On 25 October, Dr Shireen Hamza presented a paper as part of the John Hopkins Department of the History of Medicine Fall 2025 Colloquia program.
Abstract
This article explores health and embodiment in a range of waterside spaces in Ahmedabad, a city in an arid region of western India, during the long fifteenth century. Water and culture were of central importance to the flourishing and stability of the people settling this frontier city. From its founding in 1411 CE as the capital city of an emergent dynasty, building up Ahmedabad’s water infrastructure was a priority for the sultans and their nobles. Simultaneously, the sultanate welcomed and patronized saints and scholars, including physicians who authored medical texts.
This article explores how medicine was one of many discourses that shaped the embodied experience of people using waterside spaces in medieval Ahmedabad, revealing the role these spaces played in provisioning health beyond providing the material access to potable water. In this hot and arid region, access to riversides, reservoirs, and stepwells were an important way that people could cool their bodies. Thus, drawing on two Persian texts of medicine composed in Gujarat in the long fifteenth century, I explore premodern medical imperatives to heat and cool the body in relation to waterside spaces built in and around Ahmedabad in the fifteenth century.
Today, Ahmedabad remains the capital of the state of Gujarat, and many people continue to visit these buildings that have survived earthquakes, urbanization, and the violent destruction of Muslim life and heritage by right-wing ethnonationalists. Though the colonial and national water regimes have led to the centralization of water supplies and a dramatic reduction of the water table, efforts to restore stepwells and tanks as “microclimates” to cool down cities are now underway.
