Books by Projit Bihari Mukharji
Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, this book looks at the way that it is margi... more Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, this book looks at the way that it is marginalised by the state and medical establishment while at the same time being very important in the everyday lives of the poor. It describes and analyses a world of ‘subaltern therapeutics’ that both interacts with and resists state-sanctioned and elite forms of medical practice. The relationship is seen as both a historical as well as ongoing one.
Focusing on those who exist and practice in the shadow of statist medicine, the book discusses the many ways in which they try to heal a range of maladies, and how they experience their marginality. The contributors also provide a history of such therapeutics, in the process challenging the widespread belief that such ‘traditional’ therapeutics are relatively static and unchanging. In focusing on these problems of transition, they open up one of the central concerns of subaltern historiography. This is an important contribution to the history of medicine and society, and subaltern and South Asian studies.
This book offers an innovative engagement with the diverse histories of colonial and indigenous m... more This book offers an innovative engagement with the diverse histories of colonial and indigenous medicines. Engagement with different kinds of colonialism and varied indigenous socio-political cultures has led to a wide range of approaches and increasingly distinct traditions of historical writing about colonial and indigenous modes of healing have emerged in the various regions formerly ruled by different colonial powers. The volume offers a much-needed opportunity to explore new conceptual perspectives and encourages critical reflection on how scholars' research specialisms have influenced their approaches to the history of medicine and healing. The book includes contributions on different geographical regions in Asia, Africa and the Americas and within the varied contexts of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and British colonialisms. It deals with issues such as internal colonialism, the plural history of objects, transregional circulation and entanglement, and the historicisation of medical historiography. The chapters in the volume explore the scope for conceptual interaction between authors from diverse disciplines and different regions, highlighting the synergies and thematic commonalities as well as differences and divergences.
'Nationalizing the Body' revisits the history of 'western' medicine in colonial South Asia throug... more 'Nationalizing the Body' revisits the history of 'western' medicine in colonial South Asia through the lives, writings and practice of the numerous Bengali 'daktars' who adopted and practised it. Refusing to see 'western' medicine as an alienated appendage of the colonial state, this book explores how 'western' medicine was vernacularised. It argues that a burgeoning medical market and a medical publishing industry together gave 'daktari' medicine a social identity which did not solely derive from its association with the state. Accessing many of the best-known ideas and episodes of colonial South Asian medical history, it seeks to understand how 'daktari' medicine re-positioned the colonized bodies as nationalized bodies.
This book is a fascinating journey through a series of scholarly articles. The journey begins by ... more This book is a fascinating journey through a series of scholarly articles. The journey begins by tracing one of the most significant stories in the popularization of Association Football. In the next leg of the journey it charts the diverse and changing face of the modern British game. It then moves on to the global spread of the game from England and its domestication and appropriation in its new homes across the planet. It also investigates the exchanges which are increasingly taking place between these new homes of football. In the concluding pieces football’s global experience is compared with the attempts at globalizing baseball and drawing out the larger patterns that inform football’s global experience.
Papers by Projit Bihari Mukharji
Journal of the History of Knowledge, 2023
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Oct 1, 2020
Osiris
This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in... more This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in British Bengal. The presiding judges explicitly accepted the right of more scholarly “traditional” medical practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners, to engage in their profession, even while criminalizing Sukaroo’s surgical practice. The decision therefore illustrates the need to distinguish subaltern therapeutics from the larger domain of traditional medicines. It also demonstrates that, though legislative intervention into medicine was limited in nineteenth-century Bengal, colonial law did in fact intervene and shape the medical landscape. All this becomes more significant because the Sukaroo case appeared in legal reports of the time, and then was rapidly and widely incorporated into legal textbooks and even annotated versions of the Indian Penal Code, thereby becoming an important legal precedent. It has continued to feature in postcolonial legal textbooks in South Asia and beyond. This long legal shadow cast by the case highlights the ways in which colonial case law has shaped the modern lives of traditional medicines in South Asia. In particular, it demonstrates the long history of tacit assumptions denigrating subaltern therapeutics that have structured the institutionalized medical pluralism operating in contemporary India.
Studies in History
Memory studies have long demonstrated the need to critically assess the way societies remember si... more Memory studies have long demonstrated the need to critically assess the way societies remember significant, and particularly traumatic, events. The overwhelming focus of these studies has been on conquests, political riots, wars and holocausts. Very little account has been taken of the way epidemics are remembered. Yet, epidemics produce similar social disruptions and anxieties about the future as the varied episodes of political violence. Societies need to grapple with loss of life, grief, insecurity and their own reproduction through the stabilization of mnemonic frames. One of the most potent forms of social memory is engendered in ghost lore. In this article, I track one set of such ghost stories circulating in Bengal in the wake of the ravages of cholera and malaria in the late nineteenth century. By tracking the reframing of these stories, I show how the meanings and values conveyed through them changed over nearly a century. I argue that since the very basis and structure of ...
Studies in History
Senthil Babu D., Mathematics and Society: Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India, Oxfor... more Senthil Babu D., Mathematics and Society: Numbers and Measures in Early Modern South India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2022, 384 pp., ₹1,765 ISBN: 9788194831600
The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk, 2020
On Modern Indian Sensibilities, 2017
Medical Marginality in South Asia, 2013
The Movement for Global Mental Health, 2021
Technology and Culture, 2019
The histories of modern medical technologies have largely been studied exclusively within the bio... more The histories of modern medical technologies have largely been studied exclusively within the biomedical context. Yet historians of medicine have increasingly demonstrated that a number of non-biomedical therapeutic traditions-Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine to name only two-have attained their own distinctive modernity. How has the incorporation of various medical technologies affected these neo-traditional medicines? What is the relationship between technologies and the body knowledge in non-biomedical therapeutics? Do shared technologies such as the stethoscope reveal the same bodily facts in biomedical and Ayurvedic contexts? These are some of the questions explored in this article by focusing on the uptake of the stethoscope in modern Ayurvedic medicine in Bengal. In the process the article also describes the emergence of a new sonic body in modern Ayurveda.
Buddhism and Medicine, 2019
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Books by Projit Bihari Mukharji
Focusing on those who exist and practice in the shadow of statist medicine, the book discusses the many ways in which they try to heal a range of maladies, and how they experience their marginality. The contributors also provide a history of such therapeutics, in the process challenging the widespread belief that such ‘traditional’ therapeutics are relatively static and unchanging. In focusing on these problems of transition, they open up one of the central concerns of subaltern historiography. This is an important contribution to the history of medicine and society, and subaltern and South Asian studies.
Papers by Projit Bihari Mukharji
Focusing on those who exist and practice in the shadow of statist medicine, the book discusses the many ways in which they try to heal a range of maladies, and how they experience their marginality. The contributors also provide a history of such therapeutics, in the process challenging the widespread belief that such ‘traditional’ therapeutics are relatively static and unchanging. In focusing on these problems of transition, they open up one of the central concerns of subaltern historiography. This is an important contribution to the history of medicine and society, and subaltern and South Asian studies.
Reviewed by Projit Bihari Mukharji in *Postcolonial Studies*
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13688790.2018.1440892?needAccess=true&journalCode=cpcs20