Urban Histories of Anatomy Science in India

This paper inquires into the social status and agentive capacity of a dead woman in early twentieth Bombay by studying the competing claims to ownership over her body for dissection. The two competing parties were 1) a group of British colonial women doctors who wished to dissect her body for research and 2) a local Indian mortuary charity that contested the dissection. In 1913, the dead body of Manoobai Chand, identified as a “Mahomedan homeless mendicant,” was dissected at the Cama Hospital for Women in Bombay City. This act of dissection led to protests by a Sunni Muslim burial charity that assisted the poor with burial rituals. Given that bodies of women were hard to access for dissection, and that the Cama Hospital was run by women doctors, what role did Manoobai’s death play in the tension between an imperial narrative of medical progress and the ritual sanctity of a subaltern woman’s body? This paper draws upon both colonial period archives and the oral histories of contemporary mortuary charities in present-day Mumbai, to study epistemic shifts in death practices by understanding the colonial era conflict between scientific “progress” and the ritualized female body.