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MedicalCultureinTransition:MughalGentleman PhysicianandtheNativeDoctorinEarlyColonial India

SEEMAALAVI
ModernAsianStudies/Volume42/Issue05/September2008,pp853897 DOI:10.1017/S0026749X07002958,Publishedonline:31July2007

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Modern Asian Studies 42, 5 (2008) pp. 853897. C 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0026749X07002958 First published online 31 July 2007

Medical Culture in Transition: Mughal Gentleman Physician and the Native Doctor in Early Colonial India
SEEMA ALAVI Jamia Millia Islamia (Central University), Jauhar Ali Marg, New Delhi 110025 Email: seema_alavi@yahoo.com

Abstract
The essay explores a Greco-Arabic healing tradition that arrived in India with the Muslims and evolved with the expansion of the Mughal Empire. It came to be known as unani in the sub-continent. It studies unani texts and its practitioners in the critical period of transition to British rule, and questions the idea of colonial medicine being the predominant site of culture and power. It shows that in the decades immediately preceding the early 19th century British expansion, unani underwent a critical transformation that was triggered by new inuences from the Arab lands. These changes in local medical culture shaped the later colonial intrusions in matters related to health. The essay concludes that the pro-active role of the English Company and the wide usage of the printing press only added new contenders to the ongoing contest over medical authority. By the 1830s this complex interplay moved health away from its previous focus on individual aristocratic virtue, to the new domain of societal well being. It also projected the healer not merely as a gentleman physician concerned with individual health, but as a public servant responsible for the well being of society at large. These changes were rapid and survived the reforms of 1830s. They ensured that colonial medicine remained entangled in local contestations over medical authority.

Introduction This study makes a break from the narrowly dened medical histories of south Asia that focus on medicine as science.1 It explores the ideas of healing in early colonial north India and views it as a cultural process
In relation to the history of Unani medicine in particular, see J. Christoph Burgel, Secular and religious features of medieval Arabic medicine, in C. Leslie, ed., Asian Medical System: a Comparative Study, reprint, Motilal Banarsidass Publications, Delhi, India, 1998. pp. 4462. He laments the decline of Unani from the twelfth century
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that shaped social change.2 It studies a specic tradition of healing, called Unani, to explore the medical culture of the period.3 The term culture is used here to denote the language, lifestyle, comportment, religious practice and markers of status and authority that dened a healer.4 Unani healing encapsulates all these referents. It exemplies the idea of individual well-being. This wider view of Unani enables us to glean through it the social and cultural history of early colonial north India. The essay discusses the Persian and Arabic Unani literature that was produced and read in Mughal and early colonial Indian society. It studies this literature in conjunction with new kinds of Urdu medical tracts that were introduced by the English East India Company. It argues that medical literatures created communities of medical learning.5 Physicians from such communities upheld distinct notions of health and well-being. They competed with each other and strove to control medical knowledge. This was critical to their prestige and status.

and attributes it to its not following the path of Western science. In the same volume, see F. L. Dunn, Traditional Asian medicine and cosmopolitan medicine as adaptive systems. pp. 133158. For Unani in India see also studies that view it as a medical system: J. Ahmed and A. Qadeer, Unani the Science of GrecoArabic Medicine, Delhi, India, n.d.; N. Qaisar, Politics, culture and colonialism: Unanis debate with doctory, in B. Pati and M. Harrison, eds., Health, Medicine and Empire: perspectives on Colonial India, Orient Longman, Delhi, India, 2001, pp. 32930. 2 G. Attewell, Authority, Knowledge and Practice in Unani Tibb in India, c. 18901930, School of Oriental & African Studies, London (SOAS), PhD thesis, 2004. He moves away from the idea that Unani medicine was a scientistic medical system. He views Unani as a healing tradition that encompassed the moral and religious dimensions of well-being. He focuses on early twentieth-century Unani reforms and their linkage with notions of medical authority. See also for the same period, Claudia Liebeskind, Arguing science. Unani Tibb, hakims and biomedicine in India, 190050, in W. Ernst, ed., Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 18002000, Routledge London, 2002, pp. 5875. She looks at how practitioners of Unani made their tradition more compatible with Western science even as they retained its healing core. 3 Unani was a GrecoRoman system of medicine that came to India with the Muslims in the twelfth century. It thrived under court patronage throughout the period of the Delhi sultanate and the Mughal Empire. 4 The idea of healing as representative of a cultural system rather than a scientic medical system is best developed by medical anthropologists Arthur Kleinman, Mary Good and Byron Good. See their Introduction, in M. Good, P. E. Brodwin, B. Good and A. Kleinman, eds., Pain as Human Experience: an Anthropological Perspective, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994, pp. 120. 5 I use the concept of literature creating communities as elaborated by Sheldon Pollock. See S. Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History. Reconstructions From South Asia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, pp. 136.

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The essay discusses the tensions between medical communities during the period 17501830. This was a time when the Mughal Persian medical tradition gave way to new inuences, both from the Arabic-speaking world and the colonial context. The competition between men of medical communities and the English Company generated multiple ways of articulating medical authority and popularised new ideas of well-being. These ranged from health as aristocratic virtue to healing as scientistic medical wisdom. By the early nineteenth century, the spotlight on individual well-being through comportment gave way to wider debates on the well-being of society through a medical public service. The essay concludes that the dialectics between these different forms of medical knowledge and ideas of well-being are essential to our understanding of human culture. They are central to the social and cultural history of early colonial India.6 And they constitute the bedrock that grounded Indian response to colonial medical drives in the high period of nationalism.7

Persian Medical Texts in the Mughal Empire: Medicine as Aristocratic Virtue Unani was a GrecoArab system of knowledge that came to India with the Muslims. It saw the healthy body as one whose four humours were in balance with the elements of nature. It thrived in the Mughal Empire under court patronage. Its association with the court meant
6 For a different argument that follows the Michael Foucault kind of knowledge power coupling that gives the colonial state agency in manufacturing culture, see N. B. Dirks, ed., Introduction: colonialism and culture, in Colonialism and Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1992; pp. 125. For colonial science as power, see D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, pp. 111; For an argument on the cultural authority of science in colonial India, see G. Prakash, Another Reason. Science and the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999, pp. 314, 1568. And for an argument about the colonial state as a site of culture and power, see E. Said, Orientalism, reprint, Penguin, London, 1995. 7 For a discussion that sees Western science and modernity as the dening framework of Indias response to colonial drives, see D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000; P. Chatterji, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial Worlda Derivative Discourse?, Oxford University Press (OUP), Delhi, 1986; G. Prakash Another Reason; H. Bhaba, Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse, in The Location of Culture, London, 1994, pp. 8592.

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that it embodied medical knowledge in structures of high aristocracy, royal courts, high prole teachers and a textuality tied to the elite language of the Empire Persian. In Mughal India there was always a tension between Unani as aristocratic virtue, which was tightly controlled by scribes, noblemen and elite families, and knowledge as medical wisdom. The former represented the high knowledge and was shielded in ornate Persian texts. The latter was available in relatively simpler Persian and user-friendly Arabic manuals that were taught at the Madrasas. The Emperor was the fountainhead of political power. But agents who controlled knowledge as it lay dispersed between these two ideal types also wielded immense power. The high knowledge in Mughal India was produced and controlled by Iranian physician families (hakims). They constituted the medical community of Persian literature. The courts of virtually all the Mughal Emperors attracted physicians from central Asia and Iran. Both Babur and Humayun had personal debts to repay to the Safavid court.8 And the Mughals were happy to extend shelter and patronage to Persian physicians and litt erateurs who ed to Delhi to avoid the distractions and dangers due to internal strife in Safavid Iran. Among the more famous of the physicians who migrated to Delhi were Hakim Abul Fath Gilani in the sixteenth century and Nur-ul-Din Muhammad Abdullah bin Hakim Ayn-ul-Mulk of Shiraz in the seventeenth century. Another notable migrant from the same city was Muhammad Akbar Shah Arzani. These hakims leaned on the court for maintaining their monopoly over medical knowledge. The court saw immense benet in extending its support. Patronage to Unani physicians paralleled the high status accorded to intellectuals like Abul Fazl who wrote tracts on the theories of Mughal governance, and there were political reasons for this. Mughal ideas of political sovereignty corresponded to the Persiandriven medical ideas of health as aristocratic virtue. Indeed Fazls political theory that projected the King as the sole manager of the kingdom, which he maintained through the management of nature (irrigation, agricultural production, distribution, and maintenance of harmonious relations between people), mirrored the medical theory
8 C. Elgood, A Medical History of Persia and Eastern Caliphate From Earliest Time Until the Year AD 1932, Cambridge University Press (CUP), Cambridge, 1951, pp. 3723. Shah Tahmasp of Iran had extended protection to Babars sister. Later Emperor Humayun had sought refuge in the Safavid court after he was defeated by the Afghans in India.

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of Unani. This too viewed the proper administration of nature and social conduct as intrinsic to the maintenance of a healthy body. For instance, Abul Fazl likens the body politic to the animal constitution. Drawing upon the medical theories of GrecoRoman origin, he argues that the political constitution is made good tempered by a judicious division of ranks. Each rank contributes to the prosperity of the ideal city with goods and virtues. This is similar to the way in which the equilibrium of the animal constitution is dependent upon the balance of elements.9 Abul Fazl, in fact, identies different ranks in the body politic and their correspondence with the elements of nature. Thus, the warrior rank corresponds to the nature of re, the merchants and articers to air, intellectuals (jurists, physicians, mathematicians, astronomers) to water and husbandmen to earth.10 Abul Fazl saw the Emperor very much like the physician and described his role as the preserver of the health of the Empire. In his introduction to the Persian translation of the Mahabharata, he writes:
The generous heart [of his Excellency] is temperamentally inclined towards the well being of all classes of people friend and foe, relations and strangers are all equal in his farsighted view. This [consideration for all] is the best method for the physicians of bodies, and should be highly appropriate for the physician of the soul [as well]. Why should this benecence then not be the [distinctive] feature of [His Excellence], the chief physician of the chronic ailments of the human soul? He has noticed the increasing conict between the different sects of Muslims on the one hand and the Jews and the Hindus on the otherthe sagacious mind [of His Excellence] then decided to arrange the translations of the sacred books of both the communities, so that with the blessing of the most revered and perfect soul [the Emperor] of the age, they both refrain from indulging in hostility and disputes . . . . 11

The conation of medical theory and political theory was not surprising since Mughal medics and political theorists shared the GrecoArabic intellectual legacy that was structured on a similar correspondence. Thus, both Abul Fazl and physicians like Shirazi owed an intellectual debt to the GrecoArabic legacy of Islam. Shirazi borrowed directly from the Greek humoral theory of health. Fazl built on the ideas of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Greek
9 S. A. A. Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbars Reign, With Special Reference to Abul Fazl (15561605), Munshiram Manoharlal Press, Delhi, India, 1975, p. 366. 10 Ibid., pp. 3678. 11 M. Alam, Sharia, akhlaaq & governance, in M. Alam, ed., The Language of Political Islam in India 12001800, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2004, pp. 656.

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ideas ltered into Mughal political literature through the thirteenthcentury Islamic political theorist Nasir al-Din Tusi, who was inuenced by the philosophical traditions of Plato and Aristotle.12 Tusi, very much like the Greek philosophers, projected the King as the sole repository of intellect needed to maintain the social equilibrium essential for a just and humane society. Fazl based his works on Tusis writings. Like the Greek philosophers he too compared the King to a physician who kept the body healthy by maintaining its balance with nature. This correspondence of the theories of health and politics made Unani of special interest to the Mughal Emperors. They emerged as eager patrons of medical learning. Their enthusiasm was matched by a similar interest in the production of a political literature that upheld the power of the King.13 Most Iranian hakims dedicated their medical works to the Emperor and extolled his power. And not surprisingly, they constituted the inner core of court society. Many, like Hakim Gilani, held important administrative and political positions at the court of Akbar and were envied by other courtiers.14 The larger political imperative that framed Mughal interest in Unani meant that the encyclopedic medical manuscripts produced in India upheld aristocratic virtue as the key to individual wellbeing. The texts sustained the social hierarchies of society. They saw health as part of individual well-being. Stylistically, they were neither practical nor prescriptive since aristocratic virtue was not to be available to everyone. They did not have a utilitarian value beyond the professional community of Persian-knowing medical scholars and bibliophiles. But they bestowed authority and dignity on the scribe because of the respect for the written word, particularly in Persian, in Mughal society.15 They lent prestige to the family that stored or read

Ibid. Ibid. Thus it was as politically imperative for the Mughal Emperors to translate Sanskrit medical manuscripts and incorporate them into Unani texts as it was to translate Sanskritic Hindu scriptures and political tracts for an encompassing political denition of shariat. The Mughal denition of shariat connoted justiceadl. 14 It was said about Gilani that he enjoyed much proximity to the King, and had so much persuasive inuence over the Kings temperament that even Jafer Barmaki did not have on [the Abbasid caliph] Harun Rashid. He was appointed the sadr and the amin of the province of Bengal in 1579 A.D. And in 1580 the sadarat of the capital was entrusted to him. The following year he was made amin and diwan. He was duly honoured with a rank of 800. See A. A. Azmi, History of Unani Medicine in India, Jamia Hamdard University, Delhi, India, 2004, pp. 68, 202. 15 For an excellent account of the history of medieval European medical book production and the power of the written word in tenththirteenth centuries Italy,
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them. And they reinforced the power of the King as they legitimated his authority as the ruler. Written generally as commissioned texts for the King, they gloried him and enhanced his power by projecting him as responsible for the health of society not just metaphorically (as did the political treatises), but literally. The King was the welfare patron of society and his subjects looked up to him for the maintenance of their physical health. These considerations outweighed mere considerations for the usefulness of the information they represented. Many Mughal manuscripts were illustrated. Most of them were ornate. And all of them catered to the bibliophiles among the royalty and high aristocracy.16 Indeed reading them or possessing them was an essential part of gentlemanly accomplishment and signied status and noble upbringing. Most Mughal Emperors and nobles maintained libraries where such texts were housed for the consultation of the learned aristocrats in society.17 In Mughal India, being cultured and urbane in the Persianate style was to be in tune with the historical, literary and medical cultures of the world. Producing, storing and controlling such global knowledge, of which medicine was a critical component, was the key to aristocratic virtue. Medics, litt erateurs and historians strove to integrate the narratives of selfhood with that of the larger world. Thus, Mughal historians wrote world histories into which they located their own history of the empire.18 Likewise, physicians wrote global medical encyclopedias to situate Unani medicine in the world context. It
see P. M. Jones, Medical books before the invention of printing, in A. Besson, ed., Thorntons Medical Books, Libraries and Collectors. A Study of Bibliography and the Book Trade in Relation to the Medical Sciences, Gower Publishing, 3rd edition, Hants, England, 1990, pp. 129. 16 Ibid. This was very similar to the illuminated ornate medical manuscripts of medieval Italy. 17 The famous Delhi poet Abdur Rahim Khan Khanan, the son of Emperor Akbars regent Bairam Khan, had a library in Delhi that housed many Persian manuscripts. Many learned men visited the library for study and self-improvement. N. N. Law, Promotion of Learning in India During Muhammadan Rule, by Mohammedans, Calcutta, India, 1916, p. 170. 18 M. Alam, Shariah, akhlaaq and governance, p. 67. The tradition of writing medical encyclopedias, which borrowed freely from across cultures to write a denitive global medicine text, corresponded to a similar trend in the writing of world histories by Mughal scholars. Alam has discussed one such important text of global history Rauzat al-Tahirin. Tahir Muhammad Imad al-Din Hasan Sabzawari compiled the book in 1603 and integrated the history of his master, Emperor Akbar, into the larger history of the world. This spanned from the pre-Islamic Greek philosophers to the Pious Caliphs and into Indias pre-Islamic kingdoms. All the people Sabzawari included in his history were, as the title suggests, among the tahirinthe pure, clean

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followed that a good hakim was also a litt erateur and a cultured man who also claimed some knowledge of the world. He displayed this knowledge in his encyclopedic writings. In addition, he laid out the norms of proper conduct and correspondence so that people could relate to the wider world of comportment and culture. And not surprisingly, he dened a healthy body as a cultured bodyone that had mastered the etiquettes and correspondence skills laid out in the literary genre of Persian texts. The Mughal physician scribes produced encyclopedic medical texts that borrowed freely from a range of GrecoArabic literature and also from Indian medical practice. The Iranian physician in the court of Emperor Akbar, Gilani, wrote a medical compendium Fattahi, which is a commentary on Chaghminis Qanunchah. He dedicated this to Emperor Akbar. Stylistically, the texts followed the pattern of the Persianate medical literature of Galen, Avicenna and al Jurjani: wide canvassed and encyclopedic. It synthesised information freely from a variety of inuences. It certied knowledge by using the name of ancient authority without necessarily taking care of reverence to authorship, title or internal consistency.19 The same range and style can be seen in Nur-ul-Din Muhammad Shirazis Alfaz-ul-Adviyah or the vocabulary of drugs. Shirazi wrote this during 16281629 for his patron, the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.20 Such wide-ranging texts written with court patronage endowed the scribe with aristocratic virtue. But Persian medical texts were unique also because they underscored the idea of health as individual well-being. They emphasised the salience of individual comportment, proper conduct and correspondence as central to individual well-being. Tibb-i-Dara Shikuhi authored by Shirazi in 16451646 A.D. and dedicated to Shah Jahans son Dara Shikoh (16151659) is an important case in point.
and holy. Sabzawaris book was a history of mankind. The author saw himself as an inheritor of the heritage of universal humankind. 19 A. A. Azmi, History of Unani Medicine in India, pp. 6970. 20 WMS. Per. 580, Wellcome Library, London. He based his text on the Sihah al-adviyah of Husayn al-Ansari. The 1850 copy of the text compiled by the copyist Ghulam Mahomed has 138 folios and is divided into one preface (muqaddimah), one body (natijah) and one conclusion (khatimah). The text reveals that Shirazi collected drugs from the local Ayurveda pharmacopeias and combined them with those from Persia. He listed some 1441 items, in Arabic, Persian and Hindevy languages. Shirazis medica caters to the humoral concept of health qualied by natures and elements that was central to both the Unani and Ayurveda system. But it nowhere acknowledges its debts to Ayurveda or any other texts or authors.

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The original copy of the text no longer exists. We have no idea how many copies of it existed in the Mughal Empire. Probably very few as not a single one has survived. But we do have a 1780s copy, prepared in Surat for a Parsi hakim called Bizhan. This is a huge encyclopedic ornate text in three volumes that covers approximately 3,000 pages. It follows the Islamic encyclopedic tradition of Avicennas Canon. And like the Canon, it is said to have borrowed extensively from a variety of healing traditions and pharmacopeias without always acknowledging them.21 But it is unique because of its ornate Persian style, its obeisance to the court and the wide historical canvas that it sketches for Unani. It offers a denitive history of Unani that spans from the pre-Islamic GrecoArab world to the period of the Caliphates and narrows down to the pre-Mughal Indian medical tradition. The scribe underlined his aristocratic virtue and those of his readers through this wide canvas. He upheld the Kings authority as the maintenance manager of the health of the people. He thus obtained state sanction for his exclusive control of medical knowledge. And state approval was forthcoming because he upheld the idea of health being about individual well-being and aristocratic virtue. His medical ideas reinforced the social hierarchies of society. Shirazi, thus, delves into the philosophy of health even as he seeks to administer the body through the external agencies of proper conduct, comportment and diet. For him health is about individual well-being. An ideal state that can be achieved by a few through proper comportment. The rst volume of the Tibb-i-Darashikuhi copied by the scribe Mohan Rai Kayasth is on ilmi-tibb (theoretical medicine). It focuses on the making of the individual (insaan) and explains the meaning of reality (haqeeqat). It uses the philosophical wisdom of GrecoArab scholars such as Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen and Ibn Sinna. It does not always show any due reverence to authorship. It incorporates their idea of the healthy individual being in harmony with nature. Thus it gives details of botany, minerals and zoological descriptions to emphasise the idea of well-being structured in the relations between the individual and his larger socio-cultural context The second volume copied in 1193 Hijri concentrates on amli-tibb (practical medicine). It follows Hippocrates dietetics as a guarantee of heath. It offers copious details of comportment, conduct, diet and deportment to maintain a good harmony between the individual and the society. It argues that proper
21 C. Elgood, History of Persia, p. 374. A copy of the text is in Bibliotheque Nationale Paris, No. 342, suppl. The Ms. contains 1711 folios.

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individual comportment prevents disease and keeps the body healthy. Here health is very clearly about social well-being and gentlemanly conduct in a Persianate style.22 And the third volume discusses surgery, blood letting and details of diseases related to women and children.23 These were the aspects of medical science that were to be resorted to in the case of ill health. The tradition of writing medical encyclopedias continued in the period of Emperor Aurangzeb. He is said to have weathered the worst political and economic crisis in the Empire and overseen its demise. In this period of imperial crisis (1700), Muhammad Akbar Shah Arzani produced several works. More famous ones are Tibb-i-Akbari or Akbars medicine, and the Mizan-i-Tibb or the scales of medicine. Both follow the tradition of Shirazi in borrowing freely from local inuences in their choice of drugs and treatments. The Tibb-i- Akbari is the Persian translation of the Arabic text Sharh al-Asbab wa al-Alamat of Nas bin Aiwaz Kirmani (dated 1449 A.D.). But in 1700, Arzani made his own commentary to it as well.24 The Tibb-i-Akbari tries to emulate the Tibb-i-Darashikuhi both in its style and in its content. It covers its wide canvas in twenty-seven chapters, which deal with the history of Unani, symptomatic treatments of local and general diseases and the properties of medicines and comportment regimens for individual good health.25 But the Mizan-al-Tibb is different from any average Mughal text. In its concise and user-friendly style it bends more towards providing useful medical knowledge as a guarantee of individual well-being. It takes a break from the Mughal practice of offering doses of aristocratic virtue to maintain health. The Mizan-al-Tibb claims to be a handbook of medicine for beginners.26 As compared to the other voluminous

Ilajat-i-Dara Shikuhi, 342A, vol. 2, Paris. Ilajat-i-Dara Shikuhi, 8579. Suppl. Persan 342, 342A, 342B. 24 A. A. Azmi, History of Unani Medicine in India, p. 227. 25 For the British Library copy of the manuscript, see Add Ms. 17954. This has 114 folios. The different copies of the Tibb-i-Akbari at the Wellcome Institute library include those copied in the years 1790, 1813, 1818 and 1826. WMS. Per. 172, 374 folios, 1790, copied in Peshawar; WMS. Per. 564, 185 folios, 1813 AD copyist haji Muhammad; WMS. Per. 566, 171 folios, 1818; WMS. Per. 563, copied for Sultan Mahmud, 1826; WMS. Per. 165, 525 folios, copied in the eighteenth century by Abd Allah for Sikandar Ali and Chiragh Ali. F. Keshavarz, A Descriptive and Analytical Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the Wellcome Institute of Medicine, London, 1986, p. 159. 26 The different copies of the Mizan-i-Tibb at the Wellcome Institute library include those copied in the years 1811, 1818 and 1844. See WMS. Per. 179 (A), 112 folios
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Persian medical texts of the period, it is a short forty-eight folios text that is divided into three sections (maqalahs). The rst on kaiyats (temperaments), the second on the properties of simple and compound drugs and the last on the symptoms and remedies for local diseases.27 The Mughal-style dictums on individual comportment are conspicuous by their absence. Both these texts of Hakim Arzani come nowhere close to the encyclopedic intellectual range of Shirazis Tibb-i-Darashikuhi. They do not even compare to it stylistically or in their notions of health. They reect the drift from health as aristocratic virtue to health as medical wisdomscience. To some extent they reect the turn-ofthe-century changes in late Mughal society. Written in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Mizan-al-Tibbs easy-to-read style and accessibility reects the vernacularisation of Persian and the loosening of the monopoly of scribes, families and court over the medical knowledge that it embodied.28 The simplicity of the text reected also the austerity of Arzanis patron, Emperor Aurangzeb, and his redenition of gentlemanly conduct in the language of doctrinal Islam. Indeed the texts radiate the austerity associated with doctrinal languages like Arabic with its emphasis on the useful knowledge of science and theology.29 Indeed the inuence of Arabic religious literature was very much evident in the reading patterns and writing styles of late Mughal society. We noticed above that Arzani translated the Tibb-i-Akbari

dated 1811; WMS. Per. 515 (C), 95 folios, 1818, copied by Mirza Awlad Ali; WMS. Per. 514, 111 folios, 1839; WMS. Per. 126, 1844. Keshavarz, A Descriptive and Analytical Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts, p. 84. 27 Add Mss. 17949, 48 folios. British Library, London. This is a 1742 copy. 28 M. Alam, The pursuit of Persian: language in Mughal politics, MAS, 32, 2, May 1998, pp. 31749. Alam shows the attention the Mughals were forced to give to Hindavi/Braj in the early eighteenth century as a result of regional assertion. He argues that this affected the dominance of Persian. The Mughal attempts to purge Persian of Hindavi inuences followed. So did the move to Persianise the vernaculars. 29 It is not surprising that the use of the Mizan and the Tibb-i-Akbari outlived the Mughal Empire. They were seen not just as library items in the collections of the elites, but used as teaching primers until the early nineteenth century. They were used as texts, were recopied by different copyists throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and used as texts in the syllabus of the Persian schools set up by the zamindars and rajas in the Bengal province. They were also in use at the Calcutta madrasa. See British Library catalogue, Egerton 1006 and 1007 being vols. 1 and 2 of Tibb-i-Akbari. For the medical syllabus of the Calcutta madrasa, see G. W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since Annexation and in 1882, Calcutta, India, 1882, p. 74. See also IOC/v/24/942, pp. 6, 39.

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directly from an Arabic text. He complemented this with the translation into Persian of Jalal-ul-Din al Suyutis Arabic text Tibb-iNabbi or the medicine of the Prophet.30 This text dened comportment in the Arab tradition of the Prophets life. It stood in contrast to the more elaborate Persian forms of comportment popularised by the Tibb-i-Darashikuhi. The translation of such Arabic texts was new to Mughal medical collections. Their inclusion in Mughal compilations along with the circulation of easy-to-read Persian medical manuals signalled the weakening control of Persian-knowing families over medical knowledge. It reected the vernacularisation of Persian. It also revealed the increased inuence of new forms of knowledge that was streaming in from the Arabic-speaking world. The tension between the Persian-derived Unani grounded in aristocratic virtue and the Arabic-oriented revealed sciences had always existed in Mughal society. Hakims of smaller stature who served in Mughal hospitals and interacted with the public were conditioned in the more scientistic Arabic-style healing. This rung of practitioners acquired its rigorous professional training and the specialised knowledge of medicine in the Mughal madrasas. These combined Persian learning of polite conduct and literary air with the rigour of Arabic texts on theology. Medicine, science and natural philosophy continued to be taught in Persian. Medical texts were taught in the madrasa curriculum as part of natural philosophy along with theology, logic and rhetoric.31 However, Persian texts of high knowledge like the Tibb-i-Darashikuhi rarely gured in the madrasa curriculum. Here texts like the Persian translations of Avicennas Canon were prescribed. But their medical wisdom was given a Persianate cultural polish in the family clinics of the leading hakims of the city. Students from the madrasa trained as apprentices to Iranian hakims of the court. Here some of them gained access to the ideas of the ornate Persian medical manuscripts their masters had authored or collected. This crowned their scholastic training acquired from works of Avicenna in the madrasa. Yet, their tension with the hakims of high Persian learning simmered. This only intensied in the mid-eighteenth century when Persian-knowing families experienced a weakening of their hold over medical knowledge.

30 C. Elgood, Analecta Medico-Historica. Safavid Surgery, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966, p. 8. See also his History of Persia, p. 63. 31 M. Alam, The pursuit of Persian, p. 326.

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Arabic Medical Learning in the eighteenth Century: Medicine as Science In the eighteenth century, the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the popularisation of Persian made scribes and families recreate their monopoly over medical knowledge by hooking on to the doctrinal languageArabic. The cloud of Arabic had loomed over medical knowledge from the days of Emperor Aurangzeb. But in the eighteenth century, it became a language used by scribes and families to store medical knowledge away from the reach of society at large. It was used to restore the prestige of older families and scribes who were worried about the spilling over of their medical knowledge as Persian became vernacularised.32 The increased use of Arabic ushered the arrival of a new kind of medical learning. Medical texts in Arabic were austere and scientistic rather than ornate and aristocratic. Like the religious knowledge of the period, they too were inuenced by the austere doctrinal trends owing in from the Arab world-the wahabi-style return to the scriptures and the person of the Prophet.33 They trimmed medicine of its comportment frills and projected it as science rather than aristocratic virtue. But unlike religious knowledge, the austere medical literature was not popularised. It remained under the control of scribes and families who taught select students. The control of such medical wisdom gave them power. Away from the glare of the regional courts, they consolidated their hold over the new knowledge. Persian learning did not die out either. The regional courts continued to patronise the production of Persian medical knowledge and maintain those who still sought to preserve it. This kept alive the idea of health as individual aristocratic virtue. Simultaneously, new ideas of health as medical wisdom took roots in society.

32 The shift to Arabic began to give medical knowledge an Islamic slant. And this may have intersected with the other forms of Islamisation that were underway at the regional level in this period. See R. Eaton, Su folk literature and the expansion of Indian Islam, in R. Eaton, ed., Essays on Islam and Indian History, OUP, Delhi, India, 2001, pp. 189202. Also see his The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 12041760, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993. 33 For a discussion on the new learning in religious knowledge, see F. Robinson, Islam and muslim society in South Asia, in F. Robinson, ed., Islam and Muslim History in South Asia, OUP, Delhi, India, 2000, pp. 4465.

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The Arabic Reading Medical Community The collapse of the Mughal Empire in the early half of the eighteenth century devolved the patronage of medicine in the hands of the new regional courts, local rajas and zamindars. In the regional states the dignity of medical science in the Persian language was preserved. Its centrality in the making of an accomplished gentleman continued. Regional courts like those of Oudh in the north and Tipu Sultan in the south maintained huge libraries. These were well-equipped both with copies of Mughal Persian medical texts and with fresh eighteenth century texts composed in Mughal style. In the early nineteenth century, Alloy Sprenger, the assistant to the British Resident at Lucknow, surveyed the Muhammadan libraries of Lucknow. He reported that they had thousands of Persian manuscripts. These ranged from history, philosophy and literature to science, astronomy, medicine, archery, hunting and other sports.34 In the southern kingdom of Mysore, Tipu Sultans library too had a huge collection of Persian medical manuscripts.35 His collection also included a few Arabic medical texts like Avicennas Qanun and the commentary on the Sharh-i-Mujiz by Ala-ud-din Ali Bin Abu al hazim al Qureishi.36 However, beyond the courts and the capital cities, the rajas, inuential families and notables dug their heels into local society and looked for new means to legitimate their authority. Here, both the authoriality and textuality of Persianate medical knowledge began
34 A. Sprenger, assistant to resident in Lucknow, to H. M. Elliott, foreign sec. to Govt. of India, 18 March 1849, Selections from the records of the Govt. of India, foreign deptt., No. CCCXXXIV, serial No. 82. Report of the researches into the Muhammadan libraries of Lucknow, by Alois Sprenger, Calcutta, India, 1896, pp. 189. He catalogued only 1,1453 manuscripts in the Topkhana. A small collection of Arabic manuscripts also existed. In the Kings libraries alonethe Topkhana and the Farh Baksh-there were at least 6000 Persian and 310 Arabic manuscripts. Besides these royal repositories, there also existed private libraries, like in the Moti Mahal, maintained by rich bibliophiles. These too were plush with Persian manuscripts. 35 For Persian medical manuscripts in Tipu Sultans collection, see C. Stewart, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Library of the Late Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Cambridge, 1809, pp. 1083. These included a copy of the Zakhirah-i-Khwarzmshahi, the Dastur al ilaj of the pre-Mughal period. And the Tibb-i-Akbari, the Qarabadeen-i-Qadiri and the Tejurribati Akbari of the Mughal hakim Muhammad Arzani. Some home grown Persian manuscripts, like the Bihr-al Muna or the Sea of Prot (a treatise on midwifery) of Mulud Muhammad, were dedicated to Tipu Sultan. 36 Ibid., pp. 1146.

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to be realigned. At one level this was critical to break out of the Mughal norms of gentlemanly culture. But more importantly, the vernacularisation and popularisation of Persian weakened its efcacy as a tool through which such families could control medical knowledge. Individuals and families looked towards Arabic to re-congurate their monopoly over medicine. Therefore, outside the capital cities medical learning in Persian lost its pivotal role in the making of a cultured man. In post-Mughal society the dignity of medical science shifted from its Persian vehicle to Arabic, which was now projected as the custodian of the Arabic sciences. As medical communities of Arabic literature evolved one could be a cultured gentleman without having read a single Persian text of medicine. The drift towards a doctrinaire language, like Arabic, to tightly control the medical knowledge stood out in a period marked by vernacularisation and its linkages with Islamisation and regional identity formations.37 But it tted in with the general orientation of literate Muslim society towards new learning that was streaming in from the Arab lands. In the late eighteenth century the wahabi inspired ideas of Arabic scriptures and the salience of the Prophet gave religious knowledge a new austere Arab orientation. Medical knowledge too succumbed to this trend and dropped its Persianate comportment frill and like the revealed knowledges of the Arabic scriptures became more austere and scientistic. But unlike religious knowledge, which translated into the vernaculars and circulated widely, medical knowledge conned itself to Arabic. It thus remained an exclusive preserve of individuals, families and their select clientele. Islamisation through Arab learning helped communities of medical literature retain their status. It added new dimensions in the formation of regional identities.38
37 R. Eaton has shown the emergence of a Su folk tradition and literature, in the vernacular Dakhani, in Bijapur. This gave a unique Muslim identity to the Deccani Muslims. See R. Eaton, Su folk literature and the expansion of Indian Islam. And in the case of Eastern Bengal, Islamisation is seen by him as an unintended consequence of expansion of the Mughal agrarian frontier. Muslim pioneer settlers, the madad-imaash, introduced Mughal-style Islamic piety structured around the mosque and Sustyle belief in a range of local cultural cosmologies. As Islamisation gained momentum they too were venerated and remembered as local pirs. This gave Bengali muslims a distinct identity. See R. Eaton, The Rise of Islam. 38 Asim Roy talks about the PersoArabic reading elites isolating themselves from the evolving syncretistic regional culture of pre-colonial West Bengal. His focus is more on their preservation of religious knowledge through the resort to Arabic. A.

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In the countryside, rajas, rich families and notables separated Persian and Arabic learning. They made the latter exclusively the language of scientistic medicine and the former the sole language of polite culture and Persianate accoutrement. As the latter slipped beyond their control, they tightly monitored medical knowledge by relegating it to few Arabic family schools. As medicine and theology became the preserve of the Arabic schools and literary norms and etiquette the hallmark of the Persian schools, an exclusivist hakim was created. Unlike the Mughal hakim, he was not necessarily acculturated in the literature of polite conduct and correspondence as exemplied in Persian texts of medical learning. Health for him was about medical wisdom and useful knowledge. It was not about aristocratic virtue. The conning of medical knowledge to the doctrinal Arabic was deliberate. It was a reaction to the popularisation of Persian, which was no more seen as a language that could ensure the control of the scribe and families over such knowledge. Arabic was seen to exercise the control that Persian had done in the earlier century. Tighter control was most evident in the fewer number of Arabic learning institutes set up by families. These contrasted to the proliferation of Persian language and literature learning schools. Persian schools made the Persianate Mughal cultural norms of conduct and deportment more easily accessible to a greater range of people. But this popularisation also redened what it meant to be a cultured individual in the late eighteenth-century countryside. Unlike Mughal society, now the markers of a well-heeled individual were no more measured in his knowledge of medical learning, logic or natural philosophy. Instead, Persianate literary knowledge and familiarity with the literature on polite conduct-akhlaaqand correspondence-insha-was enough to mark status. This new cultured man decient in medical knowledge emerged alongside a medical professional who narrowly specialised in Arabic medical texts. He was trained by scholars in the Arabic schools where he read scientic and medical texts in the Arabic language. These separated healing from individual comportment and made it scientistic. From the late 1820s to the mid-1830s, the English Company conducted many surveys on the state of native education in north India. Almost all the reporters commented on the proliferation of family-run Persian and Arabic schools in the towns and countryside of
Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1983.

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north India. These were said to be of recent origin and exemplied the change in postMughal society. In 1829, the education committee reported that the Bareilly district topped the list in instruction as compared to other parts of India. More than 300 seminaries existed in the district, which included Persian schools (maktabkhanas), Hindi schools (chutsals), Sanskrit schools (putsals) and seventeen teachers who hawked their services teaching the Arabic language and sciences.39 The Arabic schools were few and had limited students. This reected the exclusive clientele that families strove to maintain for the medical knowledge they imparted. M. Boulderson, the collector of Bareilly, reported that the seventeen persons who hawked their services as Arabic teachers collected students in their houses, which were then called the madrasas. On the whole, 114 students in the district obtained instruction from them in the language and sciences. Such family schools received no endowments from regional rulers. They relied on individual or family investments. This ensured their hold over the limited clientele. Houses of notables and families doubled as schools. They were designated madrasas or seminaries. In many such madrasas, Persian and, occasionally, English were also taught. But sciences were taught exclusively through Arabic texts. In 1827, Boulderson reported that in his district there existed seventeen such individuals who instructed the youth in the sciences and the Arabic language in their home madrasas. They also taught the Persian language on demand. I. Davidson, sub-secretary to the Board of Revenue, reported to the government the details of Arabic teachers and their instruction styles. Most came from reputed Arabic-knowing families. Many came from theological families with long traditions of mastery over Arabic religious knowledge. They were all keen to control medical knowledge and restrict it to the chosen few. His list of medical instructors using Arabic texts ran as follows: Maulvi Niaz Ahmedhe was a learned man and an excellent astrologer and instructed twelve youths in the various sciences. Haz Ghulam Ahmed Qazi and Maulvi Ghulam Hazrat were good Arabic scholars and instructed people in sciences and whatever they wanted. Maulvi Ghod Muhammad-he had ten pupils for Arabic instruction. Maulvi Syed Mahomed, Maulvi Suttullah, Maulvi Muhiuddin and Maulvi Yaqub Ali had pupils ranging from four to fteen. Maulvi
39 Extract Bengal Pol. Consult., 5 June 1829, L No. 463, education committee to vice president in council, 9 July 1827, Boards Collection, F/4/1170, le No. 30640, p. 511.

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Mullook Shah had ten pupils and instructed them in the sciences. Akbar Abdul Rahim had two pupils whom he educated in the medical art exclusively. Muzzur-ud-din Hussain Sheikh had fteen students whom he instructed in Arabic, Urdu and Persian languages. He was supposed to be a good mathematician. Boulderson pointed out one Kunwar Rutten Singh as one of the Arabic teachers in the city who also gave instruction in English. His son Kunwar Dowlat Singh was also an Arabic teacher of the area.40 In contrast, the Persian schools were more in number and had far greater number of students. There were reported to be 1,485 students in the district studying in such schools in 1827. Persian literary learning was not monopolised by individuals and families. Ordinary people opened their houses as sites for Persian instruction. They hired teachers to instruct students. Even though their salary was as low as Rs. 34 per month to Rs. 810 per month, they were highly respected. They obtained gifts and nazars, food and clothes from their students and families. Boulderson gave a detailed break-up of the schools in every pargana of the district and concluded that the major change that had set in from the Mughal times to the early nineteenth century was that both Persian language and learning and the knowledge of sciences in the Arabic had become relatively more accessible to ordinary people than before. This was particularly true of Persian learning. He wrote, we gather that under the former governments none but ushrafs viz Brahmins, Rajputs, Bukkals, Kaits and Khattri among Hindus and Sheikhs, Syuds, Moguls and Pathans of the Muhammadans were permitted to study sciences or even learn Persian language. But now all learn Persian.41 However, all who learned Persian did not accomplish themselves in the sciences. Literary accomplishments in the Persian language, readings on proper conductakhlaaqand correspondenceinsha- were segregated as never before from scientic knowledge of medicine. Knowledge of medicine and science was now controlled by storing and teaching it in doctrinal Arabic. As Persian lost its monopoly over medical knowledge, the change was noted by Company ofcials. In the 1820s, the education committee set up by the Company to survey

40 I. M. Boulderson, collector Bareilly, to Holt Mackenzie, Sec. to Govt. Gen. 29 Jan. 1827, extract Bengal Pol. Consult., 5 June 1829, Boards Collection, F/4/1170, le No. 30640, pp .6336. 41 Ibid., I. M. Boulderson, collector Bareilly, to Holt Mackenzie, Sec. to Govt. Gen., 29 Jan. 1827, p. 617, pp. 5827.

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native education lamented that the texts taught in the Persian schools were of little relevance to present day requirements since they are, chiey epistolary compositions or compilations. Their object was the acquirement of skill in correspondence, or rather in the use of approved modes of phraseology and address, an accomplishment of some value under the Muhammadan administration, but little calculated to exercise and invigorate the intellectual faculties.42 This was corroborated by Boulderson who noted that Persian schools taught no medical texts. They concentrated on literary texts of high culture associated with the Mughals. These included Mughal favourites like the Boostan and Goshtan (Gulistan), romance texts read and enjoyed by the Mughal Emperors and nobles. They also had texts like Zuleikha, Neel Daman, Leila Majnu and Bahar Danish. Also listed in the curriculum were texts of court historians like Abul Fazl, and the Mughal Insha literature like Insha Khalifa. The Masnavis of important poets, the divan of the Persian poet Haz, Divan Nasir Allee, Divan Shumsher Khan and the Rookat Alumgiri,43 were also important readings. Indeed in the Persian schools of the North West provinces and Agra so much was the emphasis on polite education, and the neglect of arithmetic and the sciences that the course of study was considered incomplete if it did not include the usual forms of address and correspondence. In the 1830s, J. Kerr, who reviewed indigenous schools in the area, lamented that large elds of knowledge which would open and improve the minds of the pupils are left uncultivated, such as to go no further in history, geography and natural philosophy.44 A similar trend was evident in Punjab as well. At the time of annexation, British commentators reported that medicine was taught only in the Arabic schools along with Arabic law and literature. The better Arabic schools were housed in exclusive buildings. Here teachers taught Aristotelian natural philosophy, logic, rhetoric and philosophy through Arabic texts like Aristotles Shifaa. But medicine was taught by Arabic-knowing individuals in exclusive enclaves as well. These ranged from family homes to school sheds. Indeed in Punjab, Arabic was also used by inuential families to tighten their control over
42 Ibid., L No. 463, Education committee to vice president in council, 9 July 1827, p. 515. 43 Ibid., I. M. Boulderson, collector Bareilly, to Holt Mackenzie, Sec. to Govt. Gen., 29 Jan. 1827, p. 587. 44 J. Kerr, A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency 183551, Calcutta, India, 1852, part 1, p. 155.

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the fast popularisation of high etiquette Persian culture. In Punjab, families tried to monopolise their control over comportment as well by the use of Arabic. Many of the seminaries taught Arabic texts on polite conduct and correspondence rather than leave the students to Persian literary inuences. Thus the polite Arabic letter writer, the Ajab-ul-Ajaib, was taught in schools along with Arabic medical texts of Avicenna.45 In the 1830s, William Adam, who reported on the state of native education in Bengal and Bihar, noted a similar trend in the area. He noted that medical knowledge was narrowly controlled, which was evident from the fewer number of Arabic schools where it was taught. For instance, in the south Bihar district there were 291 schools, of which 279 were Persian and only 12 were Arabic. In the former there were 1,424 Persian students and the latter had only 62.46 And again like in Bareilly, many Persian schools had endowments from the local raja. In contrast, the Arabic schools were established by families, individuals and notables eager to preserve the knowledge of medicine. The endowments for Arabic schools ranged from modest, Rs. 250Rs. 200, contributed by an individual teacher, to large, Rs. 15,00050,000, contributed by local Muslim notables.47 There was a near absence of medical texts in the curriculum of Persian schools. They focused on Persian literary texts like Insha-i-Herkernon forms of correspondence, verses of Persian poets like Ur, Haz Ghani and Khakani and the works of Khusro.48 Only in rare instances was the austere style Persian medical texts of the later Mughal period listed. These included the more simplistic Persian translations of Arabic texts like the Tibb-i-Akber of Emperor Aurangzebs Hakim Muhammad Arzani.49 The Mizan-i-Tibb of the same author, which was also austere in style, was sometimes used. As medicine withdrew into the Arabic fold, the religious divide was also noticeable. Of the Arabic students, two were Hindus and the
45 G. W. Leitner, Reports on the State of Education in the Punjab Since Annexation and in 1882, Lahore, Pakistan, 1882, p. 74. 46 W. Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (18358) Including Some Account of the State of Education in Bihar and a Consideration of the Means Adapted to the Improvement and Extension of Public Instruction in Both Provinces, Ed. A. Basu, Calcutta, India, 1941, pp. 2867. 47 Ibid., pp. 2813. 48 Ibid., p. 284. 49 W. Adam, Third Report on the State of Education in Bengal Including Some Account of the State of Education in Behar, and a Consideration of the Means Adapted to the Improvement and Extension of Public Instruction in Both Provinces, Calcutta, India, 1838, pp. 703.

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rest were Muslims. In contrast, in the Persian school, there were 865 Hindus and 559 Muslims. The reason for more mixed population in the Persian schools was that they taught more elementary and grammatical works, forms of correspondence, popular poems and tales and almost no sciences. These were relegated to the Arabic schools. Similarly, in the district of Burdwan, in Bengal, there were ninety-three Persian schools with 899 Hindu and Muslim students and only eight Arabic schools with fty-one Muslim students. Out of these, only four were Hindus.50 Arabic was widely perceived as a universal language of medical science by the Muslims. And at the fag-end of the Mughal innings when regional identities were being sharply articulated in local languages, the Muslims established the pan regional links in science, medicine, astronomy and astrology in Arabic. Thus the preservation of Arabic medical knowledge added a new element in the simultaneous process of vernacularisation of religious knowledge, Islamisation through assimilation and regional identity formation. Indeed the predominance of Arab language as the vehicle of science in the region prompted British observers to suggest that medical books in the Arabic language taught at the Calcutta madrasa be introduced in Punjab schools. This they felt would only reinforce and systematise their medical instruction.51 In 1829, the education committee similarly suggested that the medical instruction going on in the Arabic family schools of Bareilly could also be improved and systematised by the introduction of the Arabic scientic texts used in the Calcutta madrasa.52 In Bareilly, Boulderson gave a list of Arabic texts that the students read in the family schools. Signicantly, medicine was taught in conjunction with other doctrinaire disciplines like law, logic and theology. These included texts on law and jurisprudence like the Ilm Fiqh, commentaries on the HidayaShareh Hidayah, logic-Ilm Mantaq, Arabic language primersthe qaidah. Such texts rubbed shoulders with medical texts in Arabic like the Sharh-i-Mujiz. All these texts oriented towards the revealed Arabic sciences were inuenced by the new learning that owed in from the Arab lands. They were austere
50 W. Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (18358), Ed. A. Basu, pp. 2813. 51 G. W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education, p. 74. 52 Extract Bengal Pol. Consult., 5 June 1829, L No. 463, education committee to vice president in council, 9 July 1827, Boards Collection, F/4/1170, le No. 30640, p. 515.

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and hived medical and scientic knowledge from its Persian-derived comportment and wider cultural frills. Thus it was no surprise that the only Mughal medical text included here was the early eighteenth century Persian text the Mizan-i-Tibb of Hakim Arzani. The Mizan as we saw above was different from the average Mughal text. It was brief, austere in style and scientistic. It saw medicine separate from individual comportment. Adam reported a similar trend in the Arabic schools of Bengal and Bihar. These schools too concentrated on texts on astronomy and natural philosophy that included medicine. It was signicant that the same families and individuals who preserved medical knowledge in Arabic continued to earn their living by popularising literary knowledge in Persian. Indeed they used their knowledge of Arabic to write different kinds of popular literary texts in Persian. For instance, in the district of south Bihar, Adam reported two maulvis who were highly rated in Arabic learning and had authored many texts. Maulvi Ghulam Hussein of Sahibgunj wrote the Persian text Jam-i-Bahadur Khani, which he culled from a range of Arabic works on arithmetic, astronomy, algebra and natural sciences using his extensive knowledge of Arabic. He also compiled the astronomical tables called the Zij bahadur Khani. Another Arabic scholar, Maulvi Mohiyuddin, of Erki in the Thana of Jehanabad composed a 288-pages long Persian text Sharh-i-Abdul Rasul on Arabic syntax. He also wrote in Arabic a thirty-two pages long manuscript called Majmua Taqrir Mantiq Amani, which is a text on logic.53 Medical knowledge taught in family schools thus articulated the new idea of health as medical wisdomscience, rather than aristocratic virtue. As medicine withdrew into the Arabic fold its popularisation was checked. Families disseminated knowledge in Arabic to few. And as Boulderson, the Collector of Bareilly, said here, both the masters and pupils are of a higher grade and have given their attention to scientic pursuits.54 According to him, this was in sharp contrast to the Persian schools.

W. Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (18358), Ed. A. Basu, p. 286. Extract Bengal Pol. Consult., 5 June 1829, L No. 463, education committee to vice president in council, 9 July 1827, Boards Collection, F/4/1170, le No. 30640, p. 639.
54

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Urdu Medical Tracts and the English East India Company: Medicine for Societal Well-Being This pre-colonial medical culture in transition shaped the English Companys engagement with Unani. Its association with the courts and Arabic also ensured that the English too treated it as a medical system.55 However, the Companys intrusion did introduce critical changes. Changes came much before the anglicist reforms of the 1830s that introduced English language instruction and Western knowledge in India. And it was rooted in and shaped by the Companys use of indigenous linguistic cultures and the medical knowledges that it sustained. Thus from the outset, the Company preserved a disembodied form of Arabic medical learning in new institutions of learning that it had set up. This kept alive the production of Arabic texts and the new learning they embodied. To this it added the Arabic translations of European texts on anatomy. These only strengthened the scientistic ideas of Arabic healing. But more importantly, it used the vernacular Urdu and the printing press to popularise these new ideas. The Company intervention shifted health to the wider domain of societal well-being. It linked medical status to public service. In the process new referents of medical authority were devised for older medical knowledges. This section shows that this process of change was remarkably rapid, and occurred long before the period of the 1830s, a period dened as a watershed in the conventional scholarship.56 The Calcutta Madrasa In 1781, Warren Hastings extended patronage to Arabic learning of all kinds by setting up the Calcutta madrasa. Its main purpose was to train a class of maulvis in Islamic law. But it instructed students from elite Muslim backgrounds in Arabic language and medical sciences as
55 This obviously contradicts the position held by David Arnold, Jean M. Langford and others who argue that the Companys motives were more ideological than material in the encounter with Unani. See D. Arnold, Colonising the Body; J. M. Langford, Fluent Bodies. Ayurvedic Remedies for Post Colonial Imbalance, Duke University press, Durham, NC, 2002. 56 Scholars such as Arnold, Prakash and Langford have hitherto argued that the 1830s signaled a turn towards coercion on the part of the Company as it abandoned orientalism, colonised the body, and introduced new style Western knowledge with the help of the English language.

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well. Medical knowledge in Arabic had been a part of the madrasa curriculum ever since its inception.57 But in the early nineteenth century a separate medical class was added that taught medical science to students from Arabic medical literature. It also familiarised them with facts culled out from Western medical tracts.58 Indeed these hybrid intellectuals were expected to be the bridge to cultivate a taste for European medical knowledge in society. In 1829, John Tytler, the orientalist scholar and Presidency Surgeon, declared that madrasas did not merely produce public servants. Their job was, he declared, to teach Arabic medical texts as well as diffuse among them [students] a taste of European literature and science [in Arabic]. If the latter is accomplished colleges would have said to have done their duty.59 He conducted the medical class and saw no contradiction in teaching both the Arabic and European sets of literature. Tytler took full advantage of the shift to Arabic learning that had been initiated by individuals and families locally. He observed that the orientals are always disposed to receive a work written in it [Arabic] with respect which they might reject or despise in a vernacular tongue.60 Like the notables of the countryside he was
L No. 12, Warren Hastings to Board of Directors, n..d., extract rev. letter to Bengal, 28 Oct. 1814, Boards Collection, F/4/708, le No. 19201, pp. 917. The madrasa had a rich library for which in 1820 Rs. 6818.3.7 were sanctioned by the government. See H. Mackenzie, Sec. to Govt., to madrasa committee, 21 July 1820, Ibid., p. 167. The madrasa divided the students into ve classes with separate teachers. Apart from the Arabic and Persian language instruction, the sciences taught in the madrasa were entirely through the medium of Arabic texts. These included natural philosophy including medicine (hikmat), theology, law, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, logic and rhetoric. Students were expected to nish the course in 7 years. 58 See for medical class, Report of the general committee for the diffusion of instruction among the natives of India for the year 1829, Bengal Pub. Collection, Pol. Letter transferred to Pub. Deptt., 27 Aug. 1830, Pub. Deptt. 29 Sept. 1830, Boards Collection, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), p. 55. Later in 1829, the madrasa introduced an English department as well that catered to a lower stratum of Muslim society who at a small fee learnt only the English language. In 1849 for a high fee of Rs. 100 per month an AngloArabic class was started to instruct in the English language such students from the Arabic classes who wanted to learn English. See recommendations on madrasa to the government by the council of education. Selections from the records of the Bengal government, No. XIV, papers relating to the establishment of the Presidency College of Bengal, Calcutta, India, 1854, MF 1/871, p. 7. 59 J. Tytler, to P. Breton, H. H. Wilson and J. Adam, members medical board, 19 Aug. 1829, Bengal Pub. Collection, 27 Aug. 1830, Boards Collection, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), pp. 7267. 60 J. Tytler, Trans. into Arabic, A Short Anatomical Description of the Heart Extracted From the Edinburgh Medical Dictionary, Calcutta, India, 1828, p. v.
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convinced about the signicant role Arabic would play as a language that would preserve medical learning in the hands of select clientele. Like the notables, he too saw Arabic as the universal language of science and medicine and contrasted its wider appeal with the narrow geographical connes of Persian, Urdu and the other vernaculars. Arabic, he said, was understood from Malacca to Morocco, whereas the vernaculars were understood only in a few provinces of India.61 Its wider connectivity meant that it could be an effective language of medical science. Tytler realised the immense potential of Arabic as a conduit through which medical knowledge could be weaned out of its earlier Mughalstyle encasement. Thus, he not only learnt the language himself but also set about the task of studying and editing Unani medical texts in Arabic.62 This was required not only because Arabic texts were taught at the madrasa but also because Tytler felt that European medical tracts could be understood best by the students if translated into Arabic. Arabic could lend them much needed legitimacy.63 Tytler collected Arabic medical texts from family schools and associates. He edited them for the use of the students. In 1832, he edited two manuscripts of the Arabic translation of Hoanin Ben Motawukkues, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates called Fusool-i-Abkrat. One of these copies he procured from a native physician in Patna, and the other was loaned to him by his trusted hakim assistant Abdul Majeed.64 Other Arabic texts used by him for teaching included the

61 R. Hooper, The Anis ul Musharrahin or the Anatomists Vade-Mecum, Trans. into Arabic by J. Tytler, Calcutta, India, 1830, p. 8. Tytler lowered his tirade against the vernaculars in 1834 when the introduction of English as the language of all instruction seemed imminent. He preferred the vernaculars like Urdu to English as the language of medical science and utility. He cited the success of the native medical institution in providing public servants as an example of the usefulness of offering medical instruction in the Urdu language. See Tracts 1881/a/3, The Calcutta Literary Gazette, June 14 1834, essay No. VII by J. Tytler, pp. 14. 62 He says that he learnt Arabic in the 14 years that he spent in India. His stint began in 1813 when he was posted in the upper provinces. He learnt it because the government needed oriental scholars. And he says he used his own resources to learn the language and did not take any special favours from the government. See TR-15, Memorial of Surgeon John Tytler addressed to the court of directors of the East India Company, pp. 356. 63 R. Hooper, The Anis ul Musharrahin or the Anatomists Vade-Mecum, Trans. into Arabic by J. Tytler, p. 12. 64 J. Tytler, ed., Trans. into Arabic Aphorisms of Hippocrates or the Fusool-i-Abkrat by Hoanin Ben Motawukkue, Calcutta, India, 1832.

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Sharh-i-Mujiz by Muhammad Kazim, the Uksari and the Sudeedi.65 He included all these in the madrasa curriculum. They all lacked the Persian comportment frills. In contrast to Persian texts they were prescriptive and comprehensive. They made Unani scientistic by their concentration on disease, symptoms and medication. They gave advice on disease and medication, rather than the details of the body and its philosophical relations with nature. For instance, the Sharh-i-Mujiz is divided into four sections that dealt with the general principles of medicine, compound medicines and treatment of local and general diseases. It focuses on medicine as science rather than comportment. Such scientistic literature was complemented by the translations of European literature on body anatomy into Arabic. Anatomy only reinforced the new idea of health as science. It made the ideas of health even more scientistic and distant from individual comportment. Such translated literature introduced the importance of body anatomy into the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Since body anatomy had universal referents, medical knowledge that was based on it saw all individuals as equals. Health was now about levelling social differences between people. It questioned hierarchies between those with similar body anatomies. The new Arabic literature based on European texts thus made the idea of aristocratic virtue and individual comportment even more irrelevant to healing. Tytler hoped that the inclusion of body anatomy in medical knowledge would make people question the social hierarchies created by the Persian medical texts. Most of the European texts he translated were on anatomy and chemistry. These included the brief twenty-two pages text, a short anatomical description of the heart (Tashreehul kalb) to the larger work of Robert Hooper called the Anatomists Vade-Mecum. Here, Tytler offered a scathing critique of the Mughal idea of health as aristocratic virtue. He justied the translations of anatomy texts by arguing that the study of body anatomy brought out the similarities of all castes, religions and communities of India. The discipline he argued was a social leveler. It underlined that all human beings had the same body anatomy. Thus, healing was about offering the correct inputs to make all individuals retain similar body functions. He argued that medicine that depended on anatomy was different from the individual comportment-driven ideas of healing that perpetuated social hierarchies.
65

IOC V/24/942, pp. 6, 39.

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He contrasted the Mughal Persian texts with the new anatomical literature in Arabic when he said,
anatomy has a most powerful inuence in counteracting prejudices that arise from birth or station or caste, by demonstrating that however mankind may differ in their externals, their internal organization is the same. Before the knife of the anatomist every articial distinction of society disappears.66

He went on to emphasise the change in the medical culture that the study of anatomy would introduce when he said,
once on the dissection table, the prince will not be found to possess a single muscle or a single artery beyond the meanest of his subjects; and the Christian, the Muhammadan and the Hindoo, the Brahmin and the Sudra have precisely the same organs and same faculties.67

Tytlers anatomical texts reinforced the idea of medicine as science that had been initiated by Arabic texts. He used the printing press to popularise this idea. He hoped the press would help break the monopoly of families and individuals on this kind of medical knowledge. The government lithographic press churned out multiple copies of his Arabic translations of European texts. It demystied medical knowledge and moved it out of its single copy encasement. This was true both for the Unani manuscripts in Arabic and for the Arabic translations of European texts. Tytler translated Robert Hoopers text on anatomy, called the Anatomists Vade-Mecum, into Arabic. Several copies of the Arabic version, called the Anis ul Musharrahin, were produced by the lithographic Education Press. Tytler emphasised the great advance that this style of Arabic book production represented over the earlier forms of knowledge dissemination. He wrote,
The teacher can instruct only a limited number of scholars; his inuence is conned both in space and time, and when period of instruction over, effect of it can be lostthe inuence of the book is very different. They travel through all parts of the country and can be studied at all times, by all classes of people, old as well as young, and when their contents are forgotten they may be reexamined.68

He reiterated the advantages of the printed book as he said, I may also add as perhaps the most advantageous circumstance of all, that
66 R. Hooper, The Anis ul Musharrahin or the Anatomists Vade-Mecum, Trans. into Arabic by Tytler, p. 14. 67 Ibid., p. 15. 68 Ibid., p. 3.

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thousands are able to purchase a few books who might be utterly unable to afford the expense of the teacher.69 The press weakened the monopoly of families over Arabic knowledge. Yet, the madrasa never severed its links with the individuals and families of Arabic learning. D. Ruddell, secretary of the madrasa committee, appointed the learned Hakim Zulqar Ali to teach the students not only Arabic medical texts like the Sharh-i-Mujiz but also anatomical and medical facts from the books composed at the Native Medical Institution (NMI) by both Surgeons Peter Breton and Tytler.70 Zulqar Alis son replaced him on his death.71 Similarly, Tytlers favourite assistant, Hakim Abdul Majeed, taught Unani texts in Arabic at the Calcutta madrasa. The Company was rst introduced to him in Mysore where he was attached as a teacher of over 12 years to the children of Tipu Sultan.72 His command over Arabic medical and theological texts brought him to the notice of Calcuttas orientalist scholars H. H. Wilson, A. Galloway, Peter Breton and Tytler. The latter employed him as lecturer of medicine at the Calcutta madrasa and also as translator in the committee of public instruction and assistant in the NMI. In all these positions, Hakim Majeed was actively engaged for more than 15 years in either teaching Arabic medical texts or composing and translating medical texts in Arabic.73 He earned a decent living through these various services.74 Tytler said that he was
69 70

Ibid. P. Breton, Supdtt. Native Medical Institution, to H. H. Wilson, Sec. Gen. committee of public instruction, 5 Aug. 1829, Boards Collection, Bengal Pub. Consult., 27 Aug. 1830, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), pp. 7101. 71 Ibid., p. 712. 72 L No. 16, Hakim Abdul Majeed to William C. Bentinck, Govt. Gen., 16 Feb. 1835, consult. 25 Feb. 1835, Bengal Pub. Consult. 5 Jan.6 May 1835, P/13/12. 73 Ibid. 74 L No. 26, Hakim Majeed to H. T. Prinsep, Sec. to Govt. in the gen. deptt. n.d., consult. 1 April 1835, Bengal Pub. Consult. 5 Jan.6 May 1835, P/13/12. He got a salary of Rs. 60 per month from the Native Medical Institution itself. In 1835 after the abolition of the institute and the shift away from Arabic learning, men like Hakim Abdul Majeed were left jobless and in dire nancial crisis. The hakim petitioned the government to be sanctioned an allowance of Rs. 60 per month, which was his last drawn salary, so as to maintain his large family. But the government refused this on grounds of there being no precedent for such allowances to men no longer in their service. In 1835, the government also refused to appoint Hakim Majeed in the newly founded Calcutta Medical College on grounds that he did not know the English language. Pundits of the Native Medical Institution, like Madhusudan Gupt and Prasad Pandit, were adjusted at the college because they knew English language. See L No. 128, Medical Board to W. C. Bentinck, 17 Feb. 1835, and L No. 133, J. C. C. Sutherland, Sec. General committee of public instruction, to Lt. Col. W. Casement,

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fully competent were he willing both to render intelligible to students the Arabian medical writers and also to explain to them almost any European medical tract which I have seen published.75 The 1830s madrasa reforms only underlined the importance of this new invigorated medical knowledge easily available in Arabic. In this period, D. Ruddell, the secretary of the madrasa committee, made the Arabic Sharh-i-Mujiz the core text for student entrance examination.76 Simultaneously, the reforms also strengthened the stress on anatomical studies. They introduced a regimen of practical training in body anatomy.77 The linkage of medicine with science and anatomy, which were seen as social levelers, introduced the idea of a larger role that medicine could play in society. It brought the issue of health central to the well-being of society. The pressures to vernacularise medical knowledge followed and so did the move to link medical status with public service. The Native Medical Institution and the Community of Urdu Literature The most vocal critic of the madrasa experiment was Charles Trevelyan, the in-charge of the Delhi education committee. He realised the tremendous inuence of the Arabic medical texts on Muslim society. He felt that the madrasa only perpetuated their hold. He and his team wanted to bypass the minority Muslim intellectual class and his knowledge base. They wished to target instead Muslims who are entirely uneducated and attached to no previous system to create a new class of Muslims educated only in European sciences
Sec. to Govt., 30 April 1835, consult. 4 May 1835, India Mil. Consult. 418 May 1835, P/35/16. 75 J. Tytler, to P. Breton, H. H. Wilson and J. Adam, members medical board, 19 Aug. 1829, Bengal Pub. Collection, 27 Aug. 1830, Boards Collection, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), p. 726. 76 Madrasa exam report 1829/30, enclosure No. 2, D. Ruddell, Sec. madrasa committee, to H. Shakespeare and colleagues, madrasa committee, 22 Feb. 1830, Bengal Pub. Consult., 27 Aug. 1830, Boards Collection, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), pp. 1512. He suggested that the reading of the Arabic grammar text Muqamat be reduced to the rst twenty-ve stories only. In its place the Mujiz be substituted as the qualifying text for admission and scholarship. 77 P. Breton, Supdtt. Native Medical Institution, J. Tytler, Presidency Surgeon, J. Adam, Sec. Medical Board, to H. H. Wilson, Sec. to Gen. committee of public instruction, 24 Aug., 1829, Bengal Pub. Collection, 27 Aug. 1830, Boards Collection, F/4/1255, le No. 5050 (1), p. 702. The students of the madrasa even though not being trained as practitioners were expected to enhance their medical knowledge by attending practical training at the native hospital in Calcutta.

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in the English language. This class could then carry forward the European knowledge in the vernacular to the masses. His pleas notwithstanding, the Company continued with the madrasa instruction and its scholarphysicians. But it did not ignore Trevelyan entirely. As the ground was prepared for English instruction, of a standard sufcient to impart Western medical knowledge, it looked to the vernaculars for help. It chose a locally spoken vernacular language-Urduto move the new medical learning produced at the madrasa beyond individual well-being. Medical knowledge was all set to embrace societal well-being. Urdu was a pigeon language that borrowed from Arabic, Persian and Hindi. In the 1820s, the Company-sponsored Native Medical Institution (NMI) became the place for medical learning in Urdu, and the government lithographic press became the site for Urdu book production. Urdu print culture, with its thrust on popularising medical knowledge and producing mass scale medical texts for sale to the public servants, only intensied the new ideas of health and body anatomy that the madrasa epitomised. But more importantly, it pushed medical knowledge from its concern with individual well-being to a larger anxiety about societal well-being. It created a native doctor who as a public servant carried forward this new role that medicine was set to play. The NMI at Calcutta came into being in 1823. It targeted students who did not have the necessary backgrounds to access medical knowledge embodied in family, courtly status, charismatic teachers or doctrinaire languages like Arabic.78 Students who were not more than 20 years of age and of respectable family background were the preferred recruits.79 They were expected to have basic knowledge of the Hindustani script. Initially not more than twenty students were admitted to the NMI at a time. If more were found t they were put
78 L No. 179, Members native medical education committee to W.C. Bentinck, n.d., consult. 28 Jan. 1835, India Mil. Consult. 2328 Jan. 1835, P/35/9. In 1835 the absence of boys from established families of hakims and vaids in the NMI was evident when out of the sixty-seven students only one was recorded as the son of a hakim. Six or 1/11th of them were sons of native doctors. The bulk of them were from military families of non-commissioned native ofcers: ve sons of subedars, sixteen sons of jemadar, fteen sons of havaldar, three sons of naiks, three sons of sepoys, three sons of pundits, one son of Tisser, one son of Moolsoodee, one son of thanadar and one son of munshi. 79 L No. 100, J. Jameson, Sec. Med. Board, memorandum on Institution for education of native doctors, 1 May 1822, extract Bengal Military Consultation (BMC) 24 May 1822, Boards Collection, F/4/737, le No. 20085, p. 17.

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on a waiting list and inducted when vacancies occurred.80 Later this number was increased to 50.81 In its last year, before its abolition in 1835, the institution had sixty-seven students.82 Each student was nancially supported at public charge and a sum of Rs. 8 per month was sanctioned for him.83 In 1825, this amount was revised and increased to Rs. 10 per month, and at the end of 2 years of study it was further raised to Rs. 12 per month.84 The NMI systematised medical instruction and laid out strict codes of medical apprenticeship and training. Indeed it linked medical instruction with professional public service, and that too under the superintendence of the military. The superintending surgeon of military divisions was to recommend potential students of unexceptionable caste, character, steady habits and good capacity to the medical board. Each recommendation was accompanied with a descriptive roll that notied the name, caste if Hindu and tribe if Muslim and the age of the application. The students presented themselves to the secretary of the medical board. Once enrolled they were sent to the NMI and placed with its superintendent. Here they graduated as qualied native doctors after a 4-year rigorous regime. The native doctor as a public servant projected the new medical concern for societal well-being. The press popularised this idea. The government printing press played a critical role in both training the native doctor and educating society on medicines new role. It was therefore not of little signicance that the government-owned lithographic press that specialised in urdu tracts and the NMI got a kick start in the same year1823.85 Mr. Rind was made the rst superintendent of the government lithographic press in the same year as NMI got its Peter Breton. He was made the superintendent after
80 L No. 133, J. Crawford, Sec. Med. Board, to Lt. Col. Casement, Sec. to Govt. in Mil. Deptt., 10 Feb. 1823, BMC 714 Feb. 1823, consult. FW 14 Feb. 1823, P/30/10. 81 W. Casement, Sec. Govt, to Sec. Med. Board, 30 Dec. 1825, consult. 30 Dec. 1825, BMC 30 Dec. 1825, P/31/41. 82 L No. 179, Members native medical education committee to W.C. Bentinck, n.d., consult. 28 Jan. 1835, India Mil. Consult. 2328 Jan. 1835, P/35/9. 83 L No. 108, GO 21 June 1822 for the NMI, extract BMC 24 May 1822, Boards Collection, F/4/737, le No. 20085, pp. 62, 68. 84 W. Casement, Sec. Govt., to Sec. Med. Board, 30 Dec. 1825, Consult. 30 Dec. 1825, BMC 30 Dec. 1825, P/31/41. 85 L No. 38, C. Lushington, Sec. to Govt., to Committee for reporting on Mr. Rinds plan for the formation of a government lithographic establishment, 29 March 1823, consult. 29 March 1823, Bengal Pub. Consult. 2029 March 1823, P/11/1. In 1823 the government agreed to buy the private lithographic press run by Mr. Rind for Rs. 1650 and ordered four additional ones from Messrs. Gessop and Co. at Rs. 1200.

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the untimely death of the founder James Jameson.86 And both men were trained in the study and practice of surgery. They were qualied to serve as assistant surgeons in the service of the Company. Both men were expected to have a good knowledge of Urdu.87 Indeed the NMI superintendent was the main lecturer for the students and was expected to author medical manuals for his classroom instructions. The superintendent of the lithographic press helped him in discharging medical instructions indirectly by printing the Urdu literature for orders as high as 800 copies of a single tract.88 The Urdu books disseminated the scientistic ideas of Western medical knowledge. These had already echoed in the Arabic literature of the Calcutta madrasa and family schools. Their additional highlight was the knowledge of body anatomy that questioned the earlier comportment-driven idea of well-being. The long superintendentship of Peter Breton (18241830) at the NMI revealed clearly the role of the NMI as the nodal point of Urdu medical book production.89 Breton, in less than a year of his taking over the NMI, was already asking for free access to the government lithographic press. He wanted several of his medical texts to be printed in Urdu. These included his works on body anatomy, pharmacology, orthopedics and surgery. By October 1824, he had already produced before the medical board sixteen copies of his vocabulary of medical terms in the Urdu

86 Ibid. See for details of the setting up of the government lithographic press, L No. 40, J. N. Rind, Supdtt. Lithographic press to lithographic committee, 25 Oct. 1828, extract Bengal Pub. Consult. 10 Dec. 1828, Boards Collection, F/4/1290, le No. 51650, pp. 6271. 87 G. Proctor, Sec. Med. Board, to C. Lushington, Sec. to Govt. in Gen. Deptt., 20 Aug. 1823, consult. 21 Aug. 1823, Bengal Pub. Consult. 14 Aug.4 Sept. 1823, P/11/8. 88 L No. 44, Govt. lithographic committee to Sec. Prinsep, 31 March 1829, Extract Bengal Pub. Consult. 5 May 1829, Boards Collection, F/4/1290, le No. 51650, p. 49. For instance, between January and December of 1826, the lithographic press had done 150 impressions of whole sheet drawings only for the NMI. 89 L No. 138, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to Lord Amherst, Govt. Gen. in Council, n.d., consult. 19 April 1824, BMC 819 April 1824, P/30/47. See also L Nos. 139 and 140 for the conrmation of Bretons salary at Rs. 1600 per month. For family detail of Breton, see VCP Hodson, List of the ofcers of the Bengal Army 17581834, London, 1927, part 1, pp. 2001. In October 1824, Surgeon Peter Breton, who came from an established Norman family of merchants of South Hampton, became the rst superintendent to be conrmed to the ofce of NMI. After having cleared the language test of Fort William College, he resigned from the Ramghur Corps where he was surgeon. He joined as superintendent of NMI on a salary of Rs. 1600/month.

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and English language published from the lithographic press.90 The following year he submitted to the medical board twenty-four copies of his Urdu version of the London pharmacopeias also produced at the same press. He retained another hundred copies at the NMI awaiting government instructions for their distribution.91 By 1829, his list of anatomy tracts composed for NMI included texts on osteology, description of thoracic and abdominal viscera, details of the brain and appendages, eye and appendages, ear and appendages, urinary organs and male generative organs. The texts on pharmaceutical issues included treatises on materia medica, translation of the London pharmacopeias, treatises on the component parts of the air and the posological table. His medical treatises included treatises on vaccination, cholera morbus, vegetable poison, mineral poison and venom of serpents, rheumatism and intermittent fever and the medical topography of the ceded provinces. The surgical treatises included treatises on suspended animation, cataract, hydrocele and dislocation.92 By 1829, so great was the pressure on the press by the NMI that its superintendent Rind reported that it required the constant use of one-fourth of his establishment, that is, two of the six presses. Breton complained that his orders had to wait because of the rush at the press. And John Adam, the secretary of the medical board, suggested the setting aside of at least one press at the government lithographic establishment for only the NMI orders.93 Breton remained dependent on an establishment of pundits, hakims, artists and maulvis in putting his medical literature together. The best ever published anatomical engravings, like the Lizars anatomical plates, were bought by him at a cost of Rs. 130 to aid his staff in the publication of Urdu texts on anatomy.94 He argued that he needed both maulvis and pundits because the tracts needed to be in
90 L No. 180, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to G. Proctor, Sec. to Med. Board, 14 Oct. 1824, consult. 18 March 1825, BMC, 1125 March 1825, P/31/16. 91 L No. 181, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to G. Proctor, Sec. to Med. Board, 7 March 1825, consult. 18 March 1825, BMC, 1125 March 1825, P/31/16. 92 L No. 125, enclosure, List of treatises prepared by Dr Breton for use of NMI, J. Tytler, Supdtt. NMI, to J. Hutchinson, Sec. to Med. Board, 28 March 1831, consult. 15 April 1831, BMC 15 April6 May 1831, P/34/3. 93 L No. 143, J. Adam, Sec. Med. Board, to Lt. Col. Casement, Sec to Govt., 12 Nov. 1829, and reply dated 11 Dec. 1829, consult. 11 Dec. 1829, BMC 1126 Dec. 1829, P/33/42. 94 L No. 136, J. Adam, Sec. Med. Board, to Lt. Col. W. Casement, 1 Aug. 1828, and reply L No. 137 Lt. Col. W. Casement, to J. Adam, Sec. Med. Board, 1 Aug. 1828, consult. 16 Aug. 1828 BMC 1629 Aug. 1828, P/33/6.

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Urdu or Hindustani both in the Devnagari and in Persian script. He entertained in his private service Maulvi Asadullah, a former teacher of the Fort William College, to assist him with the Persian script. He also had help from a pundit. Both men were paid Rs. 25 per month. Later both got regular employment at the NMI.95 Breton had in his service an artist or draftsmanRahim Buksh. He was hired by him on Rs. 16 per month to paint the blank anatomical sketches produced at the lithographic press.96 He also employed native surgeons like the Calcutta Muslim Saut Cauree who had been operating on people for cataract by the couching needle, and performing other operations for dropsy, hydorcele and spleen for the last 25 years. He trained students especially in cataract surgery at the NMI. After initial practice on the eyes of goats and sheep, the students successfully operated on human subjects. One of the students, Pursun Singh, was particularly praised for his newly acquired surgical skills. Many of Bretons tracts on cataract and the eye were inuenced by the couching technique, which he felt suited the native practitioner better than the Western mode of using the crystalline lens.97 Bretons successor John Tytler, who took over the superintendship of the NMI in 1830, continued with the tradition of composing anatomical and surgical texts. He too put together as impressive a list of anatomical publications as that of Breton. In 1832, on approval of the medical board, the government sanctioned his text on the vascular and absorbent systems. It ordered 400 copies of the text in Urdu, in Persian and an equal number in the Devnagari script to be produced at the lithographic press.98 Before this large order was sanctioned he had already translated or composed for the students of the NMI the following Urdu tracts to
95 They got salaries of Rs. 40 per month each. Ibid. Breton was also allowed, on his request, access to the library of Fort William. See for governments sanction of all his requests, L No. 75, Lt. Col. W. Casement, Sec. to Govt., to Medical Board, 1st April 1824, consult. 1 April 1824, BMC 18 April 1824, P/30/46. 96 L No. 100, J. Taylor, Supdtt. NMI, to Sec. Med. Board, 15 Feb. 1833, consult. 27 Feb. 1833, BMC 19 Feb.5 March 1833, P/34/38; see also in same consult. L No. 101, Lt. Col. Casement, Sec. to Govt., to Med. Board, 27 Feb. 1833. Rahim Buksh later demanded and obtained a hike in his salary to Rs. 20 per month when he not only just had to paint but also draw some of the anatomical plates for the medical tracts. 97 L No. 180, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to G. Proctor, Sec. to Med. Board, 14 Oct. 1824, consult. 18 March 1825, BMC, 1125 March 1825, P/31/16. 98 L No. 122 Members Med. Board to C.T. Metcalfe, VP in council, 19 June 1832, and L No. 123, Lt. Col. Casement, Sec. to Govt., to Med. Board, 25 June 1832, consult. 25 June 1832, BMC 18 June2 July 1832, P/34/23.

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be published at the lithographic press: translation of the 1824 edition of the London Pharmacopeias in Persian and Nagri script, hundred copies each in Urdu translation in the Persian and Nagri script of J. Hutchinsons Bengali tracts on the fevers, a ve-page tract on the anatomy of the fetus and a tract on cataract surgery. These were in addition to the list of tracts chiey on anatomy and surgery that he composed and circulated to students in manuscript form. These included Introduction to the materia medica37 pages; account of the most useful articles of the materia medica178 pages; a system of osteology that had descriptions of all the bones in the skeleton, attachment of muscles and ligaments, passage of blood vessels and nerves69 pages; account of the abdominal and respiratory muscles9 pages; account of the vascular system41 pages; tract of gunshot wounds that had extracts in translation from Hoopers chapter on gunshot wounds and Tytlers comments on how to use them in practice6 pages; tract on injuries of the head14 pages; tract on hernia36 pages.99 The NMI received a range of anatomical and pharmacy literature from Europe. Tytler was always enthusiastic to translate it into Urdu. In 1835, a list of books sent for the NMI from England included Claquets Anatomy descriptions, Fisher on Small Pox, Cooper on Hernia, Tuains Anatomy, Thomsons Dispensatory, Thomass Practice of Physic, Coopers Surgical Dictionary, Pariss Pharmacoloquia, Alisons Pathology, Smiths Botany by Hooker and the Medical Gazette, volumes 114.100 Tytler argued that translating these was a sure way to diffuse new ideas of medical knowledge. Urdu texts on anatomy and pharmacy popularised the new idea of medical knowledge being about medical wisdom and science rather than individual comportment. These contrasted to the Mughal encyclopedic medical texts like the Darashikuhi in their production style, and the relatively smaller range they covered. They were also marked out because of the ordinariness of their authors, as well as the pedestrian status they commanded because of being in the military camp language-Urdu. They also differed from the dense Arabic literature, like the Sharh-i-Mujiz, used in the Calcutta madrasa as well as in the family schools. In the Urdu medical literature produced
99 L No. 84, J. Tytler, Supdtt. Med. Board, to J. Hutchins, Sec. to Med. Board, 11 April 1832, consult. 7 May 1832, BMC 23 April14 May 1832, P/34/21. 100 L No. 84 enclosure, Members Med. Board to C. T. Metcalf, Govt. Gen. India, 1 Sept. 1835, consult. 14 Sept. 1835, BMC 31 Aug.21 Sept. 1835, P/35/22.

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by the NMI, the specialised knowledge of anatomy, surgical skills and chemistry prevailed. They lacked the encyclopedic range, the physical ornateness and the esoteric exclusivity of the Persian and Arabic literatures. Their focus on anatomy, which was seen as a social leveler, underlined the new role of medicine. The Urdu medicine questioned the individual comportment-centered well-being. It embraced the well-being of society as a whole. And it made medical knowledge available to those so far excluded from its ambit. Making of a Medical Public Servant: From Scholar to Native Doctor The wider social role of medicine ensured that the NMI focused on practical training as well. The knowledge of anatomy and surgery gained from texts was elaborated in lectures and practicals. This helped translate medical wisdom to medical practice. It welded a practitioner out of a scholar. Every Tuesday and Thursday, the pupils attended lectures given in Hindustani on anatomy. They also participated in performing experiments in chemistry and preparing materials used in medicine and surgery: neutral salts, acids, spirits, camphor, benzoic, sulphur and so on. On Friday night they were made to read from 8 to 10 pm the Urdu texts prepared for them at the institute: the pharmacopeias, materia medicas and tracts on anatomy. Each student was provided a copy of every text produced by the NMI. At this session the senior students were expected to memorise the names and features of the bones of the human body, the component parts of the brain, the thoracic and abdominal viscera, structure of the eye and its appendages, and answer questions on the subject. They were also expected to monitor the readings of the junior students on these themes.101 They received practical knowledge of anatomy at the general hospital and Company dispensaries. Here they observed the British surgeon dissect the human body. In 1825, Assistant Surgeon William Twining, posted at the general hospital in Calcutta, regularly demonstrated to them the anatomical details of bodies he dissected. And the apothecary Mr. Reid, at the Calingah dispensary located close to the NMI, trained students in chemistry. Students also got clinical experience in their interactions with patients at these institutes.102
101 L No. 7, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to J. Adam, Sec. to Med. Board, 25 March 1829, consult. 15 May 1829, BMC 815 May 1829, P/33/26. 102 Ibid.

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This was followed up in the classroom by anatomical wax models of the arm, leg and other body parts that came from London.103 In 1830, when John Tytler took over as superintendent of NMI he retained this thrust on anatomy lessons. He systematised its instruction and made it more practical oriented and rigorous.104 Good students were employed by him as dissectors in his anatomy classes and he wished this practice to be formalised. He pointed out that the students warmed up to dissections and often urged him to use the animal body to explain anatomical facts. Indeed, one of thema Hindu called Durohun Lallbrought to him a human skull, which his friend had picked up from the banks of the river so as to be used in the classroom demonstrations. Encouraged by this incident, Tytler asked the board to send him for the purpose of teaching a well prepared human skeleton, a set of separate bones, an injected head, trunk, preparation of lymphates, a pelvis with ligaments, a fetal head, a heart and lungs.105 But medical authority for the native doctor also came from his being a public servant and that too in the coveted service of the Companys army. The government order of 21 June 1822 claried that students admitted to the NMI would be enlisted as soldiers. And like all other soldiers they were to be fully supported nancially throughout their stint at the NMI by the government. The medical board examined them at the end of their 3 years and issued them a certicate that enabled them to work as native doctors in the military. Most sepoy regiments of the Company had a Hindu and a Muslim native doctor. These took care of the sepoys whose caste identities

103 L No. 13, Lt. Col. W. Casement, Sec. to Govt., to President and members of Med. Board, 11 Sept. 1829, consult. 11 Sept. 1829, BMC 411 Sept. 1829, P/33/34. 104 L No. 84, J. Tytler, Supdtt. Med. Board, to J. Hutchins, Sec. to Med. Board, 11 April 1832, consult. 7 May 1832, BMC 23 April14 May 1832, P/34/21. The students were divided into four classes: the lowest class started with anatomy and the highest ended with surgery. In between they studied Materia Medica and physics. Teaching of anatomy ran through all the four classes of the NMI. Tytler himself introduced the discipline in an introductory lecture. He followed this up with the demonstration of real bones. He made the students aware of their different forms, the attachment of muscles and the passage of vessels and nerves. After this demonstration he explained to the students the soft partsthe viscera of thorax, abdomen, pelvis, brain and sense organs-on the bodies of sheep and goats. He compared the physiology of the animal body to that of the human structure. And through this comparison highlighted their difference. This training was padded up at the general hospitals and dispensaries, which the students attended to observe human dissections. 105 L No. 84, J. Tytler, Supdtt. Med. Board, to J. Hutchins, Sec. to Med. Board, 11 April 1832, consult. 7 May 1832, BMC 23 April14 May 1832, P/34/21.

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the Company zealously preserved.106 In the past, the pampered sepoys had refused to be attended by native doctors who were of low caste or not of respectable status. This had prompted the military authorities to ensure that native doctors came from respectable family background.107 Most came from lower level service gentry families. They were acculturated in the tradition of public service from their contact with older regimes. But as Company servants they had more clout and authority. They were primarily military doctors. But they could be sent on civilian postings as well.108 Many of them functioned as government vaccinators in the civilian stations and others worked in the local dispensaries.109 Some of them were employed as assistant teachers at the NMI itself.110 As public servants they were responsible for the health of society as a whole. The harnessing of the new medical knowledge to societal wellbeing and public service was evident in the special status given to qualied public servants from the NMI. This added new referents to medical authority. Additional allowances were sanctioned to those with certicates from that institution. Thus, a certied native doctor from the NMI received a monthly salary of Rs. 25 when posted in the eld, instead of the Rs. 20 slotted for those who did not have an NMI certicate. And when in garrison duty in civil areas he received Rs. 20 instead of Rs. 15 that his untrained colleagues received. The
106 J. Hutchinson, Code of regulations for medical department of the Bengal establishment, compiled by order of government under superintendence of the medical board, Calcutta, India, 1838, L/Mil/17/2/450, Article 4, p. 207. 107 L No. 95, enclosure in L No. 93, civil nance committee to W. C. Bentinck, 9 Sept. 1830, consult. 3 Oct. 1833, BMC 5 Sept.3 Oct. 1833, P/34/47. 108 Extract from GO relating to NMI, 21 June 1822, J. Hutchinson, Code of regulations for medical department of the Bengal establishment, compiled by order of government under superintendence of the medical board, Calcutta, India, 1838, L/Mil/17/2/450, p. 265. In 1834, native doctors were posted in civil stations in southern central Assam, in Guwahati and in Patna. See L No. 113, Members Medical Board to C. T. Metcalfe, 26 July 1834, consult. 7 Aug. 1834, BMC 31 July21 Aug. 1834, P/34/66; and L No. 55, Members Medical Board to C. T. Metcalfe, 17 Oct. 1834, consult. 23 Oct. 1834, BMC 16 Oct.6 Nov. 1834, P/34/69. 109 For a native doctor appointed as vaccinator, see L No. 17, Col. J. A. Paul Macgregor, Mil. and Auditor Gen. to W. C. Bentinck, 16 April 1833, consult. 19 April 1833, BMC 319 April 1833, P/34/40. 110 Native doctors Jashoda Misser and Ram Ishawar Awasthi were employed at Rs. 25 per month to be assistant teachers at NMI. See L No. 6, Col. W. Casement, Sec. to Govt. of India Mil. Deptt., to Medical Board, 26 Sept. 1836, consult. 26 Sept. 1836, India Mil. Consult. 1926 Sept. 1836, P/35/45; and L No. 18, Col. W. Casement to Col. J. A. Paul Macgregor, Mil. and Auditor Gen., 19 April 1833, consult 19 April 1833, BMC 319 April 1833, P/34/40.

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additional Rs. 5 was viewed as a special military allowance called batta. It was witheld when the doctor went on long leave.111 Again, as a further incentive the native doctor got an additional increase of Rs. 5 per month after completing 7 years of service if he was favourably recommended by his medical ofcer.112 Again, the military took care of the pension benets of the doctor in the same way as it did for the sepoys and other native ofcers serving its regiments. Every native doctor was entitled to an invalids pension in case he could no longer serve because of wounds received in the service or disorders contracted while on duty. Those who had served for less than 7 years with the army received a monthly pension of Rs. 7 per month, whereas a service period of 715 years entitled him to one-third the salary of his eld pay if posted with the army. The same percentage of his garrison pay was given to him if on civil duty. All native doctors who had served for more than 15 years received an invalids pension of Rs. 10 per month. This was raised to half their salary after a service of 22 years.113 The native doctors were governed by military law. This made them exclusive in society. And very much like the sepoys they enjoyed a special status in village society. Their medical authority derived largely from this military backing. Thus no native doctor could be summarily dismissed without a court martial. And even here his respectability and authority in local society was protected zealously by the army. The army ordered that under no circumstances penalties like corporal punishments were to be used for its doctors.114 In an 1832 government order, the Commander-in-Chief took serious note of a case of corporal punishment involving a native doctor. The order noted that, the Commander-in-Chief desires it may be understood that he does not

111 Extract from GO relating to NMI, 21 June 1822, J. Hutchinson, Code of regulations for medical department of the Bengal establishment, compiled by order of government under superintendence of the medical board, Calcutta, India, 1838, L/Mil/17/2/450, p. 265. See also L No. 135, Maj. J. Stuart, Deputy Sec. to Govt. in Mil. Deptt., to Med. Board, 27 Feb. 1834, BMC 27 Feb.13 March 1834, consult. 27 Feb. 1834, P/34/59. The government discouraged long leave and left it to the discretion of the Commander-in-chief. 112 The medical ofcer had to certify that the general character and professional conduct of the individual was worthy of this hike in salary. See extract from GO relating to NMI, 21 June 1822, J. Hutchinson, Code of regulations for medical department of the Bengal establishment, compiled by order of government under superintendence of the medical board, Calcutta, India, 1838, L/Mil/17/2/450, p. 265. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid.

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consider corporal punishment as a t sentence for a class of persons whose respectability His Excellency is desirous to maintain. The order emphasised that the Commander-in-Chief authorised the court martial to dismiss the native doctor as the most extreme punishment rather than publically humiliate him.115 The institution of the native doctor lifted the focus from health being tied to comportment or mere scientic scholarship that was individual centric. He represented the new idea of public service that tied medicine to the well-being of the society. The texts he read and consulted underscored this idea. And such texts had wide circulation through the person of the doctor himself. Texts literally moved around with the marching regiments whose doctors carried them for consultation. Almost all regimental doctors carried Urdu translations of the pharmacopeias, anatomy and surgical literature. Many stitched copies of the translated London Pharmacopeias were sent to the general and native hospitals, dispensaries, marine and police departments and garrison surgeons of Fort William College for consultation. Breton was always happy to assist the lithographic press with his editorial assistance and staff whenever big demands for any Urdu medical text came from the widely scattered surgeons of the native corps. The government was invariably supportive of the endeavour.116 In 1829, Breton reported to the medical board the wide circulation of his Urdu medical literature. He claried that its circulation was not restricted only to the students and European and native assistants of the NMI. The texts were not conned either to the government dispensaries or to the hospitals. He said that it had a readership outside the Bengal Presidency. Copies of the texts were dispatched to the Madras and Bombay presidency, the Hindu and Mohammedan colleges in Calcutta, Fort William College, the Medical and Physical Society of Calcutta and the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The literature had a clientele beyond these English enclaves as well. Breton reported that they were sent on demand to the hakims of the raja of Lahore, to the French settlement at Pondicherry and also to those native doctors
Ibid., p. 207. In 1828 the government gave the sanction to the lithographic press for one such big contract for texts in Urdu that was made on applications received from surgeons of native corps and civil stations for them. See L No. 149, J. Adam, Sec. Med. Board, to Lt. Col. W. Casement, 7 Feb. 1828 and L No. 150, Lt. Col. W Casement, to J. Adam, Sec. to Med. Board, 15 Feb. 1828, consult. 15 Feb. 1828, BMC 1522 Feb. 1828, P/32/55.
116 115

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who had never been trained at the NMI.117 A happy Breton never failed to underline the great difference the lithographic press had made on the diffusion of the new medical knowledge at minimum nancial strain to the government. This was particularly true of the production of anatomical plateswhich had so far remained major lacunae in medical education. With the printing press in place he said all that was required was paper and ink. He always had words of appreciation for Surgeon Rind, the superintendent of the press, for his exertions and solicitude-to render me every assistance in his power in printing material as speedily as I can prepare them for the use of students.118

The Age of Reforms This concluding section argues that the anglicist reforms of the 1830s were limited in their impact. Without a doubt, institutions of Arabic and Urdu Unani learning were abolished. New Englishlanguage institutions of Western medical knowledge and instruction were established. However, neither of these changes extinguished the medical ethos already established from the previous interaction between the Company and the indigenous medical knowledges and linguistic cultures. Multiple ways of articulating medical authority created in the period of transition to colonial rule survived the reforms. These were used by the hakims in the late nineteenth century to organise their resistance to increased colonial intrusions.

Abolition of the NMI and Madrasa Medical Class In the 1830s age of reforms and nancial crisis, both the medical class of the Calcutta madrasa and the NMI came under severe attack from the civil nance committee, which found it an uneconomical

117 L No. 7, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMIs report on the NMI, to J. Adam, Sec. to Med. Board, 25 March 1829, consult. 15 May 1829, BMC 815 May 1829, P/33/26. See also for dispatch and receipt of Bretonss texts to Bombay and Madras, L No. 155, J Adam, Sec. to Med. Board, to Lt. Col. Casement, Sec. to Govt., 13 April 1829 and his reply L No. 156, consult. 18 April 1829, BMC 1018 April 1829, P/33/24. 118 L No. 181, enclosure, P. Breton, Supdtt. NMI, to G. Proctor, Sec. to Med. Board, 7 March 1825, consult. 18 March 1825, BMC, 1125 March 1825, P/31/16.

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experiment and recommended its abolition.119 But more importantly, these institutions came under the re of the anglicist lobby. They attacked oreintalist scholars, like John Tytler, and saw their institutions as an impediment to the introduction of Western medicine and English instruction in India. With the backing of the new governor general, William Cavendish Bentinck, they supported the establishment of a medical institution that would open up Western medical learning, in English to a respectable class of Indians.120 The future of the medical class at the madrasa and the NMI thus got tied up with the education debate between orientalist scholars and the anglicists over the appropriate timing of introducing English instruction in India.121 In 1835, Bentinck, on the recommendation of the native medical education committee, abolished the institution and the medical class of the madrasa. He recommended the establishment of a new medical college in Calcutta.122 The Company of course viewed the college as representing a new era in its functioning. From the viewpoint of London, the abolition was viewed as a change of ofcial policy and a victory of the anglicist lobby. Locally, the change was less perceptible. Many of the NMI staffers from its superintendent John Tytler to the native hakims, maulvis, pundits and native doctors like Ram Ishwar Awasthie made pleas to join the new college. They did not see it as representing any major change as far as the content of medical instruction was concerned.123
L No 93, Civil Finance Committee to W. C. Bentinck, 9 Sept. 1830, consult. 3 Oct. 1833, BMC 5 Sept.3 Oct. 1833, P/34/47. 120 See Dr. H. H. Goodeves paper on the NMI that makes a case for its abolition and suggests the setting up of an alternate institute that would impart Western medical training in English to Indians from respectable family backgrounds. He hoped this would create a class of medical professionals called sub-assistant surgeons. L No. 103, H. H. Goodeves paper, consult. 3 Oct. 1833, BMC 5 Sept.3 Oct. 1833, P/34/47. 121 See for the details of this debate, D. Arnold, Colonising the Body. 122 For the detailed report of the native medical education committee, see L No. 179, Members native medical education committee to W. C. Bentinck, n.d., consult. 28 Jan. 1835, Indian Military Consult. 2328 Jan. 1835, P/35/9. Their objections to the NMI were on grounds of economy, unsatisfactory administrative command structure and lack of regulations. They critiqued the knowledge imparted in Urdu that did not teach Western medical science in its entirety. For Bentincks minute abolishing the NMI, see L No. 183, Minute by the Govt. Gen of India, 26 Jan. 1835, consult. 28 Jan. 1835, India Mil. Consult. 2328 Jan. 1835, P/35/9. 123 In 1835 the Medical Board forwarded the applications of NMI staffers Hakim Abdul Majeed, Madhusudan Gupt and Prasad Pandit. They wanted appointment at the new college or at the education deptt. They also requested for a pension since the closure of the NMI had left them jobless. Hakim Majeed could not be adjusted since he did not know English, but the other two were taken into the service of the
119

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In 1834, John Tytler made it clear to the Company that he did not see any contradiction between the old and the new order. He was neither against the introduction of the English language nor Western medical education. Indeed he said he was clearly of the opinion that European literature should be made a permanent object of study; but I do not think the English language should be made an exclusive medium of instruction.124 The Company of course thought otherwise. It therefore turned down Tytlers application to be considered for the superintendentship of the new college, despite his continued pleadings for a reconsideration of his case.125 British ofcers in India cautioned against making too much of the change. As late as the 1850s the recommendations of Alloy Sprenger, the principal of the Calcutta madrasa, that urged the Company to show only a philological interest in Arabic learning were opposed locally. The council reporting on the madrasa advised the government against such an ideological shift. It argued that the elite Muslim families continued to pursue a scholarly interest in Arabic sciences. The Company needed to be careful as for many families medical education still was more than just employment.126 The note of caution from ofcers in the eld reected that the medical culture of the period outlived these reforms. At one level the Calcutta Medical College continued with the NMI agenda to invigorate the Arabic sciences through the introduction of Western-style anatomy and surgery. The similarity of the agendas of the two institutions was reected in the transfer of medical items of the NMI to the new college for its use.127 But the NMI had grafted
General Committee of public instruction that produced books for the new college. See L No. 128, Medical Board to W. C. Bentinck, 17 Feb. 1835, consult. 4 May 1835, Indian Mil. Consult. 418 May 1835, P/35/16; also see L No. 133, J. C. C. Sutherland, Sec. to GCPI, to Col. W. Casement, 30 April 1835, consult. 4 May 1835, Indian Mil. Consult. 418 May 1835, P/35/16. 124 Tracts 15, Memorial of Surgeon John Tytler of the Bengal establishment, addressed to the court of directors of the EIC. L No. ix, J. Tytlers reply to the committee of native medical education as to the best language to be used as a medium of instruction, p. 26. 125 Ibid., p. 6. See also L No. xi, J. Tytler to J. Cosmo Melvill, Sec. to EIC, n.d., pp. 3140, for his strong case for the job of superintendent of the new college. 126 Selections from the records of the Bengal Govt., no. XIV, papers relating to the establishment of the Presidency College of Bengal, Calcutta, India, 1854. MF 1/871., pp. 4, 1011. 127 L No. 129, Col. W. Casement, Sec. to Govt. of India, to Med. Board, 19 Feb. 1835, consult. 19 Feb. 1835, India Mil. Consult. 1924 Feb. 1835, P/35/11; and L No. 9, List of medicines and other articles from NMI to M. J. Bramley, Supdtt. of Calcutta Medical

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the new knowledge on existing medical communities of literature and the Urdu linguistic culture. In contrast, the new college carved out a less compromised way of operation. Bentinck was of the view that the new institution would impart Western medical learning in its entirety, including human dissections, to Indians. He was convinced that this would be of great political and economic benet to the Company. It would be more economical, since it would teach Western medicine in the English language and cut expenses on translation. It would churn out better-qualied Indians. This would reduce the cost of maintaining the huge establishment of Western practitioners in India. And costs would also go down when learning of oriental languages would no longer be necessary for Britishers posted in India.128 He appointed M. J. Bramley as the superintendent of the new institution and dispensed with the services of Tytler. He was sanctioned 2 years on an allowance of Rs. 1790.129 However, in March 1835, Bentinck perhaps did not realise the limitations of his reforms when the medical board reported to him that on the closure of the NMI they propose, to furnish each of the students with a complete set of all the tracts in the native language and to lodge the remainder in our ofce to meet future demands.130 In May 1835, with their Urdu medical texts rmly in place, they left the presidency in boats hired at their own expense under the care of the native assistant teacher Sheikh Waris Ali and Hira Lall.131 As the students of the NMI and its staffers dispersed in their qasbas and towns of the north Indian countryside so did their new ideas and texts about the fresh ways of articulating medical authority and linking it to welfare of society. These continued to simmer in society alongside the ame of Arabic medical learning ignited by the Calcutta madrasa
College, 19 May 1835, consult. 1 June 1835, India Mil. Consult. 25 May8 June 1835, P/35/17. The list of items included anatomical models, surgical instruments, books like Lizars Anatomical Plates, Tusons Mythology, Dewhursts Anatomy of Muscles, Annesleys Diseases of India, and accessories like tables, chairs, thermometer, electric machine and other professional articles. 128 For Bentincks minute abolishing the NMI, see L No. 183, Minute by the Govt. Gen of India, 26 Jan. 1835, consult. 28 Jan. 1835, India Mil. Consult. 2328 Jan. 1835, P/35/9. 129 L Nos. 184, 186190. These are copies of the Government Order of 26 Jan. 1835, abolishing the NMI, that were sent to the Adjutant General Army, Medical Board, John Tytler, etc. consult. 7 May 1832, BMC 23 April14 May 1832, P/34/21. 130 L No. 184, Members Medical Board to W.C. Bentinck, 4 March 1835, consult. 13 March 1835, India Mil. Consult. 1318 March 1835, P/35/13. 131 J. Hutchinson, Sec. Med. Board, to members of Medical Board, 16 May 1835, consult. 1 June 1835, India Mil. Consult. 25 May8 June 1835, P/35/17.

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even though its medical class was abolished. And the patronage to Persian medical learning at the level of regional courts also continued to icker. All these strands of learning continued to invigorate the medical culture of the region. And this was more than evident in the late nineteenth century when hakims used the Persian, Arabic and Urdu strands of the medical culture to contest colonial medical drives in the period of high nationalism.