review_recipes for immortality

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book less accessible to non-specialists than it would otherwise have been. Unfortu-nately, the book is also afflicted by more than its fair share of typographical andgrammatical errors, although only in a few instances does this obscure the sense

of what is said. Aside from these relatively minor defects, the book constitutes avaluable contribution to the literature on Sāṃkhya and Vaiṣṇavism, and on themythology surrounding Kapila in particular. It will be of substantial interest toscholars and students of India’s rich religious, mythological, and philosophicalheritage.

Mikel BurleyUniversity of Leeds

Doi: 10.1093/jhs/hip015Advance Access Publication 24 September 2009

Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion, and Community in South India.By Richard S. Weiss. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN-13:978-0-19-533523-1; ISBN-10: 0-19-533523-6, pp. ix, 260. $74.00.

Richard Weiss has written a fine analysis of the multi-leveled discourse of modern-

day practitioners of traditional medicine in Tamil Nadu, albeit at the expense of providing an adequate account of their practice. Traditional Siddhar medicine, socalled for the legendary Tamil Siddhars (‘perfected beings’) who were its founders,combines the prophylactic and therapeutic use of mainly indigenous plants andminerals with mercurials in much the same way as ayurvedic physicians through-out India have done for some two thousand years. And there lies the rub for thepractitioners extensively interviewed and quoted by Weiss, because for themSiddhar medicine in its ancient and present forms is proof positive of the primacyand superiority of all things Tamil over and against the later, corrupted, and infer-

ior medical system of north Indian Brahmins (ayurveda) in particular, but also theMuslim unani system and western biomedicine. Here, the exceptionalist claimsmade by Tamil vaidyas track closely with those of other actors in the contestedarena of South Asian identity politics, most notably the Hindu nationalists. Likethe Hindu nationalists, the Tamil Siddhar vaidyas (whose agenda for an indepen-dent Tamil nation state has been historically aligned with that of the principalTamil nationalist party, the DMK – the Dravidian Advancement Party) argue thatthe entire human race originated in their land, and that in a utopian past theirrace, language, culture, religion, and medical system were the sole human race,

language, culture, religion, and medical system on the planet. According to theTamil revivalist imagination, this golden age was brought to an end and the Tamilrace, culture, Dravidian language, and Siddhar medicine corrupted by the influx of

246 Book Reviews

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alchemy by several centuries. Greater attention to the Indic contexts of these Tamiltraditions would have supported Weiss’s arguments more than his somewhat tire-some evocations of western theorists of secrecy, utopia, ideology, and so forth.

Nonetheless, in his reconstruction of the 75-year history of the synergy betweenthe Siddhar vaidyas and proponents of the broader Tamil nationalist agenda,Richard Weiss has made an original and significant contribution to the historiogra-phy of Tamil revivalism.

David Gordon WhiteUniversity of California, Santa Barbara

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