Missionaries and their medicine

A Christian modernity for tribal India

David Hardiman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780719095399
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526119179
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

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 contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• General editor's introduction
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Map of CMS Bhil mission area
• Introduction
• The Bhils
• The mission to the Bhils
• The great famine
• The conversion of the Bhagats
• Christian healing
• Fighting demons
• Woman’s work for woman
• A little empire
• Medicine on a shoestring and a prayer
• A mission for a postcolonial era
• Medical modernity
• Closure
• Conclusion: mission medicine and Bhil modernity
• Select bibliography
• Index