Main description:

This volume interrogates the foundational categories that have come to define medical science in modern South Asia. It seeks to probe issues such as what constitutes the 'medical', in which context, and who defines it. This is achieved through case studies that range from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, from colonial Bengal and British Burma to present-day Andaman Islands and Ladakh.

By examining the close interactions between political authorities, corporeal knowledge, and objects of governance in a sustained manner, the domains of the medical and the non-medical are revealed to be more blurred and porous than apparent. This provides us with new perspectives on the co-production of medicine and social worlds by actors and agencies in specific times and places.

Contents:

Rohan Deb Roy and Guy N.A. Attewell: Introduction: Locating the Medical
I. Production of the Medical
1: Durba Mitra: Sociological Description and the Forensics of Sexuality
2: Chandak Sengoopta: Treacherous Minds, Submissive Bodies: Corporeal Technologies and Human Experimentation in Colonial India
3: Sudipta Sen: Confessions of the Unfriendly Spleen: Medicine, Violence, and That Mysterious Organ of Colonial India
II. Enactments of the Medical
4: Jonathan Saha: State Medicine or Medical State? A Prison Epidemic in Colonial Burma, 1881
5: Vishvajit Pandya and Madhumita Mazumdar: "Dr. Kar, I presume!": 'Medical' Narratives from the Jarawa Tribal Reserve
III. Rethinking Disconnections and Continuities
6: Clare Anderson: The Making of an Eclectic Archive: Epistemologies of Global Knowledge in the Papers of J.P. Walker (1823-1906)
7: Calum Blaikie: Absence, Abundance, and Excess: Substances and Sowa Rigpa in Ladakh since the 1960s
8: James H. Mills: Colonizing Cannabis: Medication, Taxation, Intoxication, and Oblivion, c. 1839-1955
IV. Contours of the Medical
9: Shubha Ranganathan: Re-thinking the 'Medical' through the Lens of the 'Indigenous': Narratives from Mahanubhav Healing Shrines in Maharashtra, India
10: Projit Bihari Mukharji: Vernacularizing Political Medicine: Locating the Medical betwixt the Literal and the Literary in Two Texts on the Burdwan Fever, Bengal c. 1870s
11: David Arnold: Technology and Health in Late Colonial India
Mark Harrison: Afterword: Making 'the Medical'
Notes on Editors and Contributors
Index