Asian Medicine and Globalization

4. Reinventing Traditional Medicine: Method, Institutional Change, and the Manufacture of Drugs and Medication in Late Colonial India

Chapter 4 Reinventing Traditional Medicine: Method, Institutional Change, and the Manufacture of Drugs and Medication in Late Colonial India s. IRFAN HABIB AND DHRUV RAINA Several themes resurface in accounts of the encounter between so-called traditional systems of Indian medicine and modern allopathic medicine, each of which focuses differently on the politics of knowledge, science, and empire (Petitjean,Jami, and Moulin 1992). In each of these themes, the nation-state most visibly confers an identity on traditional knowledge systems and often frames the encounter between these knowledge systems in terms of conflict or dialogue (Raina and Habib 1999; Chakrabarty 1998). The history of science as a discipline retreated from its original Enlightenment ideal of the late eighteenth century to a phase where regional or continental essentialisms or national centrisms explicitly or implicitly shaped the topos of the discipline (Bernal 1987; F. Cohen 1994; Raina and Habib 1999). The founding conflict of the eighteenth century that shaped the history of science as a discipline was that of the "ancients and moderns" (Crombie 1994). This European contest between the ancients and the moderns reappears in the history of science of the non-Western world as a dichotomy that distinguishes tradition and modernity. Historians who have internalized this distinction have more often than not assumed a static view of both culture and knowledge-wherein that designated traditional is unchanging, threatened , and fighting a pitched battle against a modernity that would like to see it buried (Leslie 1976). This assumption, it could be safely suggested , is common to both traditionalists and modernists who view the prevalence of the premodern as an obstacle to the realization of an authentic modernity (Wittrock 1998). Another perspective, probably more problematic but closer to the 68 S. Irfan Habib and Dhruv Raina actual practice of the different systems of medicine, would frame the encounter in terms of the mutual shaping of knowledge systems that are designated "traditional" and "modern." This does not discount the political nature of the encounter between different knowledge systems and does not reduce knowledge to power. This mutual shaping or transformation is occasionally reflected in the historical narrativization of this encounter, as different kinds of national centrisms that frame these narratives usually seek to structure the circulation or flow of knowledge in terms of transmissions that flow in one direction only. In this manner historical priority accords prestige to the imagined nation (Adas 1990; Harding 1998), and in the day of intellectual property rights, history confers or denies rights upon possible communities wishing to access this knowledge. The history of the encounter between modern allopathic medicine and so-called traditional medicine is one such field of cultural debate. However, it appears that the interlocutors for, or gatekeepers of, traditional medicine did not always entertain this perspective of the encounter between the modern and traditional. Recent research on some seventeenth-century Ayurvedic texts suggests that they are scattered with appeals to novelty as a "literary and intellectual virtue." However, the most widely distributed of these texts were more circumspect in their appeal to novelty, while the less successful proclaimed it more stridently (Wujastyk forthcoming). It could be suggested then that the response during the period of late colonial rule was quite a varied one, often inspired by very pragmatic considerations that guided medical practice (Alter this volume). The chemist P. C. Ray, discussing the future of the Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia, was quite forthright in asserting: "All that was needed was that [the] active principles (of Ayurvedic formulations) should be extracted according to scientific up-to-date methods and they should receive the imprimatur of the practitioners" (Ray 1932: 104). He appeared to have been convinced that Ayurvedic medicine had to be reconfigured along modern lines (Raina 1997a). The main drawback of the system, as perceived by some of its practitioners, was that its knowledge had become dated. Ayurveda failed to keep pace with the times and labored within the parameters of knowledge developed centuries before (Panikkar 1993: 292). Hakim Ajmal Khan, a leading Unani hakim and very closely associated with the Indian Congress party at the turn of the twentieth century, also attempted to revitalize indigenous medical systems in the light of modern medical developments, stating that these systems could benefit from modern anatomy and surgery. He was convinced that the modern innovations in the organization of medical practice and pedagogy in Europe were worth emulating (Habib 2000: 258-59). Reinventing Traditional Medicine 69 In any case, political struggles for decolonization or cultural transformation have evoked...