Revisiting a Marginalized Community

It has been argued in recent years that under the compulsion of maintaining health of the troops, a new ‘medical market’ was created in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, and that it impelled the colonial government to restructure the variety of ‘indigenous’ medical practices ¹ prevalent in the country. While some research has been undertaken on the fate of the principal medical ‘systems’ of Ayurveda (Hindu) and Unani (Islamic/Greco-Arabic), that of ‘folk’ practices such as bone-setting, laments Mark Harrison, has been largely neglected. ² Indeed, the impact of colonial intervention in indigenous medical practices seems to have been highly complex, and changed considerably over time as the relatively open and informal ‘dialogue’ between the Western and Indian practitioners gave way to scientific scepticism of the nineteenth century. While some amount of research on the bone-setters of Madras and Rajasthan has been done recently, ³ Bengal still remains a relatively less addressed area with regard to this practice.