The new work captures the growth of ‘medical nationalism’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through Ayurvedic revival movements in the United States.
Ayurveda, State and Society: United States, c. 1890-1950
Written by Saurav Kumar Rai
Orient Black Swan, 292 pages, Rs 1,400
Ayurveda has gained worldwide attention and is often promoted as ‘true’ and ‘proven’ by modern political actors, governments, social organizations, practitioners and NGOs in India. Today, with increasing state support for ‘indigenous’ healing systems, it is very important to consider the socio-political aspects of medicine, especially Ayurveda, and its role in nation-building.
The latest work in Orient Black Swan’s “New Perspectives on South Asian History” series, “Ayurveda, Nation, and Society,” explores the “medical nationalism” of the late 19th century and early 20th century through the Ayurvedic revival movement in the United States. captures the growth of, and changes in and continuation of, attitudes towards ‘indigenous’ medicine in independent India. The book criticizes the casteist, communal, class and gender-biased social culture inherent in the Ayurvedic discourse of the period under discussion, and criticizes the ‘others’ for spreading diseases harmful to ‘Hindu’ men. He points out how the position of its supporters reveals that the constant condemnation of the Ayurvedic people were actively involved in the ‘reconstruction of tradition’ and in both society and the ‘nation’.
This volume also explores the commercialization of health discourses and healing practices with the help of diverse sources such as hitherto untapped local documents such as Ayurvedic magazines and pamphlets, and literary interventions. , researches the market for Ayurvedic printed materials and medicines, and also conducts interviews with practitioners of Ayurveda in the field. Therapist and shopkeeper. The author also notes that although Ayurvedic practitioners have adopted some features of Western medicine, they have not been able to imbibe the spirit of rigorous inquiry/experimentation that is one of its central tenets. We will demonstrate how many
Author Saurav Kumar Rai is a fellow at Gandhi Smriti and Darshan Samiti, New Delhi.
Below is an excerpt from the book.
Ayurveda at the crossroads of independence c. 1946-1950
so far [in the previous chapters of this book] We have examined various aspects of the Ayurvedic discourse and the Ayurvedic revival movement in colonial India. It would be equally interesting to see developments in the immediate aftermath of independence. This is primarily because the colonial context, which hitherto was one of the main factors shaping the character of the Ayurvedic revival movement, is no longer present in a direct and explicit form. Without this colonial background, the Ayurvedic movement had to face a new kind of challenge, both internal and relatively subtle against the overt colonial onslaught. Moreover, such discussions are equally relevant in tracing the attitudes of postcolonial governments towards Ayurveda and other “indigenous” healing practices, which left a lasting mark on the future development of Ayurveda in independent India. is important.
For quite some time, historians and political theorists considered independence to be a decisive turning point in India’s history. But soon, the continuity of the colonial era in the postcolonial era became evident across the world, including in the Indian subcontinent. Ashis Nandi argued that:[W]Eastern colonialism brought not only economic exploitation and political oppression, but also the relentless promotion of a “civilizing” mission based on a worldview that believed in the absolute superiority of humans over non-humans and men over women. Ta. , the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern over the traditional. This colonial victory of “modernity” over “tradition” in the field of “indigenous” medicine has led to the shift towards Western medicine in postcolonial administrations while formulating broader health policies for the targeted population. clearly expressed through the slope of Nationalistic articulations of anti-colonial sentiment in the medical field do little to alleviate the practical contingencies of newly independent states modeled on contemporary frameworks. Medicine had already become an indispensable means of governance for modern nation-states exhibiting a spontaneous and deep-seated convergence between the requirements of political ideology and the requirements of medical technology.
The choice of healing systems by the Indian nation-state after independence relied heavily on the newly discovered medical virtues of modern governance methods. That becomes abundantly clear when we closely analyze contemporaneous reports/recommendations on health investigations and subsequent government responses.
Three reports of particular importance for the purposes of this study are the 1946 Report of the Health Research and Development Committee; Report of the Commission on Indigenous Health Systems, 1948. This chapter extensively examines each of these reports and the corresponding responses of relevant authorities, and situates the envisaged role of bioresources in independent India, and in particular Ayurveda in bioresources in India. United states.
In doing so, I look for colonial continuities and discontinuities, if any, in official attitudes toward “indigenous” medicine in the era of experimental design. Incidentally, as Rachel Berger has argued, this period was marked by a period of contestation to claim authoritative knowledge about Ayurveda and subsequent policy formulation that determined the place of Ayurvedic medicine and practitioners in the larger biopolitics of the state. It was a time when many stakeholders were involved. They range from federal politicians to state bureaucrats to educational instructors to ordinary writers.
Report of the Committee to Locate Ayurveda/’Indigenous’ Medicine in Bhore and Chopra
With independence on the horizon, officials as well as political and voluntary organizations attempted to develop a public health policy roadmap for an imagined postcolonial future. In this regard, the Indian National Congress has proposed a national plan headed by Jawaharlal Nehru to prepare a “comprehensive plan” for India’s future development with health as one of its major focuses. A committee was established in 1938. The Health Subcommittee headed by Colonel SS Sokei was one of his 29 subcommittees of the National Planning Commission. However, the Health Subcommittee took an ambiguous position on “Indigenous” medicine.
Incidentally, all members of the health subcommittee were trained in Western medicine; there were no representatives of “indigenous” medicine as such. As a natural consequence, Western medicine gained a central place in the subcommittee’s reports, and the maximization of “indigenous” healing systems as an adjunct to Western medicine diminished. Indeed, the Health Subcommittee asserted in its report that the issue of “Indigenous” health care “needs to be properly resolved; otherwise it will not be resolved.” [was] It is likely to seriously hinder the development of scientific medicine in this country. The Health Subcommittee’s report further states that, like in many other countries, the pharmacopoeia of the “indigenous” medical systems in India have not been “adequately revised” for centuries and are Despite advances in scientific methods for evaluating treatments and treatments, he argued that: When examining the value of drugs, most of the “indigenous” treatments turned out to be “worthless.” Thus, in a pioneering attempt at national planning, ‘indigenous’ medicine received little authority at the hands of the Health Sub-Committee constituted by the Indian National Congress.
[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers]
