Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (review)

Guy Attewell's book, Refiguring Unani Tibb, volume 17 in New Perspectives in South Asian History, a series supported by The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, is a welcome addition to the growing body of research on Indian medicine, especially on the interactions that took place as tensions over medical authority emerged in the colonial period. Important as a provider of health care in South Asia, past and present, Unani Tibb has not received the degree of attention it deserves from scholars. Through the diverse sources he uses, the questions he raises, and the analyses he offers on the varied processes of change and integration of medical, historical, and sociocultural ideas, Attewell opens up a world of stimulating and new insights into Unani Tibb.

Attewell's study focuses on Unani Tibb in the late 1880s to late 1930s. He draws on journals written in Urdu by learned hakims (practitioners) published in Lahore, Delhi, and Hyderabad and on pamphlets, treatises, and key texts on Unani Tibb written in Arabic and Urdu. He uses government documents and reports from archives in Hyderabad, Delhi, and London; materials in public libraries and private collection; and contemporary monographs. Through the addition of interviews with some of today's leading Unani practitioners and scholars, and field observations in working Unani clinics, Attewell rounds out this detailed portrait of Unani Tibb. His goal is to set Unani Tibb in its South Asian context as a developing, responsive tradition, showing that continuities from Arabic, Persian, and Galenic medicine should be neither readily assumed nor used as the standard for evaluation. Practitioners entering the Indian milieu from the thirteenth century onward interacted with Ayurvedic practitioners, studied herbs and plants to formulate a new pharmacy, and responded to health needs of the population.

In six in-depth chapters, Attewell follows the professional activities of hakims, their response to disease (notably plague), the interaction of nationalist politics and medicine with British colonial power, and the culturally identified health problems of women and of men. As the author himself notes in his preface, "There is so much to do!" (p. viii). A single book review cannot convey the richness of materials that Attewell deploys. From my perspective, as a researcher on Unani Tibb and other medical traditions in Hyderabad, the translations from Urdu into English (with transliteration of the Urdu provided in footnotes on the page) of materials ranging from medical education to treatment of plague, to treating women suffering from hysteria and other ailments and men suffering from "weakness" are especially rich. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Unani medicine in Hyderabad, the largest and richest of the Indian princely states. In return for accepting support and acquiescing to oversight of medical institutions from the state's princely rulers, Hyderabadi-based practitioners faced little pressure to innovate. Their situation provides an interesting contrast to Unani Tibb practitioners in Lucknow and Delhi and to the members of the All India Vedic and Unani Tibbi Conference described in chapter 4. By necessity, these practitioners developed political and institution-building skills as they entered into dialogue with the colonial state and had to prove their medical authority in contrast to those of the multiplicity of healers not in the learned, hereditary profession. Two other significant chapters (5 and 6) are notable for the presentation of Urdu print materials as a medium in which Unani practitioners interacted with their publics—both other practitioners and the lay audience. Here Attewell explores in nuanced and intelligent detail an extraordinary intersection of medicine, culture, and gender, showing the moral authority the Unani hakims held but also some of the perplexities they faced in diagnosing women's ailments because of constraints of knowledge and access to physical examinations.

In the long introductory...