Colonial Perspectives on Indigenous Medical Knowledge in Official and Missionary Records

Abstract

The historiography of medical pluralism on the Indian subcontinent has been of contested engagement between colonial administrative pragmatism‚ epistemological hegemony‚ and indigenous nationalist resistance․ This study will explore the changing representations‚ categorisations‚ and usages of customary medical knowledges of Ayurveda‚ Unani and Siddha in British official files and the Protestant missionary archive between 1822 and 1948․ Using archival material from the National Archives of India‚ the Punjab State Archives‚ the Haryana State Archives‚ and the digital repository Abhilekh Patal‚ as well as virtually the entire corpus of contemporary missionary periodicals‚ it argues that early nineteenth century utilitarian accommodation gave way to post-colonial bureaucratic institutionalisation․ The British East India Company established supplementary vernacular medical curricula at the Native Medical Institution (1822 to 1835) to economically address acute personnel shortages․ This pluralistic compromise was overturned by the institutional rise of the Anglicist party under Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education‚ when the Calcutta Medical College adopted allopathic and biomedically-based instruction․ Evangelical medical missions to the Zenana (private women's quarters) in India also recast native medical systems as theological threats and superstitions‚ which justified Christian proselytization․ Such metropolitan ideological uniformity‚ however‚ was repeatedly unsettled and shaken by local epidemiological disasters‚ such as the mass death by bubonic plague‚ cholera and the 1918 influenza pandemic․ Colonial authorities frequently turned to alternative avenues and subaltern forms of medical knowledge and practice at moments of crisis․ Ultimately‚ the political and linguistic mobilisation of native practitioners in the vernacular public sphere enabled the survival and modernization of customary medical systems‚ as popular pressures on the state led to the establishment of committees of inquiry such as the Koman‚ Usman‚ Bhore‚ and Chopra Committees‚ which cemented the structural‚ institutional‚ and regulatory foundations of contemporary India's two-tiered medical system․