Structuring Plurality: Locality, Caste, Class and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Dispensaries

Abstract:Dispensaries in colonial South Asia have received scant attention in the historiography on colonial medicine in India. Those who have touched upon them have remarked on the pluralism and hybridity of the medicine practised in them. Yet these studies remain trapped within binarisms such as coloniser/colonised, science/tradition or Occident/Orient and fail to ask further questions about the structure of this medical pluralism. Why did colonial officials collaborate with some strains of indigenous healing while they rejected others outright? Asking this question also forces us to disaggregate categories such as 'indigenous medicine,' 'colonial medical establishment,' 'indigenous practitioners of western medicine' etc. I try to investigate here how categories such as locality, ethnicity and class structured the pluralism of the colonial dispensary practice.