Meeting the Daktars

This book is about daktari medicine. Simply put, daktari medicine was the name given to the medicine practised by daktars. But who exactly were the daktars?

The term itself, as we shall see in Chapter I, did not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century. Even then they did not constitute a single homogenous group but were rather a composite group made up of many heterogeneous elements whose social status and pedagogical background both differed widely. Yet, after the 1860s the word daktar clearly referred to people who were thought to practise ‘western’ medicine. John Iliffe's comprehensive study East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession mentions the development of similar vernacular designations for some early African practitioners of ‘western’ medicine. In some cases the terms used to refer to them drew upon older ‘indigenous’ vocabularies, such as mganga or omusawo or, as in the Kenyan dakitari, the term was, like in Bengal, a vernacularization of the English ‘doctor’.

To what extent these daktars drew upon earlier traditions of South Asians practising ‘western’ medicine cannot now be ascertained with any degree of certainty. This much, however, is certain: South Asia had been exposed to ‘western’ medicine for at least two centuries before the term daktar emerged as a socially significant identity. Numerous European medical travellers such as Francois Bernier, Niocolao Manucci, Garcia d'Orta and John Ovington, visited Mughal South Asia.