Medical Knowledge of the Body: Colonial Encounters (original) (raw)

It was a call from the landowner's home. Dr. Aadam Aziz has reached the patient's room, a spacious, ill-lit bedchamber. The landowner Ghani asks him to examine his daughter. Dr. Aziz looks around. In front of him is an enormous white bedsheet, held on by two " lady wrestlers, " with a crude circular hole about seven inches in diameter. Through that hole, in the months to come in his recurrent visits, Dr. Aziz would inspect various parts of the body of Naseem Ghani, his patient. In his mind, he would form a " badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts, " that would haunt him day in and day out, until one day he proposes and marries that girl. He comes to own that body. Yet, is it he who gets that girl, or is it the 'sly civility' (a term used elsewhere in a different context) of the landowner Ghani that procures the eligible young doctor for his daughter? And does Aziz really own that body? Did he win the battle? The battle against her purdah, against the religious tutor of their children, the battle that started on their second night when he asked her to move " like a woman. " The shriek, the terror, the weeping trickled down the fissures of his victory. Is Dr. Aziz his own liberal, Western self anymore? Doesn't it fracture when he violently removes the purdah or drives away the tutor by his ears? These are events culled from Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1980). Our paraphrase of them may act as a metonym of the encounter we are about to discuss: that of the colonizer and the colonized at the site of the medical knowledge of the body. Like every other figure of speech, this metonym brings out the situation half-heartedly, a