Abstract
In writing anti-colonial histories of medicine, those engaged with the unpacking of the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘non-West’ are wary of the problem of relativism. Monographs on medicine in South Asia have pushed this argument by interrogating the implication of ‘western originated’ medicine within the South Asian context, like Joseph Alter’s (2000) monograph, Gandhi’s Body that includes a chapter on the reconstruction of Hydrotherapy and Ether within the biomoral nationalist milieu, counteracting any claims of cultural relativism. Two decades later, Shinjini Das, in her monograph, Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India, makes a striking contribution to the relatively less explored trajectory of ‘vernacularizing’ homoeopathy in Bengal, its extensive popularity and therapeutic resonance with the everyday Bengali life and its religious, economic and cultural sensibilities.
Das chronicles the history of Bengali homoeopathic practices from 1866 to 1941, its myriad entanglements with the registers of family, Bengali entrepreneurial firms, biographers, amateur practitioners and the state, emerging as one of the most revered medical practice in Bengal through these years. The roots of homoeopathy are in Germany, which emerged through the doctrine propounded by Samuel Hahnemann, advocating its therapeutic modalities through the ideas of the vital force, laws of similarity and panacea through minute doses of drugs. Dispensing away with binaries between institutional metanarratives and bodily, mundane narratives of South Asian medicine, the originality and the point of departure for Das, is that she interrogates into these spheres as engaged in dialogues and negotiations. She enquires into their everyday dynamics, mapping the hierarchies, circumventions and power relations among them. Methodologically, her work provides critical insights into the politics of the archives and conceptualising the ‘field’ through and beyond what is deemed to be documented. The lack of acknowledgement in state archives marginalized homoeopathy as the ‘alternative’ and ‘peripheral’. However, such restrictive capacities opened up newer possibilities in locating these accounts in the popular print market of Bengal that ranges from texts, biographies, novels to journals.
The thematic of the book lies in ‘the cultural production of Homoeopathy as vernacular science’ (p.11), exploring the vernacular as relational and constructed. Homoeopathy is situated within the space of the vernacular through a ‘liminal’ identity as Das has argued, from being practiced by European practitioners in Bengal to its recasting within the domains of the families, Bengali firms and the market. Homoeopathy has been argued to be a ‘science in translation’, ‘a heterodox therapeutic doctrine that is progressive but not hegemonic’, to argue for its transposition in the spaces of family, firms and texts which has been analysed by Das as heterodox institutions, co-emergent with the ethos of Bengali homoeopathic medicine. Resting upon these central arguments, the monograph is divided into five chapters: on family, homoeopathic firms, their intertwined history; biographies of Bengali homoeopaths as the new form of writing medical histories; translations as a contentious process involving cultural interpretations that are not reducible to just words; the household as the site for dissemination, translation and production of knowledge and drugs; and finally its tryst with nationalist governments, formalisation of pedagogy and standardisation of diagnosis and pharmaceuticals.
The institutions of family and market, instead of being binaries between the intimate and professional economic spaces, have been shown as fused entities. Homoeopathic firms dealing in publications and pharmacy are shown to have been formed through filial, affinal networks of kinship, forging familial entrepreneurial firms. It also upends the popular beliefs around the caste and class ideas of how intellectual history has dealt with the bhadralok, 1 showing that business, ethics of investment and wealth generation and rising of castes like Gandhabaniks 2 provide insights into Bengali society, hitherto uncharted. Family, instead of being interiorised spaces were run on business ethics of savings and discipline, an extended entrepreneurial network, a cooperative of homoeopathic practice. A Weberian idea of ethics of capitalism pervades in Das’ analysis of enterprise and family, where the household also emerges as a site for circumventing a standardised therapeutic practice of the state. It was the site of lay householders and amateur physicians to experiment with disease and drugs. Households, even the ones in mofussil 3 areas were marginalised by statist interventions, but they continued to circumvent the state. Das revisits the idea of the subaltern as an already marginalised space to show that subaltern emerges from within the community.
The implication of homoeopathy in households and firms is shown to occur through biographies as the ‘new geographies of nineteenth century science’ (p. 85), one that brings the distant physicians and the local practitioner in the same cultural discourse. It embodies writing lives and what these lives meant and co-emergence of the biomoral, material and the spiritual in homoeopathic biographies. It also propelled an informal pedagogy through the lives and characters of these physicians, where translations enabled contextualising them within the discourse of a Hindu Bengali household. Translation, Das argued, is a discursive field including locales, language and philosophy which enables translation rather than being transformed by it. Homoeopathy, its concepts of vital force and minute doses of drugs, was compatible into being translatable into the philosophy of the indivisible and intangible soul or ‘atman’ and ‘sakti’ or the life force, which makes it a familiar science, propelling Hindu households as plural and dynamic sites of medical practice.
Das’ brilliantly formed arguments, however, leaves certain questions in mind. How far were the European practitioners practicing in earlier years in Bengal, involved in the acts of translation? Was it only a textual translation or a translation including negotiations with these practitioners? Secondly, was the Hindu reception of homoeopathy uninterrupted in these translations? What about atheists, Bengali Christians and Brahmos? 4 Is the idea of a unified spirit universal among these sectarian religious categories in a smooth implication of homoeopathy?
Nonetheless, Das’ remarkable achievement lies in her post-colonial analytics in de-centring the ideas around the ‘origin’ with an essence. She examines how the origin in the form of ideas, practices and language are historically and culturally contingent, reconfigured and imbued with newer meanings. Her own note of translation in the book, regarding the negotiations between Bengali, Sanskrit, English terms and transliterations testify vernacularisation and translation as flexible and dynamic tools of making meanings.
This book is an extremely interesting reading for scholars of South Asian studies, engaged with the history and sociology of medicine and indigenous medicine. It would also capture the interest of those involved with studies on family, translations and print culture, pedagogy and business within the cultural history of Bengal and South Asia.