Dr. Neshat Quaiser, Associate Researcher with the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Delhi gave a talk on Bazaari-Subaltern Unani Medical Public Sphere: Blanket Binaries and Alternative Archives on 13 September. Unani medicine is a Greco Arab medicinal practice that developed within the Indian subcontinent over centuries.

In his talk, Dr. Quaiser spoke about how Unani medicine has been a dispersed and discursive terrain since its beginning with the simultaneous presence of two broad paradoxical spheres of Unani practices. These being textual Unani on one hand, and bazaari-subaltern Unani in different geographical, social, and cultural locales. Critically examining the recent endeavour of a group of historians to recover “the realm of subaltern therapeutics”, he argues that the relationship between the textual Unani and bazaari-subaltern Unani medical practices cannot be comprehended properly through a blanket totalising elite-subaltern binary framework. Drawing on parallels and similarities with the bazaari-woman, the idea of “bazaari” Unani was developed, while the concept of subaltern itself was also re-examined contextually, to account for the ways in which a textual tradition such as Unani itself can be rendered to a state of subalternity particularly in post-colonial situation.

Through the talk, Dr. Quaiser outlined the nuances of this simultaneity of the two paradoxical spheres with a focus on the critical prevalence of Bazaari-subaltern medicine and therapeutics, and the ways in which they can produce their own archives. He also provided illustrative cases to make his point. The Q&A session that followed was a vibrant back and forth with a variety of questions from overlapping interwoven disciplines and subjects.

September 2023