This is the seventh and final episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We talk about one of the most enduring aspects of modernization in Indian healthcare: the emergence of the biomedical profession. Who were the earliest “doctors” in the subcontinent? Why did British colonizers establish medical colleges and schools in India? What were the experiences of early women doctors? How has caste-based privilege played a central role in the development of India’s biomedical profession? This episode is hosted by Kiran Kumbhar and features historians Projit Bihari Muk ..read more

This is the sixth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We focus on a highly familiar but misunderstood topic - the history of Ayurveda - and explore why despite the wonderful diversity of the subcontinent’s medical history, we have come to honor just Ayurveda and a few other traditions while ignoring the rest. We discuss this history by focusing on a problematic cognitive framework which has been internalized by most elite Indians including those who write popular forms of history: “Orientalism”. How did Orientalism during the British colonial period radic ..read more

This is the fifth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We discuss a basic question here: how do people become historians? History is certainly not among the subjects that children and teenagers in India are universally encouraged to pursue, so we asked historians how it is that they chose this option during high school or college. Not surprisingly, there isn't a single, uniform track to enter the academic world of history, and in this episode we delve into some of those multiple pathways. We also learn about how our historians then became interested in the ..read more

This is the fourth episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". We talk about the idea that governments can and should work towards improving public health and providing healthcare-related services for the public. While such a concept of state responsibility towards public health is very common and naturalized today (and absolutely important), it is a relatively modern concept in a historical sense, and it began to be applied on a large scale starting in the nineteenth century. In this episode, we look at how this concept played out in British colonial India. We d ..read more

This is the third episode of the podcast "Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India". The primary theme pertains to the challenges, in historical research, of finding and incorporating the voices of the oppressed and the under-privileged (the "voiceless"). In the history of healthcare, which has traditionally been dominated by the perspectives and voices of male physicians, the absent or under-represented voices have mostly been of patients, communities, and community-based practitioners. In this episode, we will listen to historians speak about how they have worked to uncover such voic ..read more

This is the second episode of 'Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India'. We talk about one of the central challenges of writing any kind of history: how to find and incorporate the voices of the oppressed and the under-privileged (the "voiceless")? In the history of healthcare, this challenge manifests in the form of the disproportionate focus on physicians and surgeons, and a concomitant neglect of the stories of patients and other healthcare providers, especially women (e.g., midwives and nurses). While physicians and surgeons form an extremely important group of healthcare provider ..read more

In this introductory episode of 'Becoming Modern: Healthcare and History in India', host Kiran Kumbhar talks with Suno India co-founder Padma Priya about how the podcast was created and the ideas that went into it. They talk about the importance of knowing the history of medicine and healthcare, and the crucial role of critical thinking skills in writing history and understanding the past. The episode features excerpts from interviews with historians Pratik Chakrabarti, Projit Bihari Mukharji, and Ranjana Saha. It also features an audio excerpt from the 1941 Indian film “Doctor”. Additional re ..read more