Book Review

摘要

When, at 13, I faced a stark choice in my home, ‘it’s either those white mice or me’(I politically opted for the ‘me’, in this case, my mother), I had no inkling that threedecades on from my reluctant returning of the cute murids to their source of immediate supply,a classmate’s father working at the Pasteur Institute in my then hometown of Coonoor in theNilgiri hills of southern India, I would be reviewing a book that deals in significant partwith the origins and of just that institution and its like inother parts of the country. One knew little of the Pasteur Institute in those days, just thatit was there, its workings largely opaque to the humdrum of activity that marked the quotidianhours of the little hill station serving as its point of domicile. The opacity in question,author Pratik Chakrabarti tells us, was characteristic, engendered in elitism a centurybefore, a laboratory at considerable remove from the colonial conurbations in the plains wherethe need for medical relief was disproportionately greater, subject only to the whims ofmedical officers and researchers who claimed a moral imperative in developing cures fordiseases that were seen as both tropical and of a potentially epidemic nature.