British-owned firms extended their sales into remote towns. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs competed with traditional remedies through side-by-side production of Western and Indian drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The emergent middle classes, the creation of a public sphere, and nationalist politics transformed the medical culture of modern India and generated conflict between Western and Indigenous medical systems and their practitioners. Uniquely engaging with the cultures of both consumption and production in the country, Disparate Remedies follows the evolution of medicine in colonial India as it confronted Indian modernity and changing public attitudes surrounding health and drugs.

Her other research interests include the social history of alcohol and comparative histories of migrant labor in the global South. Her research and pedagogy has been supported by several institutions including the Wellcome Trust (UK), Carnegie Trust (UK), Leverhulme Trust (UK), and the Science History Institute (USA).

Publications

Monograph: 

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles:

• "The Problem of Alcohol in Colonial India (c. 1907–1942)," Studies in History 2 (2017): 187-212. 
• "Between the Bazaar and the Bench: Making of the Drugs Trade in Colonial India, ca. 1900–1930," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1 (2016): 61-91.
• "From Materia Medica to the Pharmacopeia: Challenges of Writing the History of Drugs in India," History Compass 4 (2016): 131-139.
• "Leisure, economy and colonial urbanism: Darjeeling, 1835–1930," Urban History 3 (2013): 442-461.
• "The Logic of Location: Malaria Research in Colonial India, Darjeeling and Duars, 1900– 30," Medical History 2 (2011): 183-202.

Book Chapters:

• "Imperial Sanctuaries: the Hill Stations of Colonial South Asia," in Harald Fischer-Tine and Maria Framke (ed), Routledge Handbook of the History of Colonialism in South Asia (August 2021).