Instant Download Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family Market and Homoeopathy Shinjini Das PDF All Chapter

Download and Read online, DOWNLOAD EBOOK, [PDF EBOOK EPUB ], Ebooks
download, Read Ebook EPUB/KINDE, Download Book Format PDF
Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family

Market and Homoeopathy Shinjini Das
OR CLICK LINK
https://textbookfull.com/product/vernacular-
medicine-in-colonial-india-family-market-and-
homoeopathy-shinjini-das/
Read with Our Free App Audiobook Free Format PFD EBook, Ebooks dowload PDF
with Andible trial, Real book, online, KINDLE , Download[PDF] and Read and Read
Read book Format PDF Ebook, Dowload online, Read book Format PDF Ebook,
[PDF] and Real ONLINE Dowload [PDF] and Real ONLINE
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in

Colonial Korea Sungyun Lim
https://textbookfull.com/product/rules-of-the-house-family-law-
and-domestic-disputes-in-colonial-korea-sungyun-lim/
Teaching AIDS The Cultural Politics of HIV Disease in

India Dilip K. Das
https://textbookfull.com/product/teaching-aids-the-cultural-
politics-of-hiv-disease-in-india-dilip-k-das/
Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and

Politics 1st Edition Papia Sengupta (Auth.)
https://textbookfull.com/product/language-as-identity-in-
colonial-india-policies-and-politics-1st-edition-papia-sengupta-
auth/
The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in

Colonial India 1st Edition Chandak Sengoopta
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-rays-before-satyajit-
creativity-and-modernity-in-colonial-india-1st-edition-chandak-
sengoopta/
Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India
Formation of a Community through Cultural Practice
Sharmistha Saha
https://textbookfull.com/product/theatre-and-national-identity-
in-colonial-india-formation-of-a-community-through-cultural-
practice-sharmistha-saha/
Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India The

Hijra c 1850 1900 1st Edition Jessica Hinchy
https://textbookfull.com/product/governing-gender-and-sexuality-
in-colonial-india-the-hijra-c-1850-1900-1st-edition-jessica-
hinchy/
McWhinney's textbook of family medicine 4th Edition

Freeman
https://textbookfull.com/product/mcwhinneys-textbook-of-family-
medicine-4th-edition-freeman/
CURRENT Diagnosis & Treatment in Family Medicine 5th

Edition Jeannette E. South-Paul
https://textbookfull.com/product/current-diagnosis-treatment-in-
family-medicine-5th-edition-jeannette-e-south-paul/
Outside the Lettered City Cinema Modernity and the

Public Sphere in Late Colonial India 1st Edition
Manishita Dass
https://textbookfull.com/product/outside-the-lettered-city-
cinema-modernity-and-the-public-sphere-in-late-colonial-
india-1st-edition-manishita-dass/
Note on Translation and Transliteration
All translations from Bengali are mine unless otherwise noted.

I have devised and followed my own code of transliteration, keeping in
mind that many of the non-English terms mentioned here appear in at
least three, if not more, South Asian languages: Bengali, Hindi and
Sanskrit. To mark their specificities in words, texts and names of people
and places, I have abided by the following general rules:
1. Diacritics have not been used.
2. Non-English terms are italicised and put in quotes when they appear
for the first time. Also, a translation is provided following their usage in
the main text, following the first appearance. If it is a significant
historiographic concept, it is footnoted in its first usage.
3. Names of non-English monographs and articles are translated and
provided in the text when they appear first. They are provided in
parentheses in the footnote when they only appear in the latter.
Further, the translations of non-English monographs are attached
with the Bibliography at the end.
4. The final ‘a’ has been done away with while transliterating Bengali
terms, unless it is pronounced; hence, Brihat, Samaj, Paribar and
Kayastha, Vaisya, Amiya. However, for widely prevalent terms like
ayurveda I have retained the spelling that is used in standard
historiography.
5. In general, for the Bengali terms I have followed the standard norms of
Sanskrit transliteration and not their phonetic use in Bengali. Thus,
Paricharak and not Poricharok, Svasthya and not Swastha, Sahitya
and not Sahityo. An exception is made in the use of the term ‘swade-
shi’ and the widely prevalent translation has been retained.
6. For the most part, I have used ‘b’ instead of ‘v’ while transliterating
Bengali terms; hence Baidya, Bhishak and Byabshayee.
7. In transliterating the names of books that are written in Sanskrit, I have
followed the standard rules of Sanskrit transliteration. Hence, Purana,
Mahabharata and Ramayana.
xiv
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. City, University of London, on 04 Jan 2020 at 07:09:50, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108354905.001
Introduction: ‘A Growing Scandal under
British Rule’
Families, Market and the Vernacular
Tucked away in a corner of one of the busiest roads of north Calcutta, and
distinguished by its colonial-style architecture, stands a rather grand, old,
porticoed building. The area, the erstwhile Baithakkhana Bazar in
BowBazaar, is now part of the more recently christened Bipin Behary
Ganguly Street near Sealdah station. For over a century, this locality has
been a traditional hub for myriad commercial activities in the city. Among
the jostling crowd of banks, mercantile offices and rows of jewellery
shops, the building in question, the headquarters of the Hahnemann
Publishing Company (HAPCO), is remarkable for the kind of pharma-
ceutical commerce it has housed without interruption since the early
1910s. HAPCO is one of the biggest dealers, manufacturers and publish-
ers of homoeopathic medicine in India since the early years of the twen-
tieth century. Its location would not, perhaps, seem strikingly unusual if
one recognises the building next door as the premises of Basumati Sahitya
Mandir, publishers of the iconic newspaper and magazine Basumati.
Established in 1881 at Beadon street, Basumati shifted its base to
Bowbazar in the early twentieth century. Basumati regularly carried
advertisements for the HAPCO.
Climbing up the narrow, musty staircase of HAPCO, one is ushered
into a busy world of medics, booksellers, compounders and clerks, work-
ing together in a massive pillared hall decorated with an impressive
number of large, greying portraits of European physicians. The final
preparation and large-scale packaging of drugs take place in several
wings of the building, while across-the-counter sale of drugs and publica-
tions is carried out in others. Heavy cartons of medicine are continuously
being sent out for shipment across the country. One is immediately struck
by the old-world charm of the place, juxtaposed with the inevitable
inflections of modernity in the form of computers, huge glass cabinets
and other present-day instruments. Once permitted into the inner quar-
ters of the building, one cannot but note its original design as a typically
opulent residence of Old Calcutta, with rooms arranged along long
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 146.196.44.109, on 07 Jun 2020 at 05:28:38, subject to the Cambridge Core
2 ‘A Growing Scandal under British Rule’
verandas, across three storeys and around a quadrangular, cobbled court-

yard at the centre. The top floor houses the office of the current proprie-
tor, Dr Durga Shankar Bhar, grandson of HAPCO’s founder Prafulla
Chandra Bhar and the custodian, among other things, of a substantial
private collection of early twentieth-century publications by the firm,
primarily in the Bengali language. Arranged systematically but with
restricted access for visitors, the collection, for Dr Bhar, is a precious
documentation at once of his own family and the history of modern
science in Bengal. The interior of the building soon begins to generate a
sense of the ways in which cultivation of a vernacular scientific ethos is
tied to practices of Bengali commerce. Using homoeopathy as a point of
departure, this book explores how medicine, family and markets were
interconnected in colonial Bengal.
Homoeopathy, a western medical project originating in eighteenth-
century Germany, was reconstituted as vernacular medicine in British
Bengal. Conceptualised in opposition to the prevalent notions of ‘ortho-
dox’ medicine, homoeopathy was a distinct therapeutic ideology popu-
larised since the 1790s in Germany by the reputed physician Friedrich
Christian Samuel Hahnemann of Saxony (1755–1843), popularly known
as Hahnemann. Put simply, homoeopathy was a novel German thera-
peutic paradigm that propounded the Law of Similars expressed in the
Latin phrase Similia Similibus Curantur (‘like cures like’). According to
this Law, only those substances could be the cure for any disease, which
were capable of producing a similar set of symptoms in a healthy person.
Further, for the medications to be most effective, they needed to be
administered in miniscule or infinitesimal doses. Borrowing from extant
German ideas of geist – ‘spirit’ or vitalism – Hahnemann also developed
the theory of ‘vital force’, which he defined as ‘life itself’. Illness was
caused by the disruption of the immaterial, spirit-like ‘vital force’ that
animated the human body. How did homoeopathy, so distinctive a phi-
losophy of medicine, endure as a credible genre of scientific medicine
among large sections of an alien society in India, despite opposition from
the British colonial regime? In mapping the vernacularisation of a western
heterodoxy, I analyse the disparate ways in which the historical under-
standing of homoeopathy and family informed one another in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Bengal.
Along with phrenology, magnetism, mesmerism, herbalism, hydropa-
thy, naturopathy and chiropractic, homoeopathy was considered a
European medical and scientific heterodoxy. The colonial trajectories of
these so-called heterodoxies have mostly remained underexplored in
histories of the British Empire. So too have their relationships with the
intellectual traditions, ideologies and aspirations of the colonised.
‘A Growing Scandal under British Rule’ 3
Relatively little is known about the colonial careers of these nineteenth-

century, sectarian, medico-scientific doctrines, whose status was hotly
debated in Europe itself.1 Of all the so-called European heterodoxies,
homoeopathy (along with naturopathy) is now officially recognised as one
among the significant ‘indigenous’ medical systems of India, command-
ing the second largest government-supported infrastructure after modern
biomedicine. Today, along with Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy,
Unani and Siddha, Homoeopathy is part of the Department of AYUSH
set up by the government of India in 2003 to oversee the modernisation
and development of various forms of ‘indigenous medicine’.
In addition to being the initial launching ground for colonial rule in
India, Bengal witnessed the early advent of a vibrant and enduring print
market around the 1850s. The second city of empire for over a hundred
years, until 1911, and a growing metropolis of millions, Calcutta wit-
nessed the foundation of the very first western-style Medical College in
South Asia. Other early institutions were also established here, such as
the Calcutta Medical Physical Society, and the short-lived Native
Medical Institution, the latter dedicated primarily to the study of tradi-
tional medicine. Leading historians of colonial public health in India
have discussed Bengal’s importance as the testing ground for many
pioneering imperial medical policies and experiments, including dissec-
tion and sanitary governance.2 A recent turn in studying the history of
medicine through vernacular sources has established Bengal as a crucial
region for interactions between colonial state medicine, and medicine
practised by non-government (including indigenous) actors.3 It is,
therefore, a particularly suitable location for the study of colonising
1
There are a few exceptions where practices such as mesmerism, naturopathy or Christian
Science have been studied in the context of colonial South Asia. For an account of
mesmerism in British India, see Alison Winter, ‘Colonizing Sensations in Victorian
India’ in Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 187–212; and Waltraud Ernst, ‘Colonial Psychiatry, Magic
and Religion: The Case of Mesmerism in British India’, History of Psychiatry, 15, 1 (2004),
57–68. For accounts of naturopathy and Christian healing, respectively, see Joseph Alter,
Gandhi’s Body: Sex, Diet and Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 55–82; and David Hardiman, ‘A Subaltern Christianity:
Faith Healing in Southern Gujrat’ in David Hardiman and Projit Bihari Mukharji (eds.),
Medical Marginality in South Asia: Situating Subaltern Therapeutics (Abingdon: Routledge,
2012), pp. 126–51.
2
See David Arnold, Colonising the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-
Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Mark Harrison, Public
Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
3
Projit Bihari Mukharji, Nationalising the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari
Medicine (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009); Ishita Pande, Medicine, Race
and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire (London and New York: Routledge,
2010).
aspects of western medicine, as well as resistance to it. Existing articles

on the history of homoeopathy in the Indian subcontinent have
acknowledged the early advent, sustained practice and deeply
entrenched social ties of homoeopathy in Bengal.4 Although the earliest
known instance of homoeopathic practice in India is believed to be the
Transylvanian physician Honigberger’s treatment of Raja Ranjit Singh
in Punjab in the 1830s,5 previous authors have unequivocally described
Bengal as the ‘domicile for homoeopathy’ in the nineteenth century,
suggesting also that ‘from Bengal homoeopathy spread up the Ganges
valley’.6 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Calcutta was
also the home to a number of non-British, European practitioners of
homoeopathy. The presence of these practitioners gave a fillip to the
practice of homoeopathy in the region, foremost among them Drs
Berigny and Tonerre of French origin, Dr Salzer of Vienna and the
Transylvanian Dr Honigberger, who moved to Calcutta for some years
(after attending Ranjit Singh in Punjab).7 Bengal remained at the heart
of transactions of homoeopathic ideas, texts and people, not only
between India and Europe but also between different regions of India.
The arrival of homoeopathy in Bengal, as elsewhere in India, is inex-
tricably related to the colonial expansion of the British Empire since the
early nineteenth century. The earliest promoters of homoeopathy were
the English missionaries8 or the ‘amateurs, in the civil and military
services’ of the colonial state.9 The short-lived Calcutta Native
Homoeopathic Hospital of the 1850s furnishes us with tangible evidence
for the British amateur and missionary interests in the early propagation
of homoeopathy.10 Established by Major General Sir J. H. Littler, the
4
S. M. Bhardwaj, ‘Homoeopathy in India’ in Giri Raj Gupta (ed.), The Social and Cultural
Context of Medicine in India (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1981), pp. 31–54; and David
Arnold and Sumit Sarkar, ‘In Search of Rational Remedies: Homoeopathy in
Nineteenth-century Bengal’ in Waltraud Ernst (ed.), Plural Medicine, Tradition and
Modernity, 1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–1.
5
J. M. Honigberger, though not a committed homoeopath, is said to have treated Raja
Ranjit Singh, the ruler of Punjab, with homoeopathy shortly before his death in 1839. For
an account of Honigberger’s encounters with Ranjit Singh and the latter’s treatment, see
S. M. Bhardwaj, ‘Homoeopathy in India’, pp. 34–6.
6
S. M. Bhardwaj, ‘Homoeopathy in India’, pp. 50–1. Also see Gary J. Hausman, ‘Making
Medicine Indigenous: Homoeopathy in South India’, Social History of Medicine, 15, 2
(2002), 306.
7
S. M. Bhardwaj, ‘Homoeopathy in India’, pp. 36–7.
8
Instances of Dr Mullens of the London Missionary Society distributing cheap homoeo-
pathic remedies in Bhowanipore can be found in Sarat Chandra Ghose, Life of Dr.
Mahendralal Sircar, 2nd edition (Calcutta: Hahnemann Publishing Company, 1935),
pp. 32–3.
9
F. C. Skipwith, ‘Homoeopathy and Its Introduction into India’, Calcutta Review, 17
(1852), 52.
10
S. M. Bhardwaj, ‘Homoeopathy in India’, p. 33.
hospital was run by English and European doctors. Early Indian patrons
of homoeopathy in other parts of India as well, such as the Raja of Tanjore
who set up a homoeopathic hospital in the 1840s, did so under the
direction and supervision of English physicians. The Tanjore hospital
was built under the supervision of a retired English surgeon from Madras,
Samuel Brooking.11 English, moreover, provided vital linguistic media-
tion in accessing the various currents of European homoeopathic
thoughts for the literate Bengali ‘bhadralok’ in the nineteenth century.12
Yet, the historical trajectory of homoeopathy is distinct from the state-
imposed, dominant medical practices variously and collectively referred
to as ‘western medicine’, ‘imperial medicine’, ‘colonial medicine’, ‘allo-
pathy’ or ‘state medicine’. Especially in the nineteenth century, homoeo-
pathy did not enjoy straightforward legislative patronage, nor overt
infrastructural support from the colonial state. A series of regional
Medical Registration Acts passed in the 1910s fundamentally questioned
the legal status of practitioners of all kinds of non-official medicine. But
even prior to these legislations, since the mid-nineteenth century, the
state-endorsed apparatus of ‘western’ medicine – including the pioneer-
ing Calcutta Medical College, as well as the British Indian Medical
Service – were meticulous in excluding practitioners associated with
homoeopathy from their ranks. Although it was not an immediate bene-
ficiary of state support, the history of homoeopathy in India remained
deeply entangled with the priorities and prejudices of the colonial state.
Homoeopathy featured recurrently in bureaucratic correspondence on
the definitions and scope of ‘legitimate’ and ‘scientific’ medicine. It
figured invariably in colonial anxieties related to medical malpractice,
particularly in discussions of ‘quackery’ or ‘corruption’ and was
11
Ibid.
12
The term bhadralok, literally meaning ‘respectable people’, is a generic term widely used
in Bengal to refer to the English-educated, though not necessarily affluent, middling to
upper stratum of society. The historical research on the category bhadralok has been
immense. Works by S. N. Mukherjee and John McGuire suggest that the term bhadralok
referred both to a class of aristocratic, landed Bengali Hindus and to those of humbler
origins. It included men who ‘rose from poverty to wealth’ in business and occupations
involving shipping, indigo plantations and so on, as well as large shopkeepers, retail
businessmen and workers in government and commercial houses, teachers, native doc-
tors, journalists and writers. See, for instance, S. N. Mukherjee, Calcutta: Essays in Urban
History (Calcutta: Subarnarekha, 1993); and John McGuire, The Making of Colonial
Mind: A Quantitative Study of the Bhadralok in Calcutta, 1875–1885 (Canberra:
Australian National University, 1983). Also see Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu
Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), pp. 3–13. Referring primarily to the salaried section of this class, Partha
Chatterjee calls the bhadralok the mediators of nationalist ideologies and politics. See
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 35–75.
frequently condemned as a ‘growing scandal’ proliferating within the

enlightened British imperial rule.
Despite such anxieties, the relationship between homoeopathy and the
colonial state was not one of straightforward governmental denunciation.
It was, instead, a more dynamic history of negotiations, derivations and
manipulations. Despite the colonial state, homoeopathy endured as a
credible genre of ‘scientific medicine’ among large sections of Bengali
literate society since the mid-nineteenth century.13 Throughout the long
nineteenth century, and across Indian society, a plethora of cultural
practices proliferated in the name of homoeopathy. These included the
consumption of infinitely diluted sweet potions, debating theories of
vitalism, translating and reading key German texts, ingesting and experi-
menting with local vegetation in the hope of preparing home-made drugs,
and observing ritualistic codes of moral regimentation in daily life. I map
the paradoxical production and dissemination of homoeopathy by large
sections of the intelligentsia as an unorthodox European science, pecu-
liarly suited to Indian culture, tradition and constitution. Indeed, homo-
eopathy was simultaneously heralded by different social groups as a
western, rational, progressive science, as well as a faith-based, indigenous
spiritual practice; often accused of quackery, and yet upheld as a genre of
radical and unorthodox cure; valorised as a symbol of the exotic, and at
the same time embraced as a marker of the accessible, everyday and
intimate. Because of this uniquely liminal and indeterminate aura, homo-
eopathy thrived as a ubiquitous ingredient of modernity in colonial and
post-colonial India. Recent ethnographic research by Stefan Ecks on drug
consumption in post-globalisation Calcutta reconfirms homoeopathy’s
liminal identity, caught between being simultaneously hypermodern and
spiritual.14
But how does one write the history of such a liminal category? And how
does homoeopathy lend a useful lens through which to study the institu-
tion of colonial family? It is impossible to retrace homoeopathy’s South
Asian trajectory without being sensitive to the question of the colonial
archive. Homoeopathic medicine’s intimate entanglement with the insti-
tution of ‘family’ in Bengal unfolded before me through a close reading of
the (un)available sources. From the official state archives, I could only get
fragmented, disorderly, yet suggestive glimpses of homoeopathy’s
13
For a historiographic overview of the complex relation between history of medicine and
history of science, which throws light on the evolving understanding and connotations of
‘science’ with regard to ‘medicine’, see John Harley Warner, ‘History of Science and
Sciences of Medicine’, Osiris, 10 (1995), 164–93.
14
Stefan Ecks, Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (New York University
Press, 2013), p. 110, 194.
thriving sociocultural past. In the state sources, homoeopathy comes into

focus and fades out of them mostly through allegations of rampant mal-
practice and the consequent governmental concerns of controlling, poli-
cing and regulating. Having lost the trail of many interesting archival
clues in state repositories, I was reminded of what has been recently
described as ‘archival aporia’ in reference to the relation between the
colonial archive, and slippery or uncomfortable categories, such as
sexuality.15 Following conceptualisation of the colonial archives as ‘fleet-
ing configurations of epistemological and political anxieties rather than
sites of pure erasure or misrepresentations’, the elision of homoeopathy
from state archives has been read ‘along the grain’.16 In regarding the
archive exclusively ‘not as a space of knowledge retrieval but (also) as that
of knowledge production’, I note the indifferent, ambivalent, hesitant and
shifting attitude of the state towards homoeopathy over the years.17
It is no surprise, then, that in my pursuit of the cultural history of a
category that the state archive largely occludes, I was compelled to trace the
‘creation of documents and their aggregation into archives as a part of
everyday life outside the purview of the state’, as suggested by Arjun
Appadurai.18 Since most nineteenth-century sources on Bengali homoeo-
pathy could be traced back to a handful of Bengali publishing houses, by
concentrating on them, I was able to uncover an extremely rich repository
of sources retained by a range of north Calcutta-based commercial houses
deeply involved in the business of homoeopathy. While some have ceased
to operate (such as Berigny and Company, M. Bhattacharya and Company
and B. K. Pal and Company), a handful of these, particularly the
Hahnemann Publishing Company and Majumdar’s Homoeopathic
Pharmacy, which now operates as a drug-chain named J. N. M. Homoeo
Sadan, are still functional. These firms maintain a (mostly disorderly)
collection of their published resources. Interviewing the present descen-
dants-cum-owners of these commercial houses proved rewarding. Even the
current descendants of the erstwhile concerns like M. Bhattacharya and
Company, which was sold off as recently as 2009 to corporate giant
Emami, could contribute generously to my research by sharing anecdotes,
memories and publications of their former ‘family business’. Together,
they revealed a whole world of family archives: a network of north
15
Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 1–3.
16
Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 1–17.
17
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance’, Archival Science, 2, 1–2
(2002), 87.
18
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Archive and Aspiration’ in Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (eds.),
Information Is Alive (Rotterdam: V2 Publishing/NAI Publishers, 2003), p. 16.
Calcutta-based Bengali homoeopathic entrepreneurs in conversation as

much with the depths of Bengali ‘mofussil’, the interiors of urban middle-
class domesticity, as with European medico-scientific journals.19 More than
performing an ‘extractive function’, such unique archival spaces appeared as
‘ethnographic sites’ that fundamentally shaped my research.20 The very
survival and availability of a plethora of materials signify the power of such
familial archives as ‘an aspiration rather than a recollection’21 – as the
‘material site of a collective will to remember’.22 The vital leads provided
by the family archives were then systematically followed up, and
complemented with research at the more predictable vernacular and
English language repositories in Kolkata and in London. Apart from the
relatively ‘respectable’ English or Bengali language health journals, there was
a vast repertoire of manuals and cheap tracts, even of the ‘Battala’ genre, that
discussed homoeopathy and indicated its wide dissemination.23
These different kinds of texts, especially those published by the familial
firms, imagined an idealised social constituency for Bengali homoeopa-
thy. The desired social base was chiefly the middle to upper class, Hindu,
primarily urban, literate classes, including women. While highlighting
homoeopathy’s urban stronghold, publications, particularly in the form
of advertisements, also illustrated its reach beyond the bigger cities of
Calcutta, Dacca, Chattagram or Patna. Indeed, advertisements by lead-
ing family firms often insisted on a large-scale circulation of drugs and
texts into the depths of rural Bengal. Numerous villages and especially
mofussil locations feature in urban discussions as spaces in need of homo-
eopathic benevolence, and where homoeopathy was in high demand.
Places like Bankipore, Khagra, Murshidabad, Bhagolpur, Burdwan,
Ranaghat, Munger and others surfaced regularly in advertisements, indi-
cating a robust circulation of homoeopathy in households and dispen-
saries beyond the urban enclaves. By the early years of the twentieth
19
The term mofussil originates from the Urdu (‘mufassil’, variant of ‘mufassal’, meaning
‘divided’). In Indian historiography, it is widely used as a term relating to the suburban
areas. It broadly referred to the regions of British India outside the three East India
Company capitals of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras; hence, parts of a country outside an
urban centre. It is believed to sometimes carry a negative resonance.
20
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Art of Governance’, p. 87.
21
Arjun Appadurai, ‘Archive and Aspiration’, p. 16. 22 Ibid., p. 17.
23
Battala: a commercial name originating from a giant banyan tree in the Shovabazar and
Chitpur area of Calcutta, where the printing and publication industry of Bengal began in
the nineteenth century. Though it was increasingly ridiculed by the rising literary gentry
for its questionable taste and production quality, Battala literature managed to survive in
the publication industry until the end of the nineteenth century. A number of scholars
have written on the history, productions and impact of the Battala publications. For an
exhaustive history of Battala, see Sripantha, Battala (Calcutta: Ananda, 1997). For the
most recent exploration of Battala print culture, see Gautam Bhadra, Nyara Battalay Jay
Kawbar (Kolkata: Chhatim Books, 2011).
century, amateur lower-class practitioners in the mofussil, peddling poorly

produced homoeopathic texts, appear as a cause of concern for reputed
Calcutta-based homoeopathic firms. Beyond the records of the Calcutta
firms, I also note the spurt of growth in homoeopathic dispensaries across
the Bengal countryside, beginning in the 1920s. Dispensaries were
usually charitable institutions built through the philanthropic efforts of
the state or of the local elites to provide cheap medicine to the masses. A
recent work has shown that, despite the Hindu, upper-caste background
of most of the practitioners, the clientele of dispensaries in Bengal
belonged to diverse social and religious groups including those described
as Muslims or tribals, as well as members of the ‘lower orders’.24
Perusal of the family archive further reveals a set of entrenched
cultural and moral foundations that defined homoeopathy and made
it popular in Bengal. It was claimed that homoeopathy offered cheap
therapeutics (in terms of cost of drugs, homoeopathic publications
and physician’s fees), which made it accessible even to the financially
disadvantaged. Besides, the principle of infinitesimal doses and the
gentle nature of the homoeopathic drugs also helped homoeopathy
claim a sharp contrast to some intrusive nineteenth-century allopathic
procedures, such as blistering, leeching, bleeding and cauterising. But
the most persistent feature that cries out of the archive is homoeo-
pathy’s promise to promote self-help, to ensure ordinary Indian
householders and lay people became autodidacts, capable of admin-
istering western medicine. By claiming that homoeopathy was a
cheap, affordable, gentle and painless mode of therapeutics that
could be mastered by ordinary men and women, its advocates impli-
citly promoted a distinct vision of egalitarian medicine beyond the
growing strictures of western professionalisation. Furthermore, along
with committing themselves to the treatment of imperial public
health categories and epidemic diseases (such as cholera, malaria,
plague, smallpox and venereal diseases), homoeopaths pledged that
they were able to heal even quotidian, individualised and chronic
ailments. Indeed, Bengali publications indicate that individualised,
symptom-based treatment of each patient was a prominent homoeo-
pathic motto, apparently derived from Hahnemann’s dictum to ‘treat
the patient, not the disease’. This even offered a new mode for
treating public health categories, like smallpox or cholera, through
self-medication.
24
Projit Bihari Mukharji, ‘Structuring Plurality: Locality, Caste, Class and Ethnicity in
Nineteenth Century Bengali Dispensaries’, Health and History, 9, 1 (2007), 99–101.
As I draw attention to the value of these colonial family archives, I focus

on the intricate, double-edged interface between medicine and family in
Bengal. On the one hand, the homoeopathic firms, as family businesses,
recurrently projected a distinctive business ideology in the rich corpus of
materials they published. The extensive body of journals, manuals, adver-
tisements, pamphlets, monographs, letters and biographies published by
these concerns reveals a specific business culture which was promoted
around homoeopathy. Asserting their own familial, intergenerational
presence, the protagonists of these concerns self-consciously encouraged
their business, and indeed the homoeopathic profession itself, to thrive
upon informal networks of friendship, kinship and affect. Their entrepre-
neurial practices prescribed a deliberate overlap between their business
ethics, and the familial virtues of intimacy and paternalism. Modelling
‘enterprise’ on ‘family’, they emphasised the cultivation of wilful perme-
able boundaries between the realms of the familial and the entrepreneur-
ial, and between the private and the public, in ensuring homoeopathy’s
proliferation. Professional relations, too, were understood through the
metaphor of family. At the same time, intergenerational, patriarchal lines
of inheritance were carefully marked out.
On the other hand, beyond the commercial operations, family was
also written about as the quintessential locus where homoeopathy was to
be preached, practised and eventually (re)produced. Homoeopathy
came to be posited as an efficient disciplining mechanism to cure colo-
nial domesticity of its various ills – even as a remedy to revitalise the
foundations of the ailing Indian joint-family system. Beyond the mere
materiality of drugs, homoeopathic science was projected and perceived
as a way of living, capable of producing the ideal family for the nation.
Thus, families acted both as the agent and the site that produced,
nurtured and sustained homoeopathy. Rather than understanding
‘family’ as an unchanging and given entity, this work is sensitive to the
diverse interests, commercial, cultural and ideological that shaped the
notion of ideal family over the colonial period.
A focus on the Bengali entrepreneur families, and especially their
family archives, has enabled my examination of the histories of institutio-
nalisation beyond the immediate patronage from the state. The concept
of ‘alternative’ medicine is revisited here, as I have distanced myself from
studies that depict homoeopathy, or any other apparently non-state med-
ical idea, as always and already ‘alternative’.25 I have drawn on the works
25
Scholars often label homoeopathy an ‘alternative’ practice without adequately proble-
matising such acts of labelling. See, for instance, Ursula Sharma, ‘Contextualising
Alternative Medicine: The Exotic, the Marginal and the Perfectly Mundane’,
of scholars such as Roberta Bivins, who insists that labels such as ‘alter-
native’ and ‘mainstream’ be historically nuanced – that their mutual
relationship be understood as relative, evolving and contextual.26 Strict
delineations between such labels, Bivins contends, often emanate from a
decidedly ‘western and twenty-first century perspective’ and are guilty of
‘engendering a view distinctly orthodox-medico-centric’. Moreover,
recent histories have urged us to be more attentive to the newer meanings
of ‘orthodoxy’ and ‘alternative’ in relation to colonial power dynamics.
They point out that as much as colonial medicine was bolstered by
notions of enlightenment science, it was, nonetheless, resisted and con-
tested at several quarters in the colonies.27 Thus, the understandings
inherent in expressions such as ‘alternative’, ‘scientific medicine’, ‘quack-
ery’, ‘legitimate medicine’ and ‘medical registration’ with regard to
homoeopathy in colonial Bengal were shifting and ambiguous. While
exploring the makings of ‘scientific’ medicine at different moments and
contexts, especially with relation to colonial law, this work also distances
itself from histories that investigate and debate the ‘real’ scientific merits
of homoeopathy.28 Rather than assuming an already marginalised status
for homoeopathy, my work traces the resilience of the category in various
registers, especially in the colonial family archives, beyond the official
state repositories.
Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India explores the interactions between
Calcutta-based homoeopathic family firms, sporadically dispersed rural/
mofussil practitioners, the British colonial state and the emergent nation-
alist governments, to study the cultural production of homoeopathy as a
‘vernacular science’ in Bengal primarily between 1866 and 1941. The
Anthropology Today, 9, 4 (1993), 15–18. For a more sophisticated and historically

grounded reading of homoeopathy, which nonetheless recognises its alternative status,
see Naomi Rogers, An Alternative Path: The Making and Remaking of the Hahnemann
Medical College and Hospital of Philadelphia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1998).
26
Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine? A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 4, 38.
27
Ibid., p. 30, 36. The contested and limited reach of western orthodoxy has been high-
lighted and discussed by several prominent scholars of South Asian history. See, for
instance, David Arnold, Colonising the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in
Nineteenth Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 3–4,
61–115.
28
H. L. Coulter, Homoeopathic Science and Modern Medicine: The Physics of Healing with
Microdoses (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1981). See also by the same author, Divided
Legacy Vol III: The Conflict between Homoeopathy and the American Medical
Association: Science and Ethics in American Medicine: 1800–1900 (Berkeley: North
Atlantic Books, 1982); Peter W. Gold, S. Novella, R. Roy, I. Bell, N. Davidovitch, A.
Saine, ‘Homoeopathy – Quackery or a Key to the Future of Medicine?’, Homoeopathy, 97
(2008), 28–33.
first private family firm, Berigny and Company’s Calcutta Homoeopathic

Pharmacy, was established in 1866. In 1941, under the imperatives of
regional nationalist political parties, homoeopathy was formally legiti-
mised as ‘scientific medicine’ and the State Faculty of Homoeopathic
Medicine was established. This complex narrative of homoeopathy’s
vernacularisation has been woven around three central issues: the family,
the market and the vernacular. The interactions between these three
themes have been explored over five chapters, which examine in turn
homoeopathic business practices (Chapter 1), medical biographies
(Chapter 2), popular scientific translations (Chapter 3), quotidian health
management (Chapter 4) and familial negotiation with colonial law
(Chapter 5).
Homoeopathy and the South Asian Family

Commentators on bourgeoisie modernity have awakened us to the
centrality of family in the making of modern regimes of power. The
category ‘family’ has been identified as singularly fundamental to
the operations of the modern state, indeed as one of its foundational
‘ideological apparatuses’.29 In his seminal 1971 essay, Louis Althusser
identified such state apparatuses as crucial to governance, since in
them ‘the ruling ideology is heavily concentrated’.30 Ensuring ‘govern-
ance without the direct intervention of law’, an apparatus such as the
‘family’ was shown to be crucial in producing ‘willing compliance’ in
the ‘reproduction of the existing relations of production’.31 For
Foucault too, as his lectures from the 1970s make clear, the apprehen-
sion of population as an entity in modern social order had the effect of
transforming the significance of the family from serving as a model or
analogy of the state to a ‘privileged instrument for the government of
the population’.32 In modern regimes of power, ‘family’ was rendered
the crucial ‘segment’ through which population could be accessed,
regulated or, most importantly, disciplined. It contributed to the pro-
cess of the modern state’s imperatives of ‘constitution of a savoir of
government’ that was ‘inseparable from that of a knowledge of all the
processes related to population in its larger sense’.33 Gilles Deleuze
29
Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy, and
Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1971), p. 127.
30
Ibid., p. 150. 31 Ibid., pp. 153–7.
32
Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter
Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 100.
33
Ibid., pp. 100–1.
Homoeopathy and the South Asian Family 13
and Felix Guattari’s Anti Oedipus too, received wide attention for its
criticisms of the bourgeois family.34 Arguing that the structures of the
modern nuclear family and that of the capitalist economy mirror one
another, the book suggests how the nuclear family accepted and even
relished capitalist social relations.35 From this perspective, family is the
agent of capitalist production and social oppression.
To unpack the role of family in modern society, some of these thinkers
have further highlighted the significance of understanding it as a histori-
cally mutating institution. Scholarship on the Foucauldian analysis of
family note that Foucault’s purpose was to emphasise the genealogy of
family, and to undermine ‘any all-encompassing or transhistorical
account of the institution’; to contest its status as a ‘quasi natural forma-
tion or a bedrock of unassailable values’.36 Following Foucault, and
especially his thoughts on family in his lectures on ‘Psychiatric Power’
and in the History of Sexuality, these works contend that as with Foucault’s
genealogy of the psychiatric hospital or the prison, his thoughts on the
family should also be read as revealing family’s novelty and contingency,
and most importantly its formation through power struggles. They argue
for ‘family’ to be treated as a continuously contested fiction that masks its
own becoming, pointing out that historical scholarship should reveal the
constructed and political nature of familial institutions and its abiding
and shifting investments in various power relations.
Since the 1990s, these two strands of conceptual understandings – the
disciplinary role of family and the genealogical understanding of
family – have informed several colonial histories, especially those explor-
ing the power of colonial state and its politics of knowledge production
and control. In his influential book, Bernard Cohn initiated discussions
on a number of variegated modalities through which the colonial state
established its cultural hegemony and political control.37 In contrast to
the ‘brutal and spectacular’ operations of the state, these ‘cultural tech-
nologies of rule’38 included the investigative modality, historiographic
modality, observational/travel modality, survey modality, enumerative
34
See Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (eds.), Deleuze and the Contemporary World
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 161–163. Also see Timothy Laurie,
Hannah Stark, ‘Reconsidering Kinship: Beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and
Guattari’, Cultural Studies Review, 18,1 (2012), 19–39.
35
Ibid.
36
See Chloe Taylor, ‘Foucault and Familial Power’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist
Philosophy, 27,1 (2012), 201–17. See also Leon Rocha and Robbie Duschinsky (eds.),
Foucault, the Family and Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 19–38.
37
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2002).
38
Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’ in Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge,
p. ix.
modality, museology modality as well as a surveillance modality.39 It has

been amply demonstrated how familial practices of the colonised people
remained central to such ‘ethnographic knowledge of the colonial
state’.40 Ann Laura Stoler’s Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race
and the Intimate in Colonial Rule demonstrates the extent to which the
‘intimate’ was a recurrent concern for the European colonial administra-
tion in Indonesia.41 Examining not just sexual relations, but also ‘parent-
ing, pedagogy, and paternalism’, her work conclusively shows how ‘the
microsites of familial and intimate space’42 were related to the macro-
political spaces of colonial governance.43 My own account of embodied
practices of homoeopathy as tools for corporeal and moral regulation of
domesticity aims to contribute to the literature analysing what has been
described as the ‘medico-familial mesh’.44
The other conceptual parameter, that of exploring the genealogy of
family, has also inspired significant scholarship that has commented on
the making of the colonial family. Depending on the difference of their
approaches, these works on the making of the colonial family can be
classified into distinct strands of historiographic interventions. The first
of these strands, heavily dominated by scholars writing on Bengal, has
looked at the ‘ideological deployment of the family … in the politics of
nation-building’.45 In conceptualising colonial modernity, these histor-
ians critically analyse the ways in which ‘family’ or ‘home’ attained a
‘special compensatory significance in the modernity that Indian
39
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, pp. 5–11.
40
Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Foreword’, p. ix. Also see, Bernard Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks,
‘Beyond the Fringe: The Nation State, Colonialism, and the Technologies of Power’,
Journal of Historical Sociology, 1, 2 (June 1988), 224–9.
41
Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial
Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
42
Ibid., p. 19.
43
For a recent work that studies such relation between colonial governance and the intimate
and the familial also see Kathleen Wilson, ‘Re-thinking the Colonial State: Family,
Gender and Governmentality in Eighteenth Century British Frontiers’, American
Historical Review, 116, 5 (2011), 1294–322. For a discussion of sociocultural surveillance
by the colonial state over domesticity, sexuality, morality and reproduction in British
India, see Sarah Hodges, Reproductive Health in India: History, Politics, Controversies
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006); Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity and
Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2005); and Srirupa Prasad, Cultural Politics of Hygiene in India, 1850–1940:
Contagions of Feeling (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
44
Foucault refers to the term in the context of medicalisation of families. See Leon Rocha
and Robbie Duschinsky (eds.), Foucault, the Family and Politics, pp. 19–38.
45
The phrase is used by Indrani Chatterjee in referring to the historiographic trend that
analysed the politics of the nationalist envisioning of family. See Indrani Chatterjee (ed.),
Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2004), pp. 4–5.
nationalists experienced in the context of imperial domination’.46

Reflecting on the Bengali valorisation of ‘home’ (griha) and ‘women’
(grihalakshmi), Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, Dipesh Chartabarty
and Sumit Sarkar have analysed the nationalist discourse around
Bengali domesticities as sites of ‘reform’, ‘recluse’ and as a ‘spiritual
domain’, in terms of either patriarchy or capitalism or both.47 I have
traced the recurrent interventions of authors advocating homoeopathy
in the nationalist literatures on Bengali domesticity. Homoeopathy was
projected not only as a form of medicine, but also an ethical and moral
regimen of Hindu life, capable of producing ideal, self-sufficient, nation-
alism-inspired domesticities, specifically in the form of Hindu joint
families.
Another distinct set of South Asian studies on ‘family’ questions,
problematises and breaks away from the very assumption of family as a
rigid, enclosed and private domain.48 These scholars have demarcated
the ‘simple conjugal family’ as a historically contingent ‘site of desire’ –
more of a nationalist male aspiration than a reality.49 Committed to the
idea that ‘family needs to be historicized and understood within an
embedded set of local practices’, these works focus on the potentially
fluid structures or contours of the institution over time, and on the traffics
between notions of the household, family, public and private relations.
The blurred and flexible boundaries of ‘family’ were constituted through
the frequently intersecting lens of law, labour (servants, dependants,
prostitutes), sexuality and governance.50 Through explorations into the
business ethics of the family-based homoeopathic concerns, I trace the
46
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Family, Fraternity, Salaried Labor’ in Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2000), p. 215.
47
See Partha Chatterjee, ‘Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question’ in Kumkum
Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, (eds.), Recasting Woman: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), pp. 233–53; Tanika Sarkar, ‘The Hindu
Wife and the Hindu Nation: Domesticity and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century
Bengal’, Studies in History, 8, 2 (1992), 224; Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Difference-Deferral
of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, History
Workshop Journal, 36, 1 (1993), 1–34; Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri, and Bhakti:
Ramakrishna and His Times’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27, 29 (18 July 1992),
1549–50.
48
Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia, 2004, pp.
3–45.
49
Ibid., p. 5.
50
See Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Gossip, Taboo and Writing Family History’ in Indrani
Chatterjee (ed.) Unfamiliar Relations, pp. 222–60; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in
Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Bhawani Raman, ‘The Familial World of the Company’s Kacceri in Early Colonial
Madras’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 9, 2 (2008), www.muse.jhu.edu/ar
ticle/246576 (last accessed 11 August 2018); Swapna Banerjee, Men, Women and
consistent invocation of the metaphor of ‘family’ in organising business as

well as professional relations. I thereby map the importance attached by
homoeopathic entrepreneurs to a flexible, commodious understanding of
business, akin to an extended family bound by paternalistic ties of affec-
tion, trust and loyalty.
Others have also examined the gradual delineation of ‘family’, under
colonialism, into a rigidly defined economic unit. Exploring the intersec-
tions of law, marriage, inheritance, property and economy, these works
explore the crystallisation of family as a normative property-holding unit
in the face of colonial legal interventions.51 Historians working specifi-
cally with the archive of law have been underlining how the personal law
privileged certain male patriarchal relations within the joint family by
making distinctions between ‘inheritance’ and ‘maintenance’.52 Several
of these works have studied the colonial rigidification of notions of the
Hindu joint family as based solely on male descent and inheritance, which
can be contrasted with earlier practices of a more loosely and eclectically
organised Indian extended family. These burgeoning studies together are
illuminating the patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritative nature of the
Hindu family.
Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial India (Delhi and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006). Moreover, with their emphasis on the fluidities of
structures and experiences, these studies further speak to some of the concerns raised
with regards to transcontinental experiences of families from the perspective of ‘new
imperialist histories’. See Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial
India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Esme Cleall, Laura Ishiguro and
Emily Manktelow (eds.), ‘Imperial Relations: Histories of Family in the British Empire’,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14, 1 (2013), www.muse.jhu.edu/article/503
247 (last accessed 11 August 2018).
51
Malavika Kasturi, Embattled Identities: Rajput Lineages and the Colonial State in Nineteenth
Century North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Rachel Sturman, ‘Property
and Attachments: Defining Autonomy and the Claims of Family in Nineteenth Century
Western India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47, 3 (2005), 611–37; Radhika
Singha, ‘Making the Domestic more Domestic: Colonial Criminal Law and the Head of
the Household, 1772–1843’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 33, 3 (1996),
309–43.
52
See, for instance, Leigh Denault, ‘Partition and the Politics of the Joint Family in
Nineteenth-Century North India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46, 1
(2009), 27–55; Rachel Sturman, Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism,
Religious Law and Women’s Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012);
Rochona Majumdar, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the
Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Mytheli Sreenivas, ‘Conjugality and Capital: Gender, Families,
and Property under Colonial Law in India’, Journal of Asian Studies, 63, 4 (2004), 937–
60; and Narendra Subramanian, Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism and
Gendered Citizenship in India (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Focusing on economic and entrepreneurial practices concerning

families, some of these scholars are particularly committed to the study
of the political economy of family and its constitution through intimate
ties between the ‘commercial’ and the ‘domestic’. In a recent exploration
of such history, Ritu Birla has investigated the unique kinship-based
operations of the Marwari ‘family firms’ and their governance in colonial
India through a special Anglo-Indian legal construct, the Hindu
Undivided Family (HUF).53 Birla adds to the ‘new research on the
historical meanings of family in India’ by addressing a significant dis-
course on the joint family, ‘one emerging not in debates on domesticity,
but in an archive of economy’.54 C. A. Bayly’s work on the transition of
north Indian society in the late eighteenth century also studied, in con-
siderable depth, north Indian merchant families.55 Dwelling on the cen-
tral roles of caste, religion, right marriage, piety and credit in the
operations of these intermediary merchant households in their ‘profit
making enterprise’, Bayly hinted at the role of these ‘family firms’ in the
contemporary formations of Hindu families.56 Beyond South Asia, reso-
nances of this approach can be found in the significant work of Catherine
Hall, who analysed the makings of familial values through a close study of
Victorian business families in England.57 Taken together, these works
seek to foreground the role of capital (in most cases mercantile capital) in
constituting and conceptualising familial practices, ethos and values.
Similarly, the familial investments and operations of the homoeopathic
commercial concerns I study here negotiated with law in asserting the
legitimacy of homoeopathic medicine in Bengal. A traffic between entre-
preneurial ethos and familial values enabled the discursive constitution of
rigidly patrilineal Hindu families.
Bringing each of these various strands of research into conversation
with one another, this book offers the following contributions to the
historiography of the South Asian family. First, the homoeopathic archive
reveals a number of distinct understandings of family and its functions.
53
Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
54
Ibid., p. 15.
55
Christopher Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British
Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The introduc-
tion to this book makes it clear that a third level of argument for the book is to study the
‘view of the north Indian merchant family and the trading institutions from the inside.
The aim is to show how economic organization was inseparable from the family firm’s
identity as a body of pious and credit worthy Hindus’, p. 8.
56
Ibid., see particularly the chapter on ‘Merchant Family as Business Enterprise’, pp.
394–426.
57
Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
There was the vision of an idealised, romanticised joint family for the
nation nurtured through nationalistic aspirations of reform, harmony and
spiritualism. Joint families were imagined to be selfless, affective, capa-
cious and paternalistic spaces that were based on multiple and hetero-
geneous kinship networks. The family firms, which modelled themselves
on the joint family, represented a flexible, commerce-based kinship net-
work loosely organised around the metaphor of an extended family reliant
on alliance, loyalty and affection beyond immediate blood relations. At
the same time, there coexisted more nucleated families headed by the
protagonists of the family firms, which thrived on rigid patrilineal ideas of
male descent and inheritance.
Second, this coexistence (of the idealised joint family, the firms mod-
elled on joint families and the nucleated family of the owners of family
firms) complicates any narrative of simple, linear and seamless transition
from joint family to nuclear family engendered by colonial modernity.
There is an element of irony in the same groups of men simultaneously
mythifying an egalitarian joint-family ideal, and also adhering to emer-
ging notions of strict patrilineal descent. Indeed, the romantic ideal of the
selfless, egalitarian Hindu joint-family was being celebrated in popular
print at the precise historical moment that the significance of individual
male authority in the joint-family system was being asserted. Often the
same group of men, like the entrepreneur-physicians discussed here,
ended up advocating the egalitarian joint-family ideal, as well as the
nucleated family based on patrilineal descent. A close focus on the patri-
archal, inheritance-based operations of the family firm reveals the ways in
which colonial family was increasingly animated by sovereign notions of
power symbolised by individuation of power at the top.58
Finally, the disciplinary function of the colonial family is also high-
lighted in the ways in which homoeopathy was posited as an embodied
ideal for regulating everyday domestic corporeal practices. Thus, with a
focus simultaneously on the commercial operations of family firms, as
well as the ideological valorisation of Indian family, this study uses the
history of homoeopathy to demonstrate family as one of the enduring sites
where the disciplinary as well as the sovereign, repressive as well as re-
productive notions of power converge. It reveals both the disciplinary
functions of family, as well as some of the historical processes involved in
the making of the colonial Bengali family.
58
Chloe Taylor makes this analysis following upon Foucault’s lectures on ‘Psychiatric
Power’. Taylor demonstrates an irony in these lectures: while Foucault so often argued
that we theorise power as sovereign when in fact it is disciplinary, in the case of family he
makes the reverse claim: we think of family as disciplinary, when it is actually sovereign.
See Chloe Taylor, ‘Foucault and Familial Power’, pp. 203–5.
Swadeshi Homoeopathy and the Market 19
Family in Bengal could simultaneously pose as the agent producing and

disseminating homoeopathy, and as the site where this so-called
European heterodoxy was best nurtured and preserved. The category
‘family’ with its multiple connotations could constitute an institution
capable of sustaining a burgeoning science over a period of time.
Through their sustained investments in print, drug, pedagogy and knowl-
edge, families could indeed provide the institutional refuge to a fledgling
science along with or perhaps ahead of colleges, hospitals or formal
associations.
Swadeshi Homoeopathy and the Market

Closely connected with the theme of family business is the question of
medical marketplaces. The distinct archiving of Bengali homoeopathy by
the Bengali entrepreneur families, their investments and leading role in
publications, the large-scale networks of drug distribution, the range of
homoeopathic domestic health manuals as well as the intermittent inter-
ventions by the imperial state together indicate a conspicuous market for
homoeopathy engendered by familial commerce. Studies on ‘medical
marketplaces’ have proliferated since the 1980s, especially in relation to
the role and position of non-orthodox health practices within a society.59
Ever since the concept was floated in the 1980s by Roy Porter and Harold
Cook to make sense of preprofessional medicine,60 the idea of ‘medical
markets’ has been analysed and reinterpreted from various perspectives,
whether in relation to historicising the patient or the role of commerce in
history of medicine, or in relation to the identity of non-orthodox, indi-
genous medicine.61 In their edited volume on the theme of medical
markets, Mark Jenner and Patrick Wallis express regret that the term is
being slowly reduced to a descriptive commonplace, and propose that it
59
For a critical overview of this topic, see Mark Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine
and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007).
60
Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and
Society, 14 (1985), 188; by the same author, Health for Sale: Quackery in England,
1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); and Harold Cook, The
Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1986).
61
Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘Medical Marketplaces Beyond the West: Bazaar Medicine, Trade
and the English Establishment in Eighteenth Century India’ in Mark Jenner and Patrick
Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, pp.
196–215; Maarten Bode, Taking Traditional Knowledge to Market: the Modern Image of the
Ayurvedic and Unani Industry, 1980–2000 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2008); and
Madhulika Banerjee, Power, Knowledge, Medicine: Ayurvedic Pharmaceuticals at Home
and in the World (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009).
needs renewed scholarship for specific contexts. They have argued

against any ‘generalized image of the medical market or medical market-
place’ and have urged scholars to begin thinking in terms of markets
involving particular ‘medical goods and services’.62 Developing on
Jenner and Wallis’ contention, historians of South Asia have more
recently cautioned against the egalitarian image of plurality and harmo-
nious coexistence that is often projected onto the notion of ‘medical
marketplace’, and have instead alerted us to the hierarchies and power
inherent in the medical market.63
Building upon these insights, I have studied the discursive constitution
of a discrete market involving homoeopathic boxes, drugs, manuals,
journals and medical biographies in Bengal. The result of my explorations
brings to life a vivid cultural history of Bengali commercial enterprise
beginning in the late nineteenth century. In comparison with the early
nineteenth century’s ‘age of enterprise’ and the early twentieth century
beginnings of swadeshi-inspired native business ventures, sporadic com-
mercial endeavours in late nineteenth-century Bengal have mostly
escaped historical attention.64 Indeed, important social and intellectual
histories of the Bengali bhadralok have emphatically highlighted the
landed rentier interests, along with Bengali obsessions with chakri or
salaried jobs as markers of education and culture. It has been observed
that these trends were opposed to the development of any sustained
Bengali commercial industry in this period.65 In contrast, the multitude
of homoeopathic business firms, which this work studies, marks this same
period as part of the development of Bengali entrepreneurial commerce.
While other scholars have talked about an ‘ideology of education’ that
animated the bhadralok in this period, I explore the thoughts and practices
of a distinct group of entrepreneur-physicians about an ‘ideology of
wealth’ accumulated through enterprise, which encompassed ideas of
respectability, national self-sufficiency as well as scientific progress.66
62
Mark Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and Its
Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, p. 16.
63
See Projit Bihari Mukarji and David Hardiman (eds.), Medical Marginality in South Asia:
Situating Subaltern Therapeutics, 2012, pp. 28–30. Also see Waltraud Ernst, Plural
Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800–2000, 2002, p. 4–5.
64
Shekhar Bandopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Rethinking History: Essays in Historiography (Delhi:
Manohar Publishers, 2001), pp. 18–19.
65
See, for instance, Tithi Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial
Intellectual in Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 28–30, 42–55;
Sumit Sarkar, ‘Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti: Ramakrishna and His Times’ in Writing
Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 186–214.
66
Tithi Bhattacharya, Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education and the Colonial Intellectual in
Bengal, pp. 26–34.
In addition to the critical interventions summarised here on the subject

of the medical market, historians of colonial markets have argued for the
need to understand market as a non-autonomous domain, asserting the
underpinnings of culture and politics in the process of economic
exchanges.67 Manu Goswami has critiqued the conventional understand-
ings of economy as a restricted domain of business and production. Her
work suggests porosity and interrelatedness between the notions of the
economic, the political and the cultural in relation to nationalism.68
Emerging reflections on the medical market are similarly inclined to
explore the mutual enmeshing of the market with other institutions
such as the state, family and religion. Speaking to these concerns, this
book also unfolds the role of a distinct market which indigenised homo-
eopathy. It presents a tapestry of intersecting ideas about quotidian
domesticity, Hindu nationalism and the consumption of homoeopathy
that blurs and complicates any rigid distinctions between the figures of
the ‘patient’, ‘physician’, ‘producer’, ‘consumer’, ‘author’ and ‘reader’.
With a heightened emphasis on economic self-sufficiency and indigene-
ity, the practitioners of homoeopathy often valorised it as an essential
means of ensuring individual welfare as well as a collective national good.
They extended the ethic of production to contend that every household,
with the support of select nationalist enterprises, could be a potent centre
for the production of indigenous items for everyday consumption, includ-
ing medico-scientific products.
This inclusive and participatory model of the medical market, with its
emphasis on ethically charged and ubiquitous domestic production of
knowledge and drugs, was often upheld as the blueprint for the nation.
Indeed, such a blurred distinction between market and domesticity, along
with advocacy for the qualities of self-reliance, enterprise, nationalism,
Hindu-ness and indigeneity, resonated deeply with early twentieth-cen-
tury ‘swadeshi nationalism’. Swadeshi, literally meaning ‘indigenous’, was
a specific strand of Indian nationalist ideology that focused on confront-
ing colonial rule by developing the Indian economy. It advocated the
boycott of British products and the strengthening of indigenous produc-
tion processes.69 The homoeopathic ideas examined here, thus, fit in with
the more recent historiography of swadeshi that seeks to understand the
67
Sudipta Sen, Empire of Free Trade: East India Company and the Making of the Colonial
Marketplace (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 8–12.
68
Manu Goswami, ‘From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial
South Asia, 1870–1907’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, 4 (1998), 631–2.
69
The origin and the progress of the swadeshi movement in the political heartland of Bengal,
following the partition of Bengal in 1905, have been detailed in Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi
Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (Calcutta: People’s Publishing House, 1973).
phenomenon as ‘Hindu nationalism’s linkage of an indigenist cultural

politics with a “productionist” vision’.70 The productionist vision of
homoeopathy further shared swadeshi nationalism’s critique of British
rule as a ‘superimposed, parasitical and unnatural global structure of
exchange relations’, and in opposition, upheld the nation as a ‘natural
unit of productive activity and the genuine substance of wealth’.71
Indeed, in advocating the importance at once of indigenous firms and of
the home-based production of drugs, the homoeopathic authors reso-
nated with the swadeshi ideals that later converged with Gandhian poli-
tical rhetoric around homespun cloth and national sovereignty.72 Besides
alluding to homoeopathy’s indigenisation through the medical market,
the phrase ‘swadeshi homoeopathy’ captures this overlapping ethos of
indigenous production, domesticity and self-sufficiency shared both by
homoeopathy and swadeshi ideology.73
Recent scholarship, rather than envisioning swadeshi nationalism
as an insulated ‘episode’ associated with the partition of Bengal
between 1905 and 1911, has situated its ideology within an endur-
ing economistic critique of colonial capital. This critique, extant
since the late nineteenth century, contributed to the consolidation
of the notion of a nationalist economy.74 Published in the year of
the first partition of Bengal and the beginning of the Swadeshi
movement in 1905, the eminent homoeopathic entrepreneur-physi-
cian Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya’s book Byabshayee
(Businessman), for example, detailed how the author developed his
views on the importance of indigenous capital to produce essential
items of quotidian consumption including medicines. Bhattacharya
mentioned in the book that his ideas on indigenous capital have
been developed since the 1880s. The book continued to be pub-
lished by the homoeopathic enterprise M. Bhattacharya and
Company over the first quarter of the twentieth century, with the
70
Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal,
1904–1908’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23, 1 & 2
(2003), 274.
71
Ibid., p. 275.
72
See Christopher Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi: Cloth and Indian Society’ in Arjun
Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), pp. 311–13.
73
In his analysis of Indian technological development around the turn of the twentieth
century, David Arnold too refers to the important impetus swadeshi ideologies provided
for small-scale enterprises relying on technology. See David Arnold, Everyday
Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 95–120.
74
Manu Goswami, ‘From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial
South Asia, 1870–1907’, pp. 609–36.
fourth edition appearing in 1921. Bhattacharya’s career reinforces

studies that question the characterisation of swadeshi as an isolated
phase of nationalist thinking in the first decade of the twentieth
century. Indeed, the Bengali homoeopathic firms that were first
established in the 1880s or even earlier need to be understood as
important predecessors to the highly publicised swadeshi indigenous
pharmaceutical initiatives, such as the foundation in 1893 of Bengal
Chemical Pharmaceutical Works (BCPW) by the noted scientist
Prafulla Chandra Roy.75 Although autonomous homoeopathic drug
manufacturing was initiated only around 1917 (pioneered by the
Hahnemann Publishing Company), these nineteenth-century firms
were involved in the final preparation, mixing of mother tinctures,
dilution and packaging of their imported products at least since the
1880s, as evidenced by the pharmacopoeias they published.76
Existing works on swadeshi have focused almost exclusively on the
writings of the acclaimed nationalist intellectuals of the time. They have
drawn upon the works of the ‘great political economists of Congress’77
including Dadabhai Naoraji, R. C. Dutt, M. G. Ranade and G. V. Joshi,
or revolutionary extremists like M. N. Roy,78 as well as the avowed
nationalist social thinkers/reformers like Aurobindo Ghosh, Bipin
Chandra Pal, Satishchandra Mukherjee and even the iconic
Rabindranath Tagore.79 My focus is on a distinct section of the Bengali
bhadralok, usually ignored in conventional histories of swadeshi
nationalism.80 Beyond the realm of the high intelligentsia, swadeshi ideals
were also espoused by a distinct group of homoeopathic entrepreneur-
physicians like Rajendralal Dutta, Batakrishna Pal, Jitendranath
Majumdar and Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya, who offered a quotidian
interpretation of swadeshi nationalism, framed around the production and
consumption of indigenous medicine. Their writings upheld and
75
For a comprehensive history of BCPW, see Pratik Chakrabarti, ‘Science and Swadeshi:
The Establishment and Growth of the Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works’ in
Uma Dasgupta (ed.), Science and Modern India: An Institutional History, 1784–1947
(Delhi: Pearson Education, 2010), pp. 117–42.
76
See, for instance, Mahesh Chandra Bhattacharya, The Pharmaceutics’ Manual: A
Companion to the German and American Homoeopathic Pharmacopeia (Calcutta: M.
Bhattacharya and Company, 1892).
77
Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal,
1904–1908’, p. 274.
78
See Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (London, New
York and New Delhi: Routledge, 2010).
79
See Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of Colonial Nationalism’, pp. 271–82.
80
The role of P. C. Roy and the BCPW has been noted in isolation. See Pratik Chakrabarty,
Western Science in Modern India: Metropolitan Methods, Colonial Practices (Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 219–52.
popularised homoeopathy as the ideal ‘indigenous’ remedy for a nation

suffering from the ills of colonialism, prioritising it over ayurveda.
Ironically, categories such as ‘swadeshi’ and ‘indigenous’ were
shaped by colonial cosmopolitanisms. Histories of colonial cosmo-
politanism emphasise how nationalism and cosmopolitanism often
entailed one another in the South Asian context.81 A case study of
homoeopathy elucidates the ways in which the logic of importation
of commodities was accommodated within the parameters of swade-
shi ideology. Such logic was not confined to the abstract idea of
German therapeutics. Instead, as I elaborate here, it can be found in
the dynamics of circulation of an entire range of commodities, ideas
and practices, including drugs, authoritative figures, journals, brands
and expertise, extending between various parts of Bengal, British
India, Britain and North America. Therefore, understanding swade-
shi nationalism within the dichotomous schemes of ‘the inner versus
outer, the local versus global, the spiritual versus secular or the
indigenous versus the Western’ is problematic.82 In revealing the
historical processes through which German homoeopathy was con-
stituted as ‘indigenous’ or ‘swadeshi’ in British India, this study
responds to David Arnold’s important caution against the problems
of excessive reliance on ‘frameworks grounded in sharp western/
indigenous divides’.83 Following this line of argument, rather than
considering ‘vernacular medicine’ as preordained, this book seeks to
understand the historical specificities through which certain ideas
and practices associated with homoeopathy were rendered distinct,
delineated and celebrated as a form of ‘vernacular medicine’ in
colonial Bengal.
Making Medicine Vernacular

The concept ‘vernacular’ seems especially relevant in unpacking homo-
eopathy’s history in South Asia. It is a useful concept emerging out of
current historiography, especially in analysing the sociocultural life of
western ideas in India. It is particularly productive in making sense of
the processes through which homoeopathy, whose ‘scientific’ status in
81
Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the
Global Circulation of Ideas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 2–3.
82
Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism, p. 5.
83
David Arnold and Sumit Sarkar, ‘In Search of Rational Remedies: Homoeopathy in
Nineteenth-Century Bengal’ in Waltraud Ernst (ed.), Plural Medicine, Tradition and
Modernity, 1800–2000, 2002, p. 54. Also see Gary J. Hausman, ‘Making Medicine
Indigenous: Homoeopathy in South India’, pp. 303–22.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
* Pronounced Yule in the original.
"Mostly," answered Willi, with slight hesitation, while Lili, remembering their various
deviations from the paths of righteousness, decided to change the subject of conversation,
and gaily embraced her father instead. Willi and Lili, the twins, were exactly eight years
old and were so inseparable that nobody even spoke of them separately. They always
played together, and often undertook things which they had a clear glimmering that they
should not do.
"And you, Rolf, how are you?" said the father, next, to a boy about twelve years old with a
broad forehead and sturdy frame. "Are you working hard at your Latin and have you made
up some nice riddles?"
"Yes, both, papa. But the others won't ever try to guess them. Their minds are so lazy, and
mamma never has time."
"That is too bad, and you, Paula?" continued the father, drawing to him his eldest daughter,
who was nearly thirteen. "Are you still longing for a girl friend, and do you still have to
walk about the garden alone?"
"I haven't found anybody yet! But I am glad you are back again, papa," said the girl,
embracing her father.
"I suppose you are spending your holidays in a useful fashion, Jul?" asked the father,
shaking hands with his eldest.
"I try to combine my pleasure with something useful," replied Jul, returning his father's
handshake. "The hazel nuts are ripe now, and I am watching over their harvest. I also ride
young Castor every day, so he won't get lazy."
Julius, who was seventeen years old, and studied at a high school of the nearest town, was
home for his holidays just now. As he was very tall for his age, everybody called him "big
Jul."
"I must ask you to continue your greetings in the garden, papa. All kinds of surprises await
you there," began Jul again, coming up to his father, who was pleasantly greeting Miss
Hanenwinkel, the children's governess and teacher.
But Jul had to pay dearly for this last remark. Immediately Willi and Lili flew at him from
behind, enjoining him to silence by pinching and squeezing him violently. Fighting them off
as best he could, he turned to Lili: "Let me go, little gad-fly. Just wait, I'll lead up to it
better." And turning towards his father he said loudly, "I mean in the garden where mother
has prepared all kinds of surprises you won't despise. We must celebrate by having
something to eat, papa."
"I agree with you; how splendid! Perhaps we shall even find a table spread under my apple
tree. I should call that a real surprise!" cried the father, delighted. "Come now!"
Giving the mother his arm, he went out, followed by the whole swarm. Lili and Willi were
thrilled that their papa thought this was the only surprise in store for him.
Upon stepping outside, the parents stood immediately under a triumphal arch; at both
sides hung small red lanterns which lit up the large hanging board on which was a long
inscription.
"Oh, oh," said the father, amazed, "a beautiful triumphal arch and a verse for my welcome.
I must read it." And he read aloud:
"We all are here to welcome you beside the garden gate;
And since you've come, we're happy now, we've had so long to wait.
We all are glad, as glad can be, our wishes have come true;
You've got back safe, and we have made this arch to welcome you."
"Beautiful, beautiful! I suppose Rolf is the originator of this?"
But Willi and Lili rushed forward crying, "Yes, yes, Rolf made it, but we invented it. He
made the poem, and Jul set up the poles, and we got the fir twigs."
"I call this a wonderful reception, children," cried the delighted father. "What lovely little
red, blue and yellow lights you have put everywhere; the place looks like a magic garden!
And now I must go to my apple tree."
The garden really looked like an enchanted place. Long ago the small colored lanterns had
been made, and Jul had fastened them that morning on all the trees and high bushes of
the garden. While the greetings were taking place in the house, old Battist and Trine had
quickly lit them. The branches of the apple tree also were decorated with lights, making it
look like a Christmas tree, with the apples gleaming out between the lanterns. They threw
their light down on the table with its white cloth on which the mother had set the large
roast, tempting the guests with the special wine for the occasion and the high pile of apple
tarts.
"This is the nicest festival hall I can imagine!" exclaimed the father happily, as he stood
under the sparkling tree. "How wonderful our dinner will taste here! Oh, here is a second
inscription."
Another white board hung down on two strings from the high branches behind the trees.
On it was written:
"Happy all at my first are reckoned,

Christmas is in the state of my second,
And for my whole the feast is spread
With candy, nuts and gingerbread."
"Oh, I see, a riddle; Rolf must have made this for me!" said the father, kindly patting the
boy's shoulder. "I'll set to work guessing as soon as we have settled down. Whoever
guesses the riddle first may touch glasses with me before the others. Oh, how pleasant it
is to be together again."
The family sat down under the tree, and the conversation soon began to flow. From big Jul
down to little Hun there seemed to be no end of all the experiences everybody had to tell.
A sudden silence fell when the father pulled out from under his chair a large package,
which he promptly began to unpack. The children watched his motions with suspense,
knowing that a present for everybody would now come to light. First, came shining spurs
for Jul, then a large blue book for Paula. Next emerged a rather curious object, turning out
to be a large bow with a quiver and two feathered arrows, a present for Rolf. As the father
took out the fine arrows with sharp iron points, he said with great emphasis:
"This weapon belongs to Rolf only, who knows how to use it. As it is no toy, Willi and Lili
must never think of playing with it. Otherwise they might hurt somebody with it. It is
dangerous, remember."
A gorgeous Noah's ark containing many kinds of animals in pairs and a Noah's family was
presented to the twins. The men all held big staffs and the women carried large umbrellas,
much needed while going on board the ark. For little Hun, who came last, a wonderful
nutcracker came to light, whose face seemed doomed to uninterrupted sorrow for all the
tragedies of this world. His mouth stood wide open when not in action, but when screwed
together, he cracked nuts in the neatest fashion with his large, white teeth. The presents
had to be shown properly and commented upon, and the admiration and joy knew no
bounds.
Finally the mother resolutely got up to tell the children to go to bed. Their usual bedtime
was long since past. As the father got up, he asked with a loud voice, "Yes, but who had
guessed the riddle?"
No one had done so, as all except Rolf had completely forgotten it.
SHE HAD BEEN LOST IN EVERYTHING

SHE HAD PARTLY SEEN AND HEARD
"But I guessed it," said the father, no other answer being heard. "I suppose it is
homecoming. Isn't it, Rolf? Let me touch your glass now and also let me thank you for the
riddle."
While Rolf joyfully stepped up to his father, several frightened voices cried out, "Fire, fire!"
The next moment, everyone leaped from their seats, Battist and Trine came running out
with bottles and buckets from the kitchen, and Hans came from the stable with another
bucket. All rushed about shrieking wildly, "The bush is on fire, the hedge is on fire." The
confusion and noise was truly amazing.
"Dora, Dora!" a wailing voice called down to the little garden of the neighboring cottage,
and the next moment Dora hastened into the house from her place of observation. She
had been so lost in everything she had partly seen and heard that she had not realized
that she had been squatting on the ground for two full hours.
Upstairs, the aunt in grief and fright had pulled her belongings from the wardrobes and
drawers and had piled them high as for immediate flight.
"Aunt Ninette," said Dora timidly, conscious of having remained away too long. "Don't be
frightened any more. Look, it is dark again in the garden over there and all the lights are
out."
Upon gazing over, the aunt saw that everything was dark and the last lights had been put
out. Now a very dim lantern approached the apple tree. Probably somebody was setting
things in order there.
"Oh, it is too terrible! Who could have guessed it!" moaned the aunt. "Go to bed now,
Dora. We'll see tomorrow whether we shall move or leave the place entirely."
Dora quickly retired to her room but she could not go to sleep for a long, long while.
She saw before her the garden and the gleaming apple tree, heard the merry children's
voices and also, their father's pleasant, happy words. She could not help thinking of her
own dear father who had always been willing to listen to her, and she realized how
fortunate her little neighbors were. She had felt so drawn to the children and their kind
parents, that the thought of moving away from the house quite upset her. She could not
go to sleep for a long, long while, for her mind was filled with the recent impressions.
Finally her own beloved father seemed to be gazing down at her and saying the comforting
words as he used to do:
"'Yet God keeps watch above us

And doeth all things well.'"
These words were still in her mind as she went to sleep, while the lights, the gleaming tree
and merry children across the way followed her into her dreams.
After the fire was put out, Willi and Lili were found to be the culprits. Thinking that Rolf's
riddle would look more beautiful if made transparent from behind like the inscription used
every Christmas behind their tree, "Glory to God on High," they had fetched two lights.
Then standing on a high step which had been used for fastening the inscription, they held
the lights very near the riddle. When no joyful surprise was shown on any of the faces,
they put the lights still nearer, till at last the paper was set on fire, catching the nearby
branches. They owned up to their unfortunate undertaking at once and, in honor of the
festive occasion, were sent to bed with only mild reproof. Of course they were forbidden to
make further experiments with fire.
Soon after, deep quiet reigned in the house, and peacefully the moon shone down over the
sleeping garden and the splendid tall trees.
CHAPTER IV
ALL SIX
"We shall have to move away from here, Mrs. Kurd," were Aunt Ninette's first words the
following morning when she came down to breakfast. "We seem to have come into a
dreadful neighborhood. We had better move today."
Speechless with surprise, Mrs. Kurd stood still in the middle of the room. She looked at
Mrs. Ehrenreich as if she could not comprehend the meaning of her words.
"I mean it seriously, Mrs. Kurd, we must move today," repeated Aunt Ninette.
"But you could not possibly find more delightful neighbors in all Tannenberg, Mrs.
Ehrenreich, than we have here," began Mrs. Kurd as soon as she had recovered from her
amazement.
"But, Mrs. Kurd, is it possible you did not hear the terrific noise last evening? It was worse
than any of the things we especially meant to avoid."
"It was only the children, Mrs. Ehrenreich. They happened to be especially lively because
they had a family party last evening."
"If such feasts are celebrated first by a wild explosion of joy, and end with a fire and an
unspeakable confusion, I call such a neighborhood not only noisy but dangerous. We had
better move at once, Mrs. Kurd, at once."
"I don't believe the fire was intended to take place at the party," Mrs. Kurd reassured the
aunt. "It was probably a little accident and was at once put out. Everything is most orderly
in that household, and I really cannot believe that the lady and gentleman can possibly
want to move on account of such neighbors as we have. You would be sure to repent such
a decision, for no better rooms can be had in all Tannenberg."
Aunt Ninette calmed down a trifle, and began breakfast with Dora and Uncle Titus.
Breakfast was over by that time in the big house, and the father was attending to business
while the mother was looking after her household duties. Rolf, who had a daily Latin lesson
with a pastor of the neighboring parish, had long ago left the house. Paula was having a
music lesson with Miss Hanenwinkel, while Willi and Lili were supposed to review their
work for the coming lessons. Little Hun sat at his table in the corner, examining his
sorrowful looking nutcracker-man.
Now Big Jul, who had just returned from his morning ride, entered the room, his whip in
his hand and the new spurs on his feet.
"Who'll take off my riding boots?" he shouted, flinging himself into a chair and admiring his
shiny spurs. Immediately Willi and Lili flew towards him, glad of a chance to leave their
work.
With not the slightest hesitation, Willi and Lili took hold, and before Jul could prevent it, he
was pulled off his chair, Willi and Lili having hold of him and not the boots. At the last
instant, he had been able to seize the chair, which, however, tumbled forward with him.
Jul cried loudly, "Stop, stop!" which brought little Hun to his big brother's rescue.
Holding the chair from the back, the small boy pushed with all his strength against the
twins. But he was pulled forward, too, and found himself sliding along the floor as on an
ice-slide. Willi and Lili anxious to complete their task, kept up their efforts in utter
disregard of Jul's insistent commands to stop, and the words:
"O, Willi and Lili,

You twins, would you kill me?"
BEFORE JUL COULD PREVENT IT,

HE WAS PULLED OFF HIS CHAIR.
Little Hun shrieked loudly for assistance, till at last, the mother came upon the scene. Willi
and Lili let go suddenly, Jul swung himself back to the chair, and little Hun, after swaying
about for a few seconds, regained his balance.
"But, Jul, how can you make the little ones so wild? Can't you be doing something more
profitable?" the mother admonished her eldest son.
"Yes, yes, I'll soon be at a more profitable occupation, dear mamma. But I feel as if I
helped you with their education," he began in a conciliating tone. "If I keep Willi and Lili
busy with innocent exercise like taking my boots off, I keep them out of mischief and any
dreadful exploits of their own."
"You had better go to your profitable occupation, Jul. What nonsense you talk!" declared
the mother. "And Lili, you go to the piano downstairs at once and practice, till Miss
Hanenwinkel has finished with Paula. Till then Willi must study. I should call it a better
thing, Jul, if you saw to the little ones in a sensible way, till I come back."
Jul, quite willing, promised to do his best. Lili hastened to the piano, but being in a rather
excited mood, she found her fingers stumbling over each other while doing scales. The
little pieces therefore tempted her more and she gaily and loudly began to play:
"Rejoice, rejoice in life

While yet the lamp is glowing
And pluck the fragrant rose
In Maytime zephyrs blowing!"
Uncle Titus and his wife had just finished breakfast when the riding-boot scene took place
in the big house. Uncle Titus went straight to his room and barred the windows, while his
wife called to the landlady, begging her to listen to the noise, herself. But the whole affair
made a different impression on Mrs. Kurd than she had hoped.
"Oh, they have such times over there," said Mrs. Kurd, amused. When Mrs. Ehrenreich
tried to explain to her that such a noise was not suitable for delicate people in need of rest,
Mrs. Kurd suggested Mr. Ehrenreich's taking a little walk for recreation to the beautiful and
peaceful woods in the neighborhood. The noise over there would not last very long. The
young gentleman just happened to be home for the holidays and would not stay long. Lili's
joyful piece, thrummed vigorously and sounding far from muffled, reached their ears now.
"What is that? Is that the young gentleman who is going away soon?" inquired Aunt
Ninette excitedly. "What is coming next, I wonder? Some new noise and something more
dreadful every moment. Is it possible, Mrs. Kurd, you have never heard it?"
"I never really noticed it very much. I think the little one plays so nicely, one can't help
liking it," Mrs. Kurd declared.
"And where has Dora gone? She seems to be becoming corrupted already, and I can't
manage her any more," wailed the aunt again. "Dora, Dora, where are you? This is
dreadful, for she must start on her work today."
Dora was at the hedge again, happily listening to the song Lili was drumming on the piano.
She appeared as soon as her aunt called to her, and a place was immediately chosen near
the window, where she was to sew for the rest of the day.
"We can't possibly stay here," were the aunt's last words before leaving the room, and
they nearly brought tears to Dora's eyes. The greatest wish of her heart was to stay just
here where so many interesting things were going on, and of which she could get a
glimpse now and then. Through her opening, she could hear a great deal and could watch
how the children amused themselves in their pretty garden. Dora puzzled hard to find a
way which would prevent their moving. However, she could find none.
Meanwhile eleven o'clock had come, and Rolf came rushing home. Seeing his mother
through the open kitchen door, he ran to her.
"Mamma, mamma!" he cried before he was inside. "Can you guess? My first makes—"
"Dear Rolf," the mother interrupted, "I beg you earnestly to look for somebody else; I have
no time just now. Go to Paula. She is in the living room." Rolf obeyed.
"Paula!" he cried from below. "Guess: My first makes—"
"Not now, please, Rolf!" retorted Paula. "I am looking for my notebook. I need it for
making a French translation. Here comes Miss Hanenwinkel, try her. She can guess well."
Rolf threw himself upon the newcomer, Miss Hanenwinkel. "My first makes—"
"No time, Rolf, no time," interrupted the governess. "Go to Mr. Jul. He is in the corner over
there, having his nuts cracked for him. Go to him. See you again."
Miss Hanenwinkel, who had once been in Italy, had in that country acquired the habit usual
there of taking leave of people, and used it now on all occasions. If, for instance, the knife-
sharpener arrived, she would say, "You here again. Better stay where you belong! See you
again." With that she quickly closed the door. If the governess were sent to meet peddlers,
or travelling salesmen coming to the house on business, she would say, "You know quite
well we need nothing. Better not come again. See you again," and the door was quickly
shut. This was Miss Hanenwinkel's peculiarity.
Jul was sitting in a corner, and in front of him, sat little Hun, busy giving his sorrowful
looking nutcracker nuts to crack, which he conscientiously divided with Jul.
Rolf stepped up to the pair. "You both have time to guess. Listen!"
"'My first is just an animal forlorn.

My second that to which we should be heir,
And with my whole some lucky few are born
While others win it if they fight despair.'"
"Yes, you are right. It is courage," explained the quick older brother.
"Oh, but you guessed that quickly!" said Rolf, surprised.
"It is my turn now, Rolf. Listen, for it needs a lot of thinking. I have made it up just this
minute," and Jul declaimed:
"'My first is sharp as any needle's end,

My second is the place where money grows,
My whole is used a pungent taste to lend,
And one you'd know, if only with your nose.'"
"That is hard," said Rolf, who needed time for thinking. "Just wait, Jul, I'll find it."
Herewith, Rolf sat down on a chair in order to think in comfort.
Big Jul and small Hun meanwhile kept on cracking and eating nuts, Jul varying the game
by sometimes trying to hit some goal in the room with a shell.
"I know it!" cried Rolf, overjoyed. "It is pick-pocket."

"Oh, ho, Rolf, how can you be so absurd! How can a pick-pocket smell?" cried Jul,
disgusted. "It is something very different. It's spearmint."
"Yes, I see!" said Rolf, a little disappointed. "Wait, Jul, what is this?"
"'My first within the alphabet is found,

My second is a bread that's often sweet;
My third is something loved by active feet.
My whole means something more than just to go around.'"
"Cake-walk," said Jul with not the slightest hesitation.
"Oh ho, entirely wrong," laughed Rolf, "that doesn't work out. It has three syllables."
"Oh, I forgot," said Jul.
"You see you are wrong," triumphed Rolf. "It is abundance. Wait, I know still another."
"The first—"
"No, I beg to be spared now, for it is too much of an exertion, and besides I must see to
Castor." Jul had jumped up and was running to the stable.
"Oh, what a shame, what a shame!" sighed Rolf. "Nobody will listen to me any more and I
made up four more nice riddles. You can't guess, Hun, you are too foolish."
"Yes, I can!" declared the little boy, offended.
"All right, try then; but listen well and leave these things for a while. You can crack nuts
later on," urged Rolf and began:
"'My first is closest bonds that can two unite,

My second like the shining sun is bright;
My whole's a flower that thrives best in wet ground
And like my second in its color found.'"
"A nutcracker," said little Hun at once. Jul being the little one's admired model, he thought
that to have something to say at once was the chief point of the game.
"I'll never bother with you again, Hun; there is nothing to be done with you," cried Rolf,
anxious to run away. But that did not work so simply, little Hun, who had caught the riddle
fever, insisted upon trying out his first attempt.
"Wait, Rolf, wait!" he cried, holding on to Rolf's jacket. "It is my turn now and you must
guess. My first can be eaten, but you can't drink it—"
"I suppose it's going to be nutcracker!" cried Rolf, running away from such a stupid riddle
as fast as his legs could carry him.
But the small boy ran after him, crying all the time, "You didn't guess it! You didn't guess
it! Guess it, Rolf, guess!"
All at once, Willi and Lili came racing towards him from the other side, crying loudly, "Rolf,
Rolf, a riddle, guess it! Look at it, you must guess it!" and Lili held a piece of paper directly
under Rolf's nose, while Hun kept on crying, "Guess, Rolf, guess!" The inventor of riddles
was now in an extremity himself.
"Give me a chance, and I'll guess it," he cried, waving his arms to fight them off.
"As you can't guess mine, I'll go to Jul," said Hun disdainfully, turning his back.
Rolf seized the small slip of paper, yellow from age, which Lili was showing him. He looked
perplexed at the following puzzling words written apparently by a child's hand:
"My hand.
Lay firmly
Wanted to be
But otherwise
One stays
And each
And now will
This leaf
When the time comes
That the pieces
fit
We'll rejoice
And we'll go
Never."
"Perhaps this is a Rebus," said Rolf thoughtfully. "I'll guess it, if you leave me alone a
minute. But I must think hard."
There was not time for that just then, for the dinner bell rang loudly and the family began
to gather around the large dining' room table.
"What did you do this morning, little Hun?" asked the father, as soon as everybody had
settled down to eating.
"I made a riddle, papa, but Rolf won't guess my riddles, and I can't ever find Jul. The
others are no good, either."
"Yes, papa," eagerly interposed Rolf now, "I made four or five lovely riddles, but no one
has time to guess except those who have no brains. When Jul has guessed one, he is
exhausted. That is so disappointing, because I usually have at least six new ones for him
every day."
"Yes, papa," Willi and Lili joined in simultaneously, "and we found a very difficult puzzle. It
is even too hard for Rolf to guess. We think it is a Rebus."
"If you give me time, I'll guess it," declared Rolf.
"The whole house seems to be teeming with riddles," said the father, "and the riddle fever
has taken possession of us all. We ought to employ a person for the sole purpose of
guessing riddles."
"Yes, if only I could find such a person," sighed Rolf. To make riddles for some one who
would really listen and solve them intelligently seemed to him the most desirable thing on
earth.
After lunch the whole family, including Miss Hanenwinkel, went outside to sit in a circle
under the apple tree, the women and girls with some sewing or knitting. Even little Hun
held a rather doubtful looking piece of material in his hand into which he planted large
stitches with some crimson thread. It was to be a present for Jul in the shape of a cover
for his horse. Jul, according to his mother's wish, had brought out a book from which he
was supposed to read aloud. Rolf sat under the mountain-ash some distance away,
studying Latin. Willi, who was expected to learn some verses by heart, sat beside him. The
small boy gazed in turn at the birds on the branches overhead, at the workmen in the field
below, and at the tempting red apples. Willi preferred visible objects to invisible ones and
found it difficult to get anything into his head. It was a great exertion even to try, and he
generally accomplished it, only with Lili's help. His study-hour in the afternoon, therefore,
consisted mostly in contemplating the landscape round about.
Jul, that day, seemed to prefer similar observations to reading aloud. He had not even
opened his book yet, and after letting his glances roam far and wide, they always came
back to his sister Paula.
"Paula," he said now, "you have a face today as if you were a living collection of worries
and annoyances."
"Why don't you read aloud, Jul, instead of making comparisons nobody can understand?"
retorted Paula.
"Why don't you begin, Jul?" said the mother. "But, Paula, I can't help wondering, either,
why you have been in such a wretched humor lately. What makes you so reserved and out
of sorts?"
"I should like to know why I should be confiding, when there is no one to confide in. I have
not a single girl friend in Tannenberg, and nobody at all to talk to."
The mother advised Paula to spend more time either with her small sister or Miss
Hanenwinkel, who was only twenty years old and a very nice companion for her. But Paula
declared that the first was by far too young and the other much too old, for twenty
seemed a great age to Paula. For a real friendship, people must be the same age, must
feel and think the same. They must at once be attractive to each other and hate the
thought of ever being separated. Unless one had such a friend to share one's joys and
experiences, nothing could give one pleasure and life was very dull.
"Paula evidently belongs to the romantic age," said Jul seriously. "I am sure she expects
every little girl who sells strawberries to produce a flag and turn into a Joan of Arc, and
every field laborer to be some banished king looking for his lost kingdom among the
furrows."
"Don't be so sarcastic, Jul," his mother reproved. "The sort of friendship Paula is looking
for is a beautiful thing. I experienced it myself, and the memories connected with mine are
the sweetest of my whole life."
"Tell us about your best friend, mamma," begged Paula, who several times already had
heard her mother speak of this friendship which had become a sort of ideal for her. Lili
wanted to hear about it, too. She knew nothing except that she recalled the name of her
mother's friend.
"Didn't you call me after your friend's name, mamma?" asked the little girl, and her
mother assured her this was so.
"You all know the large factory at the foot of the mountain and the lovely house beside it
with the big shady garden," began the mother. "That's where Lili lived, and I remember so
vividly seeing her for the first time."
"I was about six years old, and was playing in the rectory garden with my simple little
dolls. They were sitting around on fiat stones, for I did not have elaborate rooms for them
furnished with chairs and sofas like you. Your grandfather, as you know, was rector in
Tannenberg and we lived extremely simply. Several children from the neighborhood, my
playmates, stood around me watching without a single word. This was their way, and as
they hardly ever showed any interest in anything I did, and usually just stared at
everything I brought out, they annoyed me very much. It didn't matter what I brought out
to play with, they never joined in my games."
"That evening, as I knelt on the ground setting my dolls around a circle, a lady came into
the garden and asked for my father. Before I could answer, a child who had come with the
lady ran up to me and, squatting on the ground, began to examine all my dolls. Behind
each flat stone, I had stuck up another so the dolls could lean against it. This pleased her
so much, that she at once began to play with the dolls and made them act. She was so
lively that she kept me spellbound, and I watched her gaily bobbing curls and wondered at
her pretty language, forgetting everything for the moment except what she was doing with
my dolls. Finally, the lady had to ask for my father again."
"From that day on, Lili and I were inseparable friends, and an ideal existence began for me
at Lili's house. I shall never forget the blissful days I spent with her in her beautiful home,
where her lovely mother and excellent father showed me as much affection as if I were
their own child. Lili's parents had come from the North. Her father, through some agents,
had bought the factory and expected to settle here for life. Lili, was their only child, and as
we were so congenial, we wished to be together all the time. Whenever we were
separated, we longed for each other again, and it seemed quite impossible for us to live
apart.
"Lili's parents were extremely kind, and often begged my parents as an especial favor to
let me stay with Lili for long visits, which seemed like regular long feasts to me. I had
never seen such wonderful toys as Lili had, and some I shall never forget as long as I live.
Some were little figures which we played with for whole days. Each had a large family with
many members, of which everyone had a special name and character. We lived through
many experiences with them, which filled us with joy and sorrow. I always returned home
to the rectory laden with gifts, and soon after, I was invited again."
"Later, we had our lessons together, sometimes from the school teacher, Mr. Kurd, and
sometimes from my father. We began to read together and shared our heroes and
heroines, whose experiences thrilled us so much that we lived them all through ourselves.
Lili had great fire and temperament, and it was a constant joy to be with her. Her merry
eyes sparkled and her curls were always flying. We lived in this happy companionship,
perfectly unconscious that our blissful life could ever change."
"But just before we were twelve years old, my father said one day that Mr. Blank was
going to leave the factory and return home. These words were such a blow, that I could
hardly comprehend them at first. They made such an impression on me, that I remember
the exact spot where my father told me. All I could understand was that Mr. Blank had
been misinformed about the business in the beginning and was obliged to give it up after a
severe loss. My father was much grieved, and said that a great wrong had been done to
Lili's father by his dishonest agents. He had lost his whole fortune as a result."
"I was quite crushed by the thought of losing Lili, and by her changed circumstances
besides. It made me so unhappy that I remember being melancholy for a long, long time
after. The following day, Lili came to say goodbye, and we both cried bitterly, quite sure of
not being able to endure the grief of our separation. We swore eternal friendship to each
other, and decided to do everything in our power to meet as often as possible. Finally, we
sat down to compose a poem together, something we had frequently done before. We cut
the verses through in the middle—we had written it for that purpose—and each took a half.
We promised to keep this half as a firm bond, and if we met again, to join it together as a
sign of our friendship."
"Lili left, and we wrote to each other with great diligence and warm affection for many
years. These letters proved the only consolation to me in my lonely, monotonous life in the
country. When we were young girls of about sixteen or seventeen, Lili wrote to me that her
father had decided to emigrate to America. She promised to write to me as soon as they
got settled there, but from then on, I never heard another word. Whether the letters were
lost, or Lili did not write because her family did not settle definitely anywhere, I cannot
say. Possibly she thought our lives had drifted too far apart to keep up our intercourse.
Perhaps Lili is dead. She may have died soon after her last letter—all this is possible. I
mourned long years for my unforgettable and dearest friend to whom I owed so much. All
my inquiries and my attempts to trace her were in vain. I never found out anything about
her."
The mother was silent and a sad expression had spread over her features, while the
children also were quite depressed by the melancholy end of the story.
One after the other said, sighing, "Oh, what a shame, what a shame!"
But little Hun, who had listened most attentively, had drawn tenderly near his mother and
said comfortingly, "Don't be sad, mamma! As soon as I am big, I'll go to America and fetch
Lili home to you."
Rolf and Willi had also joined the other listeners, and after thoughtfully gazing at a slip of
paper in his hand, Rolf asked, "Mamma, did the poem you cut apart look like a Rebus,
written on a narrow paper?"
"Perhaps, Rolf. It might have given that impression," replied the mother. "Why do you
ask?"
"Look, mamma," said Rolf, holding out the yellowish slip of paper, "don't you think this
might be your half?"
"Rolf, it really is," cried the mother, agitated. "I thought I had lost it for good, for after
keeping it many years, I suddenly could not find it. I have never really thought about it, till
I told you about this friendship. Where did you find this dear token, Rolf?"
"We found it!" cried Willi and Lili simultaneously. "We found it in the old family Bible. We
wanted to see if Eve's face was still scratched up," the twins continued, taking turns giving
their information.
"Oh, yes, that brings back another memory of Lili," said the mother with a smile. "She did
this one day as we were both imagining how beautiful it would be to be in paradise. She
suddenly grew so furious at Eve for having eaten the apple that she scratched her face in
the picture with a pencil for punishment. But my old poem! I am afraid I can't puzzle it out
any more," said the mother after trying to study the broken sentences. "It is so dreadfully
long ago. Just think, children, over thirty years!"
The mother laid the paper, carefully folded, in her workbasket and asked the children to
pick up their things and follow her, as it would soon be time for supper. As they knew well
that their papa was always punctual, they quickly packed up their things and one after the
other disappeared into the house through the triumphal arch, which had been left
standing.
Dora had been watching the quiet group under the apple tree for quite a while through the
hole in the hedge. As everybody got up and slowly went away, she had the chance to
examine one child after another. When they were all gone, Dora heaved a deep sigh and
said to herself, "If only I could be allowed to go over there, just once."
At supper, Aunt Ninette said, "At last, we have had a few quiet hours! What a relief! If this
keeps on, we might possibly remain here. What do you think, dear Titus?"
Dora waited anxiously for her uncle's answer.
"The air is very heavy in these rooms, and I feel even more dizzy than I did in Karlsruhe,"
declared the uncle.
Dora dropped her eyes to her plate and her appetite was gone.
The aunt broke out into loud wails now. Should the whole journey and their stay here
prove absolutely useless after all? Should they have moved the very first day? She found
consolation at last in the thought that the family opposite had quieted down, and that the
windows could be opened by tomorrow. Dora clung to this hope, for as long as she lived so
near, a possibility remained that she might go and play, at least a single time, with the
children in their fragrant garden.
CHAPTER V
BEFORE AND AFTER THE DELUGE
IT HAPPENED quite often that nobody had time to play with little Hun, and he himself
found nothing on earth to do. At such times, he would wander aimlessly all through the
house, bothering everyone at their work. His mother always sent him to his little table and
wanted him to keep busy there. The boy would then be very unhappy and troublesome. He
often chose the most inconvenient moments for these restless moods, when everybody
was especially busy.
The day following the events just related was a Saturday, when the house was being
cleaned and the furniture blocked all the hallways. Hun wandered about among the chairs
and sofas and seemed in just as unsettled a state as was the house.
After looking for his mother everywhere, he succeeded in finding her on the top floor of the
house, sorting the clean laundry, but she sent him downstairs again with the words, "I am
very busy now, Hun. Go and look for Paula; she may have time for you." He found Paula at
the piano.
"Go away, Hun! I have to practise and can't guess your stupid charades," she said to her
little brother, who had caught the fatal fever from Rolf. He was most anxious to say his
own charade about the nutcracker and was terribly disappointed not to have the chance.
"Here's Miss Hanenwinkel, go to her," said Paula.
"Miss Hanenwinkel, my first one cannot drink, but eat," the little one cried as soon as he
saw the governess.
"No, Hun, please spare me," the governess hurriedly interrupted him. "I do not know what
will happen if you begin it, too. I have no time. Look, Mr. Jul is just getting down from his
horse over there; go to him."
"COME, I'LL SAY IT AND YOU MUST LEARN IT BY HEART."
The little one wandered off.
"Jul, nobody wants to guess my riddles, Miss Hanenwinkel least of all," he complained to
his big brother. "She said you ought to do it."
"Did she say so? All right, then, say it," Jul encouraged him.
"My first you can't drink, but eat," began Hun, and stopped.
"All right, keep on, Hun!"
"You have to make the rest, Jul; but the whole must be nutcracker," said the little boy.
"I can see that quite clearly; but because Miss Hanenwinkel has sent me a riddle to guess
through you, I'll send her one, too. Come, I'll say it and you must learn it by heart. Then
you can go and ask Miss Hanenwinkel to solve it for you."
Standing the little one in front of him, Jul said several times quite slowly:
"When like my first Hun's crow, disturbs all men

Into the second does the whole put then
The naughty culprit, saying, 'See you again.'" *
Before very long, the small boy had memorized the lines and eagerly ran off to serve them
up to the governess.
The latter sat in the schoolroom, trying to explain a problem in arithmetic to the twins.
This proved a hard task today. The two were dreadfully absent-minded. Just then Hun
came into the room.
"A charade, Miss Hanenwinkel," he announced at once.
* Hanenwinkel translated into English means Rooster-corner.
"But I won't let you say it now. This is no time for such nonsense," said the governess,
firmly. But as Jul was the originator this time, the little boy grew quite audacious. Without
swerving, he declared several times:
"It's Jul's charade, Jul made it up."
"Then say it quickly," said the governess, visibly relenting. The boy distinctly recited his
riddle.
Miss Hanenwinkel, who came from Bremen, did not like to be left behind and was always
quick in replies. Immediately sitting down at the table, she took up pen and paper and
wrote:
"My first's the time for nuts, my whole then finds

Much pleasure in them, for at once he grinds
Them up between his teeth; but we can't see,
That there's much of my second in this. For he,
My whole, that is, throws shells upon the floor
And makes us tumble on them at the door."
"Take this to Mr. Jul," she said, giving the little one the paper, "and tell him I refuse to be
beaten. As long as he has turned my name so nicely into a charade, I am sending him one,
too. But don't come in again, Hun. We must work hard, and another disturbance might be
fatal."
Willi and Lili were less afraid of a disturbance, and it was quite visible that the recent
interruption had already had the dreaded effect. While the governess had been talking to
their brother, the twins had moved their heads closer and closer together, apparently deep
in making plans. These had proved so absorbing that they could not even remember the
simplest sums, and Miss Hanenwinkel found herself obliged to shut her book with a deep
sigh. She remarked in conclusion, that if each number represented some foolish exploit,
Willi and Lili would grasp them all.
This opinion of the governess was not without foundation, because the twins seemed
especially gifted for such exploits. Apparently a scheme of this kind was in their heads
now, and as soon as the lesson was done, they rushed enterprisingly towards the laundry.
Here they had a secret consultation opposite all the washtubs in the place.
At table, Jul pulled out a sheet of paper and asked, "Who can guess a fine riddle Miss
Hanenwinkel has composed?" After which he read it.
He was hardly finished when Rolf cried out the answer, "Julius and by rights Yule-use."
It was the right solution. Miss Hanenwinkel, however, did not read her riddle, because she
did not wish to have her peculiarity discussed and laughed at.
After dinner, Willi and Lili ran to the laundry again, for it was Saturday afternoon and they
were free to do what they pleased. Miss Hanenwinkel had meant to watch the children, but
seeing them enter the laundry, she supposed they were going to wash some doll's
clothing, a favorite occupation of theirs. She was glad they had found something to keep
them busy for at least a couple of hours.
But Willi and Lili had an idea which reached far beyond a mere doll wash. While playing
with their new Noah's ark they had entered so deeply into the miraculous existence of the
people and animals in the ark that Lili conceived the brilliant idea of executing a trip in the
ark themselves. She carefully thought out everything necessary for such a journey, and
being alert and practical, she knew quite well how to do it.
Among the washtubs, the twins selected one of medium size for the ark, one just big
enough to hold them and the animals if everybody kept nice and quiet.
Schnurri and Philomele were to represent the animals in the ark, and the first thing the
children did, was catch hold of the two pets so necessary to their idea. Schnurri followed
the call with a growl, while Philomele rubbed her soft fur against Lili's legs so caressingly
that the little girl picked her up tenderly saying, "You really are much nicer than Schnurri,
dear Philomele."
Philomele had gotten her name because she mewed very melodiously, and Schnurri his,
because he grunted and growled so much. But there was a cause for this. The two had
been commanded to live in harmony together and to do each other no harm. Schnurri
punctually obeyed these instructions by always being peaceful and considerate towards
Philomele. While they were having dinner from the same dish, he ate very slowly, knowing
that the cat with her tiny mouth could not eat as fast, as he. Philomele was always
pleasant towards the dog when anyone was watching, but when nobody was around, she
frequently lifted her paw and gave him a treacherous blow behind the ear. This would
make Schnurri growl, and as this happened very often, he growled nearly all the time. He
had gotten his name unjustly, because he was by nature a peace-loving and friendly
creature.
For the trip in the ark, some water was necessary. Lili knew that on wash days a long
wooden funnel or pipe was laid under the fountain outside and into the tub, which made
the latter fill with water. She had planned to let the water flow from the wooden funnel to
the floor of the laundry where the washtub always stood. In that way the floor would be
gradually covered with water and finally the tub would be lifted up, representing the
swimming ark. All this was carefully planned, and only the long funnel which was
necessary for that manoeuvre had to be secured.
Willi and Lili could not quite decide whether it was wiser to ask Battist or Trine for help.
Old Battist and young Trine stood in practically the same relationship as Schnurri and
Philomele. Battist had served many years in the household, and knowing about everything,
had a word to say about all the management of the house and stable, as well as the
garden and the fields. The universal respect shown to the old man annoyed Trine, who felt
that regard was due to her, too. If she had not served the family very long yet, her aunt
had lived in the Birkenfeld household so many years that she had actually become too old
to work and was resting from her labors now. Trine had taken her place and was decidedly
jealous of old Battist's authority, which she herself did not recognize at all. She behaved
very decently to the old man before the family, but teased him as soon as they turned
their backs, just as Philomele did with Schnurri.
The children knew this, and often made use of this state of affairs for their own private
ends. Willi and Lili felt that Trine would be more willing to lend them aid than the old
gardener, who never much approved of extraordinary schemes. But the needed funnel
came under his especial sceptre, and therefore Lili decided to ask the old man's assistance,
while Willi held on to Schnurri and the cat. Finding Battist on the threshing-floor sorting
out seeds, Lili stood herself in front of him with her hands back of her, taking the identical
attitude her father always took when talking with his workmen.
"Battist," she began energetically, "where is the funnel which is used in the laundry for
filling the washtubs with water?"
Battist looked at Lili from his seeds, as if anxious to weigh her question. Then he asked
deliberately, "Did your mamma send you here?"
"No, she didn't send me, I want it myself," explained Lili.
"I see; then I don't know where the funnel is," retorted Battist.
"But Battist," Lili commenced again, "I only want a little water from the spring fountain.
Why can't I have it?"
"I know you two small birds," growled Battist. "Once a little bit of fire and then a little bit
of water, and finally some dreadful mishap. You can't have it this time, you can't have it."
"Then I don't care," sulked Lili, and went at once to the kitchen where Trine was sweeping
the floor.
"Trine," said the little girl pleasantly, "won't you come and give us the funnel for the
fountain? Battist is horrid, he won't even give it to us for a second. But you will let us have
it, won't you, Trine?"
"Of course," replied Trine. "I don't see why you shouldn't have a little bit of water. But
you'll have to wait until the old bear goes away. Then I'll go with you."
After a while Trine saw Battist walking across the yard towards the fields.
"Come, now," she said, taking Lili's hand in hers and running to the laundry.
She pulled out the pipe from its hiding place, laid one end under the spigot and the other
into a small tub. Then she explained to Lili how to take the pipe away when the bucket was
full enough. She and Willi could do this quite well themselves and when they needed more
water they could put it back. Trine had to go back to her work now.
When the maid left, they were ready to start on their excursion. After the pipe was laid on
the floor, Lili climbed in, followed by Willi, and Philomele was lifted and Schnurri was pulled
inside. Noah and his wife sat in their beautiful ark now, grateful over their delivery and
joyful over their trip on the rising floods. The water from the fountain was steadily flowing
into the laundry, and all of a sudden the ark was lifted and began to float. Noah and his
wife screamed with delight. They had really succeeded in their plans, the ark actually
swam about on real waves.
Several high stone steps led down into the laundry, and it therefore held a large quantity
of water. The water rose steadily higher and higher, and the children began to feel a little
frightened.
"Look, Willi, we won't be able to get out any more," said Lili, "it's getting higher all the
time."
Willi looked out thoughtfully over the edge of the tub and said, "If it gets much higher,
we'll have to drown."
Of course it kept on getting higher and higher.
Schnurri was beginning to get restless, too, and by jumping about, threatened to upset the
washtub. It rocked violently to and fro. The water by that time was so deep that the
children could not possibly climb out again, and seized by a sudden panic, they began to
shriek with all their might: "We are drowning, we are drowning! Mamma! Mamma! Battist!
Trine! We are drowning!"
Finally, instead of words, they just frantically screeched and yelled. Schnurri barked and
growled from sympathy, while Philomele revealed her true character, and began to bite and
scratch, while meowing loudly. Philomele refused to go into the water, neither would she
stay in the tub. Instead, she went on crazily and scratched the children whenever she
could. But when the faithful Schnurri saw that no assistance was coming in answer to their
cries, he jumped into the water with a big leap. He swam towards the door, gave himself a
shake and ran away. But the children yelled worse than ever now, for Schnurri had nearly
upset the tub in jumping out.
Dora had long ago run down to her hole in the hedge to see what was the cause of the
pitiful cries.
The laundry stood close to the hedge, but she could see nothing but a funnel through
which water flowed into the laundry. But she heard their cries about drowning and turning
about, she ran upstairs again.
"Aunt Ninette," she cried breathlessly, "two children are drowning over there. Don't you
hear them, don't you hear them?"
The aunt had heard the yells, despite her tightly barred windows.
"Oh, gracious, what does it mean?" cried the affrighted aunt. "Of course, I heard the awful
noise, but who is drowning, I wonder? Mrs. Kurd! Mrs. Kurd! Mrs. Kurd!" Meanwhile, the
soaked dog ran in big leaps towards the coachhouse, where Battist was cutting bean poles.
Schnurri rushed up to him, pulled his trousers, barked violently, then tried to pull Battist
along again, howling incessantly.
"Something is up," said Battist, and putting one of the poles on his shoulder, he said to
himself, "One can never tell what may be useful."
Herewith, he followed Schnurri, who gaily preceded him to the washhouse. By that time,
the mother, the governess, Paula, Rolf and Hun, and at last Trine had assembled, as the
awful noise had penetrated into every nook and corner of the house and garden. Battist at
once held his long pole out over the floods towards the tub.
"Take hold of it tight and don't let it go!" he called to the children, and after drawing the
whole ark towards him, he lifted the inmates onto dry land.
Willi and Lili were so scared and white that they had to recover a little before being
examined about their exploit. Taking each by the hand, their mother led them to the bench
under the apple tree and gave them a chance to revive a little.
Jul, leading the small Hun by the hand, followed and said, "Oh, you terrible twins, some
day you will both come to a terrible end."
With trousers turned up, old Battist had stepped into the deluge, and had opened all the
vents for draining to let the floods disperse. To Trine, who stood beside him, he said
pityingly, "It only happened because you have no more sense than the seven-year-olds!"
He knew quite well who had fetched the funnel. Trine, realizing that she had been duped,
could give no answer, but like Philomele, got ready to scratch her adversary.
When everybody sat safe and sound again under the apple tree, Philomele came up to Lili,
tenderly meowing and rubbing against the girl's legs. But the child pushed her away, and
instead she and Willi tenderly stroked the wet Schnurri, who lay at their feet on the
ground. The twins secretly resolved to give Schnurri their whole supper that night, for in
their great extremity, they had found out the true character of their pets.
After thoughtfully gazing at the rescued twins for a while, the small Hun joined Jul, who
was wandering to and fro on the gravel path.
"Jul," said the little one solemnly, "tell me in what way the terrible twins could come to a
fearful end?"
"They might do it in different ways, Hun," replied Jul, standing still. "You see they have
already tried fire and water. In some excited mood, they may next pull down the house
over our heads. Then we'll all be lying underneath, and everything will be over."
"Can't we quickly jump away?" asked little Hun, concerned.
"We can, if they don't do it in the middle of the night."
"Please wake me up then," Hun implored his brother.
Mrs. Kurd had come in answer to Aunt Ninette's repeated cries at the identical moment
when Battist was pulling the ark to safety and the cries had stopped.
"Did you hear it, Mrs. Kurd? Wasn't it terrible? But everything is quiet now. Do you
suppose they were saved?"
"Of course," said Mrs. Kurd calmly. "The little ones were just screaming a little, and there
can't have been any real danger."

Instant Download Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family Market and Homoeopathy Shinjini Das PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Instant Download Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family Market and Homoeopathy Shinjini Das PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Instant Download Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family Market and Homoeopathy Shinjini Das PDF All Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Download and Read online, DOWNLOAD EBOOK, [PDF EBOOK EPUB ], Ebooks

download, Read Ebook EPUB/KINDE, Download Book Format PDF

Vernacular Medicine in Colonial India Family

Rules of the House: Family Law and Domestic Disputes in

Teaching AIDS The Cultural Politics of HIV Disease in

Language as Identity in Colonial India: Policies and

The Rays Before Satyajit: Creativity and Modernity in

Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India The

McWhinney's textbook of family medicine 4th Edition

CURRENT Diagnosis & Treatment in Family Medicine 5th

Outside the Lettered City Cinema Modernity and the

All translations from Bengali are mine unless otherwise noted.

verandas, across three storeys and around a quadrangular, cobbled court-

Relatively little is known about the colonial careers of these nineteenth-

aspects of western medicine, as well as resistance to it. Existing articles

frequently condemned as a ‘growing scandal’ proliferating within the

thriving sociocultural past. In the state sources, homoeopathy comes into

Calcutta-based Bengali homoeopathic entrepreneurs in conversation as

century, amateur lower-class practitioners in the mofussil, peddling poorly

As I draw attention to the value of these colonial family archives, I focus

Anthropology Today, 9, 4 (1993), 15–18. For a more sophisticated and historically

ﬁrst private family ﬁrm, Berigny and Company’s Calcutta Homoeopathic

Homoeopathy and the South Asian Family

modality, museology modality as well as a surveillance modality.39 It has

nationalists experienced in the context of imperial domination’.46

consistent invocation of the metaphor of ‘family’ in organising business as

Focusing on economic and entrepreneurial practices concerning

Family in Bengal could simultaneously pose as the agent producing and

Swadeshi Homoeopathy and the Market

needs renewed scholarship for speciﬁc contexts. They have argued

In addition to the critical interventions summarised here on the subject

phenomenon as ‘Hindu nationalism’s linkage of an indigenist cultural

fourth edition appearing in 1921. Bhattacharya’s career reinforces

popularised homoeopathy as the ideal ‘indigenous’ remedy for a nation

Making Medicine Vernacular

"Beautiful, beautiful! I suppose Rolf is the originator of this?"

"Happy all at my first are reckoned,

SHE HAD BEEN LOST IN EVERYTHING

"'Yet God keeps watch above us

"O, Willi and Lili,

BEFORE JUL COULD PREVENT IT,

"Rejoice, rejoice in life

"Paula!" he cried from below. "Guess: My first makes—"

"'My first is just an animal forlorn.

"Oh, but you guessed that quickly!" said Rolf, surprised.

"'My first is sharp as any needle's end,

"I know it!" cried Rolf, overjoyed. "It is pick-pocket."

"'My first within the alphabet is found,

"Cake-walk," said Jul with not the slightest hesitation.

"Oh, I forgot," said Jul.

"Yes, I can!" declared the little boy, offended.

"'My first is closest bonds that can two unite,

"If you give me time, I'll guess it," declared Rolf.

Dora waited anxiously for her uncle's answer.

"COME, I'LL SAY IT AND YOU MUST LEARN IT BY HEART."

The little one wandered off.

"All right, keep on, Hun!"

"When like my first Hun's crow, disturbs all men