Interaction Between Western Medicine and Indigenous Medical Systems in Princely States

Abstract

The history of public health policy‚ epidemiological action‚ and sanitary‚ medical‚ and public health administration in late colonial India has been studied almost exclusively in terms of direct British rule․ This is unfortunate‚ because the Indian Princely States‚ which before 1947 occupied roughly two-fifths of the subcontinent‚ present an altogether different‚ and much more complicated‚ story․ The synthesis of Western (allopathic) medicine with indigenous Ayurvedic‚ Unani and Siddha systems under the indirect rule of progressive states of Travancore‚ Mysore and Hyderabad‚ the heavily regulated Rajputana states and Orissan enclaves‚ is covered‚ with inference of imperial interests by interrogation of the architecture of the administrative interface․ The story is not one of total victory but of negotiation‚ medical pluralism and institutional hybridization․ The report weaves together the struggles of humoral and biomedical epistemologies with the social rupture of Christian medical missions‚ the manipulation of public health as a vector of modern corporeal consciousness‚ and the overwhelming economic imperatives that drove Princely rulers' zealous patronage of indigenous medical lineages․ The article concludes with a discussion of how these semi-autonomous enclaves funded global-scale biomedical knowledge production and provided infrastructure for post-colonial India's pluralistic AYUSH system․