SAMHiTA-Bharat ki Soch Public Lecture Series

Diurnal Medicine: The Rajballabhiya Drabyaguna and the Making of a Regional Medical Tradition in Bengal, 18th to 20th Centuries
 

Speaker: Dr. Projit Bihari Mukharji, Professor of History, Ashoka University, recipient of the Pfizer Award, Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from National Science Foundation of the USA, and the Social Science & Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is the author of Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print, and Daktari Medicine (2009); and Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920-66 (2022).

Chair: Dr. Burton Cleetus, Centre for Historical Studies, JNU

The Sanskrit Dravyaguna genre, which developed from earlier Nighantu texts, catalogued medically significant substances (dravya) along with their uses. Focusing on Bengal, the lecture traces the transition from a widely used Dravyaguna attributed to the 11th-century physician Chakrapanidatta to an 18th-century work ascribed to Raja Rajballabh, a Baidya courtier in the court of Bengal’s post Mughal Nawabs. By tracking the evolution of this text, particularly through the early print editions, the lecture revisits the dynamics of the transition from manuscript to print in the context of medical knowledge.

Second lecture of the series on “Health, Wellness and Nutrition”, organised by IIC- International Research Division and Bharat ki Soch Foundation