| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Kavita Sivaramakrishnan. Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab (1850–1945). (New Perspectives in South Asian History, number 12.) Hyderabad: Orient Longman. 2006. Pp. xiv, 280. Rs 795.00.

This book offers a crucial sharpening of historical perspective on the modernization of indigenous South Asian medicine. While there has been abundant study of the way that indigenous practitioners responded to the universalist claims of European medicine by developing professional identities and institutional entities compatible with a nationalist frame, too little attention has been given to the entanglement of this process in linguistic and communalist projects. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan's erudite and careful study remedies the neglect. Focusing on the colonial Punjab, Sivaramakrishnan makes visible the relationships among the establishment of professional medical associations and colleges, the development of vernacular print media, and the realignments among Unani and Ayurvedic practitioners along lines of religion and language. She describes how colonial policies that reified Muslim and Hindu communities influenced budding prenationalist administrations to encourage the coalescence of indigenous medicine around religious identities. She shows how, in competing with European medicine by reframing their practice as not only medicine but cultural heritage, vaids and hakims embarked on a communalist enterprise. Not only is the particular story of indigenous medicine in colonial Punjab one that has not been previously told, but here it is told in a way that clearly reveals the connections between nationalism and print media, and between religion and modernity.

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