The most salient way in which Unani was portrayed in contemporary India is as a system of medicine. This form of representation was ubiquitous in government settings as well as among private practitioners and even the media. Sometimes people went as far as to replace the word Unani by the word system, and I found no less practitioners talking about ‘hamārā system’ (‘our system’) when referring to Unani. Yet there seemed to be a tension between efforts to portray Unani as a single system of medicine and the myriad of practices encountered across the country. This chapter addresses this apparent tension, asking if Unani is a system of medicine and, if so, how can it be multiple at the same time.

Scholarly work focusing on diversity and ambiguities takes for granted that systems of medicine have been historically shaped as such, and that forms of medicine actually lack the cohesiveness, homogeneity and continuity that the term system implies (Attewell 2007: 21ff.; Langford 2002: 14ff.). Variations in the practice of medicine have been observed by anthropologists since decades, and nowadays it is accepted that medicine is not a closed and homogeneous system of knowledge and practices as it was the case decades ago. Charles Leslie differentiated between the actual contemporary forms of practice of Unani and Ayurveda—which he termed ‘traditional-culture medicine’—from the Unani and Ayurveda described in classical sources, for example (1976b: 358). This ‘traditional-culture medicine’ was a system of medicine in its own terms, just as the Ayurvedic medicine of the Sanskrit classic texts and the Unani medicine ‘of the classic Arabic texts’ (ibid.). Notwithstanding the limitations of such a classification—which at that time was not considered problematic—, Leslie’s acknowledgment of ‘syncretic’ forms of medical practice as legitimate forms of medicine was path-breaking in the study of so-called traditional forms of medicine. Divergences between actual practices and the epistemology and theories of classical medical texts were no longer considered as deviations or corrupted forms of medical practice, but as medical practices in their own right, following an own rationale. The concept of medical system, however, was still much in vogue at that time. It was used not only to denote forms of medicine, but also ‘pluralistic structures of different kinds of practitioners and institutional norms’ (1976a: 9).