Sacred Cures: Perceptions of Illness and Remedy in Medieval India
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Medicine##common.commaListSeparator## Spiritual Healing##common.commaListSeparator## Sufism##common.commaListSeparator## Mughal India##common.commaListSeparator## Epistolary Literatureसार
The history of medicine in medieval India has often been written through the lens of court physicians, imperial patronage, and established systems such as the Unani system of medicine. However, beyond these formal structures existed an entire world of healing that was spiritual, affective, and deeply interwoven with popular belief. This paper examines the entangled domains of medicine, spirituality, and moral thought to explore perceptions of illness and healing in medieval India. While scholars of medieval Indian history have extensively examined formal medical systems, particularly the role of Unani physicians and court-sponsored treatments, less attention has been paid to the diverse body of traditional healing practices outside these institutional frameworks. Often dismissed as superstition or witchcraft by contemporaries and modern scholars alike, these remedies played a central role in everyday experiences of illness and recovery. This paper also explores how such practices were embedded in the religious and cultural consciousness of the period and are preserved in letter collections, Sufi writings, and European travel accounts. This paper argues that healing in medieval India was perceived not solely as a physical intervention but as a moral and spiritual responsibility. These spiritual practices were not merely remedies for illness, but reflections of a moral universe shaped by Indo-Islamic conceptions of divine proximity, ethical healing, and the human condition.
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Rezavi observes that private practice appears to have been the primary source of income for bazār physicians. Badauni, for instance, uses the expression mutatabib-Sirhindi, a private practitioner from Sirhind, when referring to Shaikh Hasan, the father of the surgeon Shaikh Bhina. Similarly, Banarsi Das, in his Ardha Kathānak, recalls being treated in his youth by a baidh (physician) from Jaunpur. He further refers to a nāi (literally, barber), a term commonly applied to local surgeons, who treated him for syphilis at Khairabad in 1602. See,
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