An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Poonam Bala (Visiting Research Fellow 2022; Cleveland State University)
‘Rethinking’ science and medicine: the role of Indian intellectuals in colonial India
The encounters and engagements between Indian medicine and western biomedicine in colonial India were marked by processes of contestation and accommodation with implications for health and health policies in colonial as well as in post-colonial India. In colonial India, these encounters enabled new paradigms and the ways in which disease, medicine and health were to be perceived by the local populations and colonial authorities. Ideas of medical authority, power, race, gender, existence of plural traditions unfolded as a result. The rise of the middle classes, the educated elites, or the ‘colonised elite’ as influential patrons of medical knowledge and as purveyors of ‘new’ knowledge of science and medicine, was a significant outcome of colonial imperatives. Placed in this context, my continuing research focusses on the manner in which the western educated Indian intellectuals and medical patrons sought to re-define and re-structure existing scientific and medical paradigms. Various culturally-sensitive therapeutic approaches were adopted to indigenise western medical epistemiologies; given this, the foundation of a ‘new’ and modern India could not be ruled out.
Please note that this talk will be online-only. Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/86535202023
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