Nisargopchar Ashram: Gandhi’s Legacy and Public Health in Contemporary India

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a staunch advocate for nature cure. He promoted the use of earth, air, sunlight, water and diet not only to treat medical problems but also as an integral feature of a programme for comprehensive public health reform. As such, Gandhi conceptualised healthcare as an encompassing, biomoral project designed to produce Swaraj in the broadest sense of the term. Nature cure was, in other words, fundamental to sarvodaya as a form of praxis. This essay focusses on Gandhi’s establishment of Nisargopchar, a nature cure ashram in the Uruli Kanchan village, and the conceptualisation of the ashram within the framework of the constructive programme and rural development more broadly. This focus not only highlights fundamental tensions and contradictions of social class within the Gandhian project but also sheds light on the way in which Gandhi’s vision of biomoral reform provides a perspective on how these contradictions and tensions, which are especially visible in contemporary India, reflect larger, more encompassing global problems of consumption, development and progress measured in terms of material wealth.

The Census of 1840

This chapter discusses developments relating to the 1840 census. In the course of the 1810s, gazettes and popular almanacs full of numerical data appeared, and the teaching of arithmetic in the United States was transformed. Thus, statistical data and the capacity to understand them become indispensable to anyone who claimed to speak seriously about national affairs. The growing public interest in “moral statistics,” on the poor and disabled, was fed by the growth of the movement for public health reform. This trend was visible in the 1840 census, which was the first to be carried out under the direction of a “Superintendent of the Census” now with his own staff. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the politicization of the statistical debate on slavery and the defense of erroneous statistics on insanity among free blacks by pro-slavery politicians fighting abolitionism, as well as the rise of statistical experts.