Bai’Longs and Brahmans: Illness, Medicine, and Cure in 18th-Century Highland Asia

What did medicine mean and how did it shape courtly culture in eighteenth-century Hindustan? This paper answers that question by looking at the arrival of the brahmans in the court of the Tungkhungia kings of the early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley, located in the contact zones of Hindustan. It does so by tracking the seismic shifts introduced by brahmans in medical learning. While the brahmans, a priestly caste and social elite, tirelessly sought to enter the courtly circles, for long they were considered as non-courtly actors. During their meteoric rise, their arch-rivals the bai’longs and the deodhais, the dominant priestly groups of the Tungkhungia court were gradually pushed out into domestic confines where older forms of medical thought hid in order to thrive. This shift, however, is most evident in a varied and disparate set of texts that were composed both by the new courtly actors, the brahmans and their older counterparts, the Tai-Ahom bai’longs. Both the brahmans and the bai’longs took to a wide range of genres, chronicles, medicine manuals, and occult tracts, in order to probe the crucial question of illness and possibilities of cure. Illness, however, was not confined to humans but was studied alongside that of non-humans, “meta-persons”, and the polity; thereby widening its scope beyond the corporeal. This paper studies eighteenth-century Tai-Ahom, Assamese, and Burmese texts to demonstrate the multiplicity of illness imagination, and its distinct intellectual genealogies in contact zones of Persianate and Burmese empires. While histories of premodern empires in South Asia generally neglected this crucial region of contact, they also hid the exciting story of the ways in which brahman-bai’long rivalry reframed the conceptual foundations of medical thought in eighteenth-century Hindustan. This paper, thus, rethinks global histories of medicine from the margins of imperial formations in the early modern world.