Missionaries and their medicine is a lucid and enthralling study of the encounter between Christian missionaries and an Indian tribal community, the Bhils, in the period 1880 to 1964. The study is informed by a deep knowledge of the people amongst whom the missionaries worked, the author having lived for extensive periods in the tribal tracts of western India. He argues that the Bhils were never the passive objects of missionary attention and that they created for themselves their own form of ‘Christian modernity.’
The book provides a major intervention in the history of colonial medicine, as Hardiman argues that missionary medicine had a specific quality of its own – which he describes and analyses in detail – and that in most cases it was preferred to the medicine of colonial states. He also examines the period of transition to Indian independence, which was a highly fraught and uncertain process for the missionaries.
Table of Content
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Glossary
1. Introduction
2. The Bhils
3. The mission to the Bhils
4. The great famine
5. The conversion of the Bhagats
6. Christian healing
7. Fighting demons
8. Woman’s work for woman
9. A little empire
10. Medicine on a shoestring and a prayer
11. A mission for a postcolonial era
12. Medical modernity
13. Closure
14. Conclusion: Mission medicine and Bhil modernity
Bibliography
Index
About the author
David Hardiman is Professor of History at the University of Warwick
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