The Dai and the Indigenous: Notes on the Appearance and Disappearance of a Figure in the Therapeutics of a Nation

This is a book about the dai, or traditional birth practitioner, and her place in the emerging therapeutic domain in colonial and contemporary India.

The book employs a caste-informed feminist reading of the colonial archive against the grain and explores papers by Englishwomen physicians, texts of indigenous medicine and practitioner accounts, administrative documents, public commentaries, and legislative assembly debates from the 19th and early 20th centuries. It also examines contemporar...