Medicine and Integration of Frontier Tribes: The British and After in Arunachal Pradesh traces the use of medicine as an instrument of diplomacy in British frontier policy and as a medium of integration in the post-Independence era in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. A new domain of knowledge within the sphere of British–tribal studies is presented here for the first time: the peculiar absence of medical missions; the ‘political’ role of doctors; the European-Indian divide over patronage to the tribes; and the post-Independence government policy on the integration of tribes and the development of modern healthcare infrastructure. Aside from a summary of indigenous healing traditions, the volume also explores the origins of colonial epidemiology and dispensaries in the Brahmaputra valley during the nineteenth century through the necessities of the tea economy, a theme about around which limited literature is available.
The research in this volume hopes to contribute to historical narratives on British policies in tribal hinterlands by offering an alternate account of the contact between state systems and the tribes of Arunachal in the twentieth century, a period during which the region acquired its present constitutional, national and evolving cultural identities.