Bazaari-Subaltern Unani Medical Public Sphere: Blanket Binaries, Disjunctions, Implications and the Making of Alternative Texts and Archives Convivially

The essay deals with the bazaari-subaltern unani medical practices, demonstrating how ccontrary to the predominant view within the studies of South Asian medical practices, unani has been a dispersed and discursive terrain since the beginning with simultaneous presence of the two broad paradoxical spheres of unani practices, such as textual unani on the one hand, and bazaari-subaltern unani on the other in different geographical, social, and cultural locales. Critically examining the recent endeavour of a group of historians to recover “the realm of subaltern therapeutics”, this essay, however, argues that the relationship between the textual unani and bazaari-subaltern Unani medical practices cannot be comprehended properly through a blanket totalising elite-subaltern binary framework. Moreover, the concept of subaltern itself is to be re-examined contextually, particularly to account for the ways in which a textual tradition such as unani itself can be rendered to a state of subalternaity particularly in post-colonial situation. The essay examines the ways in which bazaari-subaltern unani medical public sphere remained outside the textual unani and stateist medical imaginations and control, therefore, was/is declared inauthentic for its practitioners were/are considered untrained, and yet it catered the medical requirements of vast masses during the colonial and post-colonial periods. Bazaari unani medical practices were/are not confined literally only to bazaar, but found in homes and other social locales such as in print medium as well. The essay outlines the nuances of this simultaneity of the two paradoxical spheres with the focus on the critical prevalence of bazaari-subaltern medicine and therapeutics, and the ways in which they can produce their own text without being immanently well-ordered, fixed and complete but ever evolving. Illustrative cases are drawn from provinces of Bihar, Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Delhi, United Provinces.