Organizing Missions into Distant Lands: Medical Missionaries and the Politics of Health in Kashmir

Abstract

This paper analyzes the medical measures initiated by medical missionaries in the second half of nineteenth century in Kashmir. It was a significant period in the history of Kashmir on account of various economic and political developments. Similarly the valley of Kashmir witnessed an arrival of medical missionaries who introduced the modern forms of medicine and later on this task was persuaded by the colonial masters while reforming and reorganizing state administration. This arrival of medical missionaries has to be studied in the larger contours of history. An aspect relatively neglected by the existing body of Kashmiri scholarship who studied these missionary measures in isolation and not relating them what was happening largely at the Indian subcontinent. In such writings the missionaries have been presented as messiahs for the people without going into the deeper currents of history. Thus it is under this background, this paper argues that these medical missions have to be understood not only in the larger narratives of the socio-economic and political conditions of Kashmir, but, equally in the greater issues of Indian history.