Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–1940: The Forgotten History by Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala (review)

This is a book about a grievance. The early British colonial government of Kenya recruited Indian doctors, first to care for its Indian troops and imported railway laborers, then to serve as assistant or subassistant surgeons in outlying districts. However qualified, they were denied equality with European medical officers. When political rivalry between Indians and Europeans intensified after the First World War, forty-four of the seventy-two Indian doctors were dismissed, ostensibly as an economy measure and to broaden African opportunities. Those dismissed were generally barred from practicing privately, while the private Indian practitioners who had meanwhile joined the Indian elite of Nairobi and Mombasa suffered professional discrimination, being denied membership of the British Medical Association’s Kenya branch until 1935. This was colonial Kenya at its worst, yet its Indian doctors have also been ignored by historians who have written entirely of European or African practitioners. Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala have joined forces to rectify this. Greenwood has published a history of colonial medicine in East Africa. Topiwala’s father was a leading Nairobi physician whose career has provided an entry into the community’s history.

The result is a lucid, assiduously researched account of a subject whose novelty is, however, matched by its difficulty. Even the combination of family connections and meticulous archival study has revealed relatively little about the two hundred or so Indian doctors working in Kenya during this period, although more about those who discriminated against them. One reason is certainly the decision to end the book in 1940, well before interviews could provide anything but the most general family recollections. The most interesting passages in the book, for this reviewer, are the few pages that summarize surviving firsthand accounts of the doctors’ work, such as Surgeon-Major Masani’s report on his Mombasa expedition of 1896 (pp. 46–47) and the references to district medical reports by Indian doctors during the years surrounding the First World War (pp. 98–102). These are almost the only sections of the book in which the doctors speak for themselves about the practice of medicine. Whether more copious material of this kind exists—as it does for the first African physicians of the 1940s and 1950s—can be known only to a specialist. It is perhaps noteworthy that the bibliography lists only two or three East African contributions to Indian medical journals, that there is no reference to the African vernacular press (commonly rich in accounts of disease and medicine), that Dr. H. T. Topiwala’s numerous contributions to the press are mentioned but nowhere quoted or analyzed, and that the private papers cited relate so predominantly to grievances. The later chapters also focus rather narrowly on Nairobi, while Mombasa, where nearly one-third of traceable private practitioners lived, was less racially polarized. Comparative context is lacking, whether with other professional groups, such as Kenya’s Indian lawyers, or with other colonial situations. For example, the claim (p. 172) that the Indian doctors’ role in Kenya’s medical history was “absolutely fundamental” deserves comparison with neighboring German East Africa (mainland Tanzania) whose colonial regime did not employ Indian soldiers, railway builders, or doctors, discriminated even more fiercely against Indians (who were legally categorized as natives), and based medical work on European military surgeons with African assistants, without the district medical network that Indian personnel made possible in Kenya and Uganda.

Kenya’s Indian doctors had ample grounds for grievance, but perhaps it has been allowed to obscure somewhat the more positive and interesting aspects of their practice of medicine, difficult though these are for even the most assiduous to recover where evidence is so scarce.