Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics

This book demarcates and records subaltern therapy as a distinct realm that both interacts with and resists statist medicine. It provides a more integrated approach that places the subaltern subject and subaltern therapy in an ongoing and historical relationship with state-sanctioned and elite forms of medical practice. Focusing on those who exist and practice in the shadow of statist medicine, examining how they operate, and how they experience being in this position, it offers a means to understand how subaltern practice has evolved and changed over time, and how it has related in ever-changing ways to other forms of medicine and healing. The result shows that there is considerable fluidity in this, so that a type of practice may be elite in one context, subaltern in another. Contributors examine ‘statist medicine’ from a critical perspective, the forms that subaltern therapy assumes, and their logics, as well as the problem of transition, one of the central concerns of subaltern historiography. Finally, other forms of diverse therapeutic practice are discussed, which continue to enjoy mass popular support in South Asia to this day. Addresses an area of research that is expanding rapidly among anthropologists and historians today and including contributions by some of the leading figures in South Asian history, this book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of medicine and society, history and South Asian Studies.