Phr (vol 1, issue-1)merged

Volume 1 Issue 1 March 2015
Presidency
Historical Review
Department of History
Presidency University
Kolkata

All rights reserved.
The responsibility for all facts stated, opinions expressed and
conclusion reached is entirely that of the author. The
editorial board is not responsible in this regard.
Printed by : D & P Graphics Pvt. Ltd
143 Old Jessore Road
Ganganagar, Kolkata 700132

Presidency Historical Review is a students’ peer-
reviewed academic journal launched by the
Department of History, Presidency University. It
addresses research interests in historical studies with
an inter-disciplinary and inter-regional approach, while
catering especially to the research interests of
undergraduate, postgraduate and research scholars.
Although the journal focuses on South Asian studies,
it welcomes academic writings from other areas of
research. It aims to be a forum of scholarly discussion,
while encouraging works of new scholars. All abstracts
and articles are independently and confidentially
refereed by a students’ board and a distinguished,
multi-disciplinary Board of Editors, and undergo
double blind-review.

Editorial Board
Prof. Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History,
Director of Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean
Studies, Tufts University
Prof. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton
Distinguished Service Professor, Chicago Center for
Contemporary Theory, University of Chicago
Prof. Gautam Bhadra, (Rtd) Director and Professor, CSSSC.
Tagore National Scholar, National Library, Kolkata
Prof. Hari Sankar Vasudevan, Professor, Department of
History, University of Calcutta
Prof. Mridu Rai, Professor, Department of History,
Dr. Rajarshi Ghose, Associate Professor, Department of
History, CSSSC
Prof. Shukla Sanyal, Professor, Department of History,
Prof. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, (Rtd) S.N. Banerjee Professor
of Political Science, University of Calcutta
Dr. Soumen Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Department of
History, Presidency University
Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Department of
English, Presidency University

Dr. Sukanya Sarbadhikary, Assistant Professor, Department of
Sociology, Presidency University
Prof. Sumit Sarkar, (Rtd) Professor, Department of History,
University of Delhi
Prof. Tanika Sarkar, Professor of Modern History, Centre for
Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Executive Editors
Anish Mitra, Postgraduate Student, Department of History,
Purba Hossain, Postgraduate Student, Department of
Sudipto Mitra, Postgraduate Student, Department of

Editorial
The Presidency Historical Review was envisaged out of concerns
about providing a formal academic space to research papers that
were hitherto going unnoticed. The idea of the journal
therefore came up initially as a forum for scholarly discussions,
aiming to encourage the works of new researchers. With the
incorporation of dissertations and written assignments into the
academic curriculum, the current student has become more
familiar with the writing of academic articles. The dearth of
reviewed students’ journals in Kolkata and their clandestine
accessibility online became another major driving force. The
increasing popularity of digital archives, and a profound change
in the concept of ‘primary sources’ has enhanced the ability
of students to strive towards writing scholarly articles.
When we took our concerns to the department, the Head of
the Department Prof. Shukla Sanyal was gracious enough to not
only agree to be a part of the journal, but also answer our constant
queries. We would like to thank all who took time out of their
busy schedules and agreed to be a part of the Editorial Board.
We would also like to thank Mr. Sanjib Chatterjee for the technical
help that was imperative in building the website; and Dr. Souvik
Mukherjee for entertaining our endless requests. We wish also to
thank the scholars who contributed to this issue of the journal,
and those who reviewed each article.
We intend to use this journal as a forum for scholarly
exercise- to not only confine our endeavor to biannual
publications, but actively organise lectures, seminars and other
academic ventures.

From the Head of the Department's Desk
The first issue of the Presidency Historical Review has been
successfully launched today. Its appearance is testimony to the
incredible hard work put in by the team of student editors who
have overseen with dedication the entire process of publication
from receipt of submitted articles to their final appearance on
print. A lot of hopes rest on this issue. A positive response to this
publication will have made all the intense efforts in the past few
months of the PHR team to bring out an online students’ journal
with wide appeal and reach well worth it and also provide them
with the required incentive to carry on with the endeavor in future.
A number of historians and scholars, located all over the globe
and too numerous to mention in this short note, have come
forward with their invaluable time and experience to help out the
student editors whenever the latter have asked for it. They have
graciously agreed to serve on the Board of Editors, offered advice
regarding style and language of the journal, suggested the names
of reviewers and reviewed articles themselves. Mere words are
inadequate to express our gratitude to them.
The journal aims to provide a forum to students and research
scholars for imaginative and original research from an inter-
disciplinary perspective that may cut across standard geographical
divisions. Articles on student perspectives on historiographical
debates and musings on the meanings of history and other
scholarly subjects are more than welcome. As the journal broadens
its scope and reaches out to a wider readership in the days to
come, we hope to be able to offer more variety in subject matter
and even higher standards for our journal. But for that to happen,
we need greater response from the part of our readers and well-
wishers. I earnestly hope that the journal goes from strength to
strength in the subsequent issues, in the process making all the
dreams and hopes centred on it come true.
Prof. Shukla Sanyal
Professor and Head, Department of History

Contents
Ratnabir Guha
Native Bodies, Medical Market and ‘Conflicting’ Medical
‘Systems’: Venereal Diseases and the ‘Vernacularisation’ of
Western Medical Knowledge in Colonial Bengal ■■■■■ 11
Mriganka Mukhopadhyay
A Rising Political Voice: The Initial Growth of Political
Consciousness among the Students in Bengal and the Case
of Presidency College ■■■■■ 63
Jayanti Thokchom
Religious interaction in Manipur in the 18th and 19th
centuries: A study of the Bijoy Panchali ■■■■■ 82
Purba Hossain
The Nation and its Limits: Women’s Question in 19th
Century Bengal and the Nationalist ‘Resolution’ ■■■■■ 94
Jayanta Bhattacharya
Calcutta Medical College (CMC): The Rise of Hospital
Medicine and the Emergence of A New Medical
Epistemology in India ■■■■■ 109
Book Reviews
Aritra Majumdar
The Indian Ocean in World History
by Edward A. Alpers ■■■■■ 121

Native Bodies, Medical Market
and ‘Conflicting’ Medical ‘Systems’:
Venereal Diseases and the ‘Vernacularisation’ of
Western Medical Knowledge in Colonial Bengal
Ratnabir Guha
Existing historiography on colonial medicine in South Asia
has revolved around two opposing views. There is one strand
of thought that locates the impact of western medicine most
profoundly within certain colonial enclaves such as the army,
the jails and the lunatic asylums.1
There is another equally
powerful view that seeks to trace how western medicine
achieved complete hegemony over existing medical systems,
thereby relegating them to the margins.2
In contrast to such views, there is now a growing body
of work which seeks to demonstrate how the growth of a
shared medical market, which operated outside the dynamics
of state power, created a cultural space, where pluralised
notions of disease, body and therapeutics circulated. This
essay aims to study this market of vernacular medical print
and medicinal drugs and emphasises the role of local factors
like private doctors, practitioners of indigenous medicine,
charitable dispensaries and vernacular medical tracts in
circulating multiple notions of diseases. This was most clearly
seen in the case of venereal diseases such as Syphilis and
Gonorrhoea. Known as Upadangsha and Prameha in the
vernacular, they elicited much public debate and discussion
in popular newspapers and medical journals. The medical
manualists and writers, in the late 19th
century, came up

Presidency Historical Review12
with a number of explanations regarding the cause, symptoms
and treatment of such diseases. These explanations included
both clinical and extra-clinical notions and were heavily
influenced by factors such as race, culture and nationalism.
The Medical Market : Concept Explained
From 1980s onwards the concept of medical market has been
utilised by a large number of medical historians to
understand the social and economic organisation of
healthcare, the rise of medical consumerism, the
commercialisation of medical practices and the
professionalisation of medical practitioners, including the role
of the so-called ‘quacks, charlatans and fakers’ in early modern
Europe. Following Roy Porter’s call to do medical history
from below, the marketplace soon came to life as an
important heuristic tool revealing illuminating insights into
the histories of both patients and practitioners.3
These
histories revealed that in pre-professional system of medical
care operating in early modern Europe, there existed outside
the three-part occupational hierarchy of physician, surgeon
and apothecaries, a diverse and plural medical market which
extended the treatment options of patients thereby limiting
the power of clinical gaze and the force of official regulations.
In the context of South Asia, it has mainly been utilised
to understand the shifting nature of traditional medical
knowledge systems and practices. Pratik Chakrabarti has used
the concept profitably in his study of bazaar medicines in
18th
century India to show how in the early trading years of
the English East India Company (EEIC), the indigenous
bazaar was a crucial site of exchange for goods, services and
medical knowledges between the local practitioners and
European doctors and surgeons.4
The surgeons of EEIC
toured the bazaars and incorporated some of local medicines
into their own materia medica. However this exchange
between European medicine and local medical traditions soon
ended with the Indian markets being subjugated by western

13
medical knowledge systems and practices.
Projit Bihari Mukharji on the other hand argues that the
Bengali daktars i.e. the indigenous practitioners of western
medicine sought to relocate western medical practice firmly
within an Indian context thereby negotiating with local
therapeutic practices and cultural codes.5
With time,
‘vernacularised’ forms of western medical practices emerged
through the operations of the medical market.
Madhuri Sharma’s detailed empirical work on the revival
of Ayurvedic medicine at the end of the 19th
century and
Rachel Berger’s recently published work on the
modernisation of Ayurvedic medicine in colonial north India
have also explicated the workings of medical markets in
specific historical and cultural contexts.6
Apart from
Ayurveda, the workings of the Indo-Muslim or the Unani
medical market have recently been the focus of works by
Seema Alavi and Guy Attewell. Seema Alavi in her study of
Unani medicine in North India shows that the story of
medical encounter of western medicine with Unani was not
simply a story of domination and subjugation of one by the
other. Instead 19th
century practitioners of Unani medicine
used the medical market in order to negotiate between the
traditional humoral understandings of Unani with modern
secular notions of western medicine.7
Guy Attewell’s equally
rich monograph shows how Unani became ‘systematised’ in
the specific socio-historical context of 19th
century India.8
Thus, although the list seems impressive, my work tries
to make a contribution to this already burgeoning field, by
showing how the existence of pluralistic medical market at
the end of the 19th
century rendered a singular, homogenous
understanding of a disease undone and what were the areas
where western and indigenous medical discourses and
practices overlapped and diverged.
The essay contains three main parts: the first part deals
with the emergence of book market and print culture in late
19th
century Bengal. It shows how popular medical

knowledge drew eclectically from various sources: western
medicine, indigenous medical traditions of Kaviraji and
Hakimi as well as from a mish-mash of folk traditions, faith-
based cures and previously circulating knowledge of local
materia medica. Within such a discursive network,
boundaries between ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ were
constantly being reconfigured. The next section deals with
the drug market and actual medical practices operating
within colonial dispensaries and the local drug market.
Mainly dealing with the treatment of venereal diseases as a
case study, I argue that while for the colonial medicine the
challenge was to adapt to local medical practices, for the local
manufacturers of drugs the challenge was to provide a
modern, rational alternative to colonial medicine that would
not only distinguish itself from the dubious curative practices
offered by the self-styled medical practitioners and auto-
didactic physicians but also imbibe the local cultural codes
and idioms. Finally in the last section I deal with the debates
regarding venereal diseases in contemporary public sphere. It
shows how within late 19th
century public sphere, discussions
relating to venereal disease diffused an essentialist notion of
the disease and gave it a cultural twist.
Daktars and Boddis: Institutionalisation of Medical
Practices in Bengal
The history of colonial medicine in India is often told within
an over-arching encounter framework, within which an
increasingly confident western medical system hegemonised
the medical market of late colonial Bengal and relegated all
other existing systems of medicine to the margins.9
However
a detailed historical analysis of colonial Bengali medical
market would prove that this was not the case. India even
before the formal establishment of British rule in India had
close encounters with the medical systems coming from
outside the Indian subcontinent. The Muslim conquest in
India introduced the Unani system of medicine while later

15
there emerged a syncretic Hindu-Muslim tradition of
medicine known as Tibb. In medieval times a number of
European travellers visited India and wrote extensively on
Indian medical practices. Travellers such as Francois Bernier,
Niccolao Manucci, Garcia d’ Orta and John Ovington noted
the close structural similarities between western and Indian
medical practices. Both were humoral in nature. Moreover,
while the Portuguese introduced new plants that found their
way into the Indian pharmacopeia, they also introduced new
diseases. Syphilis, as noted in our introduction, was one such
disease allegedly brought by the European travellers and was
called Firangi Roga or the disease of the Portuguese. The
Indian medical practitioners on their part also adopted some
European medical practices such as blood-letting in the
treatment of diseases.10
In the early years of EEIC, the company had to depend
significantly on bazaar supplies and medicines for their
troops. Further, European surgeons and doctors regularly
toured the bazaars and adopted indigenous practices into
their medical systems. More significantly, Indian plants and
their uses found a place in European pharmacopeia. As the
company increased its territorial authority through wars and
armed encounters, it had to depend largely on Indians for
carrying out subordinate duties under European doctors.
This mutual exchange was given an institutional form
through the establishment of Native Medical Institution
(NMI) which aimed at creating a class of native doctors who
had training in western medical practices along with some
knowledge of indigenous medical systems. Monetary
assistance was given and successful candidates were employed
in the military and civil establishments of the company.
However, following the suggestions of the Public Instruction
Committee, Lord William Bentinck ordered for the abolition
of NMI and in its place formed the Calcutta Medical College
(CMC) in 1835. CMC, with its emphasis on western
medical education, ended the era of harmonious co-existence

between contesting medical systems and paved the way for
the dominance of Allopathic medicine.11
The First batch of CMC graduates, which included
eleven students, was employed as Sub-Assistant Surgeons on
a monthly salary of a hundred rupees in various dispensaries
operating in and around Bengal. These Sub Assistant
Surgeons coming out of the CMC trained in western
medicine represented the first generation of indigenous
practitioners of western medicine or daktars. Meanwhile,
faced with successive cholera epidemics and growing native
population needing medical care, the Company started a
Hindustani or Military Class and a Bengali Class in 1852.
The passed out students of the vernacular class were called
Vernacular Licentiates in Medicine and Surgery (VLMS) and
provided the manpower crucial to fill in the lower ranks of
civil medical services. By 1860s, although the employment of
Indian medical graduates was secured through new
regulations, low salaries and racial discrimination in
governmental services drove these men increasingly towards
private practice. Such private practitioners of western
medicine were therefore important actors in the growth of a
medical market that operated outside the dynamics of state
power.12
Another significant group operating in the medical
market of late colonial Bengal was the local practitioner of
Ayurvedic medicine. Traditionally called Kaviraja (literally
meaning prince of verse) or Vaidya or Boddi (in local
parlance), these local healers of medicine alongside Hakims
(practitioners of Unani medicine) were the dominant healers
when western medicine arrived on the landscape of Bengal.
At the beginning of the 19th
century Ayurvedic medicine was
taught and practiced according to traditional caste rules and
Ayurvedic knowledge was imparted through the local Tol and
Madrasa systems. With the establishment of CMC and the
disbandment of vernacular classes in the 1830s, the death of
these systems of medicine seemed imminent. However both

17
these systems and their respective practitioners showed
remarkable resilience by adopting modern techniques and
responding positively to modern consumer forces. Some
individual practitioners were responsible for their revival. In
Ayurveda, once such figure was Kaviraj Gangadhar Ray. He
became the court physician of the Nawab of Murshidabad
and a consulting physician to Maharani Swarnamayi Devi of
Kasimbazaar. He wrote commentaries to thirty four Sanskrit
texts and composed fourty one texts on Ayurveda. Another
contemporary physician was Gangaprasad Sen. He prepared
Ayurvedic medicine for sale to other countries and introduced
modern medical practices like asking for fixed consultation
fees and sold medicines according to fixed price list. He also
was the first Ayurvedic physician to publish advertisements
and introduced the first Ayurvedic journal. These two
physicians produced an entire generation of illustrious
practitioners who not only revived traditional healing
practices but more significantly tweaked them along modern
professional lines. Bijoyratna Sen, student of Gangaprasad,
introduced the modern method of pre-prepared medicine
instead of the time honoured practice of making medicines
for individual patients. Another leading figure was
Gangakishore, who started selling Ayurvedic medicine on a
large scale from his Kolutala pharmacy. Several other
pharmacies came up. Mathuramohan Chakravarty founded
the Shakti Aushadalaya and Jogesh Chandra Ghosh founded
the Sadhana Aushadalaya while Jaminibhushan Ray
introduced modern anatomy and revived surgery and
midwifery in Ayurvedic curriculum. Finally Ayurveda got an
institutionalised form through the formation of Ayurvedic
Associations and educational institutions such as Gobind
Sundari Ayurvedic College in 1822, Gauriya Sarvavidyayatana
and Viashawantha Ayurveda Mahavidyalaya. In short, the
existence of competing systems of medicine created an
atmosphere of medical pluralism and effectively challenged
the singular dominance of Allopathic medicine.13

However, the story of colonial medicine was not simply a
story of rival medical systems competing with each other for
public patronage. Rather there emerged multiple sites where
epistemic tensions arising out of different medical systems
were negotiated while contesting knowledge systems
underwent mutual transformation. I shall mention three such
sites of contestation and mutual infliction: the site of
vernacular print, the colonial dispensary and the native drug
market.
Print Culture and the Book Market
For a person contracting VD, late 19th
century Bengal
provided multiple options and cures. Existing studies on VD
almost exclusively concentrate on the lock hospitals as a site
for treatment and cure, ignoring the fact that such
institutions were meant only for prostitutes and not for
civilian patients. For a person of moderate means, VD
provided a thriving marketplace, where chapbooks advised
them of home remedies while quacks and charlatans provided
them with drugs that claimed to miraculously cure such
diseases. This shared space of vernacular print and indigenous
drugs had a profound impact on how knowledge about
diseases circulated within the public domain and how the
debates and discussions pertaining to such diseases shaped
their popular understanding.
The revolutionary impact of print on cultural modernity
of a nation has been a subject of wide intellectual discussion.
Benedict Anderson has shown how transformation of print
into a commodity can influence the imagination of a nation.
In India, the dominant trend has been to see the growth and
dissemination of vernacular print as the principal propelling
force behind the cultural efflorescence of the Bengali middle
class. However, recent studies on vernacular print have upset
this linear connection between vernacular print and cultural
transformation. Studies by Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar and
Anindita Ghosh have pointed out that the impact of print on

19
the cultural landscape of Bengal was far more complex than
hitherto acknowledged. Moving out of the ‘highbrow-
lowbrow’ and ‘elite-subaltern’ binaries, these studies show the
democratising impact of popular print on the cultural politics
of Bengal. While Sumit Sarkar has shown the impact of
popular print in the identity formation of the petty clerical
Bhadralok community,14
Anindita Ghosh has shown how the
impact of 19th
century print was much more pluralised and
polyvalent than previously thought.15
While pre-print
manuscript and oral traditions survived, the literature that
emerged out of the vernacular print was not just the
highbrow literature of Bengal Renaissance. More recently
Projit Bihari Mukharji’s work has analysed in detail the
impact of print in the formation and consolidation of daktari
identity.16
As daktars emerged as a social category, daktari
literature gained currency. Works on daktari medicine,
original or translated, were published from the North
Calcutta presses. Circulation of such works helped the
daktars to reach out not only to other members of the
community but also with the public at large. However, far
from simply transporting a western model of medicine,
daktari print renegotiated with the local medical knowledges
and therapeutic practices and therefore curved out a separate
niche of itself as a vernacularised version of what prevailed in
Europe. In a similar vein, Shinjini Das has shown how the
debates taking place in print, more specifically those taking
place in the vernacular medical journals of the late 19th
century Bengal, shaped the identity of Homoeopathy as an
alternative to its rival Allopathy.17
Similar studies have been
carried out in the context of Hakimi and Ayurvedic medicine
in colonial north India.18
This paper looks specifically at the impact of print and
pharmaceutical market in the understanding of venereal
diseases in late colonial Bengal. Taking cue from the previous
studies, this paper not only carries forward their argument
but also tries to gauge the impact of market and commercial

forces in the treatment of venereal diseases.
Medical literature in vernacular mainly emerged in
Bengal in order to cater to the growing needs of a vernacular
student community. Although in the 1830s the NMI was
abolished and the vernacular classes of medicine in Sanskrit
College and Calcutta Madrasa were disbanded, the colonial
state faced with recurring epidemics decided to throw open a
vernacular class for training native doctors in 1851, where
lectures were delivered on Anatomy, Materia Medica and the
practice of Medicine.19
In order to cater to this emerging
vernacular medical community, a large number of vernacular
medical works were published. From a list prepared by
Jatindramohan Bhattacharya, we come to know that, while
between 1801 and 1817 there were no vernacular works on
medicine, between 1818 and 1843, there was total of 14
books published on medicine.20
By 1852 the number has
increased to 18, which included 6 reprints. By 1865 there
were at least 22 books on medicine which constituted 2.44
percent of the total number of books published. Although
many of the earlier works were simple translations from
either Sanskrit or English works, by the second half of the
19th
century Bengali medical community had published a
significant number of original works.21
Along with increasing
output, there emerged an unprecedented diversity in the
variety of works published.
While medical literature in the west has gradually
evolved over the centuries from 16th
century onwards,
changing from high Latin to vernacular, colonialism hastened
the process in a matter of decades.22
While pre-colonial
literature did have its fair share of commentaries on
important Sanskrit works, producing an original medical work
based on observation was something new.23
The space of early
dispensaries provided the ground for training and
experimentation. The half-yearly dispensary reports written
by native doctors described in detail, case studies of patients
with complicated medical histories. Since these reports

21
attached to the Annual Dispensary Report of a particular
province were meant to be circulated among the medical
community for circulation of knowledge, they provided a
good training ground for composition of latter-day medical
texts. Of the various genres available, one significant genre
was the genre targeting specific diseases. They included tracts
on sexual diseases, diseases of spleen and liver, children's
diseases and women’s diseases including tracts on menstrual
disorders and those on midwifery.24
Textbooks on Allopathy and Homeopathy formed
another important genre of vernacular print that mainly
targeted the medical students of the Medical colleges.
Growing number of medical students studying in Bengali
meant an increasing demand for Bengali terminology.
Medical dictionaries and word banks published in the second
half of the 19th century provided another fertile site of
vernacularisation of western medicine.Western terminologies
on physiology, pathology and drugs were translated in
Bengali. However this exercise itself was not without its own
set of problems. While some favoured the use of Bengali and
Sanskrit terms, others pointed out the lack of standardisation
in Sanskrit works. In 1877 Rajendralal Mitra made a
reasoned suggestion. He suggested a flexible schema of using
Bengali words where such Bengali words were available; in
certain other cases he suggested construction of new words
from Sanskrit roots and finally in all other cases English
terminologies had to be applied. The question of terminology
or paribhasha remained a vexed question throughout the late
19th century and continues to be so in current times.25
In
case of taxonomies relating to VD, the question of
terminology remained an important one as we shall see later
in our essay.
Although not much is known about the authors of these
manuals, many of them were written by small town native
doctors and Sub-Assistant surgeons and found mention in
colonial records. Thus Hara Charan Sen, medical officer in

charge of the Sherpur charitable dispensary wrote a tract on
venereal diseases and dedicated it to W Wilson, civil surgeon
of Maldah while in Jessore’s Amrita Bazaar dispensary;
Chandra Kanth Karmakar wrote a pamphlet on the treatment
of snake bites.26
Indigenous practitioners of medicine used
the new medium of print for standardising classical Sanskrit
works which were so long preserved either in manuscript
form or transmitted through oral tradition. While works of
Charaka, Susruta, Madhav Kar and Gobinda Das were
published in Bengali translations and were circulated
through multiple editions, list of substances (dravyagunas),
vocabularies and books on local materia medica were also
extremely popular.27
From the last quarter of the 19th
century we also have a large number of vernacular medical
journals published, based entirely on private subscription and
enterprise. Although the fate of many such journals was
rather short-lived, nonetheless some of the more popular ones
like Rajendralal Mitra’s Bibidartha Samgraha (1851-61),
Chikitsha Sammelani (1885-1894), Chikitshak O Samolochak
(18895-96) and Swasthya (1898-1901) found a sizeable
audience which included a significant number of non-
medical readers such as lawyers, petty clerks, small
landholders and station masters.28
One journal, namely
Chikitsha Sammelani published articles on all three branches
of medicine: Allopathy, Homeopathy and Ayurveda, therefore
opening up a space for intellectual dialogue and scientific
exchange. Further, these journals also bred a class of small-
town rural doctors who subscribed to and enthusiastically
read such journals, thereby forging an ‘imagined community’
of vernacular doctors.
The coming of vernacular print and a thriving medical
market for books therefore had interesting ramifications for
the social politics of Bengal. Medical education even at the
end of the 19th century remained overwhelmingly dominated
by upper-caste Hindus. Despite western medicine’s
overwhelming emphasis on surgery and dissection, Hindu

23
upper-caste enrollment in Medical schools and colleges
remained high. In 1901, out of the total male literate
population, Vaidyas constituted about 64.8 percent, followed
by Brahmin who constituted about 63.9 percent, and
Kayasthyas who constituted about 56 percent of the literate
population.29
One possible reason for the upper caste
hegemony in western medical profession was that English
education, of which medicine was a part, increasingly became
associated with social mobility and bhadralok aspirations.
With the decline of commercial enterprises and fall of rent
due to fragmentation of land, government jobs in the field of
medicine, law and colonial administration etc. became the
only avenue left for the upper caste proprietorial class, for
financial security and social mobility. Thus from 1880s
onwards we see a shift of the priestly and literary castes
holding land estates towards English education in order to fit
into governmental jobs.
While this was the case in the field of medical profession,
the sphere of vernacular print opened up an alternate sphere
where numerous self-styled doctors, autodidacts and
indigenous practitioners of medicine could flourish. These
doctors and Kavirajes produced a wide variety of literature:
books on totkas and mushtijog (home remedies);30
books
advising the young on practices of celibacy (Brahmacharya
manuals);31
pedagogic texts on Ayurveda, Allopathy and
Homeopathy (Sahaj Daktari Siksha, Sahaj Kaviraji Siksha,
etc.)32
and manuals advising married couples on their sexual
lives and problems (Yauna Bigyan, Dampatyapranali, Rati
Jantradir Chikitsha, etc.).33
Although these books often
posited themselves as scientific, they frequently drew
eclectically from a wide variety of traditions: shastric
injunctions, tantric practices, astrology, magic and sorcery,
common knowledge of local materia medica etc. Thus one
advertisement of J Ghosh & Co’s book catalogue placed
names of Kaviraji books on one side and books on magic and
sorcery on the other. Such books included names such as

Adbhyut Bashikaran Mantra (a book on hypnotism), Adbhyut
Ustadi Bidyasiksha (a book on charms and spells inorder to
dispel ghosts, witches and petni or female spirit), Adbhyut
Gupta Bidyasiksha (a book on tantric practices) and Jadusiksha
(a book on magic).34
Within a single text also we find a
constant blurring of the scientific and non-scientific. Thus
one Shantiram De’s book ‘Kamratna’ which posed a
translation of Nagabhatta’s Sanskrit text included sections on
sexual practices according to Shastric injunctions, home
remedies for common diseases, astrology and a discussion on
menses.35
The democratising effect of vernacular print as it spiraled
out of the institutional control of western medical science of
the colonial state can best be exemplified with the example
of institutionalisation of hakimi profession in East Bengal.
Peasantry in East Bengal was overwhelmingly Muslim
dominated, while the proprietorial class was primarily Hindu.
The formation of a distinct Muslim communal identity
however remained absent for a long time in Bengal, partly
because of the social chasm existing between the upper class
Ashraf Muslims and the lower class, Bengali speaking, rustic
Atraps, and partly because of a syncretic socio-religious
tradition based on minor Sufi orders and Sahajiya cults. In
the 19th century as the medical profession became
increasingly upper-caste dominated and as Ayurveda became
more and more Hinduised, a need was felt for the creation of
a Bengali Islamic therapeutic tradition different from its
Hindu counterpart. However instead of drawing from the
more popular traditions of Unani Tibb and Tibb-ul-Nabi or
the medicine of the prophet it drew eclectically from local
religious cults and folklores about mythic figures associated
with the Bible and Quran. Projit Mukharji draws our
attention to at least three such traditions: one was a folk
tradition surrounding the mythical figure of Hakim Luqman,
a pre-Islamic sage or wise man associated with biblical
tradition of David and Job; second was a tradition of sorcery

25
associated with the exorcist-healer Solomon or Suleiman of
pre-Islamic West Asia and third was a peasant tradition
associated with the popular figure of Manikpir who was
considered a patron saint of cattle. 36
19th century vernacular print transformed these hitherto
existing oral-folk traditions into a standardised written form.
With the geographical dispersal of printing presses outside
Calcutta, books began to be published from other places of
Bengal such as Dacca, Murshidabad, etc. The presses
operating in East Bengal thus catered to the local population
of Muslims who increasingly felt alienated in a communal
environment. Written in what Sukumar Sen calls "Musalmani
Bangla", the language drew heavily from the Perso-Arabic
lexicon rather than modern Bengali which took a sharp
Sanskritised tatsama turn at the middle of the 19th century.37
Many of these books were published from Dacca’s Azimi
Press and were sold in a bookstore situated below the
Walliullah mosque in the city’s Chowkbazar.38
The print and
sale of such books from a press that specialised in religious
books is a clear indication of the overtly religious tone of the
books. Many of the Hakimi texts were thus directed towards
the poor Muslim peasants and couched therapeutics within
an overtly communal agenda. One Hakimi text thus noted
that Bengal is filled with unscrupulous kavirajes duping the
poor Muslim peasants.39
The author was writing this book for
their benefit. Similarly in another Lokmani text, the author
Muhammad Moyazzem Ali of Kummilla stated that for
several years he has been conducting a successful Hakimi
business based on the Lokmani tradition. However since he
was getting old he thought that it was an opportune moment
to share Lokman’s age-old prescriptions with his larger
Muslim brethren. He hoped that the book would find a large
audience and would produce many new hakims who would
use the simple and effective treatments of Lokman in order
to help poor Muslims.40
Thus what is clear from the above discussion is that

these books, unlike the more credible works produced by the
doctors and other native practitioners of medicine, made no
claim to scientificity or western medical rationality. However,
they derived their legitimacy from an already existing
tradition of orality, folk wisdom and time-tested indigenous
therapeutics. Thus, for instance Maulvi Abdus Sobhan, while
citing various sources of his knowledge, from the fakirs, jogis
and brahmacharis of Assam to the Bhutiyas of Bhutan (whom
he had met while working as a government land surveyor),
went on to cite common medicinal herbs easily found in East
Bengal.41
Similarly Abdul Kasem who claimed to have
knowledge of the Cholemani tradition cited kala jeera for
prameha.42
Medical eclecticism reigned supreme in such vernacular
texts. It was common for a Hakimi text to cite daktari
medicine and a daktari text to cite Deshiya Byabosthya
(indigenous remedy) for each disease. Thus Hara Charan
Sen’s book, would quote in detail Allopathic prescriptions
along with indigenous remedies mainly drawn from Kaviraji
tradition with each disease described.43
Similarly in Dr.
Mahendranath Ray’s text Allopathic Dhatu Daurbalyo O
Upodongsho Pidar Chikitsha, the author would go on to cite
English pharmacists and druggists operating in the city along
with Butto Kristo Pal’s Kaviraji shop where medicines for
venereal diseases could be purchased.44
Similarly, while
mentioning details of injection preparation for Syphilis and
Gonorrhoea, he went on to suggest the recipe of swarna
ghotito salsa (a concoction of mercury,sulphur, Swarnasindoor,
Makardhwaj along with 1 tola gold leaf). He even urged the
readers to buy the salsa at a reasonable rate from Kumartulli’s
famous Kobiraj Bijoyratna Sen.45
On the other hand Abdul
Kasem in his Chahi Asal Ajaeb Cholemani, suggested daktari
remedies for Hayeja (cholera) and common cold.46
Thus we see in the world of vernacular print the
boundaries between western medical knowledge and common
wisdom was being constantly blurred. Medical rationality

27
and popular wisdom thrived side by side; both making use
of the new found medium of print. However, even within
this diffused space of medical print, there seems to be a
pattern in the way texts draw their moral legitimacy. While
there was a tendency of the indigenous practitioners of
medicine to draw their legitimacy from western medicine, for
the practitioners of western medicine the task was to adapt
an alien system of medicine to local cultural codes through a
constant reference to locally available medical knowledge,
terms, categories, taxonomies and therapeutic practices.
The Drug Market and Medical Practices
The history of drug market in colonial Bengal provides
another interesting point of reference to our discussion of
vernacularisation. However, unlike medical print, the history
of the drug market has not been studied at all.47
The 19th
century drug market was littered with private
doctors and native practitioners of medicine providing
medical care for syphilitic patients. Along with regular
doctors and more famous hakims and kavirajes, there
remained several dubious practitioners of medicine. A
combination of several commercial forces such as high fees of
European doctors and famous kavirajes,48
lack of adequate
number of governmental dispensaries compared to the total
number of people needing health care, easy availability of the
commercial folk healers and the growth of market forces
assured a place for such practitioners. They sold a wide
variety of nostrums for a wide range of diseases. By taking
advantage of the print medium they made sure that their
medicines reached far wide where western medicine could
not. They often made fantastic claims and lured the
consumers with attractive pecuniary offers. However, except
for a large amount of advertising materials, very little is
known about these individuals.
Vernacular print provided a new opportunity to peddle
their products to customers residing in Calcutta as well as in

small district-towns and villages. Apart from Bengali language
newspapers and bhadralok-owned English newspapers like
Amrita Bazaar Patrika, Bengalee and The Hindoo Patriot
regularly published adverts of such private pharmacies and
dispensaries. While newspapers published from Calcutta
mainly remained an urban phenomenon, there was one
particular genre of printed literature published from the
North Calcutta presses that successfully transcended barriers
of class and social hierarchy and reached hundreds of Bengali
households. Panjikas or Almanacs remained, according to
several estimates, the single most important genre of
recreational literature published by Bottola presses and next
to educational literature it had the one of the highest rates of
circulation.49
According to James Long the total annual
production of Almanacs in Bengal was a minimum of one
lakh thirty five thousand copies and could well reach a total
figure of two lakh fifty thousand. By late 19th
century,
panjika became the single largest item printed at Bottola and
became an important source of knowledge dissemination and
advertisements of consumer goods and services. Apart from
the list of auspicious dates, the astrological implications of
planetary positions and information of several important
Hindu festivals, they also contained practical information: list
of railway timetables, fare charts, list of public holidays,
postal charges, session dates and fees of court. Advertisements
of indigenous drugs, medicines and Bengali books inhabited
such an extra-diegetic space within the panjikas and give us a
glimpse of the indigenous drug market operating in colonial
Bengal.50
For the sick poor however, the charitable dispensary was
perhaps a more reasonable option. In the charitable
dispensaries, European medicines were usually distributed for
free to the poor. In other cases they had to be bought at the
cost price.51
Each dispensary had to prepare an annual indent
based on the consumption of the past years. These indents
were then dispatched from the Medical Department and

29
were received at the India Office. Supplies were shipped from
England and were received at the Company’s Medical Stores,
from where they were dispatched to the different dispensaries.
The entire process was time-consuming and sometimes seven
to eight months would pass between the receipt of the indent
at the India Office and their arrival at the stores in India.
Although the opening of the Suez Canal expedited the
process, yet every time a war broke out, imports used to
suffer. Further, in times of epidemic, when demand for
medicines went up, the dispensaries had to dip into their
reserves, which further created a crisis. Finally, the buildings
occupied by the Store department at Fort William in
Calcutta were found to be too small for storage. Due to all
such reasons, the colonial dispensary came to rely heavily on
indigenous drugs also known as bazaar medicines.52
Bazaar medicine is a term popular in the governmental
records, which meant drugs procured locally by the
dispensaries which included mainly galenicals but sometimes
also chemicals. It was mainly due to the European medical
community’s dependence on indigenous drugs and medicines
that they came to take some interest in the medicinal
properties of native plants and herbs. The company
established physic gardens in order to cultivate plants having
medicinal properties. In Bengal Presidency alone there were
four such gardens operating in late 19th
century: Saharanpur,
Lucknow, Darjeeling and Calcutta.53
Within the dispensary,
native drugs were heavily used, which considerably brought
down the overall expenses of the dispensary. Dispensing
medicine was a practice that largely depended on the
humour of an individual officer. Although the British
Pharmacopoeia remained the authoritative guide to all the
medical officers in India for administration of European
drugs, administration of indigenous drugs often depended on
the personal knowledge of the medical officer in question.
They were often encouraged to experiment with local materia
medica and replace European drugs sometimes exclusively

with indigenous drugs. The dispensary therefore acted as a
site for clinical trial of indigenous materia medica, while
knowledge of European drugs also spilled outside the
dispensary through the Kavirajes, Hakims, Dais and native
doctors who worked, assisted or got trained in the
dispensaries. While European doctors continued their rant
against the indigenous medical system as a whole, within the
space of the dispensary they continued to use the
prescriptions written by local hakims and kavirajes. Their
understanding of the local materia medica was highly valued
and was given fair trail within the dispensary. European
medicines also found their way outside the dispensary
through curious means. Highly commercial medicines like
quinine, chiretta, jalap, castor oil and cholera pills were sold
in the market by local indigenous practitioners.54
During
times of epidemic, when supplies of European medicine
invariably fell short in comparison to their demand, bazaar
medicines gave European medicines a tough competition.55
The colonial government itself sometimes encouraged the sale
of European medicines in bazaars in order to relieve the
burden on charitable dispensaries. Thus Sir Richard Temple,
Lt Governor of Bengal proposed to allow zamindars and other
rich villagers to buy quinine in bulk and then distribute
them to the poor during epidemics.56
Such mutuality in
terms of providing medical care to the colonised people and
dependence on each other for therapeutic practices had
interesting effects on the actual treatment of specific diseases.
The case of VD abundantly clarifies this point.
Much has been written on the use of mercury and
mercurial poisoning in the treatment of venereal diseases.57
In
early modern Europe, a great debate raged between the so-
called mercurialists and the non-mercurialists. Two of the
most popular natural remedies known to modern Europe
were Sarsaparilla and Guaiac resin.58
The Guaiac tree
(Guaiacum officinale, lignum sanctum) is a holy tree, which
arrived in Europe from the torrid zone of America: South

31
Florida, Bahamas, Cuba and San Domingo, in around 1508.
Its active ingredient can be found in its resin which has an
acrid taste and has a diaphoretic and laxative effect. Apart
from Guaiac, another important herb was Sarsaparilla which
was also native to America. A decoction made from
sarsaparilla was used as a blood cleanser and an appetizer. In
a high dose it caused diarrhoea, salivary secretion,
perspiration and high urinary output. Thus, in accordance
with the medical ideas of that period, sarsaparilla was
excellent for purging the body. Since Syphilis was thought to
be a New World disease, it was natural to think that the
remedy would also come from the New World. These herbs
had a purging effect and caused perspiration, diarrhoea and
salivation. Thus it was thought that consumption of these
herbs would cause cleansing of blood.59
Mercury on the other hand was thought to be an eastern
cure. It was known to the Greeks and Romans as a highly
potent poison and was to be used only in small doses, that
too externally not internally. In Ayurveda mercury is
considered to be an important cure for many diseases.
Raskarpur (a preparation of calomel, i.e. mercurous chloride
with ten percent of corrosive sublimate) was used by the
Kavirajes for venereal afflictions.60
In many 19th
century
vernacular texts by Kavirajes we see the continued use of
Raskarpur.61
However, mercury when used in high doses also
caused mercurial poisoning. The European medical
community targeted the indigenous medical practitioners
particularly on the above ground. Dr. Norman Chevers, who
in his Manual of Medical Jurisprudence for Bengal and North
Western Province made a detailed survey of criminal cases
based on reports of the criminal courts of Bengal and North
Western provinces, gave us a comprehensive list of vegetable
and mineral poisons available in the bazaars of India.62
These
included poisons used for assassination and suicide (Aconite,
Opium, Nux Vomica and Oleander) those used for
intoxication and insensibility (Dhatura and Ganja), those

used to induce abortion (Lal Chitra) and those given as
medicines (Bishbari and Raskarpur).63
These poisons were
commonly used in a variety of crimes: dacoities by thugees,
abortion of illegal pregnancies of widows, poisoning of
prostitutes by jealous lovers.64
Although Raskarpur was
strictly speaking not a poison, a large number of cases were
reported every year where the victim had died due to
mercurial poisoning.
Chevers reported a case, which came in the Nizamat
Adalat of Bengal, where one prostitute named Wazeerun was
allegedly poisoned by her paramour Gouri, who had given
her sweetmeats in which he had put Raskarpur. Although
Chevers doubted the report of the chemical examination
conducted by the native Sub-Assistant Surgeon, he did agree
that abuse of mercury was highly prevalent in the medicines
administered by the kavirajes for the treatment of Syphilis.65
Miserable cases of destruction of mouth and jaws caused by
the native practice of salivation by mercurial fumigation were
noted in syphilitic cases in various hospitals and dispensaries
throughout Bengal. The usual practice by a native hakim or
kaviraj was to make the patient sit on a cane bottomed chair,
under which a pan of ignited charcoal was placed with the
native preparation of mercury. Sometimes the patient was
made to inhale toxic mercurial fumes from a bhatti.66
Dr.
R.H. Stevens noted a case of a Bengali boy aged 13 suffering
from a spleen disease. Salivation by a local hakim had caused
sloughing of the lower eyelid and destruction of the eyeball
that came out almost without the use of knife.67
Another case
of an unnamed sepoy (No. 1243) was reported from Bengal,
who had originally concealed his real disease. Four days after
he was brought to the hospital, he admitted that he was
suffering from Syphilis, when he could no longer bear the
pain. He was given a precautionary and a mild course of
mercury biniodide and was discharged from the hospital.
After about two months he was again admitted to the
hospital; this time due to a sprained ankle. Doctors soon

33
noted that he was covered with squamous syphilide and his
general constitution was extremely weak. Although the
doctors tried to recover his constitution he soon developed all
the symptoms of mercurial poisoning: swollen face, enlarged
glands, horrible fetor of breath, swollen and painful gums,
white and trembling tongue, loose teeth. Few days later he
died in the hospital. During the time of his stay, he
admitted that he had taken large quantities of Raskarpur but
refused to reveal as to who had administered him the drug.68
Similarly in a Darjeeling dispensary, a Nepali boy was
admitted who had a similar case of mercurial poisoning. The
doctors however were able to save him by a timely
application of iodide of potassium and an external application
of opium liniment.69
Even when mercury was not applied,
native remedies by quacks often seemed ineffective. Ameeran,
a 45 year old Muslim woman was admitted to the Patna
dispensary. About two years ago she had Syphilis and was
treated by a native doctor. Although she was perfectly cured
of her venereal sores within a month’s time, she soon
developed a rash on her genitals and a small swelling on her
clitoris. Soon the swelling turned into a large tumor, almost
six inches in size and had to be surgically removed.70
Colonial dispensary and hospital records abound in such
instances of gullible patients being duped by native doctors
only to be saved by the timely intervention of western
rational medicine. European medical community used these
instances to make an argument for governmental intervention
through medical registration and strict quality control over
manufacture of indigenous drugs (interventions which did
eventually come but only in the second decade of the 20th
century). However, despite their rant against indigenous
medicines, they continued to ‘learn’ from the medical
practices of native hakims and kavirajes, especially their rich
corpus of materia medica, which has been perfected over
centuries through empirical trial and observation. While
Arnold sees the second half of 19th
century as a decisive point

of departure from the earlier Orientalist tradition of
respectful engagement with indigenous medical texts and
materia medica, our sources reveal that at the local level of
dispensaries, such engagement with local knowledge of
medicinal plants and herbs continued. The space of
dispensary continued as a site of clinical trial of local materia
medica, as pointed out by several scholars such as Kavita
Shivaramakrishnan and Seema Alavi.71
In the treatment of Syphilis and Gonorrhoea, easily
available local drugs and plants continue to provide fruitful
alternatives to more expensive European drugs (see Table 1).
Native doctors often provided detailed reports on the use of
local herbs and plants, even mentioning their doses and
method of application. This knowledge of indigenous materia
medica often came from their interaction with the local
kavirajes and hakims who came to work in the dispensaries.
These reports then made their way to the higher levels of
colonial medical bureaucracy and sometimes found place in
the publications of pharmacopoeias like W.H. Ainslie’s
Materia Medica (1826) and W.B. O’ Shaughnessy’s Bengal
Pharmacopoeia (1844).72
These texts, particularly
Shaughnessy’s Pharmacopoeia remained the most authoritative
guide for all the working dispensaries all over the country.
And yet the Committee on the Supply of Drugs (1875)
urged the government to encourage dispensaries to come up
with their own pharmacopoeias based on careful observation
of indigenous drugs. In their half-yearly reports to the
Inspector General, native doctors observed in detail the use
of local drugs even mentioning their precise doses.73
Thus in
the treatment of Gonorrhoea, Gurjan balsam came to replace
its counterpart Copaiba balsam. Another drug used in the
treatment of Gonorrhoea was Pedalium murex locally called
gokheroo. Native practitioners used the berries and leaves to
prepare a compound decoction of sarsaparilla. It was entirely
native and was reported to have grown abundantly in gardens
and hedges throughout Bengal. Kababchini (Piper cubeba) was

35
another popular drug for gonorrhoea which was used in both
hakimi and kaviraji medicines. In the treatment of Syphilis,
extracts from marking nut also known as bhela (Semecarpus
anacardium) was used by native kavirajes.74
It was promptly
given a trial by the native doctor in Hugli Emambarah
hospital.75
The problem of mercury was never effectively
solved in the actual medical practices of the dispensaries.
Although by the second half of the 19th
century sarsaparilla,
rhubarb, potassium iodide, tamarind, purges along with ‘rest
and general cleanliness’, came to replace mercury in the
treatment of syphilis,76
we continue to see support for
Raskarpur both in dispensary practices as well as in medical
literature produced by native allopathic doctors.77
If the problem for European medical community was to
incorporate Indian materia medica within the practices of the
dispensary, for the native practitioners of medicine, the task
at hand was to familiarise native people with medicine and
therapeutics alien to their culture. Of the medicines sold and
advertised by the native drug manufacturers, salsas came to
occupy an important position as a projected cure for venereal
afflictions and as a purifier of blood. The world salsa is a
corrupted form of the word ‘sarsa’ which is a shortened
version of the word sarsaparilla, the New World cure for
venereal afflictions. Advertisements of medicines by
indigenous manufacturers, especially those by Calcutta
kavirajes, however, seem to appropriate salsa within the
Ayurvedic materia medica and give it a history it never had.
The main ingredient in these salsas was not sarsaparilla but
Hemidesmus indicus, a commonly known indigenous plant
widely recognised in the traditional Indian systems of
medicine as an effective cure for a wide range of diseases such
as blood diseases, liver complaints, renal and urino-genital
disorders, venereal diseases etc.78
Usually called Anantmul in
the lower provinces of Bengal, it is also known in different
parts of the country under different names such as Kapuri,

Sugandhipala, Sariva, Sarbia, Naruninti Nannari, Tygadeberu,
Anant Vel and Durivel.79
While the plant has been well
known in traditional systems of medicine, in the late 19th
century it was reincarnated in the form of an alien drug
called sarsaparilla.
Indigenous drug manufacturers regularly published
adverts of salsas in panjikas and vernacular newspapers;
often writing in copious details about the benefits of such
a drug. Kaviraj Satishchandra Sharma’s advert in Nutan
Panjika of 1898-99 stated that salsa is a kind of creeper
growing in the mountainous regions of temperate countries
(parbaityadeshajatalatabishesh).80
This plant in combination
with the extracts derived from various other indigenous plants
and herbs have produced the Ayurvedic salsa. This salsa was
mainly touted as an effective blood purifier that cleansed
polluted blood (dushita rakta) and helped to regenerate blood
cells (paramanu). Pollution was mainly understood as
something caused by mercurial poisoning and venereal
diseases. HDM & Co Patent Aushadalaya of Calcutta
advertised its Cooperative Salsa as an effective remedy for at
least twelve problems, all arising from venereal ills. Its advert
declared that the salsa purifies blood and generates newer
blood cells. It purges mercurial poisoning from the body,
cures rheumatism, eye disease, nervous debility and cough.
But most importantly it purged venereal poison out of the
body. Venereal poison was blamed for impotency, congenital
disorders and even menstrual problems. Generations of young
children were said to bear the brunt of their parent’s impure
blood. Further, venereal poison was also blamed for making
sperm weak and not having enough potential for generation.81
In a similar vein, another advertisement from B Brother’s &
Co claimed to purge out mercury from the body and cure all
mercury-induced skin diseases such as chancres, mercurial
sores, syphilitic sores, venereal bubo and rashes. The product
was called ‘Anti Syphilitic Drops Salsa’ and claimed that users

37
can actually see mercury being discharged from the body
during urination.82
Thus it seems that European medical
community’s charge of mercurial abuses was taken seriously
by the indigenous drug manufacturers. A government
pensioner named Kalidas Sarkar and his son Hiralal Sarkar
sold their ‘Non-Mercurial Syphilitic Pills’ claiming that its
recipe was given to them by a Muslim fakir of the Nepal
jungle towards the end of the mutiny. Similarly Muhammad
Abdul Rab of Jalpaiguri sweared in the name of Allah (Allah
kasam!) that his medicines did not contain mercury.83
The narrative of mercurial poisoning was couched within
a larger narrative of eugenic concerns and Bengali racial
weakness. Advertisers often raised the fear of generations of
Bengali children rendered weak and blind due to congenital
Syphilis and Gonorrhoea. One advertiser therefore claimed
that if human blood is polluted by Syphilis, then male semen
(sukra) loses its generative power. Such men usually pass on
the blame to the wife. Some even remarry twice or thrice.
But no matter how many times they remarry, if venereal
poison stays back in the body, they will not produce healthy
progeny. Another advertisement of H.D. Nandan & Co’s
Surasanjibani Salsa claimed that sages and householders of
ancient times lived long due to the magical properties of a
large number of Ayurvedic medicinal plants and herbs.84
Extracts from such plants and herbs have been combined to
produce this salsa. It was even claimed to be one of the elixirs
coming out of the mythic churning of the ocean. Illustrations
of healthy and weak Bengali babus inserted within such
advertisement texts further consolidated the fears of racial
weakness.The trajectory of Sarsaparilla, a New World plant in
the colony, therefore parallels the history of vernacularisation
of medical knowledge in colonial Bengal. Salsa was
repositioned within the market economy of Bengal as a drug
that was not only indigenous but also cured the ills
associated with quackery.

Table 1: Names of European drugs to be replaced by
Indian drugs
Name of European Drug Name of Indigenous Drug
Tannic and Gallic Acid Indian gall nuts
Matico Use of Indian astringents
Aloe Aloe from Indian plants
Chamomile Baboona flower
Horse Radish Moringa root
Cantharides Mylabris cichorii
Rhubarb East Indian Rhubarb
Rose Leaves Procure in India
Soap, soft and hard Procure in India
Sarsaparilla Hemidesmus Indicus
Squills Rely on Indian plants
Jalap Kala dana
Kino Indian Kino
Copaiba Balsam Gurjun balsam
Saffron Procure in India
Treacle Procure in India
Tragacanth Procure in India
Valerian root Procure in India
Almond oil Terminalia Catappa
Olive oil Sepamum
Anise oil Ajwain oil
Myrrh Procure in India
Dill water Anethum sowa
Oak Bark Babool bark
Beeberian Barberry
Chlorinated lime Other disinfectants
Chicona bark Sufficient bark to be
retained for preparation of
the tincture and extracts
Source: Report of the Committee on the supply of drugs in India (1875)
in Proceedings of GOB/Medical/March 1878/No: 31-32/W.B.S.A.

39
Debating Sexual Diseases in Print: Medical Taxonomies,
Cultural Diseases and National Health
In such a space where contesting medical systems jostled for
public attention, what would happen to the idea of a disease?
Can such a market sustain multiple notions of a disease? The
history of the etiology of venereal diseases clarifies this point
abundantly. Although we now know of a total number of
twenty different varieties of venereal diseases, their recognition
and identification as well as their differential diagnosis, i.e.
distinguishing one disease from another, required scientific
knowledge that only became available in the late 19th
and the
early 20th
centuries with the laboratory revolution and the
coming of the Germ Theory.85
Till then there was no clear-
cut distinction between Syphilis and Gonorrhoea and
different diseases were understood under umbrella terms such
as Venus illness, Morbus Gallicus, Pox, lecherous sickness and
Syphilis. Each term had an interesting etymological history
and emerged from a combination of factors such as
observation of symptoms, available scientific knowledge and
cultural considerations.86
Although Gonorrhoea has been
mentioned in antiquity, the term Syphilis emerged only in
the 16th
century. In the year 1530, Girolamo Francastoro
wrote the poem Syphilis Sive Morbus Gallicus where he used
the term, having derived from a Greek mythology.87
The
common 19th
century usage was however venereal diseases,
under which a wide range of urino-genital disorders could be
understood.
In 19th
century colonial records the most commonly used
term was also venereal diseases. Indexes of colonial records as
well as individual colonial records apply this term. European
medical officials often used the umbrella term venereal
diseases, making little distinction between primary and
secondary Syphilis, hard and soft chancre and Gonorrhoea.88
Edmund A. Parkes in his Manual of Practical Hygiene justified
the use of the term in the following words:

It is convenient for our purpose to put together all
diseases arising from impure sexual intercourse,
whether it be a simple excoriation which has been
inoculated with the natural vaginal mucus or with
leucorrhoeal discharges and which may produce
some inguinal swelling and may either get well in a
few days or last for several days; or whether it be an
inflammation of the urethra produced by specific (or
nonspecific leucorrhoeal) discharge, or whether it be
one of the forms of syphilis now diagnosed as being
in all probability separate and special diseases having
particular courses and terminations89
Thus Edmund Parkes writing in the 1864 was still not
entirely sure as to whether Syphilis was a separate disease and
a different disease from other varieties of venereal afflictions.
The medical practice in Europe then was to identify diseases
based on symptoms and not on causative agent or the actual
pathogen. However with the discovery of causative agent of
Gonorrhoea by Albert Ludwig Sigesmund Neisser in 1879
(Gram-negative Neisseria Gonorrhoea bacterium named after
its discoverer) and that of Syphilis by Fritz Richard
Schaudinn in 1905 (a spirochaete called Treponema pallida)
that Syphilis was distinguished from other varieties of venereal
afflictions.90
According to T. A. Wise, Syphilis as we understand it
today did not have a Sanskrit name. Instead its name was
derived from the Europeans who first visited India. In a 16th
text called Bhavaprakasa, we come across a disease called
Firangi Roga, literally meaning the disease of the Portuguese.
In this work the disease in question is characterised by all the
symptoms of secondary Syphilis, as detailed by European
authors of that time, such as cutaneous eruptions and
affections of the bones, particularly those of nose and palate.
Wise, writing in 1845, therefore stated that Firangi Roga in
all probability was Syphilis and went on to cite the following

41
reasons: 1. Ancient authors who had provided us with
minute details of the symptoms of various diseases, could not
have missed a disease had it been so prevalent. 2. The rapid
spread and initial virulence of the disease in the 15th
century,
which was only possible in case of a new disease. 3. Analogy
with other diseases such as small pox and measles prove that
new diseases may indeed spread from one place to another.91
By 19th
century, however, the term Firangi Roga has been
replaced by a variety of other terms. Three of the most
popular terms we come across in popular vernacular medical
tracts are: garmi, prameha and upadangsha. In all probability
Garmi was a catch-all term relating to all varieties of venereal
diseases and the most popular term among lay people. A
dictionary complied in the year 1837 lists both garmi and
upadangsha under the heading venereal or relating to sexual
intercourse.92
The terms upadangsha and prameha had a more
antiquated origin. The term upadangsha comes from the
Sanskrit words upa meaning near and dangsha meaning
biting.93
In Ayurvedic texts, upadangsha is understood as sores
on genitals produced either by mechanical injuries of the
genitals or by lack of cleanliness or due to washing of the
genitals with impure water after sexual intercourse. Five
different forms of sores are mentioned, which are
distinguished from each other by their colour and nature of
their discharge. They are battika (characterised by dark
colours of the pustules, lancinating pain and white
discharge), paittika (characterised by redness of pustules,
bloody discharge and burning pain), shleshmika (large
pustules with itching sensation), sannipatika (complicated
form of the above disease and is considered incurable) and
finally agantuka (accidental injuries to the generative organs).
It is also stated: should the above sores be treated by an
ignorant person or should the victim continue to have sexual
intercourse with women, he will die from the sloughing of
parts and the fever that accompanies it.94
The etiology of

prameha is even more interesting. While upadangsha is
understood as a disease of the genitals, prameha is understood
as a disease which results in the morbid secretion of the
urine. Susruta mentions twenty varieties of prameha of which
ten are caused by kapha (phlegm), six are caused by pitta
(bile) and four are caused by vayu (wind). The distinction
between the twenty varieties of prameha is mainly based on
the colour of the discharges.95
In the indigenous medical texts produced in 19th
century
Bengal, these two terms occur repeatedly along with a host
of other vernacular terms in order to describe venereal
diseases or diseases related to generative organs or
reproductive organs (ratijantradir pida/ jananendriyer pida).
However in the context of the 19th
century medical market
in Bengal, venereal diseases meant an assemblage of various
diseases, some of which an organic etiology but many of
which emerged from a specific cultural understanding of the
body and a community’s excessive preoccupation with body
fluids, especially semen. Native practitioners of medicine,
whether they were operating within a western system of
medicine or one of the several indigenous system of medicine,
had to interpret Syphilis and Gonorrhoea in cultural terms
reworking them through certain cultural codes which would
be easily accessible to the common people. Most of the
medical texts we come across differ from the original humoral
understanding of the disease at least in two respects:
Firstly there is an overwhelming emphasis on the loss of
semen.96
Semen understood as dhatu is one of the seven
important components that make the human body. The five
elements (panchabhutas) that constitute the universe such as
ether (akasha), wind (vayu), water (ap), earth (prithvi) and
fire (agni) are also found in the food that we intake, which
are transformed into the seven important components of the
body in successive transformations. The food is transformed
into food juice (rasa), then blood (rakta), flesh (mangsha), fat
(meda), bone (asthi), marrow (majja) and finally into semen

43
(sukra). Semen is therefore understood as the most vital
component of the body and the vital juice that makes the
whole human body.97
Despite Ayurveda’s overwhelming
emphasis on semen, the anxiety regarding the loss of semen
in the context of venereal disease, especially prameha, is a
19th
century addition. In Susruta, loss of semen is mentioned
but appears to be only marginal. Of the twenty varieties of
prameha discussed by Susruta, it is only in one variety
namely sukrameha, that loss of semen is mentioned. However
in 19th
century medical texts loss of semen in prameha
appears to be the most important symptom. A kaviraji text
from 1876 gives the symptom of prameha in the following
words: prameha is characterised by pain in the penis along
with fever, high temperature, thirst, loss of appetite, vomiting
tendency and cough. There is a constant seminal discharge,
either thick or watery, in various colours through urine. All
types of prameha soon lead to honey like secretion of dhatu
(madhurnyay dhatu ksharita hay) which is considered
incurable.98
In many other texts, prameha is directly linked
to other diseases like Spermatorrhoea, nocturnal emissions,
sexual debility and impotency. An 1881 daktari manual by
Hara Charan Sen defines Spermatorrhoea or Sukraskhalan as a
disease which is a direct result of Gonorrhoea. Long standing
Gonorrhoea or repeated affliction of the disease weakens the
generative organs. This leads to chalky secretion through
urine (thought to be semen) along with general physical and
mental weakness, involuntary discharges of semen, impotency
etc.99
A homeopathic manual from 1923 describes
Spermatorrhoea as a constant loss of semen from the urethral
orifice and lists a variety of symptoms such as involuntary loss
of seminal fluid either at night or day due to minor irritation
of the penis along with nervous debility. In an 1897
translation of Alvin E Small’s Decline of Manhood by an
anonymous writer, syphilitic infection and urinary tract
infections are directly blamed for nocturnal emissions or
swapnadosha.100

Secondly, the 19th
century texts emphasise sexual
indulgence or promiscuity associated with prameha. This too
is absent in Sanskrit texts. According to Susruta, the external
causes of the disease are: 1. idle, sedentary habits, which
include sleeping during the day and 2. excessive consumption
of sweet liquids and fat producing food.101
Upadangsha is
mainly understood as a mechanical injury to the generative
organ. Medical writers of 19th
century Bengal, across medical
disciplines emphasise sexual indulgence and coitus with a
prostitute, an unclean woman or a fallen woman (bhrastanari)
as the only cause behind upadangsha and prameha. Hara
Charan Sen in his books mentions that usually venereal
diseases occur when a man cohabits with an unclean
prostitute or a fallen woman cohabits with many men.102
Dr.
Mahendranath Ray in his 1906 manual on VD says that
humans have six enemies (shadripu) within. They are lust
(kama), anger (krodh), greed (lobha), arrogance (mada),
attachment (moha) and covetousness (matsarya). Sages in
ancient times could win over these ripus. Hence they were
called jitendriya (one who has won over the senses). However
in present times, men have fallen victim to lust or desire.
They indulge in sexual excesses or coitus with prostitutes.
They therefore suffer from various diseases of which prameha
and upadangsha are the most fatal. Only prostitutes carry
such diseases. One who indulges in a sexual relation with a
prostitute will surely catch one of these diseases sooner or
later. Those who resist temptations of prostitutes indulge in
masturbation. They waste semen and therefore suffer from
dhatu daurbalyo (literally meaning weakening of dhatu) and
impotence.103
A 1924 manual by Dr. Chandrakanta
Chakravarty, which strictly works within a rationalist western
tradition, suggests use of condoms and resorting to only ‘high
class’ prostitutes as means of preventing the disease. He
further states that since prostitutes are the main vectors of
this disease, prostitution should be criminalised and men
should be encouraged to live with their wives in healthy areas

45
(swasthyakarparibesh). Prostitution was therefore seen as not
only as a source of contagion but also as a source of polluting
the moral environment.104
How do we make sense of the changes brought about in
the late 19th
century regarding venereal diseases? In the late
19th
century contagious diseases were often linked to the
discussion of nationalism and national health. Infection,
although a pre-modern concept, was now touted as a leading
cause of disease, associated with moral and physical
degeneration of the Bengalis as a race, which was mainly seen
as a result of loss of political power and economic enterprise
of the Bengali middle class intellectuals. The cause of
Bengalis afflicted with contagious diseases found a profound
resonance in the medical writings of the Bengali daktars and
kavirajes especially in the domain of medical journals
circulating in large numbers in late colonial Bengal. In these
debates and discussions, the cause of Bengalis being afflicted
with contagious diseases was often seen in relation to the loss
of moral and material weakness of the Bengali community
and in contrast to the economic supremacy achieved by other
communities thereby replacing the hegemony of the Bengalis.
The crisis of Bengali masculinity and loss of political and
economic power soon developed into a full-blown nationalist
project of critique of marriage and conjugal practices. The
link between venereal diseases, conjugality and national
health was however not natural but rather tenaciously drawn.
Similar linkages have been made in scholarly studies done on
other parts of India.105
While explaining the causes of racial weakness and
Bengali bhadralok’s susceptibility to diseases, medical writers
declared that Bengali constitution was essentially different
from European constitution. Therapeutic practices have to
take into consideration such essential differences between
races (jati), keeping in mind cultural practices, dietary habits,
intellectual capacity and religious disposition of a particular
jati.106
That is why the plague measures introduced in India

since 1896 did not work; since quarantine measures were
based on universal principles, i.e. isolating a person from his
or her loved ones. Such measures might have worked for
Europe, but in a country like India where a wife happily
immolates herself in her husband’s funeral pyre, isolating a
dying man from his wife and a child from his mother, would
spell disaster. What makes one jati essentially different from
another one depends on two set of factors: environmental and
cultural. Environmental factors such as climate and
temperature cannot be changed and hence are resistant to
human intervention. However cultural factors depend on
human intervention and can be changed by changing the
social law that governs such cultural practices. The writer
noted at least seven areas where immediate change was
necessary in order to revive the bodily health of a nation
(jatiyadaihikpunarujjiban).107
One should note here that body
is then understood in cultural terms not susceptible to
universal laws of nature. Of all the areas of improvement,
conjugality was deemed as the most important area where
immediate change was needed. Medical writers therefore
pondered upon Hindu conjugal practices in a bid to find out
the reasons for Bengali bhadralok’s racial degeneration.
The debates were occasioned by two back-to-back
incidents that took place in the closing decades of the 19th
century: one was the gruesome death of a child wife named
Phulmoni in 1889 by her middle-aged husband on her
wedding night and the second was the nationalist outcry that
followed the passage of Age of Consent Bill into an Act in
1891, which raised the age of cohabitation within and
outside marriage from 10 to 12.108
In the massive petition
campaign that followed, the orthodox Hindu community
claimed that it violated one of the fundamental sacramental
rituals of the Hindus, namely the garbhandhan ceremony or
the ritual cohabitation of Hindu girls once her menstrual
cycle had begun. Bengali medical writers took this
opportunity to link conjugal practices to a larger discourse of

47
racial weakness and Bengali effeminacy. Feminist scholars who
have studied the controversy surrounding the Age of Consent
Act have rightly demonstrated how the colonial law
reconstituted women as legal subjects thereby not only
displacing her from her previous position as an object of
communitarian control but infusing them with a sense of
‘entitlement’ if not full-fledged rights.109
Others have noted
how women became objects of modern medical knowledge
through scientific discussions on menarche and menstruation
in vernacular print.110
In the final part I want to bring into
focus the scientific debates and discussions occurring within
the field of vernacular print, that sought to draw connections
between notions of Bengali-Hindu conjugality and
pathologies of modern Bengali selfhood in the articulation of
national health.
The grounding of marriage within a sound scientific logic
delinked pleasure from marriage and hinged it with
reproductive necessity. Medical writers and manualists did
this by a strategic deployment of a number of metaphors,
allusions and analogies. One such scientific trope was to
frequently draw parallels from the animal world in order to
establish scientificity of their claim. In an article entitled
Jatiya Daihik Punarujjiban, the writer suggested that animals
indulge in sex only with the aim of reproduction.111
If a male
approaches a female outside the mating season he is not only
rejected but also hurt. Thus the law of nature
(ishwaradishtaniyam) entails that in lower orders of animals,
coitus is geared towards the singular aim of reproduction and
not pleasure. That pleasure was not the aim of coitus was in
turn proved by two points: Firstly after the act, everybody
feels disgusted. As such if at the commencement of the act,
there was no pleasure then no one would have had the
incentive to indulge in it. Secondly, that coitus was not the
only biological function of humans is proved by the fact that
generative organs in male and sometimes in female are
located outside the body unlike more important organs like

brain, lungs, heart, spleen, kidneys and intestines which are
ensconced within the deep recesses of the body. Further
animals whose generative organs are cut off such as in goats,
bulls etc. are more virile than their sexually functional
counterparts. In humans, the khojas and the eunuchs who
used to guard the Mughal harem were also extremely
powerful. Thus the only aim of marriage should be
propagation of species, deviation from which would lead to
all sorts of maladies.
The braiding of conjugality with reproductive logic led
to other anxieties about waste of spermatic fluid for other
purposes: coitus with prostitutes and masturbation. In
another longish article entitled, Deshiya Swasthya Bigyan:
Abhigaman ba Stri-Purush Samsarga, the writer puts
masturbation and the vice of prostitution on the same plane,
on the logic that although prostitution leads to depletion of
fortunes and that of health through venereal diseases,
masturbation is no less dangerous.112
While sex with
prostitutes leads to venereal diseases, masturbation leads to
degeneration of the body and the mind and a host of
diseases: it renders the body weak, causes various kinds of
prameha rog, nocturnal emissions, retention problems,
thinning of sperm, headache and insanity, lack of memorising
ability, degeneration of penis, impotence, dark circles,
constipation and even jakshya rog. The author therefore listed
an entire range of diseases related to masturbation which
included prameha. In his somatic order, real and perceived
diseases emerged from a singular cultural vision of the body,
which sees it as a closed system of energy with fluids going
in and coming out, and bodily health being based on a
delicate balance of fluids.
Although in humoural understanding body fluids such as
semen, menstrual blood and mother’s milk have high
metaphorical and ritual values, in the 19th
century seminal
anxieties got a fresh lease of life and were linked to the
changes occurring in the sphere of colonial political economy.

49
The rise of the new order of manliness in Euro-American
society is said to be triggered off by the forces of industrial
capitalism, which led to the waning of the landed aristocracy
and the rise of the professional and commercial middle-class
that mainly derived their income from commerce and paid
services. This in turn forged a new idea of a Homo Economicus
(economic man) that valued physical labour, individual self-
interest and productivity rather than leisure, communitarian
interests and intellectual pursuits.113
This new idea of an
economic man in turn inspired a new understanding of male
body that saw it as one functioning in a spermatic economy.
Body was therefore a closed system of energy, the well-being
of which depended on de-limiting the expenditure of semen.
In many medico-moral writings of 19th
century Bengal we see
a similar masculine anxiety of the new Bengali middle-class.
By the 1880s, excessive subinfeudation, rack-rent and
fragmentation of landholding have turned land into an
unprofitable enterprise. Bengali encounter with commerce
too has not worked well and all commercial activities came to
a grinding halt by the 1840s.114
Bengalis therefore clung
tenaciously to whatever English education and governmental
services had to offer. The new professional middle-class
therefore found the lifestyle of the earlier gentry associated
with the vices of prostitution, sexual indulgence and idle
sedentary lifestyle based on hereditary privilege to be
extremely offensive. In an essay entitled, Dhani Log Santan
Labhe Banchita Keno?, the writer seems to equate moral and
material degradation of the Bengalis as a jati with the sexual
debauchery of the gentry class and extolls the working class
male as the virile other.115
He notes that since the rich man
wastes his sperm (sukradhatu) through excessive indulgence in
prostitution and rarely takes part in physical labour, he is not
able to produce children because of his wastefulness. On the
other hand, poor working class people despite appalling
living conditions and inadequate diet are blessed with several
children. Although their vegetarian diet cannot match up to

the rich protein-based diet of the richer classes, food that
they partake is not transformed successfully into semen
because they continue to deplete it by overindulgence in
coitus. Their diet which, according to the author, is rich in
kapha does not produce all dhatus adequately; rather it only
seems to increase meda (fat) dhatu.
Seminal anxiety was thus couched within a larger fear of
degeneration of the Bengali race, particularly its inadequacy
to produce healthy off springs. Such debates reached their
apogee at a time when census reports, reports on sanitary
state of the city and its suburbs and health reports were
being circulated in the public sphere. As news of rising and
falling populations, epidemics and sexes made their way into
the public domain; medico-moral writers often used numbers
to project their racial and communal fears. In a short essay
called Banglar Loksamkhya, the writer noted:
Another issue of anxiety is that Muslims are
increasing vis-à-vis the Hindus. Hindus 18100438,
Muslims 17609135. Hindus are only 5 lakh more
than the Muslims. There are many reasons why
Muslim families grow more than Hindus. Who can
tell that in future India would not be turned into a
Muslim country (desh)?116
Congenital diseases, particularly those like prameha and
upadangsha, were blamed for weak offsprings. One writer
claimed that venereal disease can affect a race for two, three
or four generations.117
Almost eighty percent of Bengalis were
afflicted with venereal poison. Another writer claimed that
due to prameha and upadangsha and other diseases of the
dhatu, the female womb is polluted forever and the woman is
denied a child.118
Men having congenital diseases were asked
not to marry, while fathers of brides were asked to find out
whether their prospective son-in-laws were suffering from
diseases related to abuses of mercury.119

51
Conclusion
The birth of modern medicine in Bengal followed the twin
processes of professionalisation of indigenous medicine and
vernacularisation of western medical knowledge. While with
the establishment of CMC and with the introduction of
western medical learning the demise of indigenous medical
knowledges seemed imminent, at the ground level, the
opening up of market forces entailed survival of older medical
knowledges and thriving of indigenous practitioners of
medicine. Colonial medical knowledge had to take into
account indigenous understanding of physiology, pathology
and therapeutics, while the colonial state itself helped to
sustain a thriving medical market of vernacular print and
medicine. This paper traced the history of such processes by
looking at three different yet interconnected sites: the
dispensary, the space of vernacular print and the market for
drugs in reference to treatments available for VD. The
medical market was littered with indigenous dispensaries
selling medicines that claimed to cure a wide range of diseases
while a thriving print market ensured that medical
knowledge reached far and wide. Books on specific diseases,
especially those on venereal diseases, claimed a large chunk of
the total amount of printed material. This medical literature
drew eclectically from various medical sources and knowledge
systems. Further, rational systems of medicine often jostled
with folk wisdom, existing public knowledges and shared
cultural memory of diseases. This ensured the survival of an
already existing cultural understanding of the disease. The
case of VD amply demonstrates this point. Syphilis and
Gonorrhoea, two of the most popular varieties of VD, were
often translated in popular medical domain as Upadangsha
and Prameha. Both the categories had existed in the high
Hindu meta-medical understanding of Ayurveda. However in
the process of translation, western medical knowledge had to
mediate through certain cultural notions attached to body
and body fluids. These notions, which had remained alive

through shared cultural memory, got a fresh lease of life in
the late 19th
century. VD was understood to be part of the
spermatic economy which viewed body as a closed system of
energy based on the delicate balance of body fluids. Fear of
sperm loss therefore was a part of the public discussion of the
VD fed into the larger racial anxiety of Bengali effeteness and
the culture of excessive sexual indulgence associated with the
Bengali gentry whose social power was already on the
downswing in the late 19th
century. Finally in the treatment
of VD too, the peddlers and manufacturers of indigenous
drugs walked a tightrope between abuses of the dubious
practitioners of medicine and the rational alternative provided
by western medicine. They therefore not only appropriated
certain western medicines such as sarsaparilla but claimed it
to be a part of their own medical legacy. Colonial medicine,
far from hegemonising and relegating other medical
knowledges to the margins, was diffused in the plural medical
culture and sustained the late colonial medical market of
Bengal.
Notes:
This paper was originally presented in a conference in JNU, entitled
“Pathways in History: Exploring Connections across Space and Time”,
from February 5th
to 7th
, 2014. I would like to thank all those who took
time to pose questions. I would also like to thank the two anonymous
reviewers of this paper for their useful suggestions.
1
The enclavist argument comes out most strongly in Radhika
Ramasubban, “Imperial Health in British India, 1857-1900” in Disease,
Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of
European Expansion, Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis, ed., Routledge,
London, 1988.
2
The argument of colonial hegemony can be ascribed to the works of
David Arnold. See his Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic
Disease in Nineteenth Century India, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1993; idem The New Cambridge History of India III. 5: Science,
Technology and Medicine in Colonial India, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2002. All citations from Colonizing the Body refer to this
edition of the text.

53
3
See for instance Roy Porter, Health for Sale : Quackery in England, 1660-
1850, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1989; idem, Quacks:
Fakers and Charlatans in English Medicine, Tempus Publishing,
Gloucester, 2000; Helen M Dingwall, Physicians, Surgeons and
Apothecaries: Medicine in Seventeenth Century Edinburgh, Issue 1 of
Scottish Historical Review Monograph Series, University of Michigan
Press, Michigan, 1995; Irvine Loudon, Medical Care and the General
Practitioner, 1750-1850, Oxford University Press, Clarendon, 1986;
Susan C Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners
in Eighteenth Century London, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1996; Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the
English Market for Medicine, 1720-1911, Cambridge University Press,
1994; Kevin P Sienna, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor:
London’s “Foul Ward”, 1600-1800, University of Rochester Press, 2004.
For the application of the term in Indian context refer to relevant
footnotes later.
4
Pratik Chakrabarti, “Medical Marketplaces beyond the West: Bazaar
Medicine, Trade and the English Establishment in Eighteenth Century
India” in Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450-
c.1850, op. cit. 2007: 196-215.
5
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market,
Print and Daktari Medicine, Anthem Press, New York, 2009. All further
citations refer to this edition of the text.
6
Madhuri Sharma, Indigenous and Western Medicine in Colonial India,
Culture and Environment in South Asia, Foundation Books, New Delhi,
2012 and Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of
Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900-1955, Cambridge Imperial
and Post-colonial Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2013.
7
Seema Alavi, “Unani Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Public
Sphere: Urdu Texts and Oudh Akbar”, Indian Economic and Social
History Review, March 2005, 42: 101-129.
8
Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial
India, New Perspectives in South Asian History, 17, New Delhi, Orient
Longman, 2007.
9
David Arnold, op. cit. 1993 and 2002.
10
For a brief pre-colonial history of medical practices in India see Deepak
Kumar, “India (Chapter-28)” in Cambridge History of Science, 4, Eighteenth
Century Science, Roy Porter ed., Cambridge University Press, 2003.
11
For a history of NMI and CMC see Poonam Bala, Imperialism and
Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective, Sage Publications, 1991

and Samita Sen and Anirban Das, “A History of the Calcutta Medical
College and Hospital, 1835-1936” in Uma Dasgupta ed., History of
Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, XV, 4, Science and
Modern India: An Institutional History, c 1784-c 1947, Center for Studies
in Civilizations, 2011.
12
For a history on English doctors in India see D. G. Crawford, A
History of Indian Medical Service, 1600-1913, London, 1914 and for
native doctors or daktars see Projit Bihari Mukharji, op. cit. 2009,
Introduction and Chapter 1.
13
On history of kaviraji practice and institutionalisation of Ayurveda see
Brahmananda Gupta, “Indigenous Medicine in Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Bengal” in Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative
Study, Charles Leslie ed., University Of California Press, Berkeley, 1976.
Also see Paul R Brass, “The Politics of Ayurvedic Education: A Case-
study of Revivalism and Modernization in India” in Education and Politics
in India: Studies in Organization, Politics and Society, ed., S. Hoeber
Rudolph and L.I. Rudolph, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: 341-75.
14
Sumit Sarkar, ''Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His
Times'' in his Writing Social History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi,
1997.
15
Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of
Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905, OUP, New
Delhi, 2006.
16
Projit Bihari Mukharji, op cit., 2011.
17
Shinjini Das, Debating Scientific Medicine: Homeopathy and Allopathy
in Late Nineteenth Century Medical Print in Bengal, Medical History,
2012, 56 (4): 463-480.
18
For Hakimi see Seema Alavi, Islam and Healing: Loss and Recovery of an
Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900, Palgrave Macmillan, New
York, 2008Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late
Colonial India, 17 of New Perspectives in South Asian History, Orient
BlackSwan, 2007 and Kavita Shivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, New
Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab, Issue 12 of New
Perspectives in South Asian History, Orient BlackSwan, New Delhi,
2006. For Ayurveda see Madhuri Sharma, op cit.,2012 and Rachel
Berger, op cit., 2013.
19
Poonam Bala
20
Jatindramohan Bhattacharya ed., Bangla Mudrita Granthadir Talika,
Vol-1, 1743-1852, A. Mukherjee, Calcutta, 1990.

55
21
Jatindramohan Bhattacharya ed., Mudrita Bangla Granther Panji 1853-
1867, Paschim Bangla Academy, Calcutta, 1993.
22
On English medical writing see Irma Taavitsainenn and Päivi Pahta,
Medical Writing in Early Modern English, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 2011
23
Lack of original vernacular works on medicine was a charge often
labeled against the Bengali writers. In an article written in Bengali medical
journal Chikitsha Sammelani, the writer complained that except for works
by a few well known Bengali daktars like Bholanath Basu, Udaychand
Dutta and Annadacharan Khastagir, most of Bengali medical literature
were translations of European works. See Jadunath Gangopadhyay,
“Bangalar Chikitshak Samaj” in Chikitsha Sammelani, Chikitsha Bishayak
Masik Patrika, Vol 6, 1889.
24
For a general discussion on the different medical genres see Projit Bihari
Mukharji, op cit., 2011. On VD see Mahendranath Ray, Allopathic
Promeho, Dhatudaurbalyo O Upadongsho Chikitsha, Calcutta, 1906;
Gyanendra Kumar Maitra, Rati Jantradir Pida, Calcutta, 1923;
Hemchandra Sengupta, Indriyo Daurbalyo O Tahar Chikitsha, Calcutta,
1923; Hara Chandra Sen, Venereal Diseases in Bengali, Calcutta, 1881;
Jogendra Chandra Ray and Manmathanath Sengupta, Jananendriya
Chikitsha, 1892; Rajendralal Sur, Promeho O Upodongsho Pidar Chikitsha,
Calcutta, 1916; idem, Treatment of Gonorrhoea and Venereal Diseases,
1924 and Mahendra Chandra Bhattacharya, Janandriyer Pida, Calcutta,
1917.
25
On the debate on terminologies see Binaybhushan Ray, Unish Shataker
Banglay Bigyan Sadhana, Calcutta, 1987.
26
See Hara Chandra Sen, op cit., 1881. For Chandra Kanth Karmakar
see Report on the Charitable Dispensaries under the GOB for the year 1868.
Appendix B, No- 32 of Medical Proceedings of GOB/January 1870/
NO-31-33/W.B.S.A.
27
Kaviraj Binodlal Sen, Ayurvediya Dravyabidhan, Calcutta, 1876 and
Haralal Gupta, Ayurved Bhashabidhan, Calcutta, 1888.
28
See subscription list of subscribers in Chikitsha Sammelani, Chikitsha
Bishayak Masik Patrika, 3, 1887; 4, 1888; 5, 1889; 6, 1889 etc.
29
Excerpted from Poonam Bala, op cit., 1991.
30
Sachindranath Chakrabarty, Saral Totka Chikitsha, Calcutta, n.d. Also
see recipes of totka or mushtijog published in various issues of Chikitsha
Sammelani etc.
31
Adiswar Bhattacharya, Chatraganer Naitik Abasthya O Tahar Pratikar,
Calcutta, 1918.

Phr (vol 1, issue-1)merged

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Ähnlich wie Phr (vol 1, issue-1)merged

Ähnlich wie Phr (vol 1, issue-1)merged (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Phr (vol 1, issue-1)merged