Indian medical indigeneity: From nationalist assertion to the global market

Social History

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 263-283

  Hardiman, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 75349083728     PISSN: 03071022     EISSN: 14701200     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03071020902975131     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. Deepak Chopra, Boundless Energy: The Complete Mind-Body Programme for Overcoming Chronic Fatigue (London, 1995), 14.
2. Deepak Chopra, Perfect Health: The Complete Mind Body Guide (London, 2001), 11.
3. David Frawley, Ayurveda and the Mind: The Healing of Consciousness (Delhi, 1998), 4.
4. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
5. I shall in this article use the term 'biomedicine' to denote what is sometimes described as 'western medicine', or in some cases 'allopathy'.
6. For some recent critical studies of 'Chinese traditional medicine', see the chapters by Vivienne Lo and Sylvia Schroer, Nancy N. Chen, and Susan Brownell in Joseph S. Alter (ed.), Asian Medicine and Globalization (Philadelphia, 2005).
7. Charles Leslie, 'The professionalizing ideology of medical revivalism' in Milton Singer (ed.), Modernization of Occupational Cultures in South Asia (Durham, N.C., 1973), 691-708
8. Charles Leslie, 'The modernization of Asian medical systems' in John Poggie and R. Lynch (eds), Rethinking Modernization: Anthropological Perspectives (Westport, Conn., 1974), 377-94
9. Charles Leslie, 'The ambiguities of medical revivalism in modern India' in C. Leslie (ed.), Asian Medical Systems (Berkeley, 1976), 356-67
10. Charles Leslie, 'Interpretations of illness: syncreticism in modern Ayurveda' in C. Leslie and Allan Young (eds), Paths to Asian Knowledge (Berkeley, 1992), 224-56.
11. Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago, 1967).
12. Paul R. Brass, 'The politics of Ayurvedic education: a case study of revivalism and modernization in India' in Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph (eds), Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organization, Society, and Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 341-3.
13. Barbara D. Metcalf, 'Nationalist Muslims in British India: the case of Hakim Ajmal Khan', Modem Asian Studies, XIX, 1 (1985), 1-28
14. K. N. Panikkar, 'Indigenous medicine and cultural hegemony: a study of the revitalization movement in Kerala', Studies in History, VIII, II (1992), 283-308.
15. Poonam Bala, Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective (New Delhi, 1991)
16. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993)
17. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859-1914 (Cambridge, 1994)
18. Anil Kumar, Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy, 1835-1911 (New Delhi, 1998)
19. David Arnold, The New Cambridge History of India, III, 5, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2000), makes, however, some useful comments in passing on Ayurveda.
20. Jean M. Langford, Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalances (Durham, N.C. and London, 2002), 12-14.
21. Kenneth G. Zysk, Medicine in the Veda: Religious Healing in the Veda (Delhi, 1996)
22. Dominik Wujastyk, The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical Writings (London, 2003).
23. Zysk, op. cit., 1-11.
24. Wujastyk, op. cit., xviii, xxix-xxx.
25. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab (New Delhi, 2006)
26. Charu Gupta, 'Procreation and pleasure: writings of a woman Ayurvedic practitioner in colonial north India,' Studies in History, XXI, 1 (January-June 2005), 17-44
27. Neshat Quaiser, 'Politics, culture and colonialism: Unani's debate with doctory' in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds), Health, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Colonial India (New Delhi, 2001), 317-55
28. Seema Alavi, 'Unani medicine in the nineteenth-century public sphere: Urdu texts and the Oudh Akhbar', Indian Economic and Social History Review, XLII, 1 (2005), 99-129
29. Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition 1600-1900 (Ranikhet, 2007)
30. Claudia Liebeskind, 'Arguing science: Unani Tibb, hakims and biomedicine in India, 1900-50' in Waltraud Ernst (ed.), Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000 (London, 2002), 58-75.
31. Anil Kumar, 'The Indian drug industry under the Raj, 1860-1920' in Biswamoy Pati and Mark Harrison (eds), op. cit., 356-85
32. Madhulika Banerjee, 'Power, culture, and medicines: Ayurvedic pharmaceuticals in the modern market', Contributions to Indian Sociology, XXVI, 3 (2002), 435-67
33. Maarten Bode, 'Indian indigenous pharmaceuticals: tradition, modernity and nature' in Ernst, op. cit., 184-203
34. Maarten Bode, 'Taking traditional knowledge to the market: the commoditization of Indian medicine', Anthropology and Medicine, xiii, 3 (2006), 225-36.
35. Alavi, Islam and Healing, op. cit., 12.
36. Langford, Fluent Bodies, op. cit., chap. 1, 1-24, is titled '(Re)inventing Ayurveda'
37. S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina have subsequently used this term in their article 'Reinventing traditional medicine: method, institutional change, and the manufacture of drugs and medication in late colonial India' in Alter, Asian Medicine, op. cit., 67-77. Likewise, they do not refer to Hobsbawm and Ranger as such.
38. ibid. 190.
39. Guy N. A. Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (New Delhi, 2007).
40. Projit Bihari Mukharji, 'Bengali Ayurbed: frames, texts and practices', Calcutta Historical Journal, XXV, 2 (July-December 2005), 15.
41. Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton, 2004), xiv.
42. Also, Joseph Alter (ed.), Asian Medicine, op. cit., 1-44.
43. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, op. cit., 67.
44. Kisorry Chandra Mitra, Hindu Medicine and Medical Education (Calcutta, 1865), 10,
45. quoted in Mukharji, op. cit., 18.
46. The assertion that Buddhism was responsible for this decline appears to have been made first in Bengali medical journals in the 1880s. See Mukharji, op. cit., 19.
47. Leslie, 'The ambiguities of medical revivalism', op. cit., 362
48. Langford, op. cit., 89-96.
49. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, 1999), 7-11, 88-90 and 100-18.
50. ibid., 118.
51. ibid., 120.
52. ibid., 119-20.
53. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, op. cit., 177-8.
54. Brass, op. cit., 453, n. 8.
55. Robert E. Svoboda, Ayurveda: Life, Health and Longevity (New Delhi, 1993), 11.
56. Wujastyk, op. cit., 2-5, 63-4.
57. Attewell, op. cit., 5-11.
58. François Loux, 'Folk medicine' in W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, vol. 1 (London, 1993), 667.
59. Romila Thapar, 'Syndicated Moksha?', Seminar, CCCXIII (September 1985), 22.
60. Attewell, op. cit., 21-6
61. Quaiser, op. cit., 322-3.
62. Alavi, 'Unani medicine' op. cit., 102.
63. Helen E. Sheehan and S. J. Hussain, 'Unani Tibb: history, theory and contemporary practice in south Asia', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, DLXXXIII, 1 (September 2002), 122-35.
64. Frederick L. Dunn, 'Traditional Asian medical systems and cosmopolitan medicine as adaptive systems' in Leslie, Asian Medical Systems, op. cit., 149-51.
65. Leslie, 'Ambiguities of medical revivalism', op. cit., 358.
66. This debate is set out in detail in Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 188-98.
67. Attewell, op. cit., 21-9.
68. Loux, op. cit., 667-9.
69. Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 71.
70. Alavi, 'Unani medicine', op. cit., 102.
71. Arnold, Colonizing the Body, op. cit., 43-58
72. Christian Hochmuth, 'Patterns of medical culture in colonial Bengal, 1835-1880', Bulletin of the History of Medicine, LXXX, 1 (2006), 44.
73. Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 29.
74. Roger Jeffrey, The Politics of Health in India (Berkeley, 1988), 50-3
75. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, op. cit., 181.
76. Leslie, 'Ambiguities of medical revivalism', op. cit., 363.
77. Brass, op. cit., 347.
78. ibid., 449.
79. ibid., 353-6.
80. Thapar, op. cit., 22.
81. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, 2000).
82. Alavi, 'Unani medicine', op. cit., 118-19, 123.
83. Attewell, op. cit., 147-60.
84. For two statements of Muslim fears at this time see Sir Saiyyid Ahmad speech at Lucknow, 28 December 1887, in J. R. McLane (ed.), The Political Awakening in India (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 43-7
85. and Mohsin-ul-Mulk, Secretary, Muslim College, Aligarh, to W. A. J. Archbold, College Principal, received 24 August 1906, in Gilbert Martin (ed.), Servant of India: A Study of Imperial Rule from 1905 to 1910 as Told through the Correspondence and Diaries of Sir James Dunlop Smith (London, 1966), 54-5.
86. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, op. cit., 183.
87. Attewell, op. cit., 163-4.
88. ibid., 184-5.
89. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (New Delhi, 1990), 234.
90. Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 185-7.
91. Young India, 11 June 1925. Gandhi adopted a critical but eclectic approach to medical topics, being a believer in a combination of sanitary principles, good diet, sexual restraint and naturopathy. He was often scathing of biomedicine. For further reading on this topic see Joseph S. Alter, Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet, and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000)
92. Prakash, op. cit., 154-6
93. Cecilia Van Hollen, 'Nationalism, transnationalism, and the politics of "Traditional" Indian medicine for HIV/AIDS' in Alter, Asian Medicine, op. cit., 91-3.
94. Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 187-8.
95. Margaret Trawick, 'Death and nurturance in Indian systems of healing' in Leslie, Asian Medical Knowledge, op. cit., 143-55.
96. Sivaramakrishnan, op. cit., 223-30.
97. Brass, op. cit., 346.
98. Report of the Health Survey and Planning Committee (Delhi, 1962), vol. 1, 32.
99. Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine, op. cit., 179-80.
100. Brass, op. cit., 347-8.
101. ibid., 353-4.
102. Attewell, op. cit., 247-55.
103. Brass, op. cit., 350-2.
104. The two items in the manifesto that dealt with non-biomedical approaches were: (1) 'Promoting traditional and alternative systems of medicine such as Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, homoeopathy, naturopathy, with particular emphasis on traditional wisdom and indigenous knowledge, with full quality assurance'; and (2) 'Safeguarding traditional medical knowledge and natural resources'. See BJP manifesto, chap. 5. Available online at: http://www.bjp.org/manifes/chap5.htm
105. Attewell, op. cit., 260-1.
106. Langford, op. cit., 14-19.
107. ibid., 43.
108. Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Body, Mind and Spirit - Mental and Spiritual Healing (New York, 1990), cover blurb.
109. Maarten Bode, 'Indian indigenous pharmaceuticals: Tradition, modernity and nature' in Ernst, op. cit., 191.
110. Amrita Sondhi, The Modern Ayurvedic Cookbook: Healthful, Healing Recipes for Life (London, 2006). For an example of a guide for self-diagnosis in Chopra's writings
111. see his Perfect Healing, op. cit., chap. 2: 'Discovering your body type', 31-61. For a trenchant critique of such practice
112. see Martha Ann Selby, 'Sanskrit gynecologies in postmodernity: the commoditization of Indian medicine in alternative medical and new-age discourses on women's health' in Alter, Asian Medicine, op. cit., 120-31.
113. It should be noted that the idea that the enlightened individual should aim for an informed self-reliance in matters of health is a thoroughly modern one. See Partha Chatterjee's gloss on Kant in this respect in The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism (New Delhi, 1997), 199.