Papers by Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
The phrase 'provincializing Europe' has become a mantra in postcolonial studies since Chakrabarty... more The phrase 'provincializing Europe' has become a mantra in postcolonial studies since Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000). But how is it possible to provincialize Europe when we argue, analyze, think, and oftentimes judge in a Western paradigm of norms and values? Sivaramakrishnan's As the World Ages is a brilliant demonstration of how such a history can be written.
Aging, COVID-19, and Resocializing Public Health
Current history, 2022
<jats:p>Many countries in the global South have rapidly aging populations. The COVID-19 pan... more <jats:p>Many countries in the global South have rapidly aging populations. The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially hard on older adults in these countries, who mainly depend on kin for care. The pandemic has shown that a recommitment to public investment in their well-being is needed.</jats:p>
A Roundtable on Old Age and History
Age is a useful category of historical analysis within the vibrant field of aging studies. But ag... more Age is a useful category of historical analysis within the vibrant field of aging studies. But age, especially “old age,” has remained marginal in the broader discipline of history, echoing the marginalization of older adults. This roundtable discussion brings together three scholars from different areas within the historical study of old age to define the field’s terms and map out some of its contours and potential future directions. Pat Thane is a social historian interested in old age in relation to gender, labor, inequality, andwelfare states, as well as the long arc of themeaning of old age in the West. Sociologist Stephen Katz draws on poststructuralist theory, feminism, and theories of materiality and embodiment in his historically informed work in critical gerontology. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s research in global public health and South Asian history brought her to the study of physiological old age as it intersects with social histories in the global South, critiquing Euroc...
Epilogue from Decolonization to Globalization
As the World Ages, 2018
Making Ageing a Global Agenda: India, China and Beyond
China Report, 2020
Demographic debates in the decades following the 1960s have shaped much of the discourse on popul... more Demographic debates in the decades following the 1960s have shaped much of the discourse on population ageing across the world. This paper traces these discourses and research agendas that led to the understanding of demographic transitions in the developed and developing world. The policies were mostly articulated by demographers from the US and ageing was seen more as a challenge for the West. The questions addressed in this paper are that apart from the predictable and unchanging vulnerabilities of ageing voiced earlier by anthropologists and social workers in the 1940–1950s, what were the new risks being articulated by development experts? Once a diffused ‘world’ agenda was articulated and largely left adrift without resources, what were its afterlives? How did experts in various parts of the world redeploy the global ageing agenda and plan to assert various other alignments? Where did China and India figure in this? The paper locates the debates on India and China in the afterl...
Genetics in medicine : official journal of the American College of Medical Genetics, Jan 14, 2018
The Gerontologist, 2016
Work is an important environment shaping the aging processes during the adult years. Therefore, t... more Work is an important environment shaping the aging processes during the adult years. Therefore, the cumulative and acute effects of work characteristics on late-life health deserve great attention. Given that population aging has become a global trend with ensuing changes in labor markets around the world, increased attention is paid to investigating the effects of the timing of retirement around the world and the macroeconomic benefits often associated with delaying retirement. It will be essential for societies with aging populations to maintain productivity given an aging workforce and for individuals it will be crucial to add healthy and meaningful years rather than just years to their lives. We first describe the available evidence about participation of older workers (65+) in the labor force in high, middle, and low-income countries. Second, we discuss the individual-level and societal influences that might govern labor-force participation of older adults. Thirdly, we review e...
American Journal of Public Health, 2011
With fears of global health epidemics (of reemerging infectious diseases) having escalated over t... more With fears of global health epidemics (of reemerging infectious diseases) having escalated over the past few decades, we must ask how we understand the diverse responses to such outbreaks. I explore a single event that merits revisiting—the 1994 outbreak of plague in Surat, the commercial capital of the Indian state of Gujarat—in an attempt to answer this question. I trace responses at various intersecting levels of public health and political authority—global, national, and local—as they interacted with each other and expressed specific political concerns and social anxieties during this outbreak.
American Journal of Public Health, 2012
The United Nations High Level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (... more The United Nations High Level Meeting on the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases (September 19–20, 2011) provided an opportunity to recast the current global health agenda and offered a formidable platform to mobilize political will for concerted action. We argue that the opportunity was missed because the World Health Organization (WHO) neglected the politics of process that are key to mobilizing political support for global noncommunicable disease policies. Instead, it focused on the implementation process. The lessons to be drawn from the summit are critical because the WHO is the key agency that will be expected in the near future to steer further discussions and debate on the noncommunicable disease agenda.
The Languages of Science, the Vocabulary of Politics: Challenges to Medical Revival in Punjab
Social History of Medicine, 2008
... Pratap Singh and Pandit Tara Singh, also belonged to various distinct, Hindu sectarian tradit... more ... Pratap Singh and Pandit Tara Singh, also belonged to various distinct, Hindu sectarian traditions that included Dhundia Jain groups, Udasin and ... For instance, Dhanvantri Utsav or Dhanwantri Festival was being widely observed by Vaid practitioners and by Vaid Sammellans or ...
Section III: Age Structure
This article explores several strands of ideas and tropes about age and aging that were articulat... more This article explores several strands of ideas and tropes about age and aging that were articulated by a new and entrepreneurial rank of social experts in India. These social experts, attempted to explain the rapid changes transforming a newly independent nation. The knowledge and narratives generated by these Indian social experts and administrators will be explored in this work at specific historical conjunctures, beginning with the 1940's when labor experts expressed anxieties about labor unrest, productivity and the breakdown of workers families; after Indian independence in the late 1940's-1950's amongst efforts to map, survey and regulate refugees and finally, by tracing discussions amongst Indian psychiatrists and social workers regarding the psychosocial pressures of climate and environment that were affecting various age groups in India in the 1950-60's.This work sug- gests that unlike in welfare debates in the west in the 1940-50's where aging began to ...
Health Inequalities in India : The Axes of Stratification
Spring/Summer 2008 • volume xiv, issue 2 On 25 January 2008, India’s first female president, Prat... more Spring/Summer 2008 • volume xiv, issue 2 On 25 January 2008, India’s first female president, Pratibha Patel, voiced an appeal on the eve of the country’s 59th Republic Day, echoing concerns about the need to reconcile economic growth with social inclusion in society. India’s impressive economic growth, she noted, was not yet allowing the underprivileged and disadvantaged sections of Indian society to find a place to enjoy “the sunshine of the country’s growth and development.”1 India’s galloping economic growth therefore clearly and urgently needs to be tempered by policies created to address concerns of equity and inclusiveness. Some of this disquiet is reflected in the low status of health achievements in India. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has convincingly argued that the health achievements of a given society are a better signal of social well being than any conventional macroeconomic measure.2 In addition to overall health achievements, how fairly health is distributed also provi...
Addressing the Health of the "Public" State Authority, Missionaries and Vaids in Punjab's Towns and Cities(circa 1880s- 1930s)
“To Understand All Life as Fragile, Valuable, and Interdependent”
Radical History Review, 2021
As old age garners more attention in the time of COVID-19, this roundtable discussion brings toge... more As old age garners more attention in the time of COVID-19, this roundtable discussion brings together scholars from three different areas within aging studies to define the field’s terms and map out some of its contours and potential future directions Stephen Katz draws on poststructuralist theory, feminism, and theories of materiality and embodiment in his historically informed work in critical gerontology Kavita Sivaramakrishnan’s research in global public health and South Asian history brought her to the study of physiological old age as it intersects with social histories in the global South, thus critiquing Eurocentric epistemologies of aging Pat Thane is a social historian interested in old age in relation to gender, labor, inequality, and welfare states, as well as the long arc of the meaning of old age in the West
COVID Roundtable
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Roles for community health workers in diabetes prevention and management in low- and middle-income countries
Cadernos de Saúde Pública
Diabetes prevalence is increasing worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC... more Diabetes prevalence is increasing worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), posing the need for improved detection and management strategies. Chronic disease models and lifestyle medicine provide structures for action. Community health workers (CHWs) can significantly contribute to chronic disease care if they are trained and integrated into low-resource health systems. Although most current CHWs worldwide are performing maternal/child health and infectious disease-related tasks, other programs involving CHWs for noncommunicable disease prevention and management are increasing. In this article, we discuss the advantages, challenges, and questions regarding possible roles assigned to CHWs in the prevention and management of diabetes. These roles include performing simple screening tests, implementing lifestyle/behavioral interventions, and connecting patients with alternatives to biomedicine. Specifically, CHWs can aid diabetes epidemiological surveillance by ...
Looking Sideways: Locating Epidemics and Erasures in South Asia
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
While focused on the United States, Rosenberg's work on epidemics offers a nuanced framing th... more While focused on the United States, Rosenberg's work on epidemics offers a nuanced framing that defines the stages and unfolding trajectories of epidemics. His writing is a good starting point to analyze the scope and challenges of epidemic historiography in South Asia. To redress its gaps, I have suggested an approach focused on writing histories of epidemics "sideways" and examined plague and influenza epidemics to situate the fluid politics of lived risks and marginality, moving away from dominant interpretations that have tried to characterize epidemics as finite and episodic.
Journal of Global History
This article focuses on the politics of epidemics, health and development in the years between tw... more This article focuses on the politics of epidemics, health and development in the years between two pandemics of influenza in India, the so-called ‘Asian’ flu (1957) and the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (1968). I explore how public health and risk-focused cosmologies were constructed about urban life, and anchored in economic priorities about development planning, industrial productivity, and self-reliance in a modernizing Indian nation. How were pandemics ‘seen’ and identified among urban populations that were already suffering from endemic risks? Were they viewed as a continuum of local, natural hazards or through wider geopolitical insecurities? The influenza crises were characterized by incapacitation and absenteeism from work rather than high mortality rates in Indian cities, causing worries about industrial plans. The Indian state intervened minimally, and articulated ideas and rhetoric about individual responsibility and ‘cooperative citizenship’ that set the stage for later manifestations...
An irritable state: the contingent politics of science and suffering in anti-cancer campaigns in South India (1940–1960)
BioSocieties
This article traces the making of anti-cancer campaigns in South India. Set at the cusp of decolo... more This article traces the making of anti-cancer campaigns in South India. Set at the cusp of decolonization, it explores how provincial physicians and women activists framed cancer care in the 1940s and 1950s. It offers insights into the argumentative, contingent ways in which public health concerns were framed and mobilized in Indian cities between a middle class public, medical experts and state agency. These cancer campaigns and local health debates have been neglected because historians have tended to focus on national level, political visions of health, on debates regarding international aid, transfer of medical technology, and targeted disease control programs. This has also shaped and limited how we have understood the complex, changing meanings and expectations of health and development in newly decolonized societies such as India. Analyzing the activist campaigns and writings of Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi an influential physician, renowned Women’s Indian Association leader, and legislator, and tracing the making of urban, anti-cancer networks, I argue that cancer care campaigns both invoked and challenged nationalist and developmental priorities, and questioned assumptions about what were termed as ‘normative’ diseases and health risks in India. Even though they spoke of the curative, technoscientific and specialized aspects of cancer treatment and urged its provision in local hospitals, they also encouraged the state and philanthropists to assume moral responsibilities for care and chronic suffering. They built on contemporary social and political metaphors, especially Tamil cultural representations of women. These ideas created emerging spaces for debates through multiple discursive ambits that emerged while trying to articulate and balance ‘needs’ that were seen as dichotomous and competing between managing population wide, curable diseases and the needs of a vocal, minority of advocates supporting cancer care. These debate were no doubt also limited by the visions of middle-class women, urban philanthropy, and engagements with male political leaders, and health officials.
Uploads
Papers by Kavita Sivaramakrishnan