ABSTRACT
Despite extensive discussion in recent years of many aspects of the medical history of modern India, including both indigenous and orthodox Western medicine, there has been surprisingly little discussion of homoeopathy in colonial India. The principal exceptions are two articles published in the early 1980s by Surinder M. Bhardwaj. Following ideas of medical ‘pluralism’ advanced by Charles Leslie and his associates,1 Bhardwaj described the rise of homoeopathy in India beginning with its introduction as a ‘Western medical system’ in the early nineteenth century, through its adoption by the ‘modern, newly emergent and Western-influenced Indian élite’, especially in Bengal, its subsequent ‘naturalisation’ and harmonisation with Hinduism and the Ayurvedic system of medicine, its dispersal throughout India (to the extent that by 1961 there were at least 27,000 practising homoeopaths in the country), and its formal recognition as a medical system by the Government of India after Independence in 1947.2 Reiterating his main theme, Bhardwaj concluded that:
By the end of the nineteenth century homoeopathy seems to have been naturalised in India … Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, Bengal served as the domicile of homoeopathy … Bengali physicians espoused homoeopathy with remarkable, even religious[,] zeal soon after its introduction by a few European laymen, physicians and missionaries. The almost religious attachment to Hahnemannian law [‘like cures like’] by the homoeopaths, and the repudiation of the same ‘law’ by the Indian allopaths[,] resulted in the recognition of the ‘new art of healing’. Homoeopathy was gradually but surely Indianised.3
