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This essay analyses and historicises a contemporary dominant narrative among India's biomedical doctors, that the early post‐independence period (1940s–1970s) was characterised by immense public trust and confidence in the biomedical profession, with the patient‐doctor relationship experiencing a 'golden era'. By exploring people's experiences with and perceptions of doctors during these decades, I show that contrary to contemporary understanding, public dissatisfaction with doctors was substantial even in the early post‐independence period. I argue that the dominance of privileged‐caste and ‐class Indians in the medical profession nurtured a caste privilege‐based elitist outlook within the mainstream profession and its leadership and created an insurmountable socioeconomic distance between doctors and the large majority of the public. What doctors deemed as people's 'trust' in them and their profession was often simply a manifestation of people's general deference towards the elites of the society. This incorrect interpretation of patient‐doctor dynamics in the past has been a constant feature of mainstream narratives around the doctor‐society relationship in post‐independence India and has remained largely under‐explored and under‐historicised in the medical, scholarly and public discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to a special section brings together three papers first presented at a panel, 'Medical Professions in South Asia: Historical and Contemporary Analyses', at the 26th European Conference on South Asian Studies, held in Vienna, Austria and online, in July 2021. All three papers deal with aspects of the professionalisation of biomedical doctors in India since its independence in 1947. The authors bring together historical and sociological approaches to illuminate the growth of specialisms, patterns of practitioner–patient interactions and efforts to maintain occupational closure and maintain status in the face of growing challenges. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these papers for the sociology of health and illness in India and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]