Examining the world of popular healing in South Asia, this book looks at the way that it is marginalised by the state and medical establishment while at the same time being very important in the everyday lives of the poor. It describes and analyses a world of 'subaltern therapeutics' that both interacts with and resists state-sanctioned and elite forms of medical practice. The relationship is seen as both a historical as well as ongoing one.

David Hardiman is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests include the Indian peasantry, tribal movements in India, medical history, and Gandhi and nonviolent resistance.

Projit Bihari Mukharji is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science, the University of Pennsylvania, USA. His research interests include subaltern sciences, everyday technologies, vernacularized "western" sciences and modernized "indigenous" knowledge traditions in South Asia.

1. Agendas Guy Attewell, David Hardiman, Helen Lambert and Projit Bihari Mukharji 2. Introduction David Hardiman and Projit Mukharji 3. Community, State, and the Body: Epidemics and Popular Culture in Colonial India Dipesh Chakrabarty 4. "Pain in all the Wrong Places": The Experience of Biomedicine among the Ongee of Little Andaman Islands Vishvajit Pandya 5. Chandshir Chikitsha: A Nomadology of Subaltern Medicine Projit Bihari Mukharji 6. Wrestling with Tradition: Towards a Subaltern Therapeutics of Bonesetting and Vessel Treatment in North India Helen Lambert 7. A Subaltern Christianity: Faith Healing in Southern Gujarat David Hardiman 8. The Modernising Bhagat Gauri Raje 9. The Politics of Poison: Healing, Empowerment and Subversion in Nineteenth-Century India David Arnold