. . .some of the greatest men of India have had the shortest biographies. Many great men have been enwrapped in the folds of oblivion.Footnote 1
. . .there is very strong evidence that Bengal does not know its great men.Footnote 2
As India entered the colonial era, the earlier hagiographical tradition was beginning to be supplemented, and to some extent supplanted, by a new form of biography, in which greater attention was given to complexity of character and personal motivation, to specific places and events, and to their role in shaping and explaining individual lives.Footnote 3
Introduction
In his three-part serialized biography of physician Rajendralal Dutta published in the monthly periodical The Hahnemannian Gleanings quoted above, the author repeatedly lamented Bengal's lack of appropriate engagement with the lives of its great men as compared to the standards set by the West. The lamentation of the biographer as well as the subsequent observation of historians studying ‘life writing practices’Footnote 4 in colonial India together hint at a proliferating culture of biography-writing throughout the nineteenth century. Over the last decade and a half, histories of colonial book, print, and publishing have come to occupy an essential strand in analyses of South Asian modernity.Footnote 5 These works, as well as those variously reflecting upon the advent of colonial modern subjectivities, have identified biography, along with autobiography, the novel, travel writing, diary, and history as significant genres for the expression of an emerging modern self.Footnote 6 In their analysis of the burgeoning print market in Bengal, arguably one of the most thriving colonial print markets, Anindita Ghosh and Tapti Roy suggest that although biographies comprised a fairly peripheral genre until the 1850s, there was a visible shift in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 7 Indeed, following the nineteenth-century enumerations of Reverend James Long, Jatindramohan Bhattacharya, and others, it is possible to trace the growing prominence of biography as a genre in the vernacular print market. Despite possible criticisms of such nineteenth-century enumerations, men like Reverend Long had statistically established that since the 1850s the ‘tide turned in favour of more useful works’, which among other categories also included ‘biographies of eminent men’.Footnote 8
Of the myriad forms of writing lives, biography seems to have received relatively inadequate attention from South Asian scholars. By contrast, the world of autobiography and memoir, upheld as a direct site for recovering women and other minority voices, has been subjected to more regular historical scrutiny.Footnote 9 In comparison, scholars have but rarely engaged with biographies on their own terms. While biographies typically have been instrumentalized as sources for other kinds of histories, South Asian historians particularly have been more inclined to the critical historical-biographic re-creation of renowned lives, most evidently the prominent leaders of our imperial and colonial pasts including Clive, Bentinck, Nehru, Gandhi, and others.Footnote 10 Since the 1990s, a growing distrust for metanarratives has further resulted in a new kind of fascinating individual-oriented work that has focused on bringing to life lesser-known figures from more humble backgrounds.Footnote 11 Some of these very interesting histories have been informed by the microhistorical approach.Footnote 12 Indulging in a strictly person-centred narrative, these scholars have frequently demonstrated the archival fragments of individual lives to be an extraordinary window on the larger social milieu that their subjects inhabited.Footnote 13 In the process, to narrate their histories, they have, in some cases, reified what Bourdieu has famously termed as ‘the biographical illusion’, that is, the teleological continuities of a coherent life.Footnote 14 In sum, whether consciously or not, and with varying degrees of criticality, these historians have sometimes tended to assume for themselves the role akin to a life narrator, deploying facets of individual life history as a methodology for narrating larger histories of South Asia.Footnote 15
Fascinating as these approaches are, what has remained relatively under-explored within this corpus is a reflection on biography itself as a specific form of historical document, its function and relevance as well as the politics of its production beyond the narration of a single life. In a recent anthology on life writing practices, the editors usefully raise the point that historians in South Asia have seldom ‘paused to consider them (life histories) as genres worthy of systemic analysis’. This is indeed more true of biography than any other genre. This article redresses this gap in the scholarship by looking into the commercial as well as moral impulses behind the sustained publication of biographies by the adherents of a specific medical ideology. Rather than focusing on any individual life, we would explore biography as a mode of expression for groups, sects or cults often considered marginalized. Narration of religious lives, often in the form of hagiographies, are increasingly of interest to scholars studying the manoeuvres of sacred communities.Footnote 16 This article, likewise, studies the content and function of the plethora of physicians’ biographies in relation to the incipient, heterodox scienceFootnote 17 of homoeopathy in Bengal. In so doing, it essentially interrogates the power of print capital in shaping and sustaining unorthodox, apparently marginal, practices not directly endorsed by the state.
Indeed, colonial trajectories of so-called European pseudo-sciences as well as medical heterodoxies like phrenology, magnetism, mesmerism, herbalism, hydropathy, homoeopathy, naturopathy or Christian Science have but rarely featured in histories of British India.Footnote 18 Predictably, their (often self-proclaimed) status as heterodoxy, and the mutating relationship with mainstream, state-endorsed practices in Europe, have long been the staple of a wide-ranging Anglo-American scholarship.Footnote 19 Historiographic attention in South Asia, however, has remained overwhelmingly divided between studying aspects of state medicine promoted by the British government on the one hand, and that of the indigenous medico-scientific traditions like ayurveda, unani, and siddha on the other. Only recently has there been a turn of interest among historians towards studying the more esoteric, popular/folk, non-canonized therapeutic practices such as bone-setting, faith healing, and the like.Footnote 20 Consequently, histories of health and healing in British India have largely ignored those motley sectarian, dissenting medical ideologies that flourished in Europe since the late eighteenth century, whose scientific status was hotly debated in Western societies throughout the nineteenth century. While at least two of these heterodoxies, namely homoeopathy and naturopathy, along with ayurveda, yoga, unani, and siddha, are today part of the Government of India Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy that oversees the development of various forms of ‘indigenous medicine’, there has been a proclivity among historians in conflating their rich and divergent colonial pasts with that of histories of ‘traditional’ medicine.Footnote 21 Sporadic works, including Joseph Alter's insightful discussion on German naturopathy and hydropathy in India with relation to Gandhian corporeal practices, Alison Winter's intriguing work on the reception of mesmerism as eastern magic, or David Hardiman's study of Christian Science among tribals in southern Gujarat hint at a fascinating cultural history of these heterodoxies hitherto uncharted.
It is true, however, that despite distinct ancestries, the imperial careers of European heterodoxies intersected, even converged, with those of indigenous South Asian medicine at various moments, most prominently in sharing the brunt of the colonial state's discriminatory stance against them in favour of ‘scientific’ medicine. After an initial phase of attempts at syncretism with the indigenous medical cultures until about the 1850s,Footnote 22 the British government indulged in an extended phase of public health policies that all but delegitimized traditional therapeutics as well as any other up-and-coming unorthodox practice such as homoeopathy. While existing scholarship has variously noted the beginnings of official tolerance for indigenous medicine around the First World War,Footnote 23 more recent works identify the dyarchic system of governance initiated in 1919 as a key moment that signalled a slow policy transition towards accepting as well as standardizing non-biomedical practices.Footnote 24
Consequently, spanning the latter half of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries, heterodox practices such as homoeopathy (along with traditional indigenous medicine) were routinely curbed by the colonial state in Bengal, as elsewhere in South Asia. The state-endorsed apparatus of Western medicine, including the Calcutta Medical College as well as the appointments in the Indian Medical Service, were meticulous in excluding practitioners associated with homoeopathy from their ambit. The circumstances around the public embracing of homoeopathy by leading physician, Mahendralal Sircar, in 1867 is a case in point.Footnote 25 The furore surrounding the expulsion of Sircar, a physician of the highest repute and the second MD of the Calcutta Medical College, from the medical faculty of the Calcutta University in 1878 on grounds of his being a homoeopath, constituted a high point in the scaling up of governmental intolerance towards any supposedly unorthodox practice.Footnote 26 With a pronounced agenda of promoting ‘orthodox’ Western medicine, leading journals like the Indian Medical Gazette, acting as the quasi-official mouthpiece of the Indian Medical Service, celebrated Sircar's expulsion as the most appropriate step in ‘maintaining the cause of scientific truth and purity in Bengal, unflinchingly against the faintest encouragement of or association with delusion or error’.Footnote 27 Indeed, the state remained attentive in policing homoeopathy, the latter figuring most prominently in bureaucratic anxieties related to medical malpractice in the province, particularly in governmental discussions on ‘quackery’ and ‘corruption’. The Bengal Medical Bill of 1913 had introduced a medical council and a system of registration that, in effect, declared all practitioners of unorthodox medicine as illegal. It was followed by the passing of the Indian Medical (Bogus Degrees) Act 1915 that made it ‘pretty evident that while tolerated, the other medical traditions would not be privileged or even considered part of the scientific tradition’.Footnote 28
Yet, this is not to stoke any romantic illusion of an uncontaminated ‘outside’ beyond the regimes of the state, with relation to these unorthodox practices. Even while being castigated by the state and the mainstream British scientific authorities in India, these practices were nonetheless sustained by institutions and processes shaped by colonial modernity, if not the colonial state. In the case of homoeopathy in Bengal, these were the reformulated colonial family and, more importantly, modern print culture.Footnote 29 We will particularly explore the agency of print culture (in collusion with the institution of family, as we will see), and indeed the exclusive genre of print as biography, in crystallizing homoeopathy. Indeed, one could only get highly sketchy, disorderly yet suggestive glimpses of homoeopathy's flourishing sociocultural past from the official state archives. In recovering the cultural history of a category that the state archives renders largely invisible, this article contends that biographies are not only more than a mere repository of straightforward information on individual lives, but that they are in fact a veritable site of power. Moreover, in pursuing the entangled histories of biography, family, and homoeopathy in Bengal we hope to broaden our understandings of the modalities through which heterodox sciences were consolidated in dispersed colonial societies, as in Tibet, Japan, the Transvaal (in South Africa) or in Egypt.Footnote 30
At one level, in making sense of the sustained deployment of the biographic mode by practitioners of homoeopathy, the article underlines the importance of expanding the historical query from the texts towards interrogating the imperatives of their publication. It identifies a range of intergenerational family-firms invested in homoeopathic print and commerce to argue that biographies are as much the story of the subject as they are of the biographer and his publisher.Footnote 31 It contends that biographies, in whatever form they are produced, are anything but innocent from a scholarly perspective. The interests of a range of physician-entrepreneurs operating through family-firms in publishing life stories are considered crucial in understanding the institutions and networks that sustained colonial heterodoxies like homoeopathy. Consequently, the biographies publicized the image of Bengali homoeopathy as a family-oriented practice, perpetrated primarily by a number of key entrepreneurial families united in their shared vision of promoting a radical cure for physical, social, and moral ills. In so doing, the article remains particularly attentive in exploring the role of biography in translating into the vernacular German homoeopathy as not merely a familial science for Indian domesticity but also one ideally suited to a (Hindu) nationalist sensibility. Moreover, taking its cue from the late nineteenth-early twentieth-century biographers’ proclamations of chronicling ‘history’ through individual lives, we will explore a Bengali public discourse around writing pasts. The homoeopathic projection of biography as a kind of history that valued ‘intimacy’ over ‘objectivity’ throws light on competing notions of history among sections of the colonial intelligentsia. It unravels the hesitations, among sections of Bengali biographers, with regard to the plausibility of Western notions of objective history.
In sum, in its focus not only on print culture in general but on a distinct literary genre, the article extends the scholarship on the processes of localization as well as sustenance of nonconformist practices in colonial societies. It explores how acculturation of European medicine and print capitalism necessarily drew upon and reinforced local constellations of religions, class, kinship, and other networks of familiarities to unravel the nature of scientific modernity in South Asia.Footnote 32 The article further makes a contribution to histories of life writing in reflecting on the function and relevance of biography, on the nature of selfhood reified through biographies, as well as by examining the late nineteenth-century status of biography vis-à-vis history. Through a study of the relationship between biographer, the subject of biography, and modernity, it contends that, apart from being instructive on larger questions of scientific modernity and the individual self, biographies also act as sites to understand more immediate and mundane workings of power in forging group identities.
Print cultures, heterodox sciences, and a ‘biography industry’
Over the last few years, the historiography of science has come to focus more and more on what has been characterized as the new ‘geographies of nineteenth century science’,Footnote 33 sites, and experiences beyond the laboratories, clinics or other conventional spaces associated with science. Along with museums, public lectures, galleries of practical science, panoramic shows, exhibitions, and so on, the role of the print market, especially the popular market around print, science, social, and individual health has been explored in its various facets in the context especially of Victorian science.Footnote 34 The sciences contested by the state and other related established authorities were crucially reliant on an increasingly global print network as James Bradley's work on British hydrotherapy or John Kucich's exploration of American spiritualism illustrate.Footnote 35
Simultaneously, the power of print, along with these other sites, in ‘staging (colonial) science’ is also being acknowledged in histories of South Asian science. Especially in the case of medicine, the paradigm of ‘medical markets’ has emerged as an important analytic tool to understand the cultural life of colonial medicine where the ‘marketplace of print’ is of increasing importance as a concept.Footnote 36 Indeed, a recent spate of fresh research on unorthodox health and physical cultures from colonial Hyderabad, Punjab, the United Provinces, and other parts of North India and Bengal has opened up conversations about the rapidly growing popular print productions owing to fast-changing technologies and the widening horizons of the nineteenth-century reading and consuming public.Footnote 37 This work, focusing on facets of traditional knowledge, notes that the negotiation with modern print impacted upon customary practices with changing notions of authority, pupillage, and consumption.
Building upon these existing works, scholars have since felt the need to go beyond the idea of a monolithic print market to explore the various genres and formats of medico-scientific print. As the historiography of the book and reading argue, studying the specific formats and genre conventions in the print market is highly instructive of the ideas they seek to convey.Footnote 38 While there has been some sporadic work on the function of science text booksFootnote 39 as well as didactic manuals on health,Footnote 40 periodicals have received the most lingering attention from historians of science in South Asia and beyond as the main conduit for forging knowledge and opinion in the nineteenth century. Focusing on various aspects such as the ‘periodicity’Footnote 41 or formation of a ‘common (national) intellectual context’,Footnote 42 the role of periodicals has been identified as fundamental.Footnote 43 While more recent South Asian works are branching out in the direction of deciphering medical advertisements,Footnote 44 myriad other areas remain to be explored, not least the world of commercially printed science visuals that is increasingly being highlighted as yet another important site for the study of Victorian science and medicine.Footnote 45
Furthering such historiographical trends, this article focuses on the writing and publication of medical biographies. While acknowledging biography to be an important mode in narrating science, historians of science have debated the usefulness of biography as a means of doing history of science, mostly agreeing that ‘biography, however useful, exerts a powerfully distorting image of how most science gets done’.Footnote 46 Few works other than the important collection of essays by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, however, actually delve into the writings and circulation of nineteenth-century medico-scientific biographies and their impact.Footnote 47 This article does precisely that. An exploration into the depths of popular medical print culture in Bengal overwhelms one with the regularity with which biographies of homoeopathic practitioners were published from the latter half of the nineteenth century. These ranged from eulogizing accounts of Hahnemann, the eighteenth-century German founder of the doctrine, to careers of those who were highlighted as ‘extraordinarily successful and efficient’ medics, to lives of medical entrepreneurs (mostly also physicians) invested in the production of homoeopathic drugs, print, and knowledge.
Biographies narrating individual lives varied in size from slender, cheap, vernacular pamphlets or monographs costing just a few anna (one-sixteenth of a rupee) to heavier, more expensive English tomes. In addition, lives of practitioners were published serially in the foremost English-language journals published, edited, and printed by the leading Calcutta-based homoeopathic family-firms. Some of these were the Indian Homoeopathic Review (published by Majumdar's Pharmacy), Homoeopathic Herald and Homoeopathy Chikitsha (published by M. Bhattacharya and Company), Hahnemann and The Hahnemannian Gleanings (published by the Hahnemann Publishing Company), and, most importantly, the Calcutta Journal of Medicine edited and published by Mahendralal Sircar and his son Amritalal Sircar uninterruptedly from1867 to at least 1913. In its heyday under Mahendralal, limited copies were sent for sale in London.Footnote 48 Indeed, while most journals boasted of a readership beyond the urban centres into the mofussils, a few others repeatedly highlighted in their editorials their ‘numerous subscribers—clients and readers, within and outside India . . .’Footnote 49 Admittedly, fund shortages and problems of arrears in running the journals were occasionally reported.Footnote 50
Yet, even these hardly exhausted the formats through which the lives of Bengali homoeopaths were addressed to the readers. True to the current characterization of biography as a ‘hybrid, unstable genre with many forms’,Footnote 51 the life stories of physicians appeared in myriad formats and on remarkably different pretexts. Prefaces, forewords, and even dedication pages of books on homoeopathic therapeutics, articles, and published lectures in journals, advertisements, journal editorials, obituaries, poems, and published conference papers read out to international homoeopathic congresses regularly served as platforms for narrating either fragmented or comprehensive lives of various ‘key figures instrumental in the spread of homoeopathy in Bengal’. This article draws upon around 64 such biographies, the bulk of them appearing as stand-alone books or serialized biographies in journals.
Indeed, spanning the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, there seems to have flourished around homoeopathy what in other contexts has come to be described variously as a ‘biography industry’Footnote 52 or a ‘biographical mania’.Footnote 53 These characterizations refer primarily to the demand, production, and reading of such biographies, as the agency and interest of the biographers can also be usefully invoked to understand the nature of homoeopathic biographic production in Bengal. An enduring interest in these lives can be assessed as well from the myriad remarks, queries, and letters in response to these biographical works, which were sent to the editors following the publication of these lives. Such readership was often not restricted to the particular journal where the biography was originally published. Rivalry between journals was often exposed in the context of the information conveyed in the life stories. An editorial of the journal Hahnemann, for example, engaged in a protracted polemic with a rival journal Homoeopathic Samachar over the details of Rajendralal Datta's life, which the former had published a few months back.Footnote 54 The narrators too seemed to be aware of the extensive demand and wide-ranging circulation of their work. Writing in 1909, a biographer of Mahendralal Sircar expressed his conviction regarding the sale of his book, ‘As many educated Indians like Homoeopathy now-a-days, there is every likelihood of my book being sent to or purchased by them in most educated households . . .’.Footnote 55 Such confidence was reaffirmed by the proliferation of many published biographies into multiple editions. The preface to the fourth edition of Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya's life, published by his own family firm, pompously noted that the account was inspired by wide-ranging interest in the life among the Bengali reading public.Footnote 56
Inevitably, this plethora of biographies focused not only on communicating the events in the lives of those personalities, but more significantly on what those lives meant. The life stories seemed to perform as cheaper, popular, and more accessible extensions to the proclaimed scientific literature. Written in lucid prose for a mass audience, they complemented the more explicitly medical treatise in establishing homoeopathy's genealogy as well as its fundamental principles, in the way that artists’ biographies have been shown to operate as complementary texts to actual museum visits and art criticisms in Britain.Footnote 57 In their meticulous recounting of the founding moment of homoeopathy—the German physician Hahnemann's discovery of the so-called ‘law of similars’Footnote 58–the many lives of Bengali homoeopaths emphasized at once the uniqueness, antiquity and, by extension, the superiority of the doctrine. A typical biography of Hahnemann entitled Homoeopathy Abishkorta Samuel Hahnemann er Jiboni (Biography of Samuel Hahnemann, the Discoverer of Homoeopathy) written in 1881, for instance, devoted the initial chapters to discussing the discovery that enunciated the homoeopathic theories of healing around the ‘law of similars’, along with Hahnemann's notion of bodily vital force and its derangements as the cause of disease as well as the homoeopathic rationale for minute doses for drugs.Footnote 59 Simultaneously trying to persuade the audience of the antiquity as well as the novelty of homoeopathic principles as compared with doctrines such as ayurveda, texts like Susrut o Hyaniman (Susrut and Hahnemann), published in 1906, asserted that, although the possibility of a cure by similars was included in ayurveda and other ancient texts, it was not elaborated in a ‘systematic and disciplined manner’ before Hahnemann.Footnote 60 It argued that the greatness of Hahnemann lay in developing a nascent principle inherent in ayurveda into a coherent body of knowledge.Footnote 61 Together, these life stories seemed to proffer themselves as a contextual literature to understand the central homoeopathic text the Organon, much as religious biographies were often conceived as preparatory texts for their relevant scriptures.Footnote 62
Apart from the canonicity, claims of homoeopathic superiority hinged crucially on the evocative depiction of distinct typology for the physicians’ characters. The texts were careful in highlighting the deep moral integrity of their personalities, and their righteous commitment towards curing social ills. Beyond the mere materiality of drugs, homoeopathy was portrayed as a biomoral regimen of disciplining lives. The practice of homeopathy was projected to ensure the cultivation of an ethical holistic vision of being. Acquisition and dispensation of wealth remained the two fundamental tropes around which narration of the lives were organized. At one level, homoeopathy's superiority and efficacy was emphasized through careful depiction of its growing popularity across Indian society. Rajendralal Datta's biography described how ‘a crowd of eager patients assembled in his house every morning with the punctuality that marks the rising of the sun in the east and as cure followed cure, the crowds grew’.Footnote 63 The fact of being summoned by eminent, even princely clients was meticulously recorded as an obvious marker of the doctrine's efficacy. Hence, while the life history of D. N. Ray noted the names of Dadabhai Naoraji, the founder of the Indian National Congress, and Byaramjee Malabari, the famous Parsi reformer and editor of the newspaper Spectator, among his patients,Footnote 64 other biographies narrated the reputation of these physicians among the princely states of India such as the nawab of Bhopal.Footnote 65 Apart from the native elites, the names of Englishmen who regularly consulted Bengali homoeopaths featured in these narratives. Rajendralal Datta's life recorded Lord Ripon, Sir Henry Cotton, Sir Herbert Hope Risley, Mr Robert Knight (editor of the Statesman newspaper), and Father Eugene Lafont as among his habitual patients.Footnote 66 In a related vein, wealth acquired by the physicians was upheld as a palpable measure of both their own repute and homoeopathy's worth. Wealth was usually assessed in terms of the property one managed to acquire and the fortunes one left behind.Footnote 67 The life stories were dotted with minutiae of the palatial residences the protagonists had built.Footnote 68
Yet significantly, along with the discussions on acquisition, there was a veritable valorization of the ability to give up acquired wealth. Narrations of these lives delineated an ethic around codes of dispensation of wealth that was integrally related to notions of ‘seba’ or ‘service’, ‘kalyan’ or ‘well-being’ and ‘tyag’ or ‘sacrifice’.Footnote 69 We will have occasion to discuss the (often explicit) Hindu nationalist undertone of these tropes in the third section of this article. For now, it is important to note that ‘seba’ or service to the poor and the distressed was considered the most ethical means of dispensing wealth. Homoeopathy was upheld as a powerful ideology that empowered its protagonists to achieve that desired end; and a range of biographies detailed their commitments towards ‘distributing medicines and food free of cost amongst the sick poor and to minister to their comforts in every imaginable way’.Footnote 70 Lives of Mahendralal Sircar, Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya, Brajendranath Bandopadhyay, Akshay Kumar Dutta, and Batakrishna Pal recounted innumerable instances of their selfless help and empathy towards the poor in the form of free treatment and free distribution of drugs.Footnote 71 At the death of Akshay Kumar Dutta, the destitute were recorded to have lamented that ‘the rich people of the country have many renowned doctors to look after them. But he was like a parent to the poor and the hapless, who had no one else to turn to’.Footnote 72 Mahesh Chandra's role in reducing the price of homoeopathic drugs in his Economic Pharmacy was narrated as an exemplary instance of his service to the people.Footnote 73 The biographies claimed such services to have a bearing on the welfare of the nation as a whole.Footnote 74
Related to the discourse of ‘service’ around homoeopathy was the emphasis on charity. Charity or ‘Daan’ was glorified as the noblest way of utilizing the wealth acquired through homoeopathic practice. Whether devoting a whole chapter entitled ‘Daan Brata’ (Codes of Charity) in Batakrishna Pal's biography or discussing Mahesh Chandra as the author of texts such as ‘Daanbidhi’, most homoeopathic biographies upheld their protagonists as those engaged in acts of (often anonymous) charity for the selfless good of society. Discussions on the ethical utilization of wealth further encompassed the extraordinarily simple everyday lifestyles of the protagonists, involving diet, clothing, and other quotidian habits. Of Mahendralal Sircar's personal lifestyle it was carefully noted that the physician ‘always wore Taltollah slippers; whether visiting patients or attending public meetings. The Calcutta public does not remember having seen him in boots or shoes . . . He more resembled an old poor Brahmin in these respects than a successful medical practitioner of the town.’Footnote 75 Likewise, Batakrishna Pal's biography recorded that even with spectacular changes in fortune, his appearance remained unaltered over the years.Footnote 76 The biographer mentioned having seen him in the same simple attire for over 50 years. Men such as Mahesh Bhattacharya categorically condemned extravagance of any kind as sin, especially in a poor, subjugated economy like India.Footnote 77 He held that the cunning colonial powers dominated other nations by luring them into a luxurious lifestyle that played havoc with prevalent social norms.
The agency of biographies in shaping cultural memory has been acknowledged in recent works.Footnote 78 The recurrent typologies deployed in the narration of homoeopathic lives equated the moral propensities of physicians with the inherent value of their doctrine. The virtues of individual lives were perceived to be inseparably linked with the craft they practised. The underlying assumption animating the narration of these lives was that readers would be sensitized towards an ethically committed, personalized care regime promised exclusively by a heterodoxy like homoeopathy, distinct from the strictly institutional, depersonalized structures of state medicine. Underlining the impact of these individual lives on larger society, the biographies construed the image of a knowledgeable, compassionate, hardworking, selfless, austere physician as the ideal type for an emerging nation.
Biography, history, and a familiar science
Such remarkably expedient representation of homoeopathy through practitioners’ life stories, I argue, was often facilitated by the practitioners’ own considerable agency in the biographic market. In her insightful work on artists’ biographies in nineteenth-century Britain, Julie Codell demonstrates that throughout the nineteenth century, Victorian artists increasingly ‘came to control their public image . . . became their own agents for the circulation and reproduction of their identities as well as of their works’.Footnote 79 She elaborates on the intimate friendships with the critics, journalists, and art dealers through whom artists indirectly ended up shaping their public image. Relations of ‘intimacy’ and ‘familiarity’ were, in fact, crucial determinants in shaping homoeopathy through life writings. Indeed, as we noted in the introduction, at the heart of the homoeopathic discourse in colonial public culture was a range of intergenerational family-firms. Late nineteenth-century Bengal saw the advent of a number of business concerns that began investing in the production of homoeopathic drugs, print, and knowledge over generations. Situated at 12 Lalbazar Street and owned by Rajendralal Datta (1818–1889) and later his nephew Ramesh Chandra Datta, Berigny and Company's Calcutta Homoeopathic Pharmacy was supposedly ‘the first and the oldest’ homoeopathic pharmacy. Besides Berigny and Company, Majumdar's Pharmacy, run by physician Pratap Chandra Majumdar along with his son Jitendranath Majumdar; the establishment of the Sircars headed by the famous physician Mahendralal Sircar and his son Amritalal Sircar; M. Bhattacharya and Company headed by Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya and sons; B. K. Pal and Company owned by Batakrishna Pal and his sons, as well as Prafulla Chandra Bhar and sons, who owned the Hahnemann Publishing Company, were some of the most prominent business concerns dealing in homeopathic publications and pharmacies. Asserting their familial, intergenerational presence in the field of homoeopathy, the protagonists of these business concerns self-consciously upheld a distinct form of enterprise delineated as ‘family business’.Footnote 80
The biography industry around homoeopathy was fundamentally held together by these commercial firms as they assumed multiple overlapping roles in relation to the printed lives. The entrepreneur-physicians and their firms were primarily the patrons and publishers, but also frequently the authors and almost invariably the subjects of the life stories. Apart from explicit blood relations, the biographies repeatedly also highlighted near-familial relationships of friendship, alliance, and intimacy between protagonists and eminent physicians related to these firms. Exceptional professional camaraderie between the entrepreneur-physicians was projected as a hallmark of the family-firm-based homoeopathic commerce, because the mouthpiece journals repeatedly emphasized that ‘harmony should be the basic principle upon which true friendship and good business can last and flourish. Selfishness, greed, enmity, rivalry and mutual vilification do away with and undo that which it took years to build up . . .’Footnote 81 Further, the biographies also narrated cordial interpersonal relations in regard to an informal network of pedagogy and pupillage shared between the foremost entrepreneur-physicians, their descendants, students, and associates. An illustrative example is the relation between Rajendralal Dutta and Mahendralal Sircar. All of the printed lives of both these physicians dramatically highlighted the way in which Rajendralal inducted Mahendralal to the principles of homoeopathy, inspiring him to ‘convert’ from orthodox state medicine learnt at the Calcutta Medical College to homoeopathy, and that Mahendralal remained eternally grateful to the former, acknowledging him as his mentor.Footnote 82 Rajendralal's life story quoted at length Mahendralal's emotional outpourings following the former's death,
. . . he used to call me his ‘father and son’, and subscribe himself in all the letters he wrote to me as ‘your son and father’. The love that he bore me was not a whit less than that of a father to his son. His faith in me as you know was unbounded. His reverence for me was that of a son. Could I be undutiful to such a man? My personal loss in his death is more than that of any other man.Footnote 83
As fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, teachers and students, mentors and disciples often ended up in print as authors, publishers, and subjects of homoeopathic biographies, it is important to situate homoeopathic life writings within these complex emotional-familial economies of their publications. More striking than the rhetoric and reality of ‘family’, perhaps, is the fact that such relationships of intimacy were highlighted variously and recurrently in print. The meticulous and persistent proclamations of familial, affective relationships between those propagating homoeopathy had the effect of construing homoeopathy as an overwhelmingly family-oriented science. Not only was it meant for the consumption of colonial domesticities, homoeopathy was projected as a science that was even produced through colonial family relations. In that projection, its history resonates with that of other unorthodox practices like ayurveda and unani, whose links with traditional, intergenerational practising families have been fleetingly hinted in the historiography.Footnote 84 Further, these narrative approaches publicized Bengali homoeopathy as an emotive, informal, personalized, and familial domain of a range of men committed to a shared mission of popularizing an unorthodox, European science for the national good. Homoeopathy was espoused as a moral tool in the hands of a group of intimate men committed to improving the medical landscape of Bengal.
Such tropes of an informal, familiar, intimate network had serious ramifications for the proclaimed purpose of the biographies. Beyond the immediate narrow agenda of chronicling individual lives, the Bengali biographies almost always shared wider convictions with a more lofty purpose than merely narrating individual lives. The authors frequently paused to reflect on the importance of biography as an academic genre, and included their own thoughts on the very act of writing and recording the lives they documented. They referred to an entrenched Victorian culture of writing and memorializing the lives of eminent personalities. By contrast, it was regretted that Indians compared dismally in celebrating and recording prominent lives for posterity. Referring to Rajendralal Dutta's entrepreneurial skills, one biography lamented ‘. . . had he been born among more appreciative people, they would certainly have recognized in him the stuff of which the Howards and the Hampdens are made . . .’Footnote 85
The authors viewed biographies as a significant means of recording the past. Indeed, through biographies, most authors claimed to have been engaged in the writing of history. While the relationship between biography and history has been a matter of much unresolved concern among historians of our times, somewhat unusually for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, many biographies defined their proclaimed function as the chronicling of the history of their time. They emphasized an integral relation between individual lives and the history of the times they lived in. It was argued that the ‘personal element plays so important a part in the history of every moment that no one can afford to ignore it or to treat it with indifference’.Footnote 86 To them, narrating a life dedicated to the cause of homoeopathy was the most effective way of recounting and recording homoeopathy's history. A monograph on the life of Mahendralal Sircar, for instance, declared at the outset,
The life of Dr. Sircar was connected in such imperishable links with the history of Homoeopathy in India that any attempt to write a biography of this great man necessitates a fair exposition of the Rise and Development of Homoeopathy in India and any biography bereft of it will not be found to be interesting and withal it will prove the incompleteness of the book.Footnote 87
Hence, narrating histories of homoeopathy and writing biographies of significant physicians were considered analogous and equivalent processes. A number of journals like The Hahnemannian Gleanings launched serial publication of biographic sketches of important personalities to give its readers ‘a taste of the history of homoeopathy in India’.Footnote 88
It is noteworthy that the physician-biographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries felt compelled to speak in the language of ‘history’. The scholarship tracing the emergence of a nationalist consciousness has elaborated on the crucial importance attached to the writing of the nation's past.Footnote 89 They have shown how since the mid-nineteenth century such writings in Bengal were increasingly imbued with post-Enlightenment thinking that regarded the Western rationalist-positivist notion of ‘history’ as the most desirable mode of knowing the past of a people.Footnote 90 The deep intertwining between the struggle for a national identity and the writing of history resulted in a proliferating culture of public engagement with history in late nineteenth-century Bengal.Footnote 91 The compulsion of the Bengali physicians to identify their biographic endeavours as history can be mapped within this early twentieth-century proclivity towards what has been described as an ‘enormous public enthusiasm for history’.Footnote 92
In their eagerness to write histories through biography, the authors were often drawn into early twentieth-century concerns over the writing of credible histories. Indeed, what constituted history was a contentious topic in late colonial India. The works of Dipesh Chakrabarty show the growing ascendancy of the notion of professional, ‘scientific’ history in India since the late nineteenth century, informed by an entrenched faith in the Rankean rationalist-positivist understanding of objective, unbiased historical truth.Footnote 93 However, others have attempted to unravel the limits of such notions of ‘scientific’ history among parts of Indian intelligentsia.Footnote 94 In her analysis of the early twentieth-century controversies surrounding the status of Kulagranthas (a specific kind of genealogical literature), Kumkum Chatterjee, for instance, shows the persistence of parallel notions of history among various sections of Bengali society, which she designated as popular/romantic history that valued emotion, memory, community and so on, any idealized notion of objectivity or rationality promoted by scientific history.Footnote 95
Operating within this intellectual milieu, the physician-biographers too, I argue, came to represent another faction of the Bengali intelligentsia who registered their differences with the plausibility of the mandate of scientific history. From a pragmatic standpoint, they ended up critiquing the notion of ‘objectivity’ and privileged the virtue of ‘familiarity’ and ‘intimacy’ as more fundamental in writing biographies. Biographies as a genre, these authors argued, thrived essentially on the intimate, familial, private, and informal sources of information.
Drawing upon and engaging with contemporary notions of ‘objectivity’ and ‘rationality’, these texts, nonetheless, hinted at their limits when it came to writing credible biographies. Thus, at one level, in a published lecture on Hahnemann's birth anniversary in 1887, Mahendralal Sircar alerted his readers to the importance of writing objective, critical biographies that did not degenerate into hero worship of its subjects.Footnote 96 Mahendralal warned that such exercises made ‘men and events acquire a magnitude and an importance which they do not intrinsically possess’.Footnote 97 Before narrating a biography of Hahnemann himself, he reflected upon the importance of a critical biography to ‘judge of him as a man, and of his place in the history of science and medicine’.Footnote 98 Such analytic distance was often measured in terms of temporality. Thus, in his introduction to the Life of Dr. Mahendralal Sircar, the author gave vent to his anxiety relating to the timing of the act of his writing. He was aware that,
He [Mahendralal] lived so long and lived so manfully and nobly and was so warmly cherished in the affection of numerous readers that it still seems too soon to venture on a critical estimate of his labours and works in the world.Footnote 99
Yet, the authors were equally concerned with the other crucial requirement of scientific history, namely, the collection of verifiable facts. To them, access to reliable sources and information was fundamental in the writing of biographies. They pointed out that accessing sources and verifiable facts were necessarily related to the familiarity and intimacy one shared with one's biographic subject. They unequivocally confessed that the virtues of ‘intimacy’, ‘affective attachment’, and ‘familiarity’ with sources had been, for them, fundamental in writing biographies. Accordingly, the biographies routinely highlighted the closeness and intimacy between its authors and subjects.
Indeed, the reliability and verifiability of the information they furnished in their texts was shown to be inherently predicated on such intimacies. The truth claim of biographies was shown to rest on the perceived intimacies between the author and the subject. Most biographies included the identity of the biographers in the form of acquaintances ranging from sons, brothers-in-law, and sons-in-laws, to close family friends or professional associates. The biographer of Mahesh Bhattacharya informed the readers of his 50 years of association with the family in the very first page of his book, while biographer Jitendranath Majumdar made no efforts to conceal his deepest reverence for his father physician Pratap Majumdar.Footnote 100 The personal affective elements were played up to the extent that the biographer of Batakrishna Pal, his friend and fellow homoeopath, expressed his deep sense of loss and helplessness at Batakrishna's death.Footnote 101 In instances where familial and other intimate friendships were not asserted, a sense of an exceptional professional camaraderie exuded from the texts. Sarat Chandra Ghosh, himself a homoeopathic practitioner, editor of the widely circulating The Hahnemannian Gleanings, and author of many serialized biographies in journals, expressed his excellent relationship with all of his subjects. He quoted personal conversations and letters, and described private meetings and the like in his biographies. His biography of Mahedralal Sircar in the journal Hahnemann, for instance, had an entire section elaborating the ‘extremely amicable relation’ between them.Footnote 102 Such shared closeness with the subject rendered his portrayal of Mahendralal's life as ‘most reliable’ compared to other biographies of the physician.Footnote 103 At the same time, the biographer of Mahesh Bhattacharya revealed his anxiety at being too intimate ‘with not only Bhattacharya, but his entire family’.Footnote 104 In a self-critical mode, he elaborated on the possible hindrances to objective analysis that such long-term familiarity engendered.Footnote 105
Hence, while establishing the relationship between biography and history, the physician-biographers unravelled a methodological dilemma between cultivating historical objectivity and procurement of sources. Biography was projected as a kind of history that essentially privileged the virtues of ‘intimacy’ over any idealized notions of objectivity. In their pragmatic rejection of objectivity, the homoeopathic biographies constituted an important counterpoint to the emerging academic project of writing ‘scientific’ history. Their quandary between objectivity and intimacy hinted at the larger issues of the politics of archiving and the problem of sourcing related to the craft of writing history. In his recent work Dipesh Chakrabarty unravels the problematic nature of public archives in early twentieth-century India in showing how historical ‘facts’ or ‘sources’ were often caught up within various kinds of ‘privileged communities’.Footnote 106 Access to such networks or communities was often determined through private relations of friendship and enmity. With specific examples from Bengal and Maharashtra, he demonstrates how the process of accessing ‘original’ historical sources for public consumption was often fraught with hidden stories of enmity, rivalry, friendship, inheritance, and alliance.Footnote 107
More general scholarship on knowledge formation in the nineteenth century too shows the centrality of networks of friendship, alliance, and intimacy as crucial, latent determinants of knowledge and history.Footnote 108 The processes of consolidation of homoeopathy through public assertions of intimacy contributes to this scholarship. Further, in privileging ‘intimacy’ and ‘familiarity’ over objectivity, the homoeopaths, as practitioners of a family-oriented, informal, intimate science, avowed a special status for themselves, as indeed did other sectarian groups caught up in family, caste, kinship or sacred networks, as producers of authoritative biographies.
Writing lives, translating science
Between construing homoeopathy as a family-oriented, intimate science and an ethically charged moral regimen of living, the biographies, to a considerable extent, transformed the image of homoeopathy from an essentially rational, Western scientific doctrine. The life stories, in fact, simultaneously celebrated homoeopathy as a Western marvel as well as a faith-based Indian spiritual practice, embedded in indigenous tradition. Poised within such a contrarian framework, the texts carved out a liminal status for both homoeopathy and its eighteenth-century German pioneer Hahnemann as radically Western yet deeply chiming with Hindu spiritual values.
Circulation and localization of science in the imperial world has emerged as a significant strand in understanding the genealogy of modern science and medicine. There is a rising interest in analysing the linguistic and sociocultural strategies by which doctrines, concepts, terms, and even theoretical constructs are made legible across cultural borders and rendered stable over time. Referring to the process as one of ‘translation’ and realignment of power rather than imposition, Gyan Prakash was one of the earlier South Asianists to foreground how scientific ideas across cultures effected ‘inappropriate transformations’ and displacements in meanings.Footnote 109 More recent works have dwelt upon the processes through which colonial science became a mode of ‘enchantment’ of Indian modernity.Footnote 110 There is an increasing emphasis now to explore specifically the local embeddedness of such knowledge production as well as to study the particular impact of such translations on the languages concerned.Footnote 111
The case of homoeopathy's circulation in Bengal underlines the centrality of local factors and interest groups as well as the contingencies of the vernacular print market in rendering homoeopathy national. It illustrates that the displacements in meaning associated with ‘translation’ could also occasionally be deliberate, premeditated, and self-conscious. The journals that published many of the biographies also carried articles discussing the translatability of science across contexts.Footnote 112 Literal assimilation was dismissed as inadequate if it did not take into account the specific context of Bengal, its physical and emotional landscape, as well as its national context. The authors repeatedly and purposefully pointed out that although ‘homoeopathic science is their science, to be able to use it in India, we need to adapt it to our situation and make it our own’.Footnote 113 It was held that while translating Western doctrines it was not advisable to follow their contents unconditionally and completely.Footnote 114 Along with differences in physical conditions, including climate, food habit, dressing patterns and the like, the authors especially emphasized the cultural divergences between India and the West.Footnote 115 Along with such self-conscious processes of assimilation, the adoption of a Hinduized vocabulary reinforces stereotypes concerning a Bengali public culture, inspired by nationalism, which was increasingly Hindu in orientation. These discussions on translating Western science, further reflected upon the biographic inclusion of a range of Western terms and concepts to describe homoeopathy, and its impact on the vernacular language.
A common feature of most biographies was to glorify homoeopathy as a significant constituent of the progressive, modernizing West. It was projected as an innovative and cutting-edge European science that critiqued deep-seated orthodoxy of even the Western medical mainstream. Representative biographies of Hahnemann in Bengal frequently referred to homoeopathy's advent as the ‘most glorious and beneficent reform’Footnote 116 that would ‘overturn the whole of the present practice of medicine’.Footnote 117 Echoing a common language of radicalism, unorthodoxy, Western rationalism, and reform, homoeopathy was, to a certain extent, mapped onto extant Western-inspired reformist discourses like that of Brahmoism in Bengal that had set out to modernize Hinduism as a rational religion in the light of Western Unitarianism.Footnote 118 Indeed, in highlighting Brahmoism as a ‘rational, scientific reformist agenda against orthodoxy and irrationality’, the biographies indicated a close resonance between the visions of homoeopathy and Brahmoism. At one level, men like Mahendralal Sircar were reported as champions of the cause of Brahmo reform. It was noted that
Dr Sircar hated from the bottom of his heart all retrogressive movements. He publicly taunted those educated men who advocated progress in science, literature and politics but propounded retrogressive views in matters of social life. His sympathy for the great reformer Raja Rammohan Roy, was due to the fact of his having inaugurated religious and social reforms.Footnote 119
An obituary collection of Mahendralal’s works explicitly stated his appreciation of the Brahmo cause—including his material help in the foundation of the Bharatbarshiyo Brahmo Mandir.Footnote 120 Mahendralal, however, was not alone. Biographies of most of the renowned homeopaths included appreciative discussions of Brahmo activities as ‘rational’. Some, like those of Pratap Chandra Majumdar and his associates, including M. M. Basu and Akshay Kumar Dutta, were introduced as practising Brahmos. Simultaneously, the biographies were meticulous in narrating the profound interests of the contemporary Brahmo leaders towards the German doctrine. Biographies of Pratap Chandra Majumdar, in particular, detailed the abiding faith of the Tagore family in homoeopathic cures as an acceptable import from the West.Footnote 121 Biographies of the physician detailed that after an instance of easy recovery from serious illness, Debendranath Tagore declared his unbounded faith in homoeopathy as opposed to allopathy, which engaged in ‘mere patchwork’ in the body. Homoeopathy, for him, was the marker of a more rational, holistic therapeutics.Footnote 122 Rabindranath himself, it has been suggested, marvelled at the doctrine. Biographies of Pratap Chandra Majumdar sketched Rabindranath's efforts towards establishing a charitable dispensary in his zamindari estate of Silaidaha to promote free distribution of homoeopathic drugs.Footnote 123 The Western, unorthodox aspect of homoeopathy was repeatedly played up through similar discussions. Thus Vidyasagar, another pre-eminent reformist and promoter of homoeopathy, was recorded as having built up an enviable private collection by importing relevant homoeopathic books from Europe.Footnote 124 The progressive, cheap, emancipating doctrine was described as gaining a rapid foothold across the colonial world. It was carefully noted that ‘wherever ships go, there is spreading the knowledge of this doctrine and practice. From Rio Janeiro comes proof of its extension, from Labuan and the Spice Isles, from India, New Zealand and Australia, from the steppes of Tartary and from the coast of Africa . . .’.Footnote 125
Yet, while highlighting the Western, rational, radical, reformist core of the doctrine, the biographies were meticulous as well in discussing homoeopathy's inherent reverberation with the age-old traditional spirituality of India.Footnote 126 Ascription of a distinct religio-spiritual identity to homoeopathy itself is evident from the frequent resort to literary idioms with underlying Hindu resonance, like ‘high priest’, ‘Guru’ or preceptor, ‘sheeshya’ or disciple, ‘deekha’ or initiation, ‘bhakti’ or faith, and ‘conversion’, in depicting homoeopathic lives. Evidently propelled by the interests of medical commerce around a professedly Western science, and catering to the demands of a growing print market, many of the biographies, nonetheless, were titled as ‘Charitkatha’.Footnote 127 It is difficult to overlook the allusion to an entire body of Hindu ‘Charita’ literature from medieval and early modern times that was primarily religious and hagiographic in orientation. A profusion of titles such as ‘Sadhu Batakrishna Pal’, ‘Prabhu Hahnemann er Proti’, ‘Maharshi Hahnemann’, and ‘Maheshchandra Charitkatha’ reiterates the position that trade in the popular print market was very often ‘led by, rather than leading the popular taste’,Footnote 128 their presentation often slanted towards appealing to a mass readership. Further, we have already explored how the depiction of individual lives of physicians was woven around the recurrent typologies of piety, service, temperance, sacrifice, and charity. As the existing historiography illustrates, such ideas had begun acquiring a significant position in the Hindu nationalist lexicon since the late nineteenth century.Footnote 129 Some authors made more explicit connections between Hindu pasts and homoeopathy, claiming ‘homoeopathy is our own Vedic property which has recently come back to us dressed in Western attire. If we make it our own, with time it will be most efficient in maintaining the power, health and resources of independent “swaraj” India.’Footnote 130 Often expressed through English language texts, such processes of translation and vernacularizations of homoeopathy illustrate that the ‘vernacular’ is more about the ‘style and sensibility they stood for’, rather than any particular language.
Indeed, the fractured, hybrid, ambiguous identity of homoeopathy is captured most convincingly in the many lives of Hahnemann circulating in Bengali print since the 1860s. Biographies of Friedrich Christian Samuel Hahnemann collectively appropriated the distant figure of a German physician as that one, central ‘original’ figure around which Bengali homoeopaths coalesced as a distinct community. On the one hand, the vernacular lives of Hahnemann echoed the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western, heterodox discourse around the advanced nature of homoeopathic knowledge. Hahnemann, accordingly, was portrayed as a rational scientist and a critical scholar. Widely read and knowledgeable, he was written about as ‘[. . .] a thinker—and a very original one [. . .]’.Footnote 131 His logical bent of mind and his aptitude for questioning the established order of things were emphasized as markers of great intellect.Footnote 132 Depicted as an quintessential scientist engaged in laborious research, it was argued that ‘. . . his discovery was not the mere theory of a chamber philosopher indulging in idle reveries, but a plain induction from facts and experiments . . . after a series of trials covering many years of his life’.Footnote 133 He was credited with anticipating future directions in scientific research as biographers concluded that ‘. . . the Chemistry of our day is more and more approaching Hahnemann . . . the infinitely little is becoming infinitely potent and the bulk and energy of particles are seen to be in inverse ratio’.Footnote 134
On the other hand, an impressive array of biographies approached Hahnemann through the prism of spirituality and faith. He was portrayed as a sacred, mystic persona in possession of divine powers. Quoting the Hindu text Gita, these biographies drew analogies between Hahnemann and the scriptural Divine power that was reborn periodically to restore religion on the face of the earth.Footnote 135 Depicting him as a ‘chosen messiah’,Footnote 136 it was argued that Hahnemann was sent with the preordained mission to cure millions of ailing people with his talent, sacrifice and compassion.Footnote 137 He was addressed with epithets like ‘Sadhu’ or the hermit, ‘Guru’, ‘Maharshi’, and ‘Prabhu’ that closely stood for ‘spiritual head’.Footnote 138 Other than these subtle references, there were more explicit instances of comparisons with major deities. A poem titled ‘Deboddeshe’ (‘To the Divine’), published in the journal Hahnemann, for instance, compared Hahnemann with both Siva and Budhha.Footnote 139 Hinting at Hahnemann's experiments with different drugs on himself, the poet drew the analogy between him and Lord Siva, who according to Hindu mythology, had consumed poison in order to save the gods. His determination to overcome disease and human distress was shown to be analogous with Buddha's spiritual quest to defeat death. Analysing the dramatic effect of Hahnemann on the Bengalis, the biographies asserted that ‘he has shown the path to salvation from diseases, has liberated them from fear . . . has transformed drugs into sweets . . .’.Footnote 140 Comparing his discovery to a holy blessing, a poem titled ‘Hahnemann’ described homoeopathy's rising popularity in every household.Footnote 141 Faith in homoeopathy was coupled with a deep devotion towards Hahnemann in such households. An instance of the heightened literary exposition of such emotions can be found in the drama ‘Shantir Sandhan’ (‘In Search of Peace’) published in the journal Homoeopathy Paricharak.Footnote 142 It captured a scene where the hero, a homoeopathic physician, literally worshipped the image of Hahnemann with appropriate Hindu rituals. When confronted by his wife, the physician justified his act by enumerating the spiritually transformative influence on him caused by an exposure to Hahnemann's principles.
Finally, revealing a simultaneous sense of uneasiness about the cultural impact of homoeopathy on the Bengali language, these texts contribute to the historiography by assessing the translatability of science across cultures that focuses on asymmetries in language and power.Footnote 143 A discreet nationalist sensibility and awareness of imbalances in power is apparent in the current concern for a probable corrupting influence on language. While recognizing the ascendancy of homoeopathic texts, mostly in the form of biographies, in the vernacular print market, they discussed and debated the incorporation of a range of English words and terms (often with supposedly German roots) into the Bengali vocabulary including ‘homoeopathy’, ‘Organon’, ‘vital force’, ‘Hahnemann’, ‘drug-proving’, ‘potency’, ‘infinitesimal dose’, ‘chronic-disease’, ‘law of similars’, and the like. To some, such overabundance of scientific writing itself had a distinctly positive impact on the language as a whole in expanding its scope.Footnote 144 For others, prose littered with a profusion of foreign words was detrimental to the healthy growth of the vernacular languages. In their confusion over whether to incorporate the foreign terms as they were, or to find their vernacular equivalents, these texts reflected the popular version of similar anxieties that had been perturbing the official circles in previous decades.Footnote 145 The journal Hahnemann,Footnote 146 edited by Basanta Kumar Dutta, which published a number of biographies, also publicized a series of articles titled ‘Homoeopathic Bangla Sahitya’ (‘Homoeopathic Bengali Literature’) echoing these concerns. The author expressed sincere reservations against the arbitrary ways in which the bulk of the homoeopathic concepts were being translated in the biographies and beyond.Footnote 147 Lamenting the lack of any coherence or standardization in the various acts of adoption and translations, he pointed out that it was quite common for authors to use different Bengali words for a single English term, which was hardly helpful for the readers.Footnote 148 Such writings were considered deeply injurious to the cause of both homoeopathy and Bengali as a language.Footnote 149 To him, efforts at scientific translations, however necessary, ran the tragic consequence of generating a prose that was Bengali only in its form and alphabets. Such recurrent angst about the purity of language, coupled with the deliberate depiction of homoeopathic lives within (Hindu) nationalist tropes, reiterate ‘translation’ itself as a deeply constitutive process that shaped colonial medicine.
Conclusion
In our exploration of the writing and publication of an extensive repertoire of biographies around physicians practising homoeopathy in Bengal, we have refrained from using biographies merely as sources for other kinds of histories. Nor has the article attempted a biographic endeavour around any individual life. Rather, we have analysed the relevance of the genre of biography in relation to the colonial trajectories of a Western heterodox medicine. Even as the historiography studying the ‘new geographies of nineteenth-century science and medicine’ is expanding to explore various facets of the profusion of print culture around science, the place of popular medico-scientific biographies has hardly been explored, especially in South Asia.Footnote 150 Through an exploration of the myriad kinds of medical lives, this article has reiterated biography's vision in a significant democratization of science and medicine. Posing as a contextual, even complementary, text to actual works of science or medicine, the biographies upheld a certain egalitarian promise of a ‘republic of science’ reaching out even to the functionally literate. But the chimera of any democratic, universal concept of science somewhat dissolves as one unravels biography's role in the translation and cultural reconstitution of science across contexts. Indeed, lives of colonial ‘men of science’ can hardly be narrated without reference to local issues of power, language, identity, and nationalism. While this is not entirely novel in the existing scholarship on post-colonial science, yet the ambiguous refiguring of homoeopathy as a Hindu national science of Western origin further illustrates that the apparent ‘displacements’ and ‘enchantments’ of colonial science were in many cases self-conscious, deliberate, and deeply entwined with the dynamics, conventions, and interests, particularly of medical commerce and the popular print market.
Perhaps the larger point that the article has driven home is the relationship between the life stories and practices marginalized by the state or scientific authorities. In the absence of any substantial state records on homoeopathy's history in British India, this article identifies the systematic publication of biographies as a significant arena of assertion for a heterodox, family-based practice like homoeopathy. In so doing, it offers a glimpse into the complex relationship between texts, society, and the practices actively censured by the state that are often caught up within family, caste, kinship or sacred networks. Following Arjun Appadurai, the article has identified homoeopathic biographies as useful reminders of the possibility of ‘creation of documents and their aggregation into archives . . . outside the purview of the state’.Footnote 151 It is useful to remind ourselves that the very survival and availability of this plethora of texts, mostly in their now-obscure-yet-still-continuing entrepreneurial concerns, signify the power of such alternative archives as ‘an aspiration rather than a mere recollection’Footnote 152—as the ‘material site of a collective will to remember’.Footnote 153
Such traces of the resilience of unorthodox, marginalized practices also caution us against concluding any straightforward narrative of victimhood around these practices. We have been aware of their role in the ‘domains of politics and profiteering’ by underlining the role of the homoeopathic family-firms in relation to the biographies. In arguing that biographies are as much the story of the subjects as they are of the biographers and publishers themselves, the article has unravelled the intertwined trajectories of commerce, print capital, nationalist ideology, and medical knowledge with relation to homoeopathy in Bengal. Indeed, the nexus between leading Calcutta-based commercial families and biographies often entailed its own sets of exclusions and violence regarding what constituted ‘authentic’ medical knowledge. The mofussil as a space, for instance, was a frequent target of the biographies as they expressed recurrent anxieties about the possible inevitable distortions inflicted on pristine science beyond the urban enclave of Calcutta. Distinguishing between the urban and sub-urban practitioners of homoeopathy, it was feared that ‘the standard, good quality texts and physicians are never adequately appreciated beyond the capital (that is, Calcutta), as beyond it homoeopathy is practiced variously’.Footnote 154
Further, the network between the leading homoeopathic families, commerce, and life stories is instructive of the nature and relevance of ‘biography’ itself as a literary genre that was indulged in by sections of the educated bhadralok. A pervading concern in the scholarship on life histories in South Asia has been to analyse the kind of selfhood and individualism refracted through these texts.Footnote 155 Scholars have tried to assess if the sense of selfhood, of personal identity and agency, is muted and subsumed within larger social and cultural domains. A related interest has been to search for the ‘interiorised private self’ as a signifier for a modern bourgeois identity.Footnote 156 So what can be concluded of the selves captured in this distinct corpus of medico-scientific biographies? The contours of an autonomous, individual self was most evidently blurred in the context of the homoeopathic lives, insofar as there were persistent invocations of similar lives within a single text. The readers were often reminded of the futility of reading these lives in isolation. Thus, a biography of Rajendralal Dutta stated, ‘as the works of Rajendra Dutt as a healer were so inseparably connected with those of the late Dr Mahendralal Sircar, it would not I hope tire the patience of our audience if I would relate how Dr Sircar's conversion was brought about’.Footnote 157 Framed not within any explicit singular network of caste or kinship, these lives were, nonetheless, written and studied within a carefully cultivated sense of a collective around the leading homoeopathic families as well as (Hindu) nationalistic sensibility. They exemplify the processes of construal of communities with intersecting ideologies of religion, family or kinship to sustain apparently modern, secular, scientific doctrines claiming Western origins. The emplacement of the biographic individuals within a shared sense of community is palpable: the subjects were variously referred to as the ‘leader of the movement’, ‘conversion’ narratives were glorified, while the death of some were lamented as a ‘loss for the spiritual mission of homeopathy’. Such creation of communitarian aspiration was evident when biographies were suggestively titled as accounts of the ‘first homoeopathic missionary in India’ and frequent appeals were sent out for ‘more diligent workers’ and those ‘devoted to the cause of homoeopathy’. Moreover, the bourgeois distinctions between any defined sense of ‘private’ and ‘public’ too stand problematized in these texts, as the rhetoric of family as well as the perceived familial emotions of intimacy, affect, paternal love, and the like were transposed onto the public domains of enterprise and medical culture. Virtually nothing was conveyed of the emotional-psychological-sexual tensions of these protagonists beyond their professional lives. In defiance of conforming to any exalted, Western ideal of narrating an autonomous modern self, the homoeopathic biographies were not only in conversation with other colonial life histories, but homoeopathy itself was made into a uniquely colonial modern experience.
Finally, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were extensive deliberations on the status of biography in recovering and recording the past. Acclaimed as a useful form of literary exercise that colonial societies ought to nurture, biography was widely recognized as one of the most effective forms of writing history. Participating actively in the ‘enormous public enthusiasm for history’, the physician-biographers, nonetheless, posed a critique to the emerging Western rationalist-positivist notion of ‘scientific’ history. Asserting biography-writing and history-writing as analogous processes, these authors registered their emphatic differences with regard to the plausibility of narrating any objective biographic pasts.
