ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Local Actors and Global Sciences: Contextualizing the Making of Modern Mind Sciences in Late-Colonial India

• In Event: Contested Theories of Body and Mind

English Abstract

This paper problematizes the many worlds of the plural medical market in late-colonial India, vis-a-vis the local interlocutors of techno-scientific practices (modern and traditional) in the subcontinent, that altogether posit serious challenges to the hegemonic narratives of the western science. It centres the plural networks of science, colonial efforts through regulatory legislations and pharmacopoeias, thriving print culture and entrepreneurial engagements of the local mental health and mind sciences’ practitioners in early twentieth century south Asia (vernacular press reflecting the plural world of practitioners and patients), and in conclusion, argues that, despite repeated structured attempts of colonial governmentality, there was seldom any uniform consensus on medico-scientific ideas and practices in the region, and that, it was in this south eastern locale of the globe where emerged the innovations that would soon shape the discipline of modern psychiatric practices worldwide. Exploring primary texts in English as well as in the vernacular, this paper shows that the Foucauldian notion of ‘self-regulating field of the social’ in colonial governmentality cannot be held in essence in the south Asian context, rather the plural medical market and sections of the Indian intelligentsia actively appropriated, re-appropriated, braided, shaped, reshaped and subverted the western medico-scientific ideas in everyday practices. Situated at the intersection of history of psychiatry, history philosophy of sciences, popular culture, vernacular texts, internationalization of scientific networks, twentieth century advances on sciences, decolonization, and history of ideas, the paper is an important addition in contextualizing the contested realm of the mind sciences in south Asia.

Author

• Pradipto Roy