Poonam Bala: Medicine and Medical Policies in India: Social and Historical Perspectives

Abstract

This succinct volume (111 pages of narrative text) is nonetheless an ambitious attempt to trace the historical trajectory of Indian medicine—or, more specifically, Ayurveda—through the British colonial period up to Indian independence from the earliest Vedic references to ritual practices that could be considered therapeutic. Bala, a historical sociologist, seeks to examine the effects of changes in State and other sources of patronage on the textually based medical traditions of Ayurveda and, to a lesser extent, Unani. Coverage of this impressively broad sweep of history from the Vedic period onward allows Bala to provide an overview of trends and continuities in the social and institutional position of medicine as knowledge tradition and therapeutic practice, though detailed analysis and specificity are inevitably sacrificed at times. Historians, in particular, may be dissatisfied that Bala relies exclusively on secondary sources until the Imperial period is examined in the final substantive chapter. Her analysis of the interactions between religious and state authorities and the development of medical knowledge in ancient India thus inevitably rehearses arguments previously put forward by earlier scholars (such as Chattopadhyaya). In Bala’s account, we read that the dominance of Brahmanical priestly authority, which condemned forms of medical learning such as anatomy because tainted by the polluting practice of handling corpses, restricted the development of medical knowledge by forcing it to acquiesce to the superiority of religious principles. However, judicious use of secondary sources for the medieval period allows her to contest the received view that Ayurveda stagnated under Muslim rule. Bala argues convincingly that Muslim rulers were important patrons for both Ayurvedic and Unani medicine and that syncretic developments in these two systems were facilitated by their common humoral bases, overlapping pharmacopeias and approaches to professional training. Moreover, other middle-class supporters of