ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Subaltern Petitions and the Making of a Medical Counter-Archive in Colonial India

• In Event: Practising Medicine in Colonial India

English Abstract

This paper reorients colonial medicine in India by foregrounding subaltern actors who challenged and reinterpreted state medical interventions. It analyses an overlooked archive of petitions, complaints, affidavits, and formal appeals authored by dais (traditional midwives), prostitutes, hakims, and neighbourhood associations. These documents demonstrate how colonial medical regulation was constantly fought and transformed through embodied forms of expertise, ritual claims, and vernacular arguments. Petitions by licensed prostitutes resisting mandatory examinations, dais defending attempts to marginalise indigenous birthing expertise, Unani practitioners contesting diagnostic limits defined by municipal regulations, and residential groups denouncing plague-era intrusive household inspections collectively comprise what I term a medical counter-archive. This counter-archive offers alternative frameworks of health rooted in caste ethics, gendered labour, ritual obligation, and household moral economies. Approaching these contestations through the lens of “plural worlds,” the paper shows that childbirth, cleanliness, and disease were conceptualised not through bacteriological science but through social and ritual systems. The household appeared as a protected moral domain rather than an epidemiological site of risk. By centring these subaltern interventions, the paper reveals colonial medicine as a negotiated and co-produced field. It highlights epistemic disobedience as a critical mode through which ordinary actors redefined authority and legitimacy in the colonial medical order.

Authors

• Shubham Pathak, Indian Institute of Technology, BHU, Varanasi, India

• Vinita Chandra, Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi, India