Dis-locating Subaltern Therapeutics

Abstract

AbstractThe article is about totka chikitsha, a particular type of subaltern therapeutics widely recognized in northern and eastern South Asia. These simple recipes often circulated through transient encounters, physical or mediatized, between strangers. During the colonial era, government employment and the traveling that it required made many Bengalis in clerical jobs particularly authoritative in totka therapeutics. Though this mode of therapy was seen as an alternative to the increasingly commoditized medical market, anticonsumerism also became a discursive frame within which certain sections of the medico-print market appropriated totkas. My discussion of the colonial history of totka therapeutics is also intended as a critique of the persistent “localism” that haunts any attempt to engage, whether academically or practically, with subaltern therapeutics. I insist that we must historicize the local, the same way we now historicize the global.