Small pharma chronicles: the curious tale of Indian generics

Speaker: Sarah Hodges (King's College London)
Series: Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science

Within the moral landscape of global pharmaceuticals, the past few decades have seen Indian generic drugs hold a series of potent material and affective charges. The access-to-medicines movement embraced the Indian generic as a cheap and effective life-saving object: a global south David against the Goliath of big pharma. Yet soon thereafter, others – whether regulators from Global South nations, or World Health Organisation taskforces – warned that, far from being life-saving, cheap drugs from India potentially posed an urgent danger to the entire global pharmaceutical supply chain. Today, many Indian generics have so consolidated their positions as lucrative global commodities that they have ceased to be Indian owned at all.

This shifting material and affective charge of Indian pharma storytelling has left a spectacular contemporary archive of polemic: of campaigns and counter-campaigns. But polemic-as-archive presents a navigational challenge to the scholar. Although select main characters and moral imaginaries are rendered hyper-visible, many others thrive in the shadowlands of small pharma. This talk is an initial attempt to sketch out some of the characters that small pharma brings into view when used as an analytic lens for the curious tale of Indian generics and its shadowlands.