Subaltern Surgeries

This article examines the trial of a subaltern surgeon named Sukaroo Kobiraj from 1886 to 1887 in British Bengal. The presiding judges explicitly accepted the right of more scholarly “traditional” medical practitioners, such as Ayurvedic practitioners, to engage in their profession, even while criminalizing Sukaroo’s surgical practice. The decision therefore illustrates the need to distinguish subaltern therapeutics from the larger domain of traditional medicines. It also demonstrates that, though legislative intervention into medicine was limited in nineteenth-century Bengal, colonial law did in fact intervene and shape the medical landscape. All this becomes more significant because the Sukaroo case appeared in legal reports of the time, and then was rapidly and widely incorporated into legal textbooks and even annotated versions of the Indian Penal Code, thereby becoming an important legal precedent. It has continued to feature in postcolonial legal textbooks in South Asia and beyond. This long legal shadow cast by the case highlights the ways in which colonial case law has shaped the modern lives of traditional medicines in South Asia. In particular, it demonstrates the long history of tacit assumptions denigrating subaltern therapeutics that have structured the institutionalized medical pluralism operating in contemporary India.