Indian Medical Thought on the Eve of Colonialism
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> Research & Reports Indian Medical Thought on the Eve of Colonialism London Library, Wellcome British colonial power decisively established itself on the Indian subcontinent between 1770 Research > and 1830. This period and the century following it have become the subjects of much South Asia creative and insightful research on medical history: the use of medical institutions and personnel as tools for political leverage and power; Anglicist/Orientalist debates surrounding medical education in Calcutta; the birth of so-called Tropical Medicine. Despite much propaganda to the contrary, European medicine did not offer its services in a vacuum. Long-established and sophisticated medical systems already existed in India, developing in new and interesting ways in the period just before the mid-eighteenth century. By Dominik Wujastyk to the present, laying bare for the first ring to the views of contemporary A physician and time the sheer volume and diversity of physicians. nurse attending a n recent years my research has the scientific production of the post- The second major influence on my sick patient and her Ifocused on the Sanskrit texts of clas- classical period. Production in no way research has been the recent work of servant. Watercolour. sical Indian medicine (Sanskrit: Ayurve- diminished in the sixteenth, seven- Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit seventeenth century. da, ‘the science of longevity’). System- teenth and eighteenth centuries, which at Chicago, and the invitation to partic- atic medical ideas, embodied in spawned rich and vitally important ipate in his ‘Indian Knowledge Systems ayurveda, began to be formulated at the medical treatises of all kinds. on the Eve of Colonialism’ project time of the Buddha (d. ca. 400). The The late sixteenth century saw the which has brought together a research Buddha was the first to explicitly state composition of such critically influen- group interested in similar social and that disease arises from an imbalance tial medical works as Bhavamipra’s intellectual issues in disciplines as of three humoral substances (wind, encyclopaedic BhAvaprakAPa, the even diverse as astronomy (jyotiQa), logic bile, and phlegm), an idea that would larger VodarAnanda, produced for (nyAya), poetic theory (alaKkAra), litur- possibilities for integrating the history whose ideas have been passed down to become a cornerstone in Indian med- vodaramalla at the Mughal court, the gical hermeneutics (mGmAIsA) and, of of ideas with that of the social process- later generations. < ical theory. After a lacuna of several RAjanighaLtu (the largest extant lexicon course, medicine.1 es that shaped their production and hundred years, medical encyclopaedias of Indian materia medica), Lolimba- Pollock’s recent research, published transmission through this period of Dr Dominik Wujastyk is a senior research were compiled, edited, and re-edited. raja’s incredibly popular VaidyajGvana, in articles such as ‘Indian knowledge Indian intellectual history. Data on rela- fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Two of these compendia are relatively and Harqakgrti’s YogacintAmaLi. A cur- systems on the eve of colonialism’ tionships connecting families and on History of Medicine at University College well known today as the Supruta and sory examination of any manuscript (Intellectual History Newsletter, 2000), lines of academic tutelage can be London (www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed). His cur- Caraka. A third work, named Heart of library in India reveals hundreds of ‘The death of Sanskrit’ (Comparative retrieved, and it now appears possible rent research interests involve the social and Medicine (AQSAKgahOdayasaI-hitA) and copies of these works, which were Studies in History and Society, 2001), to begin exploring the social basis of intellectual world of Indian medicine, 1550- composed by the Sindhi author Vag- energetically copied, distributed, and and ‘New intellectuals in seventeenth- ‘knowledge making and knowledge 1750. bhasa shortly after 600, brilliantly syn- studied throughout the subcontinent. century India’ (The Indian Economic holding’ (Steve Shapin) and the social [email protected] thesized earlier compendia. Due to its Printed editions of some of these works and Social History Review, 2001), and intellectual links among thinkers many translations and adaptations, and are in wide circulation and use in India explores and develops ideas from his its wide adoption as a medical school even today, in traditional medicine col- earlier work, for instance the meaning Notes > text, it ranks among the most important leges and clinics. in the Indian context of such crucial medical treatises in Asia The seventeenth century continued concepts as modernity and novelty. 1 See: http://dsal.uchicago.edu/sanskrit Like other medical historians trained the rich production of medical texts, Based on close readings of an unusu- 2 See also: Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of in Sanskrit, I have been mesmerized by including those of Trimallabhassa, and ally wide range of texts from Sanskrit Intellectual Change, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1998). these early and important works on several works commissioned by and other languages, Pollock offers a medicine filled with extraordinary Maharaja Antpasiiha of Bikaner. grand narrative of social, literary, and ideas. They seem to represent the inter- Other authors worthy of study include linguistic change. In his more recent ests and values of a section of Indian Bharatamallika, who wrote on the writings he identifies novel genres of society that was Sanskritic and yet free genealogy of the medical families of literary production and the growth of from orthodox Brahmin values such as Bengal, and Praharaja who wrote a certain types of potentially anti-tradi- vegetarianism, even caste. Many ques- medical text in the novel form of a tionalist questioning that seem to have tions surround these works; the histo- dramatized dialogue between husband become acceptable, even fashionable, ry of medicine that we can recover from and wife. Several medical works were in more than one intellectual discipline. these treatises is necessarily condi- also produced under the patronage of While some of Pollock’s arguments tioned by the sources themselves – doc- the Maratha dynasty of Thanjavur in and evidence have been challenged by tor’s manuals – and can only be partial. South India. scholars such as Juergen Hanneder, There also remain other under- The eighteenth century witnessed, nobody has plausibly replaced or dis- researched medical topics worth inves- apparently for the first time, the emer- placed Pollock’s overall argument about tigating, such as the social history of gence of a linguistic situation in which the forces at work within language and medicine, non-Sanskritic medical prac- medical authors began to develop liter- thought in second-millennium India. tice, religious and folk healing, barber- ary discourses spanning languages. In surgeon traditions (including the his- this, so far as we can tell, medical writ- Sanskrit systems of thought tory of the Ambastha caste), the history ing seems to differ from other disci- An intriguing feature of Pollock’s of healing halls, clinics and hospitals plines of Sanskrit intellectual life. For work is the status it grants to the intel- recoverable from epigraphic records, example, Diler Jang composed in both lectual history of Sanskrit South Asia as and the continuing search for patient Sanskrit and Persian, while Mahade- a formation of great, possibly uniquely records and narratives of disease and vadeva wrote two works, which contain great, importance in the global history healing. Perso-Arabic terms and introduced of human thought. Pollock encourages Islamic medicine to a Sanskrit-reading us to adopt an approach to under- A rich medical tradition audience. Vyasa Kepavarama composed standing Sanskrit systems of thought Two recent developments have taken a bilingual Gujarati-Sanskrit medical that place them on the world stage, as my own research in a different direc- glossary, which referred to Persian well as the application to India of tion. First, between 1999 and 2002, Dr medicine, and Maharaja Pratapasiiha sophisticated ideas and tools that have G. Jan Meulenbeld’s gargantuan A His- of Jaipur wrote in Marwari, and then developed in studying pre-modern tory of Indian Medical Literature was translated his own work into Sanskrit European thought. Additionally, the published. Its five thick tomes are a verse and Hindi prose (incidentally dis- ideas and contributions of Sanskrit detailed survey of the body of Sanskrit tinguishing five new types of insanity). authors and scholars are discussed in a medical literature, born of a scholarly In Thanjavur the Maharajas themselves social as well as purely intellectual lifetime of reading the original texts began composing medical texts. This milieu. This is only possible when a and noting the important features of period is marked by a growing aware- reasonable amount of biographical their contents, their intellectual and ness of foreign medical traditions in information survives, as is the case with medical innovations, the biographical India: Rakgajyotirvid mentions English intellectuals from the last millennium, details of their authors, and much else operations for piles, and refers to sev- especially from the centuries preceding besides. Volumes IIa and IIb are of spe- eral contemporary foreign physicians. colonialism. cial interest as they survey thousands Govindadasa introduced various for- The medical authors of the sixteenth of Sanskrit medical works from 600 up eign medical innovations, while refer- to eighteenth centuries illustrate the IIAS Newsletter | #31 | July 2003 21.