Engrafting Modernity: Daktari in Nineteenth Century Bengal, c.-1830--c.1900

This dissertation addresses two significant moments in the institutionalization of medical service in nineteenth century India---the Anglicist-Orientalist debate in the early decades, and the vernacularization of medical education in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It studies the colonial exigencies of institutionalization of medical education and treatment in the light of an absence of a legal mandate to rule India. Related to this, I study how the discipline of surgery was reconfigured in the context of its elaboration as an idiom of governing the bodies of the native subjects. Moreover, I explore how vernacularization of medical knowledge and practice within British bureaucratic disciplinary norms of service and charity led the native doctors of the nineteenth century to reclaim trust between the patient and the medic in idioms, which contested the very legitimacy of British rule in India.