A workshop was held at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Warwick on
7-8 May 2009 on the subject ‘Situating the Subaltern in South Asian Medical History’. It was organised by David Hardiman through the Centre for the History of Medicine in the
Department of History. The aim was to set out the terms and conditions for a field of study that can set itself apart from most of the existing studies in South Asian medial history, which focus either on the history of biomedicine, particularly colonial biomedicine, or the classical systems of Ayurvedic, Unani Tibb, and Siddha as practised by elite South Asian physicians.
Ayurveda, Unani Tibb and Siddha are seen principally to be humoral systems of medicine.
They were augmented under British colonial rule by modern scientific medicine, or biomedicine, that in India is known generally as ‘allopathic’ or ‘English’ medicine. Even today, this imported medical system has won only patchy acceptance, and is still hardly available for large numbers of people, either on grounds of cost or because of lack of facilities. Indeed, Ayurveda and Unani – in their more erudite, textually grounded forms – have been, and still are, largely inaccessible for the mass of the people. This situation has allowed for a range of healing practices to flourish alongside each other. There are unqualified or so-called ‘quack’ healers who mix allopathy and popular remedies together eclectically, local bonesetters and masseurs, cauterisers, village midwives, travelling mendicants with their cures, priest at healing shrines, faith healers, diviners, exorcists, and herbalists. Many cures are carried out within the home, using charms, rituals, and plant-based remedies. For the purposes of this workshop this was defined as the
‘subaltern’ realm of health and healing.
In his opening remarks, David Hardiman pointed out that since Subaltern Studies I appeared nearly thirty years ago, it has received much praise as well as criticism. It has also evolved and has been deployed by many historians in very different ways, so that it is hard to now distinguish any obvious ‘subaltern’ positions. Many have sought to write the obituary of Subaltern Studies, and it might be asked why we still using it as a frame for analysis. He argued that the history of medicine is an area which may both show that the exercise not only has life in it yet, but in fact is still very necessary. As people who study the history and anthropology of medicine and healing in South Asia, we are well aware of the gross inequalities of access to safe and reliable health care in South Asia. We see people suffering and dying because doctors treat the poor with contempt. We see health provision being continually misused for political ends. We see health policies by the state that ignore realities on the ground. We see a huge growth of so-called indigenous medicine – in particular Ayurveda – that markets itself with the most questionable claims for both efficacy and antiquity. There is much to anger us, and he felt that such anger might inform our engagement with the health care that exists for the subordinated people of South Asia – the ‘subaltern’. In the process, we engage ourselves in a critical dialogue with much modern development driven by the state – what the BJP, memorably, defined as ‘Shining India’ – bringing out what it entails for the mass of the people.
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The papers (in order of presentation)
Vishvajit Pandya, in his paper titled ‘ “Pain in all the wrong Places”: The experience of biomedicine among the Ongee of Little Andaman Islands’, examined the way in which an
Ongee family of the Little Andamans experienced state-provided biomedical treatment.
Classed as a Primitive Tribal Group by the Indian state, the Ongee have been the object of welfare policies that have been frequently insensitive and neglectful of their needs. After setting out the history of contact between the colonial and then the Indian state and the
Ongee, Pandya focused on the story of a young Ongee man called Jain who had fallen sick.
His father Totanagey, who had spent his life trying to mediate between his Ongee community and the medical workers, took him for treatment. The doctors treated them in a callous and uncomprehending manner, branding Jain as a ‘drunkard’ and incarcerating him in the mental wing of their hospital. Jain’s real issue, which appears to have been sexual abuse by a nurse as a child, went unaddressed. Totanagey eventually lost faith in the system that he had tried to serve with such diligence. All of this, Pandya argues, shows that the Andaman islanders continue to be treated by Indian state employees as ‘primitives’ who are considered to be by nature ignorant, deviant, sexually transgressive and morally corrupt. Their experience of illness and expression of pain is dismissed without understanding or indeed any diagnosis of value. In such a situation, the outside medical practitioner never ‘hears’ the voice of the subaltern. In the discussion, when questioned as how typical this history was, Pandya said that this was not the only such case he had come across in the records or in his fieldwork and that it revealed systemic problems with medical care for the Ongee.
The next paper was by Gabriel Alex, titled ‘Narikuravar folk medicine’. The focus here was on a system of healing practised Narikuravar community of Tamil Nadu. This group has an extremely low status and is largely marginalized and heavily stigmatised. In the past they were branded as a ‘criminal tribe’. One of the occupations of the Narikuravar has been that of healers and fortune-tellers; they are specifically famous for treating impotence and infertility. The paper described how, despite their poverty and supposed criminality, they are popularly believed in Tamil Nadu to possess great strength, health, beauty and sexual potency. They become an embodiment of the rural and ‘natural’, and are seen in this respect to resist the debilitating effects of modern civilisation and city life. In recent years, some Narikuravar healers have exploited these perceptions to establish thriving practices as healers and suppliers of aphrodisiacs. Some go out as itinerant hears, others have established shops to which patients travel. Alex has found that there is great diversity in their practice and in the remedies they use. Healing is in some respects a performance, with the healer projecting an image of vigour and strength, wearing a lungi, turban, necklaces, perhaps a tiger skin, and with a bare tattooed chest. The aim is to give the impression of a charismatic male strength that makes to ordinary Tamil feel weak by comparison. Their cultural distinctiveness thus becomes a selling point. They resist being modernised in a conventional way through schooling and upwardly-mobile professional jobs. The discussion of the brought out how ‘tribal medicine’ has become increasingly popular in India, being depicted as a remedy for the evils of modern civilisation. The way in which the Narikuravar negotiate the system were also discussed, by, for example, obtaining certificates as ‘Siddha’ healers, even though they distance themselves from this system in practice. They add supposed ‘horns’ to the skulls of foxes that they tote around with them,

3 claiming that these horns have powerful healing properties. Vishvajit Pandya suggested that they operate as ‘tricksters’ in this respect. William Sax agreed that some communities certainly assert their power through trickery – including of the anthropologists who study them – but he preferred to understand such practice among the Narikuravar as
‘performance’, as ‘trickery’ is too value-loaded a term.
David Hardiman’s paper was titled ‘A Subaltern Modernity: Christian Faith Healing in
Southern Gujarat’. In conventional narratives of medical progress, forms of healing associated with spirit possession and religious devotion are supposed to give way in time to modern biomedical practices based on science and rationality. The paper argued that in the case of healing provides by Christian missionaries in the adivasi tracts of South Gujarat, this has not been the case. The earlier focus on biomedical healing by Christian missionaries has been eclipsed through faith healing that caters to a strong popular demand. The position of faith healing within the Christian missionary movement of the colonial period was examined, bringing out how it was not a feature of most western mission work at that time, and was indeed spurned as a form of charlatanry. Tamil Christian missionaries from South
India began to proselytise amongst the adivasis if South Gujarat in the 1970s and, inspired in part by Pentecostalism, deployed faith healing to advantage. There was a wave of conversion to Christianity that was brought about to a large extent through such healing.
Taking on a momentum of its own, it is now sustained largely by local adivasi Christians. It was argued that it had become a strongly subaltern practice, rooted in adivasi communities.
The success of the Christians in this area attracted the attention of the Hindu right in the
1990s, leading to a divisive politicisation of such practice. Embracing Christianity and faith healing has in this respect come to represent a rejection of the Brahmanical Hinduism of the
Gujarati Hindu elites. However, while the Hindu right holds that ‘Indian’ culture is under threat from a ‘foreign’ imported culture, it was argued in the paper that an older adivasi practice had been replaced by a modern one, and that faith healing represents a form of indigenous subaltern modernity.
Gauri Raje spoke on ‘The fallacy of the traditional-modern divide in the practice of tribal healers in contemporary western India’. This focused on the bhagat healers of the Dangs in
Gujarat, who practice divination, exorcism and herbal treatment. They describe their practice as their bhakti, in other words as a devotion towards their craft. Their status rests on the recognition they receive from the community of bhagats in the Dangs. She focused on one particular bhagat from the village of Shivarimal who has updated his practice in a range of ways. Most notably, he deploys a sauna bath which he uses to expose patients to the smoke from healing herbs. He claims to be able to treat ‘new’ diseases that have come to the Dangs in recent years, something that he alleges other bhagats are not competent to do. He uses herbal treatment and divination as and when required. He travels all over the region in a large vehicle that he has purchased from his earnings, going as far as the city of
Baroda. He advises serious cases to visit his home in the Dangs for the sauna cure.
Although very ‘modern’ in these respects, he insists strongly that he is a bhagat and not a
‘doctor’. Raje found, however, that other bhagats considered him something of a maverick.
She shows, however, how he had managed to negotiate his position with great skill. To officials, he projects himself as a herbalist in a climate in which traditional herbal remedies are being promoted by the state as an important resource. He and his sons have attended health training schemes run by the state, where they have gained certificates that are

4 displayed so as to legitimise their practice. These appear to recognise them as ayurvedic practitioners, even though the bhagat himself is adamant that he is not in this category.
Raje came across another bhagat who has linked up with a private ‘doctor’ to establish a socalled ‘polyclinic’ in which both practice in their discreet ways. In the discussion, Guy
Attewell asked whether the clientele of the Shivarimal bhagat differed significantly from that of other bhagats. Raje replied that they all attract a number of patients from outside the Dangs, but that the others tend to treat working class people from the cities using divination, while the clientele of the Shivarimal bhagat is more middle class, and less likely to demand divination. Helen Lambert pointed out how in Rajasthan diseases are popularly described as devtaki bimari or daktarki bimari – that is, diseases from deities that have to be treated through divination and offerings, and disease that can be cured by doctors. The
Shivarimal bhagat, she observed, appeared to be eating into the latter sphere through his claim to be able to treat ‘new’ diseases. Vishvajit Pandya noted how the similar budva healers of Chhota Udaipur claim to be able to read X-rays, even though they do not use them in diagnosis. By doing so, they are claiming an expertise that is on a par with that of
‘doctory’.
David Arnold presented a paper on ‘The Politics of Poison: Crime, Toxicology and
Empowerment in 19 th -Century India’. He argued that while studies of medical history conventionally focus on healing practices and therapeutic substances, it should be recognized that the dividing line between what heals and what kills is a slim one. Many of the substances used in nineteenth-century India as medicines, whether by colonial or indigenous physicians, by elite or subaltern practitioners, were (like nux vomica or aconitum) extremely dangerous substances that could be highly toxic if used incorrectly or in excess. Some of the principal aphrodisiacs, designed to give pleasure or aid procreation, could also be fatal to those who consumed them, and a range of herbal and mineral substances (notably the trinity of opium, arsenic and aconitum) doubled as both poisons and medicines. Despite legal attempts to police the division between acceptable medicine and toxic misdemeanour, and to establish a pharmacopoeia that could delineated between the two, such widely available substances repeatedly evaded control. Problems of identification and diagnosis further aided uncertainty as to cause and intent. The implications of such toxic substances were examined in a range of situations – in healing, the use of elixirs and aphrodisiacs, abortion, infanticide, suicide, in the deliberate killing of humans and animals, and in accidental deaths – in an attempt to establish how ‘subaltern’ and subversive such practices might be considered, what motivated them and how they came to be configured as part of the negative representation of certain sections of Indian society or even of India at large. Projit Mukharji asked whether the discourse on poisoning was very different to that of medicine and healing. Vishvajit Pandya pointed out that deities and sadhus have a reputation of being able to consume poison without harm, in the process demonstrating their power.
Helen Lambert spoke on ‘De-composing traditions: Bonesetting, ethnophysiology and other conundrums of subaltern therapeutics in Rajasthan’. She noted that subaltern forms of therapy were not practised in a systematic way in the past, but represented a fragmented form of knowledge. They had resisted, and continue to resist, the systematisation of more elite forms of therapy. This was a conceptual resistance that rested on different notions of health and the body, rather than any overt political resistance. For example, there is a

5 popular notion that a good healer can tell what is wrong with a patient by merely examining the pulse, without having to ask any questions. Healing is also seen as a vocational service, rather than as something that is carried out for gain. She examined these issues in terms of the pahalvan and bonesetters of Rajasthan. Pahelvan were patronised by royalty as wrestlers during the princely era, but afterwards turned to the practice of massage and bonesetting to earn a livelihood. In the process, they incorporated elements of popular practice. One Jaipur pahelvan told her how he could diagnose a complaint by merely looking into the eyes of a patient, and contrasted this with the biomedical doctor who asks lots of question. He did not need to take X-rays, but merely feel for a fracture with his hands. He used ‘country medicine’ (desdvai) that he said could get rid of a malady more permanently than biomedicine could. The latter acted in a ‘fast’ manner, but failed to deal with the root cause of an illness. He insisted on the importance of faith in treatment. He represented his work as a vocation, and not for gain, and he limited the number of patients he treated in a day. He charged according to what the patient could afford. Pahelvan were not found in rural areas, only bonesetters, who tended to be less professional. They had varying levels of skill, and patients would choose a practitioner on the basis of what was known about his skill.
In the discussion, William Sax said that such healers did not have a ‘system’ as such, but generally gained their knowledge through work in a family practice. Often, they were associated with particular places, such as Ramchandra Meerutwallah in Delhi. He preferred to see this as a form of ‘distributed cognition’, with popular practice, religious beliefs and other elements feeding into the mix. Guy Attewell addressed the problem of historicising such practice, due to the lack of adequate historical sources. Vishvajit Pandya said that this was an example of ‘total body practice’, in which the therapy is for the whole body and not just for a part, with the body being understood in a way that differed profoundly from that of biomedical science. This was linked to ayurvedic notions of the body, but adapted and modified through subaltern practice.
Guy Attewell’s paper ‘Ambiguities in subalternity: thinking about the category jarraha
(‘bonesetter/barber-surgeon’)’ was also on bonesetters, this time in Hyderabad. He described the lineages of bonesetters that practice to this day in Hyderabad who trace their occupational ancestry back to the Nizams of the Asif Jahi dynasty. At that time they were
‘elite’ practitioners in terms of their clientele, though they made no claims for a textual tradition, and did see themselves as ‘unani’ physicians. Subsequently, with their form of healing being excluded from the processes of professionalization, institutionalization and government support, they could be classed as subaltern in the sense that they now operated outside the frames of established legitimacy as determined by the state. It seems, then, that this was a case of the creation of subalternity: a marginalization that is the outcome of professionalization of unani medicine that sidelined surgical practices and their practitioners, as well as the changing political economy, away from a patrimonial state.
Attewell argued that it is not however easy to describe such healers as either ‘elite’ or
‘subaltern’, as they present themselves in their printed English-language brochures as heirs to a life of courtly privilege, and they situate themselves within a rich Hyderabadi culture.
They also charge fees – which can be hefty – for a long-term treatment. And yet, they cater largely to a lower class clientele. Villagers from outside Hyderabad save and travel to receive treatment from them, in preference to government hospitals which are in the same

6 locality and where treatment would be free. This, therefore, is an alternative practice that is popular not because it is particular cheap, but because it accords better with the wishes and needs of its lower class clientele. Clare Anderson, in the discussion, noted that subalternity is a process, rather than a category, and that this therefore provides an example of how subalternity is created as process, even when a group might at one time have been elite.
William Sax, in a discussion of his book God of Justice: Ritual Healing and Social Justice in the
Central Himalaya, argued that much subaltern healing practice can only be known about through fieldwork and oral history. In the case of Dalit healing in Chamoli District of
Uttarakhand, it went entirely unrecorded until Sax himself wrote about it. What had started as a study of Dalit religion became a study of healing, as he found their worship was suffused with concern for suffering and its alleviation. The causes of misfortune or illness were divined by an oracle, and a guru then carried out the ceremony to pacify the spirit or deity concerned. Healing became a performance that empowered them. It was nonetheless a deeply conservative and patriarchal practice, with women being frequently blamed for casting spells or issuing curses. In the discussion, David Arnold said that the focus here was on affliction (dukh), and he asked us where this leaves us in terms of ‘disease’. In one story related by Sax, cholera had come as a form of revenge. At what point does affliction make a transition to the category of ‘disease’? In the case of Dalits, they could never be ‘healed’ from their social affliction, but they could be from actual diseases. Sax replied that only certain diseases were treated in such a way. People did not utilise such rituals in the case of a broken leg, for example. In particular, they were used for psychosomatic maladies. He argued that biomedicine locates affliction within the physical body, while neglecting the psychosomatic. Projit Mukharji said that misfortune may include an episode of disease, but the misfortune will continue even after the disease has been healed. Sax remarked that biomedicine is uncomfortable with the idea of ‘healing’, as it is too holistic. Biomedicine cures a disease or injury, but does not claim to heal the whole person. Helen Lambert expressed some scepticism about dichotomies of this sort – such as that biomedicine cures the body, while traditional healing cures the soul.
Markus Daechsel gave a paper titled ‘Magic, medicine and subalternity in the late colonial
Urdu print sphere: the case of Hakim Azhar Dihlwi’s Chin aur Bengal ka jadu’. While carrying out research in Lahore, Daechsel described how he had found in a street market a small, cheaply printed book in Urdu titled Chin aur Bengl Ka Jadu, published around 1930.
This, he discovered, had been a particularly successful publication of the period. Printed in
Lahore by the commercial firm of J.S. Sanat Singh and Sons it was widely distributed across religious community lines not only in Punjab, but all across North India and as far afield as
Hyderabad State. The contents of the pamphlet crisscrossed several topical divisions: they include material mainly designed for entertainment such as party tricks and magic feats complete with how-to-do-it explanations; followed by number and letter mysticism and astrology; then there was a substantial collection of charms and ta c wiz against personal calamities and ill-health, as well as sections on ghost healing and clairvoyance of Western provenance. The paper explored the two main questions: (1) to what extent did the material in this widely-read pamphlet challenge and undermine the demarcation of
‘medicine’ as an autonomous and by implication unified and rationalized field of discourse?
Or put differently, was there anything like a distinct ‘medical’ register, distinct from other

7 registers where questions of aetiology could be posed and tackled? And (2) To what extent could the lower rungs of the Urdu print market be assigned to a ‘subaltern’ position?
Drawing on his earlier work on middle class development I argued that material such as Chin
aur Bengal ka jadu in fact travelled very widely across class divisions and is therefore hard to pin down. If anything it can actually serve as an illustration that non-canonical forms of
‘medicine’ and ‘healing’ cannot – simply by virtue of going against the grain of established discourse – be automatically assumed to be of a non-elite character. Vishvajit Pandya noted in the discussion that people bought such booklets not only to heal themselves, but also to discover if others were using such techniques to harm them. Projit Mukharji noted how
Bengal was depicted here as the land of magic – an exotic region lying far to the east. Guy
Attewell noted how such texts did not need to explain themselves in an introduction or preface, as they were a very common and well-understood genre.
Projit Mukharji spoke on ‘Chandshir Chikitsha: A Nomadology of Subaltern Medicine’. He described how healers who called themselves ‘Chandshir Daktars’ were found in cities in eastern India from the late 19 th century onwards. Though fast disappearing, a few remain till this day. Writing their history presented numerous challenges, as there are almost no references to them in the archives traditionally used by historians of Bengal. This problem was surmounted by turning to a range of unconventional sources. A more fundamental and difficult problem lay in the very ontological nature of Chandshir Chikitsha. Its therapeutic resources, its social profile, the set of diseases it has claimed to treat and even its stated identity have undergone dramatic and uneven changes. It seems to have no discernible
‘essence’ whose continuity can be traced through time. At some stages it was a surgical tradition while at others it explicitly claimed to heal without surgery. Occasionally it was an independent tradition, while frequently it was a ‘school’ of Ayurveda. Often it treated humans, but sometimes it treated animals as well. What, then, are we to write the histories of? Can we write a history without an object? Though prominent for awhile in urban milieus, it definitely lacked the power and prestige of high Ayurveda or Unani. Yet the fact that it enjoyed considerable custom across a fairly large geographical area would confound the proposition that it was utterly ‘powerless’. Indeed the family credited with its original development did fairly well out of it and their scions enjoyed both fame and fortune. How then are we to conceptualise the ‘subalternity’ of Chandshi? What does ‘subalternity’ mean in the context of Chandshi? Mukarji argued that Chandshi is best seen as an unstable assemblage that is always in flux. It constantly oscillates between what Deleuze and
Guattari called in their Thousand Plateaus the two poles of Royal and Nomad Science. The former gravitates towards fixity, exactitude, measurability, clear axioms, well-articulated protocols of practice, in short; structuration. The latter operates on the principle of fluidity, hydraulic models of explanation, deliberately approximate understanding, shifting groups of practitioners. The latter conceptualises his or her work in terms of problems and solves them through his or her stock of experience and common-sense, and does not seek to draw any major conclusions. The two often share the same ontological domain and a common epistemic frame, and can be seen as two tendencies that pull practitioners one way or the other.
This ‘nomadology’ is in many respects, Mukhari argued, the ‘opposite of history’. It does not try to trace genealogies, but examines a multiplicity of narratives – or as Deleuze and
Guattari put it – a ‘thousand plateaus’. It escapes the totalising effects of linear histories. It

8 traces the ‘interior heterogeneous interiority of a subject within the context of an equally heterogeneous exteriority’. It accepts that connections are multiple and exist within competitive milieu. It resists the reification that occurs in linear narratives. It suits the shifting, fragmentary character of subaltern pasts. The subaltern have to constantly imagine themselves in relationship to the events, symbols and realities of the hegemonic order. It is necessarily fragmentary, shifting and discontinuous. We should not try to reify the subaltern into a coherent and essentialised subject – a shadowy reverse-image of the hegemon – but to map out effects within the subaltern subject. Thus, in calling certain aspects of Chandshi medicine ‘subaltern’, we are not committed to applying the tag to every aspect of it. It eschews the extreme relativism which reduces subalternity to a purely relational matter, which allows for almost any group to be considered ‘subaltern’ to another more powerful one. Subalternity exists within a matrix of political affiliations with struggles for the empowerment of marginal groups. It is thus a politicised category. It avoids having to define whether a practice is part of a system, as it incorporates both systematic as well as non-systematic elements without privileging either. It never presents a closed past – many multiple strands can be accommodated within its analysis. Other nexuses and flows might be found that enrich the overall picture. It does not limit the possible futures that are open to Chandshi medicine. The questions thrown up by the researcher’s own investigations can also be integrated into the narrative.
In the discussion, Bodhisattva Kar asked whether there was any logic in the range of diseases treated by the Chandshi practitioners. Mukharji said that although sexual problems feature strongly, as well as the treatment of piles, enlarged spleen and liver complaints, all diseases are considered treatable by this means. Helen Lambert felt that
Chandshi might have abandoned surgery because biomedical surgery had been so successful, and also because surgery by unqualified people was being clamped down on by the authorities. Vishvajit Pandya asked whether it was more helpful to consider this in terms of what Claude Levi Strausse defined as ‘bricolage’. Mukharji said that he had problems with this idea, and felt that the concept of ‘nomadology’, as set out by Deleuze and Guattari, provided a much richer way of understanding the issue.
Concluding session
In the final session there was a general discussion of the issues raised in the workshop.
David Hardiman began by asking whether this sort of exercise is best situated within the history of health, healing and medicine, or within Subaltern Studies. In the latter respect, are we rethinking the idea of subalternity, rather than merely situating the subaltern within an existing history of medicine? Projit Mukharji said that the concept of ‘subaltern’ carries a lot of baggage, but it does get people talking and thinking. This is more important than coming to a neat conclusion. Also, there is very little in the history of medicine on lower class health and healing. Even anthropologists are moving away from such study, looking at the globalisation of medicine, biomedical power and so on. Guy Attewell asked the anthropologists present how they felt about this. Vishvajit Pandya said that there was a common concern here between the historians and anthropologists at this workshop at least.
Concepts were being debated in fruitful ways, such as bricolage, and nomadology. There was a debate about how to overcome the lack of sources for such a study. Anthropologists can relate to that – they lack an archive and have to create their own sources through

9 fieldwork. He felt that a focus on narratives of healing involving particular subaltern people provided one useful way of looking at this issue, allowing us to explore perceptions of health and healing. Also, subalternity appears in many guises and forms – we need to be clear about this.
Waltraud Ernst argued that the context in which the original subaltern Studies came out is very different to the present-day one, and some of its methods now appear questionable.
We need to re-state the significance of the idea for us today in a changed context. It is certainly good to try to situate the subaltern into mainstream medical history, making it something for more than just ethno-historians and anthropologists. Vishvajit Pandya replied to this that he does not find it helpful to demarcate these various areas of study.
Clare Anderson said that we should be aiming to create an ‘integrated history’ – a
‘histropology’. This will entail a new form of interdisciplinary writing. She also added that subalternity is still a crucial area of study, as domination has certainly not gone away in today’s world. Subalternity is a process, and something that is constantly being remade.
Helen Lambert commented that in anthropology the focus is on the micro-level, with the overarching social structure being seen in terms of a rather stereotypical understanding of political economy. Here, we are looking at the process of the negotiation of subalternity at this wider level, which is something not found in much ethnography. A language that allows for a meeting-point is required. Vishvajit Pandya commented that the Chicago historiananthropologists provide a model in this respect – they have tried to write a historically nuanced anthropology, and an anthropologically-nuanced history.
Clare Anderson said that gender needs to be taken on in a more central way than was the case in this workshop. The issue was hovered around rather than tackled centrally. It needs to be carried out in a systematic way. Waltraud Ernst, in reply, said that we can study female patients, and David Hardiman added that there were also female practitioners, such as dai (midwives) who could be a focus. Helen Lambert said that this felt like tokenism – merely to insert women in the exercise. It was agreed that it was the politics of gender and gendering that was the issue, and this should permeate the exercise.
Bodhisattva Kar argued that there were many crossovers in the papers at this workshop.
They often blurred the boundaries between the categories of the medical’ and ‘extramedical’. Where does magic, dance, affliction, dukh (sadness, pain) fit in? It is hard to determine the frontier of ‘South Asian medical history’. This opens up a problem of what exactly ‘medical history’ entails. There is a need for further blurring of such boundaries in fact, providing a critique of ‘medical history’. Clare Anderson agreed, adding that it is perhaps a subaltern move to blur what is considered ‘medical’.