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Hindu Medicine and the Aroma of Structuralism

Recent reviews of Francis Zimmerman's path-breaking book, and the blurbs on its dust jacket, are so laudatory that it is time to reflect in some depth on its limitations and the theoretical and methodological issues it raises for the study of systems of Hindu thought. Zimmerman, a student of Louis Dumont, recognizes that the dominant pattern of Hindu thought is the opposition between pure and impure that in turn generates hierarchy. But, he says, there is another key movement, an ecological theme in Hindu medicine, that seems to contradict the dominant one. This is the idea, found in the ancient Hindu medical texts, that the classification of the land and its fauna are systemically related to body function, disease classification, and therapeutics. This ecological theme entails a basic structural contrast between anfipa, the region of water, and jangala, the dry climate that stretches from the borders of deserts to those of monsoon forests. Since the spread of jangala is so vast, we must, says Zimmerman, "pick out one primary sense of dry lands with varying extensions: pseudo steppes, brakes, savannahs, sparse forests" (p. 4). Strictly speaking, the term should be confined to the vast region of deciduous trees stretching from Uttar Pradesh to Tamil Nadu and marked out into zones by modern geographers (pp. 4-6). Thus Zimmerman in effect superimposes the classical formulations of jangala and anispa on a modern ecological map. His argument constantly shuttles between the "ecological" ideas of ancient Ayurvedic thinkers (Susruta, Caraka, Vaigbhata) and those of modern European geographers and ecologists. In other words, the ancient classifications could be pinned down by modern geography, and, consequently, ancient disease classifications have a reality in modern ecology and epidemiology (even though the ancients, unlike modern geographers, had little or no knowledge of the geography of much of India). Zimmerman recognizes the problems posed by this approach. He admits that he is primarily interested in the Hindu texts and their "spiritual geography" (p. 67); these texts are of a "literary nature" (p. 29) where "empirical facts are subordinated to the schema of classical thought" (p. 67). Yet he writes as if there is a concordance between the medicoecological theme of these texts and modern geography, ecology, and epidemiology. Zimmerman is unaware of the methodological significance of using modern knowledge for his analysis. In effect,