Traces of Folk Medicine in Jaunpur

In a village compound built along a hillside in northern Utter Pradesh, Puskarji, a 90-year-old healer, told my research assistant, Jyoti, and I about a valuable book that he had once possessed. "My father had a book that was later lost. It was a published book with mantra cures for illnesses; every method of healing was in that book. My father got the book from a man who lived beyond Tehri, a man who knew mantras. My father learned from that book; later I also learned from it." Unfortunately, Puskarji continued, he had loaned the book to a nephew who had never returned it. He had made repeated efforts to get the book back but without success. He spoke wistfully and angrily of this excellent printed book of healing lore that he used to possess. "Nothing bad ever happens in the house where that book is kept," he said. Puskarji's lost book is a useful allegory for the subject of this article, which is the relationship between ethnography and the knowledge practices of certain elderly healers living in Jaunpur, a region of the Uttarakhand (the Himalayan foothills of northern India). In one register, the image of the lost book is reminiscent of the image of "lost culture" that often haunts ethnographic texts. Puskarji seems almost to share this nostalgic longing for vanishing knowledge. Yet the book also works as an image of contact between communities where knowledge is passed through oral tradition and cosmopolitan worlds where knowledge is transmitted primarily through writing. Finally, the book, by being both a collection of words signifying information about remedies and at the same time a powerful talisman that protects its owner from misfortune, also crosses the gap between two seemingly opposed modes of language: one that refers to events and one that enacts them. The first mode of language is the one practiced within academic discourse and through the modes of questioning usually employed in ethnographic research, including my own. From some scholarly perspectives, the second mode of language belongs to magical thinking or to the semiology of sympathetic magic where words and images are not simply representations but repositories of power. It belongs to the category of performative language, which does not simply describe reality but produces it. In the field of healing, sympathetic magic is associated with "folk medicine," an important trope against which professional or classical medicine is defined. In Indian contexts, the marginalization of folk medicine, such as healing mantras,