Legitimising Indian Knowledge Systems: Local Healers in Udaipur

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of hierarchies within Indian medical knowledge systems as much as with biomedical knowledge. Using the lens of politics of knowledge, it seeks to examine the efforts of an organisation in Rajasthan that sought to challenge structures of authority, to establish the legitimacy of local healers who provided valuable health care at the primary level to the rural populace, especially when it was not available to them through the public health care system or from private practitioners. It argues that deploying the very frameworks that characterise governmentality—whether in the technicality of knowledge or legality—ultimately foregrounds the difficulty of overcoming hierarchies, rather than surmounting them.