Why is public health a neglected political and electoral question in India? This editorial discusses the historial background and potential contemporary issues at stake. Editorial (in Bengali), 9 May 2024. 

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of India’s public health infrastructure. Yet, public health issues remain missing from the electoral agenda of Indian political parties.

Welcome Re-Course is a collaborative project by a network of researchers, students and teachers across several European Universities who are part of EUniWell, the European University for Well-being. We inform inclusive research, pedagogy and practice around the welcome and inclusion of students from refugee, migrant and international backgrounds, supporting EUniWell‘s core mission to improve well-being within universities and society. For more information on EUniWell, please see our website:

www.euniwell.eu 

This training resource is available in English, French, German, Swedish, Italian and Spanish. It is available for download in all featured languages at the following website: www.euniwell.eu

Welcome Re-Course är ett samarbetsprojekt mellan forskare, studenter och lärare vid flera universiteten i EUniWell, the European University for Wellbeing. Vi bidrar till inkluderande forskning, pedagogik och praktik kring hur vi välkomnar och inkluderar studenter med internationell eller flykting-/ invandrarbakgrund, i linje med EUniWells kärnuppdrag att förbättra välbefinnandet inom universiteten och samhället i stort. För mer information om EUniWell, se vår webbsajt: www.euniwell.eu 

Detta utbildningsmaterial finns på engelska, franska, tyska, svenska, italienska och spanska. Det går att ladda ned på dessa språk från följande webbsida: www.euniwell.eu 

This article seeks to address a thematic thread that remains relatively less explored in historical disaster research – victimhood – through an analysis of publications by disaster relief funds and their supporters in the aftermath of the 1934 earthquake in Bihar in northern India. By examining the representations of victimhood, I aim to explore the historical significance of perceptions and constructions of victimhood in the late colonial period. Based on photographs, illustrations, and descriptions of suffering in images and texts, the article suggests that constructions of victimhood effectively relied on an imagery that contained, on the one hand, an absence of bodies, and on the other, a feminised anthropomorphization of suffering. The narratives underlying such depictions of earthquake victims are based on a constitution of victimhood that relied on contemporary historical and culturally founded imageries. The analysis of images and texts focuses on how representation of disaster victims effectively communicated suffering to audiences. I tentatively argue that historically and culturally founded tropes of what a victim constituted formed along two narratives of victimhood that appealed to a colonial and a nationalist readership respectively. These conceptualisations of victimhood formed the basis for collecting aid towards relief and reconstruction, rather than the loss of life, dispossession, social marginalisation, and displacement suffered by victims of the earthquake.

The aim of this paper is to discuss how new infrastructure interacts with human and non-human nature in local sites through in-depth historical research from western India during the 1860s and 1870s. The environmental implications of railway construction in colonial South Asia have foremost been raised in connection with deforestation and forest management practices. The arrival of railway construction in towns and rural areas throughout western India changed the environmental situation and local communities’ relations with resources and work during the decade of the 1860s, especially with the increased demand for cotton during the American Civil War. As previous research outlines, the railways fulfilled its purpose in enabling large-scale resource extraction through increased speed and capacity in trade, which changed human interaction with land and livelihoods. Against these larger transformations in land use, labour demands and resource extraction, this paper examines the social life of infrastructure in local sites through archival sources that document constructions, livelihoods, the work and perceptions of engineers, and contributions of workers along the railways. The planning and construction of railways and ancillary infrastructure such as roads, buildings, drainages and other sanitary facilities, were documented by engineers, colonial administrators and contractors in reports, photographs, memoranda, correspondence, diaries and accounts, where local societies and individuals feature in their everyday interaction with the railway. The paper highlights how the railways’ physical presence in the landscape changed social and spatial relations in terms of how societies related to local uses of resources, their interaction with land and livelihoods.

This socio-political history on the aftermath of the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake explores disaster aid, relief, and reconstruction and the questions they give rise to about class, communities and inequality. The book traces disaster responses across the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how they were embedded in political processes transcending the event of the earthquake. Aid, relief and reconstruction mirrored political agendas and ideas that articulated both changes and continuities by the colonial state, civil society and international organisations. The impact of the earthquake and aid in its wake varied widely according to social groups, ethnicity and gender in the aftermath. By studying the effects of the earthquake on communities directly affected and society, the author argues that we can come closer to an understanding of the role political, social and cultural factors held in shaping resilience to natural disasters.