द ब्यूटीफुल ट्री: १८वीं सदी में भारत की स्वदेशी गुरुकुल शिक्षा (धर्मपाल)

considerable repute for skill and learning. They were all absent,
and I had not an opportunity of conversing with them; but their
neighbours and friends estimated their monthly professional
income at eight, ten, and twelve rupees, respectively. There are
at most two or three other educated Hindu physicians in
Nattore, and all the rest are professionally uneducated, the only
knowledge they possess of medicine being derived from Bengali
translations of Sanscrit works which describe the symptoms of
the principal diseases and prescribe the articles of the native
materia medica that should be employed for their cure, and the
proportions in which they should be compounded. I have not
been able to ascertain that there is a single educated Musalman
physician in Nattore, and consequently the 34 Mahomedan
practitioners I have mentioned, rank with the uneducated class
of Hindu practitioners, deriving all their knowledge of medicine
from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works to the prescriptions
of which they servilely adhere.
The only difference that I have been able to discover
between the educated and uneducated classes of native
practitioners is that the former prescribe with greater confidence
and precision from the original authorities, and the latter with
greater doubt and uncertainty from loose and imperfect
translations. The mode of treatment is substantially the same,
and in each case is fixed and invariable. Great attention is paid
to the symptoms of disease, a careful and strict comparison
being made between the descriptions of the supposed disease in
the standard medical works and the actual symptoms in the
case of the patient. When the identity is satisfactorily
ascertained, there is then no doubt as to the practice to be
adopted, for each disease has its peculiar remedy in the works of
established repute, and to depart from their prescriptions would
be an act of unheard of presumption. If, with a general
resemblance, there should be some slight difference of
symptoms, a corresponding departure from the authorised
prescription is permitted, but only as regards the medium or
vehicle through which it is administered. The medicines
administered are both vegetable and mineral. The former are
divided into those which are employed in the crude state, as
barks, leaves, common or wild roots, and fruits etc.; and those
which are sold in the druggist's shop as camphor, cloves, carda-
mums, etc. They are administered either externally or in the
forms of pill, powder, electuary, and decoction.
The preceding class of practitioners consists of individuals
who at best know nothing of medicine as a science, but practise
316

it as an art according to a prescribed routine, and it may well be
supposed that many, especially of the uneducated class, are
nothing but quacks. Still as a class they rank higher both in
general estimation and in usefulness than the village doctors. Of
these there are not fewer than 205 in Nattore. They have not the
least semblance of medical knowledge, and they in general limit
their prescriptions to the simplest vegetable preparations, either
preceded or followed by the pronouncing of an incantation and
by striking and blowing upon the body. Their number proves
that they are in repute in the villages; and the fact is ascribable
to the influence which they exercise upon the minds of the
superstitious by their incantations. The village doctors are both
men and women; and most of them are Mahomedans, like the
class to which they principally address themselves.
The smallpox inoculators in point of information and
respectability come next to the class of general practitioners.
There are 21 of them in Nattore, for the most part Brahmans,
but uninstructed and ignorant, exercising merely the manual art
of inoculation. One man sometimes inoculates from 100 to 500
children in a day, receiving for each operation a fixed rate of
payment varying from one to two annas; the less amount if the
number of children is great, the greater amount if the number is
small. The cow-pox has not, I believe, been introduced into this
district amongst the natives, except at the head station.
Elsewhere the smallpox inoculators have been found its
opponents, but, as far as I can understand, their opposition does
not arise from interested motives, for the cow-pox inoculation
would give them as much labour and profit as they now have.
Their opposition arises, I am assured, from the prejudice against
using cow-pox. The veneration in which the cow is held is well-
known, and they fear to participate in a practice which seems to
be founded on some injury done to that animal when the matter
was originally extracted. The spread of the cow-pox would
probably be most effectually accomplished by the employment of
Mussalman inoculators whose success might in due time
convince the Brahman inoculators of their mistake.
Midwives are another class of practitioners that may be
noticed, although it has been denied that Hindus have any. An
eminent London physician, in his examination before the
Medical Committee of the House of Commons, is stated to have
affirmed that the inhabitants of China have no women-midwives,
and no practitioners in midwifery at all. ‘Of course,’ it is added,
‘the African nations and the Hindus are the same.’ I enquired
317

and noted the number of women-midwives (there is not a man-
midwife in the country) in the villages of Nattore, and find that
they amount to 297. They are no doubt sufficiently ignorant, as
are probably the majority of women-midwives at home.
Still lower than the village doctors there is a numerous
class of pretenders who go under the general name of conjurors
or charmers. The largest division of this class are the snake-
conjurors, their number in the single police sub-division of
Nattore being not less than 722. There are few villages without
one, and in some villages there are as many as ten. I could, if it
were required, indicate the villages and the number in each; but
instead of incumbering Table I with such details, I have judged it
sufficient to state the total number in this place. They profess to
cure the bites of poisonous snakes by incantations or charms. In
this districts, particularly during the rainy season, snakes are
numerous and excite much terror among the villagers. Nearly
the whole district forming, it is believed, an old bed of the
Ganges, lies very low; and the rapid increase of the waters
during the rainy season drives the land-snakes from their holes,
and they seek refuge in the houses of the inhabitants, who hope
to obtain relief from their bites by the incantations of the
conjurors. These take nothing for the performance of their rites,
or for the cures they pretend to have performed. All is pecuniar-
ily gratuitous to the individual but they have substantial advan-
tages which enable them to be thus liberal. When the
inhabitants of a village hitherto without a conjuror think that
they can afford to have one, they invite a professor of the art
from a neighbouring village where there happens to be one to
spare, and give him a piece of land and various privileges and
immunities. He possesses great influence over the inhabitants. If
a quarrel takes place, his interference will quell it sooner than
that of any one else; and when he requires the aid of his
neighbours in cultivating his plot of ground or in reaping its
produce, it is always more readily given to him than to others.
The art is not hereditary in a family or peculiar to any caste. One
I met with was a boatman, another a chowkidar and a third a
weaver. Whoever learns the charm may practise it, but it is
believed that those who practise it most successfully are ‘to the
manner born’, that is, who have been born under a favourable
conjunction of the planets. Every conjuror seems to have a
separate charm, for I have found no two the same. They do not
object to repeat it merely for the gratification of curiosity, and
they allow it to be taken down in writing. Neither do they appear
to have any mutual jealously, each readily allowing the virtue of
other incantations than his own.
318

Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms
professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in
other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake-
conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and
tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although
scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those
parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered
by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three
kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of
gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of
preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the
crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of
a hailstorm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the
villages with a trident and a buffalo's horn. The trident is fixed in
the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it,
running naked blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations.
It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this
means protected from hailstorm. Both men and women practise
this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are
provided for in the same way as the conjurors.
Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably
are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the
character of the humblest classes of native society who
constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness
and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the
country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile
superstition, yet it is superstition which does not appear to have
its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish
ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most
imperfect education or the most limited mental cultivation would
remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan,
being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both
classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both
systems of faith and have been handed down from time
immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators
of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in
successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this
country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the
same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now
found.

319

320

321

322

323

324

325

(c) BOOKS USED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
Abbreviations: Murshidabad = MD; South Beerbhoom = BM;
S. Behar = SB; Burdwan = Bun; Tirhoot = TT
326

327

328

329

330

331

332

333

334

335