The Birth of the “Indian” Clinic: <i>Daktari</i> Medicine in <i>A Ballad of Remittent Fever</i>
This article locates the clinic as a historically contingent space which faced cultural resistance and remained alien to the colonized population in India. It corroborates the socio-political tension in setting up a clinic within the colony and investigates how the Western clinic as a colonial appar...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2024-12-01
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| Series: | Humanities |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/13/6/169 |
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| Summary: | This article locates the clinic as a historically contingent space which faced cultural resistance and remained alien to the colonized population in India. It corroborates the socio-political tension in setting up a clinic within the colony and investigates how the Western clinic as a colonial apparatus was resituated as the “Indian clinic” per se. With the historical emergence of a new class of medical practitioners called “<i>daktars</i>” (a Bengali vernacularization of the term “doctor”), the health-seeking behaviour and public health model of colonial India witnessed a decolonial shift. Unlike their English counterparts, <i>daktars</i> did not enjoy a privileged position within the medical archives of colonial India. This archival gap within Indian medical history presents itself as a viable topic for discussion through the means of the literature of the colonized. Bengali writer Ashoke Mukhopadhyay’s novel <i>Abiram Jwarer Roopkotha</i> (2018), translated into English as <i>A Ballad of Remittent Fever</i> in 2020, remedies the colonial politics of the archive by reconstructing the lives of various <i>daktars</i> and their pursuit of self-reliance. The article takes a neo-historical approach towards understanding and assessing the past of <i>daktari</i> medicine and thereby offers comments on its traces in the contemporary public health of India. |
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| ISSN: | 2076-0787 |