Book Reviews – Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, Chicago

Projit Bihari Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies and Braided Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, xii+374 pages, price not stated.

Much before the Chopra Report (viz. Report of the Committee on Indigenous Systems of Medicine, authored under the supervision of Ram Nath Chopra in 1948), recommended the creation of a ‘unified system (of healing) for the country’, the ‘indigenous’ practitioners of India had already been ‘braiding’ particular strands of ‘Western’ and ‘Indic’ sciences in their own unique ways. In this regard the present monograph, Doctoring Traditions by ProjitBihari Mukharji, is an interesting in-depth analysis of how particular strings of broadly Ayurvedic and broadly ‘Western’ scientific knowledges were pulled together and ‘braided’ around technological objects in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal, thereby leading to the emergence of ‘modern’ Ayurveda.