This paper focuses on colonial Kerala (which included the princely states of Cochin and Travancore; and Malabar which came under Madras Presidency of British-ruled India), in analysing the historical renderings of the medical encounters in the region, the cross-cutting influences of missionary works and the launching of a nationlistic medical experiment.

Enlightenment ethos and colonial ‘mentalities’ at times essentialised local medical traditions as inherently inferior in its ‘scientific’ content. This paper poses that, not only were there racial connotations in distancing the people of the ‘orient’, from that of the west, but the same physiological distinctions were also used to establish social inferiority. A critical overview of the writings of Francis Buchanan, William Logan and Francis Day is attempted in this paper to unveil such historical underpinnings.

Missionary endeavours also often complimented colonial representations of local medical traditions. While professional western medicine attracted the English educated urban rich, the medical missions attended to the diet and hygiene of the masses through the prism of Christian ethics. Even though rooted in absolute faith in ‘science’, and hegemonising - through its supposed emancipatory and civilising role - western medicine and medical profession had to undergo localisation by adopting and adapting to techniques and methods of local medical traditions, other than borrowing local pharmacopeia. This paper explicates it through the medical writings of Howard Somerwell who was an honorary surgeon of the South Travancore Medical Mission of the London Missionary Society.

On the other side, local medical traditions, particularly the elite forms, fascinated by the western professionalism and induced by its own dynamics, emulated western medicine in a number of ways, in attempts at revitalisation. This led to a stream of imagination for a national medicine, silencing or side-lining the plurality of medical traditions of the locale. This is explicated here by taking up the case of P.S.Varier and the historical narrative around his Kottakkal movement.