Contesting Colonial Authority: Medicine and Indigenous Responses in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India ed. by Poonam Bala (review)

The history of contestation and negotiation between Western and indigenous medicine within the colonial backdrop has been well documented. This edited collection brings new materials and ideas from the Indian subcontinent to this ongoing examination. The discussions here are around relatively familiar themes such as Ayurveda, Unani, hospitals, and medical schools, but each of the chapters adds a new dimension to the existing scholarship on contestation of colonial authority through medicine. In the introduction, Poonam Bala treats indigenous medical responses to colonialism and the dominance of Western medicine in India as a paradigmatic moment, shaped by negotiation and encounter with and covert resistance to authorities of power. What is significant for Bala, and something that is investigated in this volume throughout, is how these negotiations created alternative spaces for traditional forms of knowledge.

The first chapter, by Bala, is a continuation of this exploration of the structures of contestation into the history of the emergence of Ayurveda as an alternative paradigm of medicine in India. In the twentieth century, the general anti-British political climate, the growing feeling among Indians that colonial policies and the introduction of English education were detrimental to indigenous practices of knowledge shaped a new phase of medical encounter, which in turn led to the revival of Ayurveda. Madhulika Banerjee’s chapter on Ayurvedic pharmaceuticals picks up on some of the themes touched upon by Bala. She too sees the late nineteenth century as the period of “encounter” leading to the emergence of Ayurvedic medicine and particularly the Ayurvedic pharmaceutical industry in Bombay, Kerala, Dhaka, and Calcutta.

Cristiana Bastos focuses on the Portuguese colony of Goa in western India and the Medical School of Goa, which was established in 1824. She traces the long history from the time of Garcia D’Orta (1479–1572), but leaves out, somewhat disconcertingly, large chunks of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history. The chapter presents a fairly institutional account of the medical school, the role of head physician, Matheus Moacho, the teachings of Germano Correia, admission of first generation of local students, and more interestingly its role in training physicians to serve in the new Portuguese colonies in Africa. Although Bastos suggests in the beginning that native agency was critical in shaping colonial medicine in Goa, that point does not come through quite as clearly.

Shrimoy Roy Chaudhury studies the complex history of the emergence of a unique medical institution in Bengal, the Hooghly Imambara Hospital, established in 1835 following the government’s appropriation of Haji Mohamed Mohsin’s Hooghly Imambara fund and a consensus formed between the Anglicists and the Orientalists. Through this institution, Roy Chaudhury studies the emergence of a new indigenous medical institution or profession: “daktari,” which, as he describes, became “a vernacular idiom of articulating concerns about national health” (p. 52).

In his chapter on Unani medical culture, Neshat Quaiser shows that “memory” played an important role in the contest with Western medicine and in developing a pan Indian Muslim identity, which in turn led to the creation of the distinct medical culture. Memory remained a tool with which the colonial hegemonization of public spaces and culture was resisted as Unani practitioners presented the past as “living present” (p. 119). Quaiser identifies the primary articulation of such memory in print culture; in the works of the Urdu poet Altaf Husayn Hāli, Syed Ahmed Khan, which were then articulated within the Tibbi conferences.

Seán Lang studies the Countess of Dufferin’s fund, an association concerned with women’s health in India. In addressing these issues, the members of the fund encountered Hindu religious critique, although the need for such an institution was simultaneously and widely acknowledged. Lang characterizes the fund as an “intensely political organization” (p. 93), as its main aim was to change Indian attitudes toward Western medicine and thereby toward the British Raj. The nationalists creatively engaged...