Health & the Body
An organised indigenous inoculation system, banned around 1802 — and the difference between evidence-tested integration and cure-claims the record cannot carry.
Dharampal's health argument is narrow and well-evidenced: that Indian medical systems existed and were suppressed, not that every remedy worked. The clearest case is smallpox. An organised indigenous variolation practice — inoculation with live matter under dietary and ritual protocol — was banned under the Bengal Presidency around 1802–03, after Jenner's cowpox vaccine (1798), and epidemics followed. The system was displaced by administrative fiat, not out-competed on results.
A second, more contested strand concerns cattle. Dharampal argues that the colonial state, feeding a growing garrison, expanded organised beef-and-hide slaughter to a new scale — and that the "Muslim cow-killing" story served as a divide-and-rule alibi for it.
The inoculation evidence is European testimony. J.Z. Holwell's 1767 account for the College of Physicians, London, records a near-universal, low-fatality practice, and Indian inoculators holding a striking proto-germ theory — that "imperceptible animalculae floating in the atmosphere" cause epidemic disease. Under correct treatment Holwell reckoned failure "next to a miracle"; a later Superintendent General of Vaccine put fatality nearer 1 in 200 among Indians and 1 in 60–70 among Europeans. The Bengal ban followed around 1802. Documented Corroborated by Brimnes (2004) and Kochhar (2011).
On cattle, Dharampal catches the rulers admitting the mechanism. Queen Victoria wrote to Viceroy Lansdowne on 8 December 1893 that the British "kill far more cows for our army, etc., than the Muhammadans." Army strength grew from about 20,000 early in the century to 45,000 (1856) and 100,000 after 1858, driving organised beef and hide demand; 63 Kukas were executed in 1872 after protesting slaughter. Documented
The book's own title overreaches, and this archive says so. The colonial scale-expansion of slaughter is documented; the claim of British origin goes too far, since pre-colonial slaughter existed. Contested Dharampal's framing of Indian cow-protection as "neither lethal nor brutal" is also contested — historians (Freitag, McLane) document deadly riots such as Mau/Azamgarh (1893). Contested And the older backdrop that "the cow was always sacred and inviolable in India before Islam" is contradicted by textual evidence of Vedic and post-Vedic beef-eating (D.N. Jha). Unsupported
Dharampal's prescription is one health system for all, built like the neighbourhood school: in Bharat ka Swadharm he asks that "for each village or residential region, there should be a system of health-and-medicine of this same kind," and predicts that if the rich and powerful use these common centres, "their level will surely improve" and India's traditional medicine "will then come alive too."
The governing principle here is evidence, not sentiment. The documented claim — that indigenous systems existed and were suppressed — is a different claim from "our medicine cures everything." The design problem is integration on tested ground: recover and study what worked, without letting revival slide into unproven cure-claims.
- The Ministry of AYUSH (created 2014) saw its Budget 2026 allocation rise about 20%, with three new All India Institutes of Ayurveda and the WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre at Jamnagar. Documented as budget-and-institution facts; whether specific therapies are efficacious is a separate, evidence-governed question.
- Cow-derived research (panchgavya, cow-dung, urine) has become a funded science line item — and, as recently as 2026, Indian scientists have publicly protested the spending as pseudoscience. Documented that both the funding and the protest exist; the counter-view is printed alongside the programme.
- The claim that cow urine or home regimens cure cancer or diabetes is Unsupported — testimonial only, clinical evidence absent. The Patanjali misleading-ads / contempt proceedings before the Supreme Court (closed August 2025) mark exactly this boundary between health revival and cure-claims.
Sources
- Dharampal, Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (1971) — inoculation: the Holwell account (1767). dharampal.net PDF.
- Dharampal & T.M. Mukundan, The British Origin of Cow-Slaughter in India (2002) — full PDF. Victoria–Lansdowne letter (8 Dec 1893); Thagi & Dacoity Dept. reports. Counter-case: D.N. Jha, The Myth of the Holy Cow (2001).
- Present-day: AYUSH Budget 2026 · scientists' cow-science protest · Patanjali case closed. See Evidence & Claims.