Part of the reason that Bengali vernacular forms of ‘western’ medicine-more appropriately called daktari medicine—have largely remained absent from the historian's account of nineteenth century South Asian medical history is because the daktars for whom it had meaning as a distinct form of medical practice have themselves remained out of sight. Histories mainly reliant upon English language archives—both governmental and nongovernmental—have mostly tended to see this numerous group of physicians as anonymous statistics, sometimes as half-trained quacks exploiting the lacunae of medical legislation and occasionally—it must be admitted—as prominent representatives of ‘native’ opinion, such as Dr Madhusudhan Gupta, Dr G. C. Roy, Sir Nil Ratan Sircar or even the Congress leader Dr B. C. Roy. Little detailed account, however, has been available of the actual lives and of the numerous and varied Bengalis who came to practice ‘western’ medicine at various levels of the colonial establishment, ranging from the lowly hospital assistants to the grand Edinburgh- or London-trained MDs. It is through their agency and through contact with their lifeworlds that daktari acquired its unique identity. Any history of daktari medicine will therefore remain incomplete without an account of the histories of these daktars.

The study of individual lifeworlds, i.e., lives in context, has been popularized since the 1970s by the increasing intellectual prominence of microhistory. As one of its pioneers, Carlo Ginzburg, has clarified, for a long time microhistory was only a vague quest for a more intimate view of the past in smaller scale.