Urdu Medical Texts in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This Chapter Discusses the Late — Nineteenth — Century Unani response to colonial medical drives. It argues that Unani’s reaction did not constitute a narrow anti-colonial shrill. Instead, it derived from the plural medical culture that colonialism itself had helped sustain. It shows that Unani healing underwent tremendous internal change in an age characterized both by modern capitalist infrastructure and print culture, as well as the related disturbances of modernity: population explosions, famines, disease, epidemics and related death. This conjuncture was used by Muslims who did not come from traditional hakim families to fashion a new Unani. They challenged both the traditional custodians of Unani knowledge as well as the colonial state. Very much like religious dissent movements of the period, they questioned the received medical knowledge of the Perso-Arabic brand. They used colonial artifacts like print to create a wider medical public sphere. Through their writings they created a culturally larger Unani in the vernacular, Urdu. This mirrored social changes, and the close connections between medicine and ashrafiyat—upward social mobility.