Nowhere is the biomoral character of Bengali medical discourses and their shaping within a cosmopolitan medical market more clearly marked out than in the texts on what has come to be called the dhat syndrome in psychiatric literature. Most available histories of this affliction, however, have been framed by the debate amongst psychiatrists over whether it can be called a ‘Culture Bound Syndrome’ (hereafter CBS) or not. These histories, therefore, follow contemporary medical practice in assuming dhat to be a single, unified, pathological reality, be it an independent category or part of some larger denomination. This means that the phenomenon is thought to have a fixed set of symptoms located in the human physiology, and a clearly defined vocabulary to distinguish these.

We will argue, however, that the Bengali physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had not conceptualized it as a unitary pathological reality. We will argue that they had conceptualized it as a shifting cluster of ideas. The specific form the cluster took and the vocabulary that was deployed to describe it could often vary. What were described as symptoms in one text could be described as a related illness in another. Moreover, words and categories used could change—slightly or more drastically. New categories could be added or old ones discarded. Following Deleuze and Guattari thus, we suggest that the reality of the dhat complaints in these texts should be conceptualized as a rhizoid reality.