Summary
This chapter considers the contradictory positions that global health creates for Indian tuberculosis (TB) physicians and technocrats. When global health – a speculative field of actors, value systems, institutions, and logics around pharmaceuticals and development – entered India in the 1990s, its actors were keenly interested in treating TB to prevent a global epidemic. The double vision, in managing individual suffering and securing global health, undermined India’s national TB research institutions and delocalized TB as well as its treatment. It also gave Indian clinicians an opportunity to test and contest global health’s universalist projects and knowledge claims. Considering three Indian clinician-scientists’ responses to global health, this chapter examines how global paradigms interact with clinical practice. It shows how research by Indian TB physicians, within and outside of global health, highlights situated TB expertise and nationally particular bodies and bacilli.
