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‘Regarded, paid and housed as menials’: nursing in colonial India, 1900–1948

This article highlights the role of the colonial state in the ongoing stigmatization of the profession of nursing in India. The low status of nursing in India has long been ascribed to local culture, namely, caste and gender practices, which, it is often argued, made the acceptance of nursing as a career for young women impossible. My examination of interactions between the professional leadership and the state between 1900 and 1948, however, illustrates that in fact the inaction of the state meant that society's negative perceptions of nursing, whatever their origins, were entirely rational and reasonable. The state failure to attend to working conditions or to pay liveable wages meant that nursing was indeed a dirty, dangerous, low-status job, and that a number of nurses were forced to turn to prostitution. The dreadful conditions in which nurses were allowed to work in fact reinforced and validated the distaste many felt for the career of nursing, creating a longstanding legacy of stigma and low status for the profession in India. It is my contention that political discussion of the fortunes of nursing, throughout twentieth-century India, has remained overly focused on the issues of stigma and status, with insufficient focus on the more easily remedied issues of working conditions and pay.