In-Disciplining Jwarasur: The Folk/Classical Divide and Transmateriality of Fevers in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

Extant scholarship on Jwarasur [the Fever-Demon] sees him as a colonial-era invention tied to the exigencies of colonial rule. Jwarasur is held to belong exclusively to the domain of Bengali ‘folk medicine’ rather than ‘classical Ayurveda’. We challenge both these contentions and draw four inter-related inferences. First, we posit that Jwarasur was not alien to classical Ayurvedic medicine. Second, we claim that Jwarasur was significant to the way Ayurvedic physicians negotiated fever. Third, we trace the invention of the folk/classical divide under colonial modernity. Finally, we posit that the divide inspired new reading strategies through which modernising Ayurvedists sought to expunge the transmateriality of Jwarasur. Jwarasur, we find, was constantly re-embedded into multiple heterogeneous traditions of medical and religio-moral practice. These diverse embeddings actively militate against the existence of any corpuscular ‘systems’ called ‘folk’ or ‘classical’ medicine. Rather Jwarasur is a common figure that networks a number of heterogeneous, amorphous domains. The extant disciplinary protocols of History, Anthropology, etc., however, are blind to this networked past and hence keep alive the colonial distinctions of ‘folk’ and ‘classical’. Our critical history contrapuntally, seeks to restore the promiscuity of these corpuscular fields and historicise the divisions that distinguish them.

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