데올랄리: 식민지 군대의 요양과 재활공간

Abstract

This research examines Deolali, a British military convalescent and rehabilitation base in colonial India during the First World War, as a site where medicine, administration, and ideology converged to reinforce imperial control. Rather than a humanitarian institution, Deolali embodied the moral and political contradictions of the British Empire, transforming welfare and healing into mechanisms of colonial domination. Using primary sources such as the Papers of Sir Walter Lawrence and correspondence from the India Office Records, this paper reveals how British authorities utilized medical welfare as propaganda to legitimize empire. Under the guise of rehabilitation, the empire managed Indian soldiers’ bodies and minds to sustain its authority while projecting moral superiority. The treatment of psychological trauma exposes the racial hierarchy within military medicine. Whereas British soldiers’ “shell shock” was recognized as a medical condition, Indian soldiers’ suffering was dismissed as moral weakness or racial inferiority. Many were repatriated to India without treatment, transferring responsibility from the metropole to the colony and erasing their trauma from imperial visibility. Similarly, the distribution of prosthetics reveals how technological and fiscal pragmatism shaped imperial policy. Despite the availability of advanced metal limbs such as the Desoutter prosthesis in Britain, Indian amputees were provided cheap wooden limbs produced locally. The establishment of a prosthetic workshop in Deolali was framed as self-sufficiency but primarily reduced imperial costs and reinforced dependence. Rehabilitation at Deolali emphasized discipline over recovery. Convalescent depots functioned as training sites to reimpose obedience rather than spaces of healing. British officers were preferred supervisors, reflecting the belief that Indian soldiers required control, not care. The paternalistic rhetoric of a “father–son” relationship between Britain and India further disguised inequality, presenting minimal welfare as imperial benevolence. Ultimately, Deolali symbolizes the empire’s transformation of welfare into control and of care into surveillance. The colonial state used medicine to mask violence, exporting the suffering of Indian soldiers while claiming moral responsibility. By converting trauma, disability, and rehabilitation into instruments of imperial power, Deolali reveals how colonial modernity internalized domination through the language of compassion. The site thus stands as a historical microcosm of the empire’s self-contradiction, a space where healing became a form of governance and welfare an ideology of rule.