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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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.
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and to delight in it as goodness; to be wholly possessed with a life-
absorbing passion to find and to diffuse goodness everywhere. This
approaches nearest to the Divine ideal. “He hath pleasure in
uprightness, and hath no pleasure in wickedness” (1 Chron. xxix. 17; Ps.
v. 4). There is no pleasure like that we find in true goodness. Severus,
emperor of Rome, confessed on his deathbed, “I have been everything,
and now find that everything is nothing.” Then, directing that the urn
should be brought to him, he said, “Little urn, thou shalt contain one
for whom the world was too little.”
III. That completeness of moral character is attained by the
exercise of a Divinely inspired faith.—“And the work of faith with
power” (ver. 11). We have no innate righteousness. It is God-given. It is
received, maintained, and extended in the soul by faith in the merits of
the all-righteous Saviour. “While faith itself is the gift of God, it is no
less an exercise of the mind and heart of man. And because, like
everything else about man, it partakes of his great weakness, it needs
ever, as it walks in the light of the Divine Word, to stay itself on the
Divine hand.” Faith is the mighty instrument by which the Divine life is
propagated in the soul, and by which the loftiest blessings are secured.
IV. That completeness of moral character promotes the Divine
glory.—“That the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in
you, and ye in Him” (ver. 12). It will be seen at the last that Christ has
been more abundantly glorified by a humble, holy life than by wealthy
benefactions or by gigantic enterprises. The name now so much
despised, and for which those who now bear it suffer so much, shall be
magnified and exalted “above every name” (Phil. ii. 9). The followers of
Christ shall share in the glory of their Lord. Their excellencies redound
to His glory; and His glory is reflected on them in such a way that there
is a mutual glorification. “What a glory it will be to them before all
creatures that He who sits upon the throne once shared their sorrows
and died for them! What a glory that He still wears their nature and is
not ashamed to call them brethren! What a glory to be for ever clothed
with His righteousness! What a glory to reign with Him and be
glorified together!” (Lillie).
V. That completeness of moral character is rendered possible by
the provisions of Divine grace.—“According to the grace of our God
and the Lord Jesus Christ” (ver. 12). The source or all human goodness,
in all its varying degrees, is in the Divine favour. It is worthy of note
that Christ is here recognised as on an equality with the Father, and as
being with Him the fontal source of grace. The glory which it is
possible for sanctified humanity to reach is “according to grace.” The
grace is “exceeding abundant” (1 Tim. i. 14); so is the glory. There is a
fathomless mine of moral wealth provided for every earnest seeker
after God.
VI. That completeness of moral character should be the subject
of constant prayer.—“Wherefore also we pray always for you” (ver. 11).
The Thessalonians where favoured in having the prayers of the
apostles. It is a beautiful example of the unselfishness of the Christian
spirit when we are so concerned for others as to pray for them. We
value that about which we pray the most. We have need of prayer to
help us to attend faithfully to the little things which make up the daily
duties of the Christian life. Attention to trifles is the way to
completeness of moral character. The great Italian sculptor,
Michelangelo, was once visited by an acquaintance, who remarked, on
entering his studio, “Why, you have done nothing to that figure since I
was here last?” “Yes,” was the reply, “I have softened this expression,
touched off that projection, and made other improvements.” “Oh!” said
the visitor, “these are mere trifles.” “True,” answered the sculptor, “but
remember that trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
Lessons.—1. It is important to have a lofty ideal of Christian perfection
constantly in view. 2. While humbled by failures we are not to be
disheartened. 3. Earnest, persevering prayer wins great moral victories.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.

Vers. 11, 12. Genuine Religion illustrated.
I. Religion in its nature.—It is a worthiness into which we are called
and with which we are invested.
II. Religion in its source.—The goodness of God. 1. All present
religious views and feelings are the effect of Divine grace. 2. Man has no
rightful claim to Divine grace. 3. Religion has its true source in the good
pleasure of God.
III. Religion in its principle.—Faith. “The work of faith with power.”
The producing and sustaining principle of religion.
IV. Religion in its end.—1. The glory of the Redeemer. “That the name
of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you.” 2. The glory of the
redeemed. “And ye in Him.”
V. Religion in its measure or rule of dispensation.—“According to
the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”—Zeta.
Ver. 12. Christ glorified in His People.—The bust of Luther was shut out
from the Walhalla, or German Westminster Abbey. The people were
indignant, but said, “Why need we a bust when he lives in our hearts?”
And thus the Christian ever feels when he beholds many around him
multiplying pictures and statues of Christ, and he can say, “I need
them not, for He is ever with me; He lives perpetually in my heart.”
CHAPTER II.
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.

Ver. 1. Beseech . . . by the coming of our Lord.—The English reader
who consults the similar phrase “to beseech by” in Rom. xii. 1 will be
wholly astray. St. Paul begs his readers not to be thrown into
consternation or kept in a flutter of excitement over that matter of the
Parousia, or “coming.”
Ver. 2. Not soon shaken.—Like a house built on sand when the storm
breaks to fury, or like the mobile vulgus in Thessalonica who were only
too willing to follow the lead of Jewish agitators (Acts xvii. 13). In
mind.—R.V. “from your mind.” “Out of your wits” expresses the
apostle’s meaning exactly. They are to behave like men in whom reason
is supreme—not like men in a panic. Or be troubled.—The same
word was used in reporting our Lord’s counsels on the same subject.
“Be not troubled: . . . the end is not yet” (Matt. xxiv. 6). By epistle as
from us.—Either by misinterpretation of something St. Paul had
written, or by a forged letter purporting to have come from him.
Ver. 3. Let no man deceive.—R.V. “beguile or cheat you.” A falling
away.—Lit. “the apostasy,” a desertion from the army of God; a
recantation of faith in Christ. Our Master foretold that when “iniquity
shall abound the love of many shall be blown cool” (Matt. xxiv. 12).
That man of sin.—Another reading is “lawlessness.” The man in
whom sin gathers itself up into a head—the last product of sin. The
son of perdition—par excellence, sharing the title with him whom
Christ so named (John xvii. 12). Abaddon (Rev. ix. 11) may claim him as
his own ultimately.
Ver. 4. Who opposeth and exalteth himself.—The participle
rendered “who opposeth” is used twice by St. Luke in the plural as
“adversaries.” So in the singular (1 Tim. v. 14). The compound word for
“exalteth himself” occurs (2 Cor. xii. 7), and is given as “exalted-above-
measure.” Above all that is called God.—The shudder of horror in
these words reminds us how a monotheistic Jew must regard the
impious act. We can understand that a Roman emperor would regard
the God of Jew or Christian as a tutelary deity; but the acme of
profanity is reached in this act of Antichrist. Or that is worshipped.
—R.V. margin, “Gr. an object of worship.” “The very name Sebastos, the
Greek rendering of the imperial title Augustus, to which Dieus was
added at death (signifying ‘the one to be worshipped’), was an offence
to the religious mind. . . . Later, Cæsar or Christ was the martyr’s
alternative” (Findlay). Showing Himself that He is God.—Or, as we
would say, “representing Himself to be God.” Compare Herod’s
acceptance of the worship (Acts xii. 22).
Ver. 6. What withholdeth.—R.V. “that which restraineth.” “A hint was
sufficient, verbum sapientibus: more than a hint would have been
dangerous” (Ibid.).
Ver. 7. He who now letteth.—R.V. “there is one that restraineth.” The
old word for “obstruct” is found in Isa. xliii. 13: “I will work, and who
shall let (i.e. hinder) it?” “Where then are we to look . . . for the check
and bridle of lawlessness? Where but to law itself? The fabric of civil
law and the authority of the magistrate formed a bulwark and
breakwater against the excesses both of autocratic tyranny and of
popular violence” (Ibid.).
Ver. 8. And then shall that Wicked be revealed.—R.V. “and then
shall be revealed the lawless one.” Outward restraint being withdrawn,
there is no inward principle to keep him back: he is “lawless.” And
shall destroy.—R.V. “bring to nought.” It is the same word as that
which describes the effect of the revelation of the Gospel on “death” in
2 Tim. i. 10—to render absolutely powerless. With the brightness of
His coming.—R.V. “by the manifestation of His coming.” Lit. “by the
epiphany of His presence.”
Ver. 9. Even Him, whose coming, etc.—These words look back to the
beginning of ver. 8. “The two comings—the parousia of the Lord Jesus
and that of the Man of Lawlessness—are set in contrast. The second
forms the dark background to the glory of the first” (Ibid.). Power and
signs and lying wonders.—Simulating the supernatural evidences of
the Gospel as the magicians of Egypt those of Moses.
Ver. 10. Deceivableness of unrighteousness.—R.V. “deceit.” The
deceit which is characteristic of unrighteousness, or marks its
methods. They received not the love of the truth.—The sine qua
non for an answer to Pilate’s question (John xviii. 38) is this love of the
truth.
Ver. 11. God shall send them strong delusion.—R.V. “God sendeth
them a working of error.” “It is a just, but mournful result, that rejecters
of Christ’s miracles become believers in Satan’s, and that atheism
should be avenged by superstition. So it has been and will be” (Ibid.).
One is reminded of the old saying that “the gods first drive mad those
whom they mean to destroy.”
Ver. 12. Believed not the truth, but had pleasure in
unrighteousness.—Here again we have the mental rejection of truth
consequent on a liking for that which truth condemns. If “the heart
makes the theologian,” the want of it makes the infidel.
Ver. 13. We are bound to give thanks.—The same form of expression
as in ch. i. 3, save that here “we” is expressed separately and
emphatically.
Ver. 15. Stand fast.—Ready for any shock which may come
unexpectedly through the insidious methods of Antichrist. Hold the
traditions.—As of the apostle said, keep a strong hand on them.
Tradition is that which is handed over from one to another. Compare
1 Cor. xi. 23. “I received of the Lord . . . I delivered unto you . . . He was
betrayed.” Here the words “delivered” and “betrayed” represent a doing,
of which the word for “tradition” is the act completed. Paul handed
over that which his Lord charged him to transmit; Judas handed over
Christ to the Jews.
Ver. 16. Everlasting consolation and good hope.—Consolation, or
comfort, is ministered by the Paraclete (John xiv. 16; Acts ix. 31), who
abides for ever with those who are Christ’s.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 1–12.

Antichrist Portrayed.
Various interpretations of this remarkable paragraph have been
attempted. Some modern German critics would divest it of any
prophetic significance and treat it as a representation of the writer’s
own personal feelings and forebodings. Others would restrict its
application to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, and to
persons, principles, and events that preceded that catastrophe. The
commonly received Protestant interpretation is to identify the Man of
Sin and his doings with the Papacy; and there are certainly many
points of that interpretation that accord very remarkably with the
prophecy. But there are serious objections to all these views. We believe
the revelation of the Antichrist here depicted is yet future, though the
elements of his power are now in preparation. From the whole passage
we gather the following suggestions:—
I. That Antichrist will be embodied in some living personality.—
He is called “that man of sin, the son of perdition”: “that Wicked”—the
lawless one (vers. 3–8). The fathers of the early Church, for at least
three centuries after the apostolic age, while differing on some minor
details, seemed unanimous in understanding by the Man of Sin, not a
system of deceit and wickedness, or a succession of individuals at the
head of such a system, but some one man, the living personal
Antichrist, the incarnation of Satanic craft and energy, who should put
forth his power to weaken and destroy the Church.
1. He will arrogantly assume Divine prerogatives.—“Who opposeth and
exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so
that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is
God” (ver. 4). In these words we note Antichrist’s intrusion into the
special dwelling-place of God, his usurping session there, and his
blasphemous and ostentatious assumption of Divinity. The wildest
excesses of pride and audacity cannot exceed this.
2. His advent will be accompanied with remarkable displays of Satanic
power.—“Whose coming is after the working of Satan with all power
and signs and lying wonders” (ver. 9). Antichrist as the masterpiece of
Satan will be endowed with extraordinary qualities. The devil will tax
his prodigious abilities to the utmost in making this great adversary of
the Church as potent for mischief as possible. We know how readily
the man of science can impose upon the ignorant with his
experiments. And how easy it is for Satan, with his vast knowledge and
resources, to delude thousands with his simulations of the miraculous!
The advent of Antichrist is to be a fiendish caricature and audacious
mockery of the glorious coming of the Son of God!
II. That Antichrist will work deplorable mischief in human souls.
—1. He seeks by secret methods to promote apostasy from the Church of
God. “A falling away first” (ver. 3). “The mystery of iniquity doth already
work” (ver. 7). Here we detect the germs and preparation of the
antichristian curse that is to work such havoc. The primitive Church of
apostolic times was not such a model of perfection as we sometimes
imagine. The leaven of iniquity, of lawlessness, the essence of all sin,
was already working. Observe the sorrowing references of the apostles
to the many evils of the different Churches: Tit. i. 11; 1 Tim. vi. 5; 2 Cor.
xi. 26; Philem. 9; 2 Tim. i. 15; 1 John ii. 18–20; 2 John 7; 3 John 9. Passim.
The most disastrous apostasies have been the result of long, secret
endeavours.
2. He begets a dislike to saving truth.—“With all deceivableness of
unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the
love of the truth that they might be save” (ver. 10). The truth was
revealed, its saving benefits were offered; they had but to accept the
truth and they were safe. But they rejected the truth; they loved it not.
Their treatment of the Gospel rendered them more easy victims to the
deceptions of Antichrist; fascinated by his unrighteous glamour, they
recede from the truth and cherish a bitter hostility towards it.
3. His victims are abandoned to self-delusion and condemnation.—“And
for this cause God shall send them strong delusion that they should
believe a lie; that they all might be damned”—might be judged
according to their individual character and works—“who believed not
the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (vers. 11, 12). See here
the fearful consequences of a hatred to and rejection of the truth! The
soul takes delight in sinning—has “pleasure in unrighteousness.” It is,
then, not only abandoned to its iniquity, but its delusions are
intensified so as to embrace the most palpable falsehoods as truth. It
shall then be judged on its own merits, so that God shall be justified in
His speaking and clear in His judging. Terrible indeed is the fate of the
victims who fall under the spell of Antichrist.
III. That the coming of Antichrist is for a time restrained.—“And
now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his
time. . . . Only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the
way” (vers. 6, 7). There is an external power with an individual at its
head which holds back the power of Antichrist until the proper season
comes. What that power is is not revealed; but God can use any power
for this purpose, until the Divinely appointed time shall come for the
revelation and overthrow of Antichrist.
IV. That Antichrist shall be summarily destroyed.—“Whom the
Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth”—as insects wither on
the mere approach of fire—“and shall destroy with the brightness of
His coming” (ver. 8)—with the appearing of His coming, as it were the
first gleaming dawn of His advent. For a time Antichrist shall reign in
pomp and splendour and delude many to their ruin; but at the coming
of the true Lord of the Church the great impostor shall be dethroned
and utterly abolished. “It is enough,” says Chrysostom, “that He be
present, and all these things perish. He will stay the deception simply
by appearing.”
V. That the followers of Christ need not be afraid of losing any
benefits to be conferred by His second coming.—“Now we beseech
you, brethren, by the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and by our
gathering together unto Him, that ye be not soon shaken in mind, or
be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as
that the day of Christ is at hand” (vers. 1, 2)—on hand, has already
come. When Paul wrote the first epistle, the Thessalonians “were
sorrowing by the graves of their departed friends, and the grief of
nature was enhanced by the apprehension that their beloved ones
might suffer loss at the coming of the Lord. But now, should they hear
that He had come and had not called for them, a yet deeper, more
agitating motion must seize them, lest they themselves had forfeited
their share in the glory of the kingdom.” These words would allay their
fears. Christ has yet to come, and before that coming Antichrist is to
arise and reign. Wait patiently, labour diligently, and be not harassed
with too great an eagerness to know future events. All the blessings of
Christ’s second coming shall be shared by you and by all who are to be
gathered together unto Him.
Lessons.—1. There are trying times ahead. 2. The only safety for the
soul is to hold fast the truth. 3. At the darkest moment of the Church’s
trial the glory of God will appear.

Vers. 1–6. A Warning against Imposition.
I. The danger.—1. Their faith was imperilled. 2. Daily duties were
interfered with.
II. Signs of the coming end.—1. By a great apostasy. 2. The
appearance of Antichrist as the man of sin and son of perdition. 3. The
proud pretensions of Antichrist. (1) Opposing Christ. (2) Substituting
error for truth. (3) Overweening self-exaltation.
III. Hindrances to the spread of truth (ver. 6)—1. The civil powers of
that day. 2. The machinations of Satan at all times. 3. The
unfaithfulness of God’s people.
Vers. 1–3. A False Alarm—

I. May arise from a misconception of an important truth.
—“Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our gathering
together unto Him” (ver. 1).
II. Is aggravated by unwarrantable deceptions.—“Let no man
deceive you by any means” (ver. 3). “Neither by spirit, nor by word, nor
by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is come” (ver. 2).
III. Is the cause of much real suffering.—“Shaken in mind—
troubled” (ver. 2)—like a ship escaped from its moorings, tossed in a
rolling sea.
IV. Is allayed by the affectionate entreaty of competent teachers.
—“We beseech you, brethren” (ver. 1).
Ver. 5. Memory—
I. Is freighted with treasures of precious truth.—“I told you

these things.”
II. Associates the presence and character of the teacher with the
truth taught.—“When I was yet with you.”
III. Is often vividly reminded of the value of its possession.
—“Remember ye not.”
Vers. 7–10. The Mystery of Iniquity—
I. Is the deepest and most subtle form of error.

II. Is propagated with great cunning and persistency.
III. Is embodied in a powerful and wicked personality (vers. 7, 8).
IV. Is Satanic in its origin and manifestation (vers. 9, 10).
Vers. 10–12. The Destructive Subtlety of Sin.

I. It has manifold methods of deception.—“With all deceivableness
of unrighteousness” (ver. 10).
II. It incites the soul to a hatred of saving truth.—“That received
not the love of the truth that they might be saved” (ver. 10).
III. It abandons its victims to judicial self-deception.—“God shall
send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie” (ver. 11).
IV. It leads to inevitable condemnation.—“That they all might be
damned” (ver. 12).
V. It encourages sin for the love of sin.—“Who believed not the
truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (ver. 12).
Vers. 11, 12. Strong Delusions.
I. Believing a lie as truth.

II. Sent as a judgment for not believing the truth.
III. Are brought on by those who have pleasure in sin.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 13, 14.

Salvation a Divine Act.
When the air is thick with antichristian theories, sincere inquirers after
truth are perplexed, the grasp of the hesitating is loosened, and the
fidelity of the strongest severely tested. Only those who fully yield
themselves up to the teaching and guidance of the Divine spirit are
safe. A clever inventor has recently constructed a fireproof dress, which
enables him to walk about unharmed in the midst of the fiercest fire.
Experimental godliness is a fireproof dress, and the soul clothed with
this is safely guarded from the fiery darts of the wicked and will pass
unscathed through the fiercest fires of temptation. We never know
what it is to be really saved till we personally experience the sanctifying
power of the truth. These verses teach that salvation is a Divine act.
I. Salvation is an act of the Divine will.—1. The Divine will is
actuated by Divine love. “Brethren beloved of the Lord, God hath from
the beginning chosen you to salvation” (ver. 13). When we examine the
sources of salvation, we find them not in ourselves, but in some power
outside of ourselves. We are saved, not because we are good, or better
than others, or more favourably circumstanced, but because God has
chosen us. And if we ask still further how it is that God should lavish
the grace of His salvation on sinful man, we are reduced, in the final
analysis, to this answer: Such is the Divine will—a will swayed in all its
mighty potentialities by infinite love.
"Love, strong as death; nay, stronger

Love mightier than the grave;
Broad as the earth, and longer
Than ocean's widest wave.
This is the love that sought us,
This is the love that bought us,
This is the love that brought us,
To gladdest day from saddest night,
From deepest shame to glory bright,
From depths of death to life's fair height,
From darkness to the joy of light."Bonar.
2. The Divine will provides the means of salvation.—“Whereunto He

called you by our gospel” (ver. 14). The Gospel is God’s method of
salvation, and it is through this Gospel He “will have all men to be
saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. iii. 4). If
the Gospel were but a human expedient, it would fail; but, as it was
originated and devised in the Divine mind, so it is backed and made
forceful by the operation of the Divine will.
II. Salvation as a Divine act is in harmony with individual
freedom.—1. Salvation implies personal holiness. “Through
sanctification of the Spirit” (ver. 13). The Spirit sanctifies the individual
soul, and the soul, in the exercise of its voluntary power, co-operated
with the Spirit. The soul feels the need of being sanctified, is willing to
be sanctified, earnestly desires to be sanctified, and gives free,
unrestricted scope to the Spirit in His sanctifying work.
2. Salvation implies personal faith.—“And belief of the truth” (ver. 13).
This clause brings out distinctly that the sanctification of the Spirit is
not wrought on a passive and unresponsive agent. Faith is the gift of
God, but it is an act of man. It is a self-giving; the surrender of his own
freedom to secure the larger freedom that salvation confers on the soul
that trusts. Without God’s gift there would be no faith, and without
man’s exercise of that gift there is no salvation. It is not faith that saves,
but the Christ received by faith. Erskine puts it thus: “As it is not the
laying on the plaster that heals the sore, but the plaster itself that is
laid on, so it is not the faith, or receiving of Christ, but Christ received
by faith that saves us. It is not our looking to the brazen serpent
mystical, but the mystical brazen serpent looked unto by faith—Christ
received by faith—that saves us.”
III. Salvation as a Divine act aims at securing for the soul the
highest blessedness.—“To the obtaining of the glory of our Lord
Jesus Christ” (ver. 14). The saved soul aspires after glory, but it is glory
of the loftiest type. It is not the changeful glory of worldly
magnificence. It is not the glory of Paul, or of the greatest human
genius. It is “the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” When the soul catches
a glimpse of the splendour of this Divine blessedness, it can be satisfied
with no lower aims. “Paint and canvas,” said Guthrie, “cannot give the
hues of a rainbow or of the beams of the sun. No more can words
describe the Saviour’s glory. Nay, what is the most glowing and ecstatic
view that the highest faith of a soul, hovering on the borders of
another world, ever obtained of Christ, compared with the reality? It is
like the sun changed by a frosty fogbank into a dull, red copper ball—
shorn of the splendour that no mortal eyes can look upon.” As it is
Christ’s glory that we seek, so it is Christ’s glory we shall share.
IV. Salvation as a Divine act affords matter for unceasing
gratitude.—“But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you”
(ver. 13). The mercy of God in our salvation is ever providing fruitful
themes for gratitude on earth: the glory of Christ as revealed in heaven
will be the song of everlasting thankfulness and praise. Every added
trophy of saving power augments the gratitude and joy of the faithful.
Lessons.—1. The rejection of the truth is the rejection of salvation.
2. Salvation brings the highest good to man and the greatest glory to
God. 3. Salvation will be the exhaustless theme of the heavenly song.

Ver. 13. The Holy Ghost the Sanctifier.
I. Connect the Divine purpose and agency that the nature and
effect of the latter may be more apparent.—To collect a people out
of the wreck of human life has been God’s purpose from the first. To
sanctify them is to separate them to God in fact and in effect. The Holy
Ghost is given by Christ to sever the once dead in sins from the dead
around them.
II. The scope of this agency.—God’s work is perfect. It has its stages;
but the Holy Ghost conducts it from first to last. Sanctification is
progressive. The end of sanctification is salvation.
III. The ordinary means through which the Holy Ghost operates.
—Through belief of the truth, the Gospel. The Spirit sanctifies through
the truth.—H. T. Lumsden.
Ver. 14. The Glory of Sainthood—
I. Is the object of the Gospel to promote.—“Whereunto He hath

called you by our gospel.”
II. Is a conscious personal possession.—“To the obtaining of the
glory.”
III. Is a sharing of the glory of Christ.—“Of the glory of our Lord
Jesus Christ.”
What Saints should be.—In the cathedral of St. Mark, Venice, a

marvellous building lustrous with an Oriental splendour beyond
description, there are pillars said to have been brought from Solomon’s
temple; these are of alabaster, a substance firm and endurable as
granite, and yet transparent, so that the light glows through them.
Behold an emblem of what all true pillars of the Church should be—
firm in their faith and transparent in their character; men of simple
mould, ignorant of tortuous and deceptive ways, and yet men of strong
will, not readily to be led aside or bent from their uprightness.—
Spurgeon.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF VERSE 15.

Christian Steadfastness.
In all ages the people of God have been assailed with the weapons of a
subtle and plausible philosophy which has sought to supplant the
simple truth of the Gospel with human opinions. The evil heart of man
chafes under the righteous restrictions of the truth, and in its angry
and delirious opposition has sought to rid itself of God and of all the
laws that bind it to a life of obedience and holiness. And when it
fancies it has succeeded in demolishing the truths it hated and against
which it rebelled, it is aghast at the desolation it has wrought and
recoils in alarm from the dark, horrible gulf to the brink of which it has
forced itself. Stricken with bewilderment and despair, man strives to
construct a religion for himself, and he seeks to substitute his own wild
ravings for the truths of Divine revelation. It is the attempt of a bold,
impious infidelity to put error in the place of truth, philosophy in the
place of religion, human opinion in the place of God. The exhortation
of this verse is always timely.
I. Christian steadfastness is an important and ever-present duty.
—1. It is necessary to growth and maturity in personal piety. Trees must
grow or die. So it is with piety; it must grow or perish. No plant or tree
can thrive that is being perpetually plucked up and transplanted; nor
can the soul prosper unless it is steadfastly rooted in the soil of truth.
Darwin describes a marine plant—the Macrocystis pyrifera—that rises
two hundred feet from the depths of the Western Ocean and floats for
many fathoms on the surface, uninjured among the waves and
breakers, which no masses of rock, however hard, can long withstand.
It maintains its strength by clinging tenaciously to the rocks far down
below the surface of the sea. So personal piety grows and flourishes by
maintaining a firm hold of the Rock of Ages.
2. It is necessary in bearing witness for Christ.—The value of a
lighthouse or a landmark to the mariner is, that he can rely on always
finding it in the same place. And the value of a Christian testimony is
that it is not erratic and changeful, but stable and reliable: it hesitates
not to witness for Christ in any place. Fifty years ago at a dinner-party
in the west end of London, the conversation was dishonouring to
Christ. One guest was silent, and presently asked that the bell might be
rung. On the appearance of the servant he ordered his carriage, and
with polished courtesy apologised to his host for his enforced
departure, saying, for I am still a Christian. This gentleman was the late
Sir Robert Peel.
3. It is a stimulating example to the weak and faltering.—There are
timid, feeble followers of Christ who, until they become well grounded,
lean on others; and if their exemplars vacillate and change, so do they.
Few have the courage to break away from a pernicious example. When
travelling on the Continent, Dr. Duff made the acquaintance of
Cardinal Wiseman, and for some time travelled with him; but when at
Antwerp he saw the cardinal prostrate himself before the Virgin, he
courteously but firmly bade him “good-bye.”
II. Christian steadfastness is shown in an unflinching
maintenance of apostolic doctrine.—“Hold the traditions which ye
have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” These traditions
were the doctrines preached by the apostles. For some years after the
ascension of Christ, there was no written Gospel or epistle. The truth
was taught orally by those who were living witnesses of the facts on
which the doctrines—or traditions—were based.
1. Apostolic doctrine must be clearly apprehended.—It must therefore
be diligently studied, and the truth sifted from the mass of errors with
which false teachers surround it. What is not intelligently
comprehended cannot be firmly held.
2. Apostolic doctrine must be earnestly embraced.—Not simply
discussed, not simply admired and praised, but prayerfully and
cordially accepted—taken in as spiritual food, and systematically fed
upon to give strength and stamina to the soul.
3. Apostolic doctrine must be firmly held and stoutly defended against
all errors.—“Hold the traditions.” Believe them when tempted to
disbelieve; defend them when assailed by the enemy. A brave Athenian,
who wrought deeds of valour in the battle of Marathon, seized with his
right hand a stranded galley filled with Persians. When his right hand
was cut off, he seized the boat with his left, and when that was smitten,
he held on with his teeth till he died. The grasp of truth by a Christian
believer should not be less tenacious than the dogged heroism of a
heathen warrior.
III. Christian steadfastness is emphatically enforced.—“Therefore,
brethren, stand fast.” Though misunderstood and misrepresented,
though savagely opposed by the enemies of the truth, stand fast. As the
wings of the bird are strengthened by the resistance of the atmosphere
in which it floats, so your graces will be strengthened by the opposition
with which you resolutely contend. In order that your own personal
piety may be matured, that your witnessing for Christ may be
unmistakable, and that your example may be a stimulating
encouragement to others, “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye
have been taught.”
Lessons.—1. The unstable are the prey of every passing temptation.
2. The Word of God is the unfailing source of moral strength.

Prayer an Expression of Ministerial Anxiety.
The apostle had warned the Thessalonians of the errors that were
becoming rife among them. Indeed, the existence of these errors, and
the grave injury they threatened to the faith of the new converts,
prompted him to write these epistles—the first in a series of
magnificent apostolic polemics. The apostle knew that if the simplicity
of the Gospel was vitiated at the beginning of its world-wide mission,
unspeakable disaster would ensue, as the checkered history of the
Church in the early centuries unhappily proved. Hence his anxiety, not
only to clearly state, but with all his resources of logic and persuasion,
resolutely to defend the cardinal principles of the Gospel. He not only
argues but prays. These verses teach that prayer is the expression of
ministerial anxiety.
I. It recognises the need of spiritual consolation.—“Now our
Lord . . . comfort your hearts” (vers. 16, 17). You have sorrowed over the
loss of friends and harassed yourselves as to their condition in another
world. I have pointed out to you that your fears were groundless
(1 Thess. iv. 13–18). Now, I commend you God as the Source and Giver of
all consolation and pray that He may specially comfort you. “It is God’s
presence,” says Burroughs, “that constitutes the saint’s morning. As the
stars may impart some light, and yet the brightness of all combined
cannot form the light of day, but when the sun appears there is day
forthwith, so God may make some comfort arise to a soul from
secondary and inferior means; but it is He Himself alone who, by the
shining of His face and the smiles of His countenance, causes
morning.” A comfort that is made up of our fancies is like a spider’s web
that is weaved out of its bowels and is gone and swept away with the
turn of a besom.
II. It recognises the perils that beset the path of obedience.
—“And establish you in every good word and work” (ver. 17)—or,
according to the Revised Version, “every good work and word.” Work is
better than speech, deeds more eloquent than words, though both are
necessary. The best safeguard against temptation is to be employed.
“The busy man is tempted by one devil, the idle man by a thousand.”
The force of gunpowder is not known till some spark falls on it; so the
most placid natures do not reveal the evil that is in them till they are
assailed by some fierce and sudden temptation. Excellence in anything
can only be reached by hard work; so stability in grace is attained only
by being diligently engaged in God’s service. Steadfastness is not dull
quiescence: it is self-absorbing activity. If you would be strong, you
must work.
III. It recognises the Divine source of all spiritual help.—1. That
this help is the outcome of Divine love. “Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself
and God even our Father, which hath loved us” (ver. 16). God helps
because He loves. His love evokes the best and noblest in us, as the
master-musician brings out melodies from an instrument that inferior
players have failed to produce.
"Love is a passion
Which kindles honour into noblest acts."
"O let Thy love constrain us

To give our hearts to Thee;
Let nothing henceforth pain us
But that which paineth Thee.
"Our joy, our one endeavour,

Through suffering, conflict, shame,
To serve Thee, gracious Saviour,
And magnify Thy name."
2. That this help meets every possible exigency of the Christian life.
—“And hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through
grace” (ver. 16). The consolation refers to everything in the present, the
good hope to everything in the future. The consolation is constant,
everlasting, as flowing from inexhaustible sources, and is ever available
in all the changes and needs of life; and the hope turns our fears into
confidence and our sorrows into joy. When the frail barques of the
Portuguese went sailing south, they found the sea so stormy at the
southern point of Africa that they named it the Cape of Storms; but
after it had been well rounded by bolder navigators, they named it the
Cape of Good Hope. So, by the Divine help afforded us, many a rough
cape of storms has been transformed into a cape of good hope. All
spiritual help is given “through grace”—the free, unmerited favour of
God—and is therefore a fitting subject of prayer.
Lessons.—1. Every minister should be emphatically a man of prayer.
2. Prayer for others has a reflex benefit on the suppliant. 3. An anxious
spirit finds relief and comfort in prayer.

Vers. 16, 17. St. Paul’s Prayer for the Thessalonians.
I. The objects the apostle addressed.—1. God, even our Father.
2. Our Lord Jesus Christ.
II. The gifts the apostle acknowledged.—1. The manifestation of
Divine love. 2. The communication of saving grace. 3. The bestowment
of Christian hope.
III. The blessings the apostle requested.—1. Increasing felicity in
the Lord. 2. Persevering stability in the truth.—Eta.
Ver. 16. A Good Hope through Grace.

I. The grace of hope.—1. Refers to the resurrection of the body. 2. To
eternal life to be enjoyed by both soul and body. 3. Pre-requisites of this
hope.—Conviction of sin. An experimental acquaintance with the
Gospel.
II. The excellency of this hope.—“A good hope.” 1. In opposition to
the hopes of worldly men. 2. It is a lively hope. 3. The object of it is an
infinite and eternal good. 4. It has a good foundation. 5. It produces
good effects.
III. The source of this hope.—“Through grace.” 1. Man is the subject
of infinite demerit. 2. Christ alone possesses infinite merit. 3. The
Scripture warns against all self-dependence.—Helps for the Pulpit.
CHAPTER III.
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.

Ver. 1. Have free course and be glorified.—Probably St. Paul took
this image from the Old Testament. In Ps. cxlvii. 15 the word of the
Lord is said to “run very swiftly.”
Ver. 2. Unreasonable and wicked men.—The word for
“unreasonable” only occurs twice besides in the New Testament: once,
the malefactor on the cross says, “This man has done nothing amiss,”
or out of place; and again the barbarians “beheld nothing amiss” come
to Paul when the viper had fashioned on his hand. The thief is a good
commentator here. Men who by their vagaries hold even their friends
in painful suspense, and especially such as are indifferent to morality,
seem to be meant.
Ver. 3. And keep you from evil.—“Keep” here is a military word
reminding of the psalmist’s name for God—“Shield.” The Revisers add
“one” after “evil,” as in the Lord’s Prayer.
Ver. 5. Direct your hearts.—The same word for “direct” again occurs
only in 1 Thess. iii. 11 and Luke i. 79. A similar phrase in the LXX. of
1 Chron. xxix. 18 (R.V. “prepare”). Into the patient waiting for Christ.
—A.V. margin and R.V. text, “into the patience of Christ.” “The
Thessalonians were eagerly awaiting His return: let them wait for it in
His patient spirit” (Findlay).
Ver. 6. Walketh disorderly.—Falling out of the ranks and desertion of
the post of duty are grave faults, which if the esprit de corps does not
prevent it must be punished by treating the defaulter as one who has
discredited his comrades in arms.
Ver. 7. We behaved not ourselves disorderly among you.—“We
never lived an undisciplined life among you.” Men will bear the sharp
rebukes of a martinet, even when they observe that he is as much
under discipline as he would have the youngest recruit, as the lives of
men like Havelock and Gordon testify.
Ver. 10. If any would not work, neither should he eat.—“A stern,
but necessary and merciful rule, the neglect of which makes charity
demoralising” (Ibid.). It is parasitism which is condemned.
Ver. 11. Working not at all, but are busybodies.—“Not working, but
working round people,” as we might represent St. Paul’s play on the
words. “Their only business is to be busybodies.”
Ver. 13. Be not weary in well-doing.—Such bad behaviour under
cover of the Christian name is abhorrent to St. Paul. “The loveliness of
perfect deeds” must be worthily sustained. Well-doing here points to
that which is admirable in conduct rather than that which is
beneficent.
Ver. 14. Have no company with him.—The difference between this
treatment of a delinquent and excommunication may be more in idea
than fact. He would feel himself tabooed in either case. But this agrees
better with the notion of Christians as being separated. “Come out
from among them.” Cf. Tit. ii. 10. That he may be ashamed.—Not, of
course, that he may become a laughing-stock, but that, feeling
abashed, he may quickly put himself right with the community.
Ver. 15. Yet count him not as an enemy.—When Christ says the
impenitent brother is to be regarded as a Gentile, He gives no sanction
to the way in which the Jew too often regarded the Gentile. Admonish
him as a brother.—Who, though in error, has not sacrificed his claim
to gentle treatment and consideration.
Ver. 16. Now the Lord of peace Himself give you peace always.—
The Church at Thessalonica had been passing through stormy waters.
The apostle prays that God may give them to—
“Feel His halcyon rest within
Calming the storms of dread and sin.”
Ver. 17. The salutation . . . the token.—As though he said, “This that
I am about to write is my sign-manual.”
Ver. 18. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.—
Whatever St. Paul’s handwriting may have been, it could not well be
more characteristic than this word “grace,” as certainly he could not
have chosen a more beautiful word to engrave on his seal.

Prayer for Ministers.
Prayer should not be all on one side. It is a mutual obligation and
privilege. The Thessalonians are reminded how often they were the
subject of anxious prayer, and they are now asked to remember their
own ministers at the throne of grace. Mutual prayer intensifies mutual
sympathy and affection and deepens the interest of both parties in
promoting the success of the Gospel. Note:—
I. That prayer for ministers is apostolically enjoined.—“Brethren,
pray for us” (ver. 1). True prayer is spontaneous. It does not wait to be
formally authorised. A loving heart loves to pray. Nevertheless, there
are laggards in this duty, and they may be prompted to the exercise by
employing all the weight of apostolic authority and example. If
apostles felt the need of prayer, how much more should we! Ministers
are but men; but by the use of the word “brethren” the writer indicates
that ministers and people have common privileges, common wants,
and common dangers. The ministerial office has also its special
responsibilities and perils, and nothing helps more vitally the efficient
discharge of its duties than the constant prayers of an appreciative and
devoted people.
II. That prayer for ministers should have special reference to the
success of the Gospel.—1. The Gospel is Divine. “The word of the
Lord” (ver. 1). The Gospel is a message to man, but it is more than a
human message. It is the voice of God speaking to man through man.
If it had been simply of human origin, it would have been forgotten
and superseded by the changing theories ever teeming from the fertile
brain of man. Every human institution is liable to be supplanted by
another. There is nothing permanent in philosophy, government, or
morals that is not based on eternal truth. The Gospel is abiding,
because it rests on unchanging truth. It is the “word of the Lord.”
2. The spread of the Gospel is beset with difficulties.—“That the word of
the Lord may have free course” (ver. 1). The pioneers of the Gospel in
Thessalonica had to contend with the malignant hatred of the
unbelieving Jews, with the seductive theories of the Grecian
philosophy, and with the jealous opposition of the Roman power. All
hindrances to the Gospel have a common root in the depravity of the
human heart—hence the difficulties occasioned by the inconsistencies
of half-hearted professors, the paralysing influence of scepticism, and
the violence of external persecution. The chief difficulty is spiritual,
and the weapon to contend against it must be spiritual—the weapon of
all-prayer. Savonarola once said, “If there be no enemy, no fight; if no
fight, no victory; if no victory, no crown.” We are to pray that the
Gospel “may have free course”—may run, not simply creep, or loiter
haltingly on the way, but speed along as a swift-footed messenger.
“Take courage from thy cause: thou fightest for thy God, and against
His enemy. Is thy enemy too potent? fear not. Art thou besieged? faint
not. Art thou routed? fly not. Call aid, and thou shalt be strengthened;
petition, and thou shalt be relieved; pray, and thou shalt be recruited.”
3. The glory of the Gospel is to change men’s hearts and ennoble men’s
lives.—“And be glorified, even as it is with you” (ver. 1). You
Thessalonians, notwithstanding your imperfect views and defective
conduct, are samples of what the Gospel can do in changing the heart
and giving a lofty purpose to the life. Pray that its triumph may be
more complete in you, and that its uplifting influence may be realised
by others. “That which Plato was unable to effect,” says Pascal, “even in
the case of a few select and learned persons, a secret power, by the help
only of a few words, is now wrought upon thousands of uneducated
men.”
III. That prayer for ministers should be offered that their lives
may be preserved from the violence of cruel and unbelieving
enemies.—“And that ye may be delivered from unreasonable and
wicked men: for all men have not faith” (ver. 2). Not all have faith, even
among those who profess to have it, and it is certainly true of all those
who scout and reject the Gospel. The unbelieving are perverse and
wicked, and it is from this class that the minister is met by the most
unreasonable and malicious opposition. Perhaps the most dangerous
foes with which a minister has to contend are those who make some
profession of religion, but in heart and practice deny it. “Men will write
for religion, fight for it, die for it—anything but live for it.” The
minister, girded with the prayers of his people, is screened from the
plots and attacks of the wicked.
Lessons.—1. The success of the Gospel is a signal demonstration of its
Divine authorship. 2. Ministers of the Gospel have need of sympathy and
help in their work. 3. The grandest spiritual results are brought about by
prayer.

Ver. 1. The Ministerial Request.
I. The request presented.—1. That the power of religion may be
eminently experienced in our own souls. 2. That we may be preserved
from the official dangers to which we are exposed. 3. That we may be
able ministers of the New Testament. 4. That prudence and fidelity may
distinguish our labours.
II. The grounds on which it rests.—1. It rests on the mutual
connection which subsists between ministers and people. 2. On the law
of love. 3. On its advantage to yourselves. 4. On the prevalency of
fervent prayer. 5. On its connection with the salvation of souls.—
Sketches.
Ver. 2. Unbelief—
I. Abandons the guide of reason.

II. Leads to a vicious life and causes trouble to others.
III. We should pray to be delivered from its evil results.

The Faithfulness of God.
From the want of faith in man, referred to in the preceding verse, the
writer, as if to show the contrast, naturally glides into the subject of the
Divine faithfulness. Unbelief may abound, but God can be relied on;
man may be fickle and unreasonable, but the fidelity of God is
inviolate.
I. The faithfulness of God is a fact established by abundant
testimonies.—“But the Lord is faithful” (ver. 3). He is faithful to His
own nature. He cannot deny Himself. He is faithful to His purpose, to
His Word, to every promise, and every threatening too. The whole
history of God’s dealings with the Jewish people is a suggestive and
impressive commentary on His inflexible faithfulness. The fact that the
Church of God exists to-day, notwithstanding defection within and
persecution without, is an unanswerable testimony to His fidelity. “You
may be faint and weary, but my God cannot. I may fluctuate and alter
as to my frames and feelings; but my Redeemer is unchangeably the
same. I might utterly fail and come to nothing, if left to myself. But I
cannot be so left to myself. He is rich to relieve and succour me in all
my wants. He is faithful to perform and perfect all His promises”
(Ambrose Serle).
II. The faithfulness of God is practically manifested in
establishing His people in all good and in keeping them safe
from all evil.—“Who shall stablish you and keep you from evil” (ver.
3). The people of God do not perpetuate themselves. He perpetuates.
His faithful guardianship gives persistency to His people, so that in
every age and in the darkest times there has been a bright succession of
living witnesses of His unchanging character. He preserves them, not
because of any inherent grace or self-deserving, but because He is
faithful. “Janet,” said a Scottish minister to a Christian woman of great
faith, whom he was visiting, “suppose, after all, God were to let you
drop into hell!” “Even as He will,” was her reply; “but if He does, He will
lose mair than I’ll do.” A single flaw in the Divine fidelity would shatter
the faith of the universe.
III. The faithfulness of God inspires confidence in the fidelity of
the obedient.—“And we have confidence in the Lord touching you
that ye both do, and will do the things which we command you” (ver.
4). Because God is faithful, we know that you can be kept faithful, if
you are willing and seeking to be so kept. Moreover, you will assuredly
be kept faithful, while you observe in the future, as you have done in
the past, “the things which we command you,” and in commanding
which we have the Divine authority. Consider these things, let them
sink into your hearts; then act accordingly. Let obedience follow
conviction, and we have no fear about the result. Von Moltke, the great
German strategist and general, chose for his motto, “Erst wagen, dann
wagen,”—“First weigh, then venture”; and it was to this he owed his
great victories and successes. Slow, cautious, careful in planning, but
bold, daring, even seemingly reckless in execution, the moment his
resolve was made. Vows thus ripen into deeds, decision must go on to
performance. The final perseverance of the saint depends on the
Divine perseverance; his faithfulness on the Divine faithfulness. If we
had no living Saviour to pilot our ship, no promise on which to rely, we
might have cause to fear. The Divine faithfulness is unquestionable;
our faithfulness is maintained only by obedience.
Lessons.—1. The faithfulness of God is the guarantee of the believer’s
safety. 2. The faithfulness of God should encourage the exercise of
implicit faith in Him. 3. The faithfulness of God demands undeviating
obedience to His laws.

Ver. 3. The Divine Faithfulness—
I. An incontrovertible fact.
II. A guarantee of personal establishment in the truth.
III. An invulnerable protection from evil and all its works.
Ver. 4. Christian Obedience—
I. Is a voluntary and constant activity.

II. Is based on well-understood and authoritative precepts.
III. Is the pathway of blessing.
IV. Inspires confidence in others.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF VERSE 5.

Divine Love and Patience.
Again, the apostle is on his knees. How beautifully the habitual
devoutness of the apostle’s spirit comes out in the side-lights thrown
from passages in his writings like this verse! He lives and breathes in
the electric atmosphere of prayer. All the time he is reasoning,
expounding, warning, and persuading he is also praying. Prayer is a
powerful aid to the preacher. It keeps his soul in sympathy with the
realm of spiritual realities, gives him clearer insight into truth, and
intensifies his experience of the Divine. We learn from this verse:—
I. That Divine love and patience are conspicuous elements in
man’s redemption.—“The love of God and the patient waiting for
Christ”—the patience of Christ (R.V.). The love of God devised and the
patience of Christ carried out the great plan of human salvation. The
Gospel is a grand revelation of the Divine love and patience in Christ
Jesus; and the history of the Gospel in its world-wide progress is a
many-sided illustration of these two conspicuous virtues in the Divine
character and operations. After the last French war, the Roman
Catholic Archbishop of Paris was imprisoned. His cell had a window
shaped like a cross, and with a pencil he wrote upon the arms of the
cross that they denoted the height, length, breadth, and depth of God’s
love. That man knew something of the love of God. The patience of
Christ in suffering for mankind was sustained and sublimated by the
love of God, and was an object-lesson to the world, teaching, in a way
that appealed to the most callous, the power and universality of that
love.
II. That Divine love and patience are the distinguished privilege
of human experience.—“Direct your hearts into the love of God and
patience of Christ.” The love we are to enjoy is no mere human passion,
fickle and evanescent; the patience, no mere grim stoical endurance.
We are admitted into the sacred adoption of the Divine mysteries; we
share in their spiritual ecstasy and unruffled calm, the very love and
patience of God! The Divine in us becomes more growingly evident to
ourselves and to others. Love gives staying-power to and teaches us
how to suffer without murmuring, to endure without retaliating. “Sire,”
said Beza in his reply to the king of Navarre, “it belongs to God’s
Church rather to suffer blows than to strike them; but let it be your
pleasure to remember that the Church is an anvil which has worn out
many a hammer.” With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes
satin.
III. That Divine love and patience are more fully enjoyed by the
soul that prays.—“And the Lord direct your hearts.” The prayerful
apostle had realised the blessedness of a personal participation in the
love and patience of God. But for the love of God he would never have
ventured upon his evangelistic mission, and but for the patience of
Christ he would not have continued in it. Now he prays that the hearts
of the Thessalonians may enjoy the same grace or be set in the direct
way of attaining it. It is of vital consequence that the current of the
heart’s outgoings should be set in the right direction. This brief
petition shows what we ought to ask for ourselves. The best way to
secure a larger degree of love and patience is to ardently pray for them.
"What grace, O Lord, and beauty shone

Around Thy steps below!
What patient love was seen in all
Thy life and death of woe!
"Oh! give us hearts to love like Thee

Like Thee, O Lord, to grieve
Far more for others' sins, than all
The wrongs that we receive."
Lessons.—1. The Christian life is a sublime participation in the nature

of God. 2. Love and patience reveal the God-like character. 3. Prayer is at
its best when engaged with the loftiest themes.

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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

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.

CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 1–12.

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.

Vers. 1–3. A False Alarm—

I. Is freighted with treasures of precious truth.—“I told you

Vers. 7–10. The Mystery of Iniquity—

I. Is the deepest and most subtle form of error.

Vers. 10–12. The Destructive Subtlety of Sin.

I. Believing a lie as truth.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 13, 14.

"Love, strong as death; nay, stronger

2. The Divine will provides the means of salvation.—“Whereunto He

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.

Ver. 14. The Glory of Sainthood—

I. Is the object of the Gospel to promote.—“Whereunto He hath

What Saints should be.—In the cathedral of St. Mark, Venice, a

MAIN HOMILETICS OF VERSE 15.

MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Verses 16, 17.

"O let Thy love constrain us

"Our joy, our one endeavour,

GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES.

Ver. 16. A Good Hope through Grace.

CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES.

"Love, strong as death; nay, stronger

"Oh! give us hearts to love like Thee