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"At present India is a leading producer, distributor, and consumer of generic medicines globally. Disparate Remedies traces the genealogy of this development and examines the public cultures of medicine in the country between 1870 and 1960. The book begins by discussing the expansion of medical consumerism in late nineteenth-century India when British-owned firms extended their sales to distant provincial towns. As a result, laboratory-produced drugs competed with traditional street remedies through side-by-side production of 'Western' and 'Indian' drugs by pharmaceutical companies. The emergent middle classes, the creation of a public sphere, and nationalist politics transformed the medical culture of modern India and generated conflict between Western and Indigenous medical systems and their practitioners. Nandini Bhattacharya demonstrates that these disparate therapies were sustained through the tropes of purity or adulteration, potency or lack of it, and epistemic heritage, even when their material configuration often differed little. Uniquely engaging with the cultures of both consumption and production in the country, Disparate Remedies follows the evolution of medicine in colonial India as it confronted Indian modernity and changing public attitudes surrounding health and drugs."

Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market.

This article analyzes why adulteration became a key trope of the Indian drug market. Adulteration had a pervasive presence, being present in medical discourses, public opinion and debate, and the nationalist claim for government intervention. The article first situates the roots of adulteration in the composite nature of this market, which involved the availability of drugs of different potencies as well as the presence of multiple layers of manufacturers, agents, and distributors. It then shows that such a market witnessed the availability of drugs of diverse potency and strengths, which were understood as elements of adulteration in contemporary medical and official discourse. Although contemporary critics argued that the lack of government legislation and control allowed adulteration to sustain itself, this article establishes that the culture of the dispensation of drugs in India necessarily involved a multitude of manufacturer–retailers, bazaar traders, and medical professionals practicing a range of therapies.

ABSTRACT:This article posits that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. It shifts historiographical interest from major urban centres in colonial India (such as Bombay or Calcutta) and instead attempts a greater understanding of smaller urban centres. In the process, it also interrogates the category of hill stations, which have been understood as exotic and scenic sites rather than as towns that were integral to the colonial economy. In arguing that hill stations, particularly Darjeeling, were not merely the scenic and healthy 'other' of the clamorous, dirty and diseased plains of India, it refutes suggestions that the 'despoiling' or overcrowding of Darjeeling was incremental to the purposes of its establishment. Instead, it suggests that Darjeeling was part of the colonial mainstream; its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy was effected from the time of its establishment. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout.

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines and new urban centres for Europeans. Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. It establishes the vital link between medicine, the political economy and the social history of colonialism. It demonstrates that while enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of articulation of colonial power and economy, they were not isolated sites. The book shows that the critical aspect of the enclaves was in their interconnectedness; with other enclaves, with the global economy and international medical research.