Situating Medicine: New Directions Conference, 5-6 June 2014
Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
Panel: Indigenous Knowledge, Power and the
Everyday
ABSTRACTS
David Hardiman, University of Warwick
Miracle Cures for a Suffering Nation: Sai Baba of Shirdi
Sai Baba of Shirdi, who died in 1918, was raised as a Muslim but is today revered as a
Hindu saint. One of his most important perceived qualities was his ability to provide
miraculous cures for his devotees – an effect that has continued after his death. It is
argued in this paper that such an emphasis on healing the sick by saintly figures in the
Hindu tradition is a relatively modern phenomenon. Earlier, while such figures were
renowned for their miracles, healing played a very minor part in this. In general, their
miracles were designed to worst religious rivals, and to enable them to speak truth to
power. In the modern era, however, saintly figures of this sort can gain a reputation
through healing in a way that is depicted as being beyond the comprehension of modern
medical science. In this, such people are seen as providing living evidence of the
superiority of Indian civilization and its religious beliefs. This is a move that became
entangled with nationalist sentiments, so that getting the better of the 'English' doctor
became a means to reveal the limited scope of Western science and culture. Although this
appears to suggest that many Indians have rejected the biopolitics associated with western
modernity (as defined by Michel Foucault), it is argued that there are certain elements to
such biopolitics that are central to this whole process. The article illustrates this through a
study of Sai Baba – a village holyman who was taken up by the Indian middle classes and
made into a pan-Indian figure, with a now global presence.
David Arnold, University of Warwick
‘How to Murder a Resident: Poison, Politics and India’s Toxic Transition, 1870-1914’
On 9 November 1874 an apparent attempt was made to poison Colonel Robert Phayre, the
British Resident (Political Agent) to the western Indian state of Baroda, allegedly by
Malharao the Gaekwar, or ruler. The poisoning can be situated within a long history of
contestation over control of the state and of poison practices among India’s princely rulers.
But it also represents one of the first major attempts in British India to establish scientific
evidence for poisoning (in this instance arsenic and crushed diamonds) and demonstrates
British concern about poisoning as a political instrument. The Baroda episode also
anticipates a shift away from individual cases of homicidal poisoning to a wider social and
environmental engagement with the governance of toxicity—in everyday items of
consumption and use, in industrial processes and urban localities, and in common
criminality. This perceptual and administrative shift (India’s ‘toxic transition’), largely
complete by 1914, further illustrates the value of seeing poison as a form of indigenous
knowledge and aberrant medicine.
Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania
Whence Came the Devi? The Story of Mrs Duncan, the Bengali Goddess of Cholera
The eponymous Devi arrived, for a second time, in 1987. Her first coming had been in
1922, but decades of Rationalist and Marxist dismissal had buried her deep in the bowels of
the colonial and mnemonic archives. The second coming signalled a radical change of
South Asian historiographic mood. Ranajit Guha had made the first efforts to resurrect the
radical gods of peasant politics, but it was David Hardiman who acted as shaman to raise
the Devi, in all her radicalism and ambiguity. Since then, the power of the old gods has
continued to grow once again. David Arnold has seen in them a peculiarly South Asian and
subaltern way of responding to epidemics. Dipesh Chakrabarty has found in them the limits
of rationalist historiography and the homogenizing reach of global capital. Goddesses,
vampires and many other supernatural beings have frequently become symbols of the
trenchantly local, the unmistakably vernacular and the very antitheses of the cosmopolitan,
especially in Histories of Medicine. Using the history of Ola Bibi, the Bengali cholera
goddess, I want to interrupt this reification of the local. By recovering the forgotten historical
identity of the goddess prior to her deification and historicizing the process of her
deification, I seek to restore the promiscuity of the transnational and the transrational. My
hope is to thereby show up the ‘translocality’ of the ‘local’ and its enchanting
cosmopolitanisms.