SOCIAL TRENDS
Journal of the Department of Sociology of North Bengal University

Vol. 10, 31 March 2023; ISSN: 2348-6538
Peer-reviewed National Journal

9

Indigenous Therapeutics, Public Discourse and the
Politics of Practice in 20th Century Colonial Bengal

Anuradha Gupta
PhD Scholar, Department of Sociology,  Jadavpur University

Email: anuradhag633@gmail.com

Abstract: State sanctioned archival documents on indigenous medicine
is reflective of the practice of forgetting and foregoing in constructing
an “Indian Medical System”. These documents not being the only one
in public discourse bears open an elite practice of institutionalisation
of a dynamic field with possibilities in voices and vocation that
transgresses such elite and authoritarian definitions. The public
discourse is a space that not only accommodates the “official” but
also a wide range of documents that have an official charge but does
not fit into the restrictive scope of the statist registers of qualifying as
officially sanctioned knowledge. The article attempts to make a close
reading of public policy of documents of indigenous medicines in the
late colonial period in India and the vast circulation of printed matters,
especially Bengali periodicals publishing on the same, that were being
published in those years and reading them together in a dialogue.
Unlike reading them as existing dichotomously, the article attempts to
study what Henry Lefebvre calls the “present” in understanding the
everyday life. The task of policy makers around medical matters and
practitioners in constructing an authentic charter overlooks these
periodicals that supplements the former’s nationalist cause as well as
circumvent it. Grihachikitsa and Mustiyog, that the article will focus
upon, dotting these periodicals continue to pose itself as an epistemic
conundrum refusing to settle indigenous therapeutics into any dominant
discourse and disciplinisation. Methodologically, everyday life of
therapeutic matters will unfold the problem of knowledge formation
around the historicity of these medicinal materials and also how it
remains a contested field due to the policies that overlook the identities
around caste, regional, linguistic and gender diversity in contributing
to the epistemic repertoire of “national medicine”.



Keywords: Indigenous therapeutics, mustiyog, grihachkitsa, public policy,
Indian medicine.

Introduction

The article aims at upholding a problem - a problem of location and
categorisation of forms of knowledge. According to Bernard Cohn, the
epistemological construct of the “Indian” has been through a classification,
categorisation and containing the social world in defined boundaries. The
creation of these categories has constructed a misplaced discipline of the
“official”, the “popular” and the “simple” form of knowledge, materials,
practices and the practitioner. It has also overlooked the flawed assumption
of creating a dichotomy of location in so far as putting different phenomena
and objects as central and constructing a space for the relegated as
“peripheral” or “at the margins”. This spatial hierarchization that shifts the
objects, practices and identities, identifies them as a disarrayed and
amorphous body of practice that lies at margins both in terms of spatial
location (the rural space, the family) as well as the problem of embedding
it in any specific knowledge regime that is ratified by the dominant elite
voice.

The preface to the establishment of post-colonial indigenous medical
institutions and indigenous medical regulation was marked with debates
about creating policies and accommodating, regulating and cataloguing
therapists and therapeutics according to standardisations. It creates universal
discourse of categorizing drugs and training authentic experts in the field of
Ayurveda, Unani and Homoeopathic medicine. The Bengali periodicals
and magazines on the other hand, kept publishing and devoting sections
under the name of oushadhtottwo, mustiyog, grihachikitsa, totka and
bhesajtottwo that were neither coming from the space of antiquity of Indian
medical texts, a state designated vaidya or hakim nor a definitive “scientific”
validity of tested medical matters. Yet, these were co-existent in the public
circulation of assertion of indigenous voices in bring together a coherent
and robust reservoir of indigenous medicines that had a diverse provincial
history of practice and knowledge. The policies were putting forth a universal
system of indigenous medical knowledge, the practical realities stemming
from a range of co-terminus therapeutic works on the other hand were
subverting and displacing the essentialist claims of the policy makers and
elite institutions around thinking of Ayurveda, specially, as a well-rounded a
priori institution that fits its antiquity well into the registers of modern
medicine.

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The article is divided into four sections. The first section deals with the
decade long debates around institutional reorientations of indigenous
medicine, heavily focussing on Ayurveda and focussing on drug regulation
and procurement, in the quest to form a national collection of codified
indigenous medicine. The second section will enumerate on the Bengali
periodicals dealing with matters on indigenous medicine and even pages
including indigenous medical practices in periodicals related to home, women,
agriculture and the Bengali community’s nationalist assertions. The third
section gives a detailed account of mustiyog and totka, what were they
indicative of, who was prescribing them and the relation of its existence to
the popular proponents of kabiraji medicine in those years. The fourth
section deals with the problem of nomenclature in settling these therapeutics
and whether they can be justified as “simple” and amorphous. It also
interrogates questions of medicines as subversive categories which
reconstitute the idea of the indigenous and expressing themselves as
possibilities that confront the essentialist therapeutic domain of the sanctioned
drugs and medicines.  The central argument of the paper is to show how
indigenous therapeutic matters through their everyday existence has seldom
been understood as an epistemic space itself but has nonetheless been a
formidable force in challenging elitist nationalist narratives and forming an
independent voice in public discourse.

Indigenous Medical Policies, a Nationalist Assertion and Public
Memory

The Report of the Committee on Indigenous System of Medicine, was
compiled in three volumes. The first official release of the first volume was
in 1948, co-emergent with the Indian national state emerging as a sovereign
body. It however, precedes two decades of debates and deliberations among
government appointed vaidyas and hakims. The report being the first
documented publication claimed a “national” voice that was not collating
the provincially distributed histories of Ayurvedic practices but was trying
to put forth a coherence between ancient textual precepts and modern
forms of scientific knowledge. The policy’s thrust was neither condescension
nor reinvention and revival that we find among colonial and subsequent
nationalist discourse in late 19th century. It was rather the problem of practice
that was seeking to standardize medicine and regulate medical practitioners
so that the epistemological lack which the policy makers were facing could
be settled, amidst a constant clamour for asserting and empowering the
indigenous. The members who formed the committee, the progress meetings,

Indigenous Therapeutics, Public Discourse and the Politics of... 145



arguments on drugs and rural Ayurvedic practices, showed unilateral process
of institutionalising Ayurveda, but a continuous struggle in containing and
disciplining the same.

The report was prepared under the chairmanship of Col. R. N. Chopra,
with the members being Vaid Bishagratna, Dr. Balakrishna Chitamani Lagu,
Dr. B. A. Pathak, Hakim Shifa-ul-Mulk, who were spearheading boards
on indigenous medicine in Bombay, Madras, Benaras and Dhaka. Also Dr.
B. N. Ghosh, a pharmacologist from Calcutta was appointed.1 The late
colonial period was now seeking a form of knowledge system for elite
administrative medical practices to be established that could make indigenous
medicine bereft of its diverse independent existence and reorient it as a
science that could easily merge in matters and methodologies of the modern
medical science. To quote from the report itself, the functions to be
discharged by the appointed personnel, was ‘an enquiry as to whether the
three systems, Ayurveda, Unani and Modern cannot be combined into one
all-comprehensive system’ and responding to it, stating, ‘the heritage of
India, coupled with discoveries of the West, should produce a system,
universal in its application and general in benefits’ (Chopra 1948: 9). The
policy also validates the state sanction by quoting from the Sushruta Samhita,
one of the early textual compendium on Ayurvedic medicine that a
practitioner after training should only begin the practice after permission
from the king.

The close reading of the policy in the form of a narrative enables an
understanding of those who have been purposively excluded and the
practices that have been deliberately erased. The policy looks at appointing
registered medical staff and supervisors in provincial and rural spaces,
bringing the vaidyas and the hakims under the purview of medical
registration and one National Board of Governance which would alleviate
the positions of the Ayurvedic vaidyas who may be practicing under
unrecognized and underdeveloped medical conditions. The policy makers
also drafted a classificatory scheme of therapeutic materials by bringing
them together under the category of drugs and trying to draw an
anachronistic classificatory model by juxtaposing the Indological ideas on
medicine and modern pharmaceutical objects. The medical and drug
regulation required the vaidyas to collaborate with botanists and
pharmacologists, in provincial and regional centres but co-ordinated under
the direction of Central Research Institute and ‘possibly to identify correctly
most of the crude drugs and classify them’ (Chopra 1948: 173). Treading
along the path of the colonial botanists and administrators of creating an
herbarium to archive plants and catalogue them in a fixed laboratory, under

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an authoritarian gaze, like the Botanical Garden at Shibpur, the members of
the national committee, Chopra and Budhwar created herbariums in the
School of Tropical Medicine in Calcutta, followed by Forest Research
Institute in Dehradun and Drug Research Laboratory in Kashmir. The
chikitsak and oushadh, was now formally being inducted into the policy
as the pharmacist and the pharmacopoeia. The autonomous body of the
kabiraj, practicing through knowledge and training handed down through
a family vocation, was also being given acknowledgement only to encourage
him to get registered under a nationalized regime of Indian medicine.
Ayurvedic medical matters were found to be difficult to be brought under
specific categorisation and standardisation2 of purity and potency because
not only were the ancient texts on Ayurveda distributed and spread over a
vast number of charters on medicine but a collation of all such matters was
not easy because of the varying quantities of preparation, everyday regular
use of these therapeutic matters that varied from illness to patients and the
kabiraj’s own disposition and decision.

The Report prepared by the committee was the first face of indigenous
medical knowledge that was trying, even though fallaciously, to bring
together a vast set of practices that involved autonomy and individual
therapeutic ethics to be clubbed together as one of the scientific faces of
modern Indian nation state. Such kind of nationalist assertion was based on
the dubious model of first, imagining the ancient and the precolonial texts to
be universalist in nature, containing a unified doctrine that could be easily
made compatible with another discipline of knowledge and secondly, these
being the only form of practices to which the idea of indigenous therapeutics
and Ayurveda could be contained. It also is indicative of nationalisation of
the space of memory and identity. Unlike thinking of the official and the
everyday as two distinguished discourses, it is argued that both the spaces
are implicated in one another and co-constitutive of one another. The
nationalisation of public memory entails an attempt to document indigenous
history in a monolithic voice that will forge a new relationship of actors,
therapists, patients, consumers along a building new institutions and archives
that tries to obliterate differences, co-existence and circumventions in
history. However, public memory is also fraught with narratives from
provincial voices, writings, oral narratives, pictures which uphold the
challenges and the non-negotiability of policies and policy makers in
categorising and settling a huge repertoire of therapeutic practices existing
beyond state control and expressing itself with equal authority in public
discourse.

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Bengali Periodicals - Nationalism Revisited

In spite of not being in the same tone of the state and elite authoritarian
regime in the process of documentation and archiving, a large body of
printed materials were simultaneously being published through regional and
vernacular bodies3 and organisation, which were a part of an everyday life,
regular readership and forging a space for a non-essentialist nationalism.
These publications were either devoted specifically to indigenous medicine
or a wide range of topics that contained matters of the community, but
eclectically tying up all the different topical issues around identity in an
anti-colonial space. The periodicals had an inclusivity of a diverse set of
practices, diverse opinions and as a text, circulating in the public domain,
gave a context to see co-emergent realities engaging in conversation with
each other. Also, it is interesting to note, how in a diffused manner, indigenous
medicine was in a dialogue with questions of gendered identity, home and
family, agriculture and so on. It brought out the regular, mundane practices
but not a celebration of a universalized model of nationalism. Instead, it
was an expression of nationalism expressed through the intersection of a
multiplicity of native therapeutics in conjunction with ideas of women and
nation, children and nation and how to strengthen the space of the indigenous
without silencing varied voices. To put it in another way, the epistemic
conundrum which the policy makers were unable to settle in, is found to be
existing as a formidable existence, punctuating public memory and revisiting
the idea of nationalism.

 This section will talk briefly about four such periodicals that were regularly
published in the late colonial years and the initial years of the 20th century
that contained precepts of indigenous therapeutics and its possibilities.
Bangalaksmi was a periodical that was published by Hemalata Debi and
started in 1924 and continued into post-independance years. Devoted to
the figure of the Bengali bhadramahila, the periodical had issues relating
to the moral and religious issues expressed through poems, stories,
commentaries on women, family and motherhood. Among these articles,
we find an eminent Baidya kabiraj, Indubhushan Sen’s piece on Shishu-
khadya, as a directive to the mother for a healthy childhood. Child health,
ideal motherhood, ingestion were ideas through which nationalism gained
an immense momentum, but the state authorities failed to use this register
as a distributed field of looking at indigenous therapeutics. Moreover, a
standardisation of pharmacopoeia often overlooks categories such as
khadya or food as an everyday therapeutic practice that reputed kabirajs
of that time prescribed. Moreover, food is a much broad register that has
been overlooked by modern science as being prescriptive and potent in

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healing, which the Ayurvedic kabirajs laid great stress on. The policy makers
purposively forget and by-pass these forms of medical realities, because it
lacks a language that can accommodate these realities. Grihastha was
another periodical that was published from Grihastha Publishing House in
Kolkata, a monthly periodical chronicling domestic life and rural space,
through essays and poems on social and political events.  Among the various
topics on “Amar Bongobhumi” (my land Bengal), Chhtrajiban (student
life), appears a column on mustiyog, which is a series of remedial measures,
therapeutic objects and illness. The editors compile them after a month-
long contribution from various sources- written and oral and there are regular
contributions of indigenous medical therapies. Along with Grihastha, there
was Grihasthamangal, that began publishing as a guidebook for the rural
Bengal, the agrarian sector, explicitly voicing for a self-dependant agrarian
and rural sector under colonial rule. The assertions of self-dependence
again bring back medicine in the purview of an anti-colonial struggle to
establish modes of knowing. Along with advertisements on Homoeopathic
medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, mentioned as totka chikitsa,
Grihasthamangal credits the contributors of totka chikitsa, enabling the
readers to get a brief biographical account of the contributors, understand
that medicines occupy a space of everyday vocation that neither always
comes from official training nor a fixed ascriptive caste4 status and history.
It is rather dispersed and exists through remedies that are formed through
sudden encounters with matters, a repeated use of them and having entered
the therapeutic corpus through trials, intuitions and effectivity. A pictorial
representation before every section on Totka medicine has a mother and
child, which is argued to not only mean a certain relationship but also an
intimacy to matters rising from certain domestic institutions along with family.
The final periodical to be discussed is Cikitsa-Sammilani that was edited
by Annadacharan Khastagir, a noted allopathic physician in the late 19th

century and kabiraj Sitalchandra Chattopadhyay. The monthly journal had
debates and discussions around Allopathy, Ayurveda and Homoeopathy,
with popular physicians and kabirajs from both erstwhile undivided Bengal
would contribute. It was also critical of government policies and how it
should induct Ayurvedic practices in institutes. The periodical has contribution
from one Dr. Mathuramohan Chakraborty of Tangail in present Bangladesh,
enumerating on mustiyog concerning diseases of the spleen, liver.

Mustiyog, was not just amorphously spread over a non-specialized field of
medicine, but also a part of the physician’s prescriptions for regular use,
that could be validated as a prescribed form of indigenous therapeutic
material. It is also indicative of the irreconcilable medicinal practices and

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practitioners that the policies on indigenous medicine were struggling to
deal with and why. In spite of the nationalist claim of the home, the intimate
sphere, the ethics of the native physicians and the possibilities of the body
of the therapist, the official sanction does not consider it veracious enough
to counter colonial forms of knowledge, since these nationalist claims
themselves follow an epistemic frame that overlooks indigenous medicine
to be intersected and entangled with everyday modes of identities built
around gender, language and caste.

Mustiyog, Grihachikitsa and Totka – Possibilities within and
Beyond the nationalist Rhetoric

The Report of the Committee on Indigenous medicine, was faced primarily
with two dilemmas that it seeks to settle through a standardisation and
scrutinisation. The first one was how to differentiate between an expert
and a laity- designating a qualified Vaidya or hakim, and secondly, how to
create an herbarium, catalogue mainly plants and putting medical matters
through scrutiny of potency. The identities of the practitioner and therapeutic
objects were displaced from their lived realities and socio-cultural contexts
and converted into an identity that was created through a formal education
structure and laboratory-controlled objects. Such identities were based on
an idea of objectivity that modern science claims but in doing so tends to
purposely not acknowledge the embedded realties of the daily practice of
science through possibilities in time and space.

The periodicals discussed in the above section, were contributions from
the Bengali community in bringing together voices supporting the cause of
an emergent nation state and the need to realize the full potential of
indigenous knowledge. The editors, belonged to the group of small but
reputed Bengali men and women, who were publishing and voicing their
views and also dedicating spaces in the columns to ideas that were at the
risk of getting lost. Mustiyog and totka chikitsa or even categories like
grihachikitsa, khadya needed to be kept alive through continuous
publishing. It is found that the risks, non-verifiability, the gaps and the
epistemic conundrum that the policy makers faced is responded through
these medical existence as everyday realities among the ill, the debilitated
and conveying a guide to a healthy body of a Bengali man, woman and
child. These acted as a panacea for the community which was trying to
express its agency and autonomy in the face of colonial episteme. It also
documents histories of indigenous therapeutics from the rural and the
moffusil areas. The editors of Grihasthamangal, make a plea for a

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collection and documentation of totkas and mustiyogs from the kabirajs,
physicians and the layman alike. To paraphrase from the editor’s note for
contributors, it says ‘anyone who has any knowledge, can contribute to the
propagation, will have their names credited…. Together we have to
contribute in whatever amount we can and record them… individual
knowledge, collected from friends and relatives will be collated and
documented… it is not worthy to lament over medicines and medical
knowledge being lost from memory, but to sustain it, we must act as a
community to document and preserve our medicines and identities’.

Such a call, was responded from medical practitioners including the kabirajs,
the laity and the doctors. It also talked about issues of health seldom
considered important for public health but involving issues around
masculinity, sex and community such as swapnodosh (involuntary
ejaculation of semen), frailty, poisons and their remedies. Kabiraj Nishinath
Sen, an Ayurvedic practitioner of the Baidya community, offers totka
chikitsa for swapnodosh by prescribing three anna measure of roots of
shimul tree bark or root combined with dry amla and butter, to be consumed
every night before going to bed. Similarly, for debility, the totka was warm
ghee with some asafoetida and rock salt to strengthen the weak body and
for scorpion sting poison, to reduce the pain, tobacco leaves soaked in
water was advised to be fed to the patient. The kabiraj’s prescription was
followed by some totkas from the supposed lower caste group men from
rural Bengal. Bhupendranath Maity from Mongolmari, Midnapore, suggests
that to tackle blood dysentery, honey, basil, thankuni leaves could act as
immediate relief to people suffering from such ailment and Mrityunjoy Maity
from Keshibari suggests opium as giving relief to ailments of ears and
throat. Apart from the botanical knowledge, many animal products were
also a part of the mustiyog. Dr. Mathuramohan Chakraborty of Tangail,
Bangladesh, in Cikitsa-Sammilani writes the use of bhasmas of snail’s shell
for the treatment of ailments of spleen and liver. The editors of Grihastha,
were welcoming contributions to the mustiyog collection by introducing
some which have been tested and found to be effective through the editor’s
own encounters with the therapeutic possibilities of certain herbs, fluids
and ingestible matters and also by inviting contributions through any walk
of life, either to have been collected from any text or passed through aural
modes of listening (sruti), and verbal knowledge (moukhik). As a footnote
he credits his jethima (aunt), a person named Pitambar Das, who deals in
herbs, a municipal chikitsalay at a neighbourhood in Calcutta, and a kabiraj
Pyarimohan Deb, practicing in Harinavi (a neighbourhood area in erstwhile
Calcutta). Kabiraj Indubhushan Sen, one of the most reputed ayurvedic

Indigenous Therapeutics, Public Discourse and the Politics of... 151



kabirajs of 20th century, wrote in details about shishu-khadya in
Bangalakshmi patrika, which was a prescription not only for a child’s
health but also educating the mother as to how she can have remedial
matters for her child’s illness and how to use the kitchen in an efficient
way for a healthy child and a healthy household.

The periodicals, offer an insight into the space of nationalism from the
perspective of the Bengali community, upending the idea of the binary
between the official, national, scientific on one hand and the domestic,
expressive, intimate space on the other hand. These periodicals documented
the everyday practices, vocations through aurality, familial ideas, practices
in certain government sanctioned institutions, but not particularly practices
tied to what the state dictates which also shows that the categories of the
state, official and the domain of the layman, the domestic and the popular
are implicated in each other. The policies that overlooked these intersections,
were struggling to settle with knowledge and practices that were posing
themselves as excesses beyond the state control. However, the public
discourse, the space of nationalist assertion was punctuated with narratives
from the private sphere, the autonomous institutions, medicine makers and
even provincial governmental bodies. Intersections of the ideas of
womanhood in late colonial years, development of recognition of indigenous
medicines and native practitioners of medicine, childhood, agricultural, public
health, had the presence of mustiyog and totka as domains that needed to
be archived, to keep alive the quest for self-dependence, sovereign body of
knowledge and practices.

Mustiyog, Totka and the Problem of the “Simple”

The meaning to mustiyog literally means a handful of something or the
offering of handfuls. Totka means unverified practices as per the standards
of disciplined science, seeking a truthful claim through the practitioner’s
belief in its effectivity and application in his immediate community. Not
only have they been thought to exist in a dichotomous relationship with
scientific practices and considered “unscientific”, but have mostly been
acknowledged as existing in the form of “simple medicines”, “quackery”
and “folk medicine”. It is argued in this section that the social construction
of these categories is based on an erroneous assumption of science being
exclusively a state practice that is always regulated, whereas practices in
medicine beyond it are relegated to the sphere of “irrational” and “arbitrary”.
The problem of such classification and dichotomy circumscribes all that
have therapeutic propensities, from matters and materials that are used for

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everyday therapeutics, practitioners and the question of possibilities of
codifying the knowledge. As discussed in the above section, such binaries
create a hierarchy and an elite form of history writing based on teleology
and essentialism. The space of mustiyogs, totkas and grihachikitsa indicate
that how the field of medicine and science is implicated in caste, gender
and linguistic domain. Medicine and therapeutic matters do not exist a priori
but are configured and embedded through these identities and such identities
are also created through spatial history of the therapeutic matters. The
universalism and the false dichotomy between what are assumed to be
science and “non-science” enables a practice of bioprospecting of materials,
uprooting it from the socio-cultural contexts. It creates and sustains a false
binary of space also between the central and the peripheral, where the
peripheral realm is carefully curated by the elites by arranging a body of
knowledge assuming to be sacrosanct.

Mustiyog, on the other hand, indicates the lived reality through intersections
of the multiple points of therapeutic existence, the home and gendered
identity being the primary ones. The home is also the seat of nationalism, a
place of sovereign assertion and hence mustiyog is a register of practices
where such assertions mature. Writing on Homoeopathy and the domestic
sphere, Shinjini Das writes that it ‘…demonstrated a fracturing of
homoeopathy’s professional identity and domain of expertise… could be
written as a science that could be mastered at home and… be most useful
while treating their children’ (Das 2020: 169). It also was a training ground
for the “ideal Hindu wife”. The therapeutic matters of mushtiyog, entered
the Bengali periodicals as training the wife of the Hindu household, to be
the seat of panacea not only for the family but also the community and
thereby the nation, as found in Indubhushan Sen’s precepts to the
householder in Bangalakshmi. Similarly, it was also voicing the agency of
the editor’s jethima, who constructs a therapeutic repertoire through an
offering of a handful.

The marginalisation of medicine has been argued by the subaltern studies
of medicine to study these ‘‘fragments” which ‘reveals the limits to statist
knowledge and agenda’ (Hardiman and Mukharji 2012: 15). Mustiyog and
Totka chikitsa are completely opposed to the unified concept of medicine
tied to a particular ascriptive space either. Studying the contributor’s
biography, it is spread over multiple caste identities and not just tied to the
Baidya caste, as it claimed to be the sole seat of Ayurvedic medicine and
Ayurveda also was no longer a monolithic body of medicine, but got dispersed
and distributed through the topography of caste and gender. Indigenous
medicine was now also within the practical application of the Kayasthas,

Indigenous Therapeutics, Public Discourse and the Politics of... 153



the ojhas and even the low caste groups of the merchants and businessman.
Another reason for marginalisation within medicine is the way through
which documentation has negated orality and aurality as modes of
transmission of knowledge, the art of listening as forms of training and
practice. It has been instrumental in creating a classical/folk binary and
also a dichotomy between a master or a qualified medical practitioner and
a quack. But an interrogation into the everyday life of medicines, indicate
that these categories are a cultural construct of an elite historiography,
statist policy intervention, which is constantly circumvented by the categories
of mustiyog and totka by redefining the boundaries of therapeutic practices.
In his study of the cult of Jwarasur, Projit Bihari Mukharji confronts the
same archival error of a construction of the “folk medicine” standing in
opposition to the textually instituted Ayurvedic reference to fevers. Mukharji
argues that such divide would only ‘naturalise the historically produced
divisions between these to, not to mention naturalize the very identities of
the social groups involved…. Critical history must unpack the historical
contingencies of such divisions… show that classical and folk forms of
knowledge have not always been distinctive bodies of knowledge belonging
to distinctive social groups…. Instead, these are components of a once
connected network of knowledge open to multiple socially, regionally and
intellectually elaborate iterations… multiple resonant embedding’ (Mukharji
2013: 285). Jean Langford argues along similar thoughts in her article on
medical mimesis where she discusses the problem of creating the “quack”
vis-a-vis the doctor. Unlike treating illness and therapeutics from the
perspective of truth and falsehood, Langford states that it exists in
simulations and simulations erode this distinction, if a simulation doctor is
able to produce true wellness.

Conclusion

The Bengali periodicals, the diffused identity of the healer and the
geographically, socially and culturally contingent therapeutic matters reveal
the limiting and restrictive trope through which knowledge, science and
identity has been constructed by the statist model of nationalism and its
registers. Indigenous therapeutics that the article has spoken about also
interrogates the sphere of the indigenous as a stable and settled category
of thought. “Traditional” or “indigenous” as David Hardiman5 argues the
modern Ayurveda practiced in the post-colonial curriculum in India, are
instance of an “invented tradition” that attempted at binding disparate people
within uniform nationalism and the cultural processes not fitting into the
narrative were either put into the category of the marginalized or the

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excluded. This article has been an attempt in not falling in the trope of
studying the “marginalised” or the peripheral, since these categories have
emerged through an elitist trope of dichotomous phenomena. However,
studying the public discourse of expressions of nationalism from
communitarian perspective, different registers of nationalist assertions from
the everyday spaces of the household, the dispensaries, the local
governments and the hugely popular sphere of the prints, show that these
are entangled entities which intersect the ideas of gender, medicine, caste
and material realities. Also, medicines as therapeutic objects, dispersed
through space, time and cultural forces show that a direct translation of
medicines from an Indological study of texts and an attempt to make it
compatible to biomedicine is overlooking the vast repertoire of the
embeddedness of matters in socio-historical contexts and getting imbued
with therapeutic values through the vocations of the agency, senses, intuitions
and experiences of the therapist. The social lives of medicine in this way
are a subversive reality to what Hardiman calls, creating uniform systems
out of a range of eclectic practices.

Notes

1.  Report of the Committee on Indigenous Medicine, Volume 1, 21-25

2.  See, Madhulika Banerjee, 2002, Public policy and ayurveda:
Modernising a great tradition, 1138-39

3.  See, Projit Bihari Mukharji, 2009, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical
Market, Print and Daktari Medicine, 35-38

4.  See, Projit Bihari Mukharji, 2016, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda,
Small Technologies and Braided Science, 61-62

5.  See, David Hardiman, 2009, Indian Medical Indigeneity: From
Nationalist Assertion to the Global Market, 263-265

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