Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India
Family, Market and Homoeopathy

Interrelated histories of colonial medicine, market and family reveal how Western homeopathy was translated and made vernacular in colonial India.

Shinjini Das (Author)

9781108420624, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 March 2019

304 pages, 16 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.64 kg

'In its cultural location in the colony, where it was believed that homeopathy was an indigenous 'Hindu' medicine, Shinjini Das' book recounts the fascinating story of the domestication and vernacular lives of this German school of medicine. Blending local histories of medical practice with the social histories of family and family-owned businesses in Calcutta, this book on the Bengali career of homeopathy is one that has been long waiting to be written.' Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Science, Calcutta

Conceptualised in opposition to 'orthodox' medicine, homoeopathy, a western medical project originating in eighteenth-century Germany, was reconstituted as vernacular medicine in British Bengal. India went on to become the home of the largest population of users of homoeopathic medicine in the world. Combining insights from the history of colonial medicine and the cultural histories of family in British India, Shinjini Das examines the processes through which western homoeopathy was translated and indigenised in the colony as a specific Hindu worldview, an economic vision and a disciplining regimen. In tracing the localisation of German homoeopathy in a British Indian province, this book analyses interactions between Calcutta-based homoeopathic family firms, disparate contributors to the Bengali print market, the British colonial state and emergent nationalist governments. The history of homoeopathy in Bengal reveals myriad negotiations undertaken by the colonised peoples to reshape scientific modernity in the subcontinent.

Introduction: 'A growing scandal under British rule': families, market and the vernacular
1. A heterodoxy between institutions: bureaucracy, print-market and family firms
2. A family of biographies: colonial lives of a Western heterodoxy
3. A science in translation: medicine, language, identity
4. Healing the home: indigeneity, self-help and the Hindu joint family
5. Colonial law, electoral politics and a homeopathic public
Epilogue: a familiar science.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], Asian history [HBJF]