Bodies at the Threshold: Regulation and Exclusion in the Water Structures of Medieval Gujarat

People have responded to the hot and arid climate of western India, in which rain falls only for the few months of the monsoon season, by building a range of water structures. Historians of art and architecture have emphasized the importance of the steps to water in reservoirs and stepwells as tirthas, or sacred thresholds between worlds. But reading medical texts alongside water structures and their inscriptions show us another dimension to this threshold, foregrounding the porosity of human and animal bodies to cooling and moistening spaces. Focusing on surviving inscriptions carved into monumental water structures, scholars have emphasized the importance of patronage, power and gender in their construction. Caste was deeply embedded in their construction and use, both in terms of the centuries-old hereditary knowledge of those who dug and built them, as well as ongoing contestations in who can access water there. Feeling for the corporeal boundaries of waterside enclosures requires us to look beyond text at material and oral historical sources.

This presentation draws together Persian medical texts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and inscriptions on water structures across medieval Gujarat, both created with the patronage of the Gujarat Sultanate, to explore water structures as enclosures with intertwined social and material dimensions. Medicine has and continues to create social enclosures in tandem with religious and other discourses as well as physical structures, and to varying degrees, were incorporated into the medical traditions of Tibb and Ayurveda. Here, focusing on the history of medicine, religion and architecture in medieval Gujarat, I offer new reflections on embodied porosity in the history of humoral medicine.