leads to nothing less than the paradigm shifts in which medical theory and practice went hand in hand with a transformation of the professional identity of physicians

In Nationalizing the Body, Projit Mukharji presents a meticulously researched construction of the identity of Daktari physicians, or Indian practitioners of Western medicine, through the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in British Colonial Bengal. With new and compelling views and evidence, Mukharji’s revisits a critical theme in the history of medicine in the colonial context. Namely, what is ‘colonial’ about colonial medicine? He makes a case therefore for moving beyond the frame of the colonial ‘encounter’. His work carefully maps the discursive spaces that were created not only through the representations of the Daktari practitioners as they publicised their practice in an emerging medical market and through a burgeoning vernacular press, but also through images of them seen through the eyes of colonial administrators, patients and the popular press. The significant historical question in this book is how are identities socially constructed and Mukharji draws initially on biographical narratives of well-known Daktari physicians, their responses during epidemics of the plague, cholera and ‘syndromes’ to reconstruct the shifting locus of their social origins and their challenges to colonial medical interventions during epidemics. He thereby reconstructs a fascinating world, where the seeming boundaries of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ medical ‘systems’ and their therapeutics and practice are blurred and being constantly negotiated. By tracing the construction of Daktari learning and its mobilization, Mukharji explores contemporary debates that straddled the realms of the public and domestic spheres, definitions of what comprised ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’ as well as interpretations of colonial authority. He thereby demonstrates the multiple ways in which Western medicine began to forge a distinct space and identity and in turn reflects on the ambivalent ways in which colonial authority was ‘seen’ and addressed. Mukharji begins with an unusual and original theme; by tracing the biographies of Daktari lives and telling through this cast of actors the changing context of professional and social origins, urban–rural networks, the shifts in colonial health services and education policies, the rise of private colleges and how ideas, technology and medical markets were mutually shaping each other in this period. This beginning is vital and co-opts the reader into identifying with a small but vital cast of actors that appear throughout the rest of the book. Physicians such as Khastagir and Narendranath are introduced at the outset and their work and engagements wax and wan through the latter part of the narrative. The core of the book lies in the reconstruction of the efforts by Daktari physicians to ‘nationalize’ or make less alien their medicine. He explores the dialogue between Daktari and indigenous medical practitioners such as Ayurvedic healers and traces an active intellectual dialogue sustained between practitioners such as through Daktari’s deployment of Ayurvedic notions of Din-Chary or daily routine. He also explores the efforts by Daktari physicians to undertake translation projects of Western medical texts in a manner as to give importance to ‘one’s local experience’ and argues that this demonstrated a re-appropriation of Western medicine based on careful, critical understanding of Book Reviews 181