Transnationalizing Postcolonial Health: Addressing Shortages through Rajkumari Amrit Kaur’s Health Diplomacy in the 1950s

Abstract By 1950, policymakers in postcolonial India, many of whom were erstwhile anticolonial activists, recognized the pressures and politics of the early Cold War as a continuation of the colonial world order. Both the United States and the ussr utilized their programs of technical support for developmentalist projects to win over the allegiances of newly decolonizing countries. Using archival records and the personal correspondence of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, independent India’s first Health Minster, this paper aims to rethink the nature of postcolonial India’s collaboration with the Cold War powers in planning for health. Against existing historical accounts that have referred to these early Cold War collaborations between Global South policymakers and their Cold War power blocs as instrumentalist politics, this paper shows that Amrit Kaur was envisioning and enacting a new order in international health—one foregrounded by an uneven distribution of scientific and medical personnel and expertise.