Mitia Nath, PhD Candidate, recently published an article, "Public health as critique: examining the caste of filth and disease in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India," in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
The article's abstract reads: "Drawing on Dalit writer Kanwal Bharti’s 2019 translation of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), this essay argues that through the employment of a radical anti-caste reading practice, the original text yields a powerful critique of Hindu caste structures and Hindu supremacist ideologies that assume a new significance in contemporary India. An against-the-grain reading of Mayo’s emphasis on life and health as opposed to casteized purity, when unmoored from the author’s original intentions, offers a vision of public health that operates in conjunction with the social, and can be reclaimed to the advantage of the marginalized and dispossessed. In its emphasis on the impact of colonial modernity on marginalized lives in colonial India, the text finds an intriguing alignment with radical anti-caste politics. This solidarity between what is widely recognized as a colonialist critique on the one hand, and radical anti-caste thought on the other, I argue, is a reminder of the uneasy relationship between colonial politics, Hindu nationalism, and anti-caste politics that sought to use colonial rule to strategically counter Hindu supremacy."