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Book Review
The story of Unani
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History of Islamic healing tradition’s interaction with Indian society and politics
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Lakshmi Subramanian
ISLAM AND HEALING — Loss and Recovery of an Indo-Muslim Medical Tradition, 1600-1900: Seema Alavi; Permanent Black, ‘Himalayana’ Mall Road, Ranikhet Cant., Ranikhet-263645. Rs. 695.
The making of an Indo-Islamic medical tradition in North India constitutes the principal theme of this fascinating book. Just plotting this over a long period of more than four centuries would have validated the author’s competence. But she does much more as she uses the story of Unani to heal the historiography of 18th and 19th century South Asia from the lingering malaise of state centrism and the disproportionate representation of the colonial state. This she does with exemplary scholarship that rests upon a huge archive of Persian, English and Urdu material that in itself reflects the diachronic aspects of transformation that Unani underwent.
The making of the Unani tradition was a complex process of reconfiguring assumptions and practices, and reconstituting principles of health and well being and which was only partially affected by the colonial encounter. In contrast to other important areas of cultural and social practices, where colonialism featured as a crucial catalyst in change and adaptation, Unani, according to Alavi, had to respond to far reaching internal compulsions than the external threat of colonialism and its epistemic hegemony.
The idea is persuasively argued even if the assertions of the relative immunity of Unani to colonial influence tend to be repetitive especially as she herself presents substantial evidence on the implications of colonial policy; on the other hand, the bold and innovative approach of looking at social practices from the prism of the Mughal legacy and not from that of the early colonial state is very commendable.
Patronage
The principal arguments around which Alavi’s dense narrative is ordered are as follows: the Unani system which had emerged out of a mélange of Greek, Ayurveda and Persian ideas enjoyed unprecedented patronage in the Mughal court where the idea of medical knowledge and healing as an integral part of aristocratic etiquette fed into the existing notions of good governance and kingly virtue. Medicine as a form of healing was central to the building of an imperial political culture, which had far reaching social implications quite outside the boundaries of the state.
From here the argument is made that the decline of the Mughal state did not necessarily correspond to a decline of the Unani system — instead a more complex process of change generated internal differences within Unani and that ultimately proved more crucial than the colonial intervention in Unani’s tryst with modernity.
Democratisation
The whole process of transformation was triggered off by a democratisation of Persian etiquette medical literature that in turn encouraged small elite families to close their ranks and preserve their knowledge by adopting Arabic, which had in any case been the medium of a parallel medical discourse that perceived healing in scientistic terms.
The adoption of Arabic came with a price — it forced an arbitrary correspondence between Unani and Islam, and cut into the older inclusive constituency of Unani. This tendency was reinforced by the early educational policies of the English East India Company that in its wisdom introduced yet another factor namely the diffusion of medical knowledge through Urdu by the native doctors they appointed under the Native Medical Institution.
What these changes involved was the introduction of several communities of medical literature that on the one hand threatened the status and influence of old and respected hakim families, and on the other, democratised the learning besides exposing it to a variety of influences. Evidently in all this the great leveller was print and the vernacularisation of medical knowledge that happened to coincide with the program of the colonial state but developed a momentum that the latter could not contain or control. The late 19th century saw older Unani families respond to the situation — to what was evidently a crisis as far as their preserve was concerned. The battle was fought on the pages of the Oudh Akbar, whose proprietor editor’s affinity with elite culture and loyalty to the state was well known.
Amalgamation
The new practitioners were criticised for their incompetence and falling standards and the call was loudly sounded for professionalisation and modernisation as they understood it. This inevitably invoked the ideal of a judicious amalgamation of Unani and western medicine and locating it within a national cultural project.
Alavi’s chapters on the argumentative Hakims and the Azizi family initiative in this context bring out the complexities of the project with a wealth of material. What one misses here is some visual material of advertisements that she talks about in passing and which would have relieved the narrative from its density. But that is a minor quibble in what is undeniably an extremely important book for understanding not merely medical traditions and practices but for reappraising notions of colonial modernity and the Muslim nationalist cultural project.
The dynamism with which the Muslim public intellectual straddled the worlds of pre-colonial medical ethos and the Western traditions is well illustrated. What it did not need was the occasional refrain that the colonial state was only one player among many, a refrain that occasionally interrupts the flow of the book.
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