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Srirupa Prasad. Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1890-1940: Contagions of Feeling. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. x + 142 pp. Ill. $95.00 (978-1-137-52071-5).
In the Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, Srirupa Prasad sets out to identify the part played in the nationalist discourse of late-colonial India by "affect," a term she equates with emotion and feeling. Drawing on affect theory, she develops this concept in the four themes that underpin her narrative. In the first of these, focusing on "alimentary anxieties," her discussion ranges over issues of nationhood, nutrition, and hunger, passing from everyday concerns about food adulteration to the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1943, before turning in the following chapter to Gandhi's notions of bodily purity and corporeal self-regulation. A third chapter considers "the ethic of care" (p. 71), expressed through a range of women's autobiographical writings in their reflections on domesticity and well-being, while a fourth assesses the visual culture of medical advertising and its promise of the "enchantments" of empire and nation. Through these topics the book seeks to explore "ideas, emotions,...