A medical sociologist with a historian's obsession with detail and documentation, Poonam Bala tenaciously follows the developmental trajectory of medical pluralism in India with a keen eye to the dynamic social production of health and healing systems as social systems, practices, and technologies of power. Covering a broad swathe of history, this book explores how a turbulently emerging Indian State with shifting alliances and evolving rules ideologies (with the accompanying emergence of class and caste identities and opportunities) gave rise to a particular growth of scientific and,...

This volume presents biomedicine as a site of contestation and conflicts, of processes of adaptation, accommodation, and of resistance, in a unique relationship with colonization and social control in a medical encounter that signaled the limits of State control of indigenous populations.

Poonam Bala's Contesting Colonial Authority explores the interplay of conformity and defiance amongst the plural medical tradition in colonial India. The contributors reveal how Indian elites, nationalists, and the rest of the Indian population participated in the move to revisit and frame a new social character of Indian Medicine. Viewed in the light of the cultural, nationalistic, social, literary and scientific essentials, Contesting Colonial Authority highlights various indigenous interpretations and mechanisms through which Indian sciences and medicine were projected against the cultural...