Recipes for Immortality

Abstract

Abstract This book illuminates the present success of traditional doctors by examining the ways that siddha medical practitioners in Tamil south India have won the trust and patronage of patients. While biomedicine might alleviate a patient’s physical distress, siddha doctors offer their clientele much more: affiliation to a timeless and pure community, the fantasy of a Tamil utopia, and even the prospect of immortality. They speak of a golden age of Tamil civilization and of traditional medicine, drawing on broader revivalist formulations of a pure and ancient Tamil community. This work illuminates the lives, vocations, and aspirations of these traditional doctors, documenting the challenges they face in the modern world. It demonstrates that medical authority is based not only on physical effectiveness, but also on imaginative processes that relate to personal and social identities; conceptions of history, secrecy, and loss; and utopian promise. Drawing from ethnographic data; premodern Tamil texts on medicine, alchemy, and yoga; government archival resources; college textbooks; and popular literature on siddha medicine and on the siddhar yogis, this book presents a study of a traditional system of knowledge that serves the medical needs of millions of Indians. It is more than a local study, however, analyzing the political and religious dimensions of medical discourse and authority in our modern world.

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