ABSTRACT
This entry explores health and illness in Northeast India through the theme of ‘healing’. This is a term with broad scope for studying the myriad intersections between the body, itself a healing system and site of cultural mediation, and society, with its family, community, market, and state institutions that form a complex of healing systems. While these intersections merit concerted sociological and anthropological investigation, they are further embedded in historical contingencies unique to the region. The entry demonstrates, for example, how the public health landscape, and the form and function of its health institutions, uniquely evolved from 19th-century British efforts to contain disease epidemics such as black fever, cholera, and malaria, which were decimating local populations, and threatening colonial tea revenues. While well-intentioned post-independence health policies have done little to substantially overhaul the poor colonial-era health infrastructure, this entry argues that recent policies promoting Ayurvedic medicine, while clearly motivated by ideological interests, do offer hope that indigenous health systems might gain some recognition, principally among modern medical practitioners, as playing a role in a deeply diverse and complex Northeast Indian healthcare landscape.
