Doctoring Traditions begins with a fascinating anecdote of material culture, when Mukharji finds a small medicine bottle with a Bengali-language label in his perambulations through a Philadelphia flea market. The label suggested that the medicine bottle, which likely dated back to the 1890s, had been sold by a well-known Calcutta-based Ayurvedic firm, Chandra Kishore Sen, and Sons. For Mukharji, the bottle underscored the transnational nature of modern Ayurveda, but it is also a fitting entry point into a book that centers on the materialities of everyday practice. Doctoring Traditions is situated against a rich, interdisciplinary body of work on Ayurveda. As Mukharji points out, this scholarship has examined the intellectual/practical pasts of Ayurveda in ancient and medieval India, the response of Ayurveda to both colonialism and the growing dominance of biomedicine, how Ayurveda experienced profes-sionalization in the nineteenth century, and how it has become part of a transnational network of ideas, actors, and practices in the twenty-first century. His explicit aim is to set up a more vibrant, nuanced conversation between Ayurveda and biomedicine than in the existing literature, and to frame Ayurveda in colonial Bengal as a dynamic system, absorbing and adapting to ideas and technologies.
展开▼
