{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,5,20]],"date-time":"2026-05-20T18:12:58Z","timestamp":1779300778366,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":36,"publisher":"BMJ","issue":"2","content-domain":{"domain":["bmj.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Med Humanities"],"accepted":{"date-parts":[[2021,10,11]]},"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2022,6]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo\u2019s <jats:italic>Mother India<\/jats:italic> (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo\u2019s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of \u2018international health\u2019 post-Versailles. <jats:italic>Mother India<\/jats:italic> provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a \u2018minor\u2019 and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can \u2018safely\u2019 harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo\u2019s representation of India as \u2018world-menace\u2019. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo\u2019s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt\u2019s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify <jats:italic>Mother India<\/jats:italic>\u2019s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space <jats:italic>and<\/jats:italic> in the \u2018humane\u2019 domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-political maturity at a time when Indian nationalism\u2019s organised challenge to Empire could not be gainsaid, <jats:italic>Mother India<\/jats:italic> urges a re-imagination of the political field as a battlefield where \u2018the enemy\u2019, construed as a problem of health, <jats:italic>will<\/jats:italic> kill. Building a case for continued imperial domination in the name of global health and immunity, the book\u2019s humiliating representation of colonial bodily habits, habitations and contagions aimed to undermine liberal imperialism, internationalism and Indian nationalism, all increasingly vocal after World War I.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1136\/medhum-2021-012247","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,22]],"date-time":"2021-11-22T13:20:13Z","timestamp":1637587213000},"page":"144-152","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1136\/crossmarkpolicy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":1,"title":["Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo\u2019s <i>Mother India<\/i>"],"prefix":"10.1136","volume":"48","author":[{"given":"Sandhya","family":"Shetty","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"English, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"239","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,22]]},"reference":[{"key":"2025092411360345000_48.2.144.1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Ahuja N , and Lal V . 2016. 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