Healing in South Gujarat: Conceptions, Practices and Restricted Medical Pluralism

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether larger masses in India have the greater choice in terms of accessibility, affordability, efficacy of health care due to supposedly existing pluralistic medical tradition in India. The study findings indicate that there are certain illnesses for which the rural communities depend exclusively on healers irrespective of caste and class. The normative questions that Indian modernity has raised about the scientific credentials of these healers (biological efficacy) or about them propagating retrogressive social values, for example, actually camouflaged the essential meaning and efficacy of their practices. These questions have hijacked the social anchorage of folk healing and therefore fostered its understanding in narrow biological and moral terms.