Structuring Plurality: Locality, Caste, Class and Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Dispensaries

Abstract

Dispensaries in colonial South Asia have received scant attention in the historiography on colonial medicine in India. Those who have touched upon them have remarked on the pluralism and hybridity of the medicine practised in them. Yet these studies remain trapped within binarisms such as coloniser/ colonised, science/tradition or Occident/Orient and fail to ask further questions about the structure of this medical pluralism. Why did colonial officials collaborate with some strains of indigenous healing while they rejected others outright? Asking this question also forces us to disaggregate categories such as 'indigenous medicine, ' 'colonial medical establishment, ' 'indigenous practitioners of western medicine 'etc. I try to investigate here how categories such as locality, ethnicity and class structured the pluralism of the colonial dispensary practice. Since the appearance of David Arnold's Colonizing The Body in 1993, an impressive body of scholarship has developed on the medical history of South Asia. Yet there remains very little work on specific medical institutions. The little that is available in this regard tends to focus on Hospitals and Asylums.1 Dispensaries, on the contrary, have hardly been investigated by historians of medicine. Arnold provided a brief sketch of the role of dispensaries with special reference to those of the Madras Presidency.2 In the following year Mark Harrison commented on the dispensaries of