In this episode of Medicine and the Healing Arts, hosts Profs. Michael Stanley-Baker and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim speak with Prof. Projit Bihari Mukharji about Ayurveda, colonialism, race science and the making of modern medical knowledge in South Asia.
Prof. Mukharji is a historian of science and medicine whose work explores how medical traditions are shaped through encounters between people, institutions, technologies, political movements and forms of knowledge. In the conversation, he reflects on his own intellectual trajectory, from growing up in West Bengal and studying in India, to working with David Arnold at SOAS, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and returning to India to join Ashoka University.
Together, Michael, Ronit and Projit discuss how we might think about traditional medicine beyond simple oppositions between “modern” and “traditional”, or “Western” and “non-Western”. They explore Ayurveda not as a fixed inheritance from the past, but as a living and changing field shaped by print culture, markets, practitioners, bottles, pocket watches, stethoscopes and other small technologies.
The episode also looks at Projit’s idea of “braided sciences”: a way of understanding medical knowledge as something made through the creative weaving together of different strands, rather than through the meeting of two separate and unchanging systems. From Ayurvedic pulse-taking to medicated hair oil bottles travelling from Calcutta to Philadelphia, the conversation asks how objects can transform the ways bodies, medicines and healers are understood.
In the second half of the episode, the discussion turns to race science, nationalism, genetics and the politics of remembering and forgetting. Projit reflects on his book Brown Skins, White Coats, the afterlives of colonial categories, and the ways scientific knowledge can become entangled with national identity, exclusion and claims about who belongs.
At the heart of the episode is a question that runs throughout the series: how can the history of medicine help us think more carefully about knowledge, power, healing and the many ways human beings have understood the body?
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Links and resources:
Prof. Projit Mukharji:https://hss.sas.upenn.edu/people/projit-bihari-mukharji
Prof. Projit Mukharji’s blog:https://web.sas.upenn.edu/mukharji/
Projit Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66:https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo183632345.html
Projit Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences:https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo23996931.html
Projit Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine:https://anthempress.com/books/nationalizing-the-body-hb
Actor-Network Theory:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%e2%80%93network_theory
Subaltern:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaltern_(postcolonialism)
Prof. David Arnold:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/d_arnold/
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India:https://www.ucpress.edu/books/colonizing-the-body/paper
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks :https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313127/black-skin-white-masks-by-fanon-frantz/9780241396667
Saidiya Hartman - critical fabulation:https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/298/4088
India’s Ministry of AYUSH:https://ayush.gov.in/
Prof. Judith Farquhar:https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/directory/Judith-B-Farquhar
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