All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Contesting the claims of Colonial'scientific' medicine: Indigenous Medical Practitioners and the politics of recasting scientificauthority in British Colonial India (1890-1940)
| This paper examines the impact of British Colonial medical intervention in the context of the ideas and rhetoric that projected and sustained colonial medicine. It argues that ideas regarding the scientific nature of colonial medicine were critical to validating its authority in the colony. Colonial medical intervention or its scientific, rational-critical nature represented the promised gains of a rational, civilizational modernity to Colonial subjects. These ideational claims were however constantly contested and recast by groups, such as indigenous medical practitioners as they sought to appropriate these claims and to relocate the locus of colonial authority and its sanction.
This paper traces the efforts of colonial medical administrators in the frontier province of Punjab( now part of Pakistan and India), to draw the boundaries of legitimate, scientific medicine in the spheres of colonial medical education and in the registration of professional medical practice. It centrally examines the responses of practitioners of indigenous medicine, such as the practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine as they faced the threat of loss of state patronage and occupational status and began to mobilize through urban vernacular print publicity to contest and recast the claims of colonial medicine.
Their mobilization and writings 'indigenized’ the claims of colonial medical science by reconstructing histories of Hindu science and redeploying the arguments of orientalist philology regarding the scientific contents of vernaculars to project the claims of indigenous medicine and indirectly also legitimized an indigenous modernity. Yet these ideas and representations were also characterized by internal ambiguities and negotiations, as the claims of colonial medicine and its scientific norms were simultaneously appropriated and recast by diverse groups of practitioners and their urban patrons to validate both the interests of the Hindu nation as much as the competing aspirations of Sikh ethnic, community interests at the level of the province and locality. This paper therefore argues for locating the understanding Colonial medical intervention and responses to its concerns amongst the politics of mobilization and political-cultural claims of both the nation and ethnic community identities.
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