Lately, there has been a big increase in big-ticket claims about Ayurveda and Indian Traditional Medicine (TM). Although, like many Indian children, I grew up watching my mother soothe her cough with a mixture of tulsi and bathe her wounds in the juice of some shrub’s leaves, the relentless enthusiasm that we share today is complete. Kind of different. But then my academic training in the humanities came to my rescue, and it at least helped me process the claims and assertions better.
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A common element of how people talk about TM is a neglect of the dynamism and complexity of social and cultural change. Today there is a belief that Ayurvedic compendiums like ‘Charak Samhita’ are the standard textbooks that dictated how medicine was practiced in the past. But in reality, the content of these texts, as well as the grassroots practice, were always variable.
Focus on Sanskrit Codes
Physicians in the past – as physicians today – were always open to the larger world of medicine around them, seeking ideas and providing insight from others. For example, pulse-based diagnostics (pulse test) entered Ayurvedic practice only after 13th century. It is only in recent centuries, after the advent of large-scale printing, that Ayurvedic texts have assumed their physical form, such as textbooks. In the past, only a few vaidyas had and used the full quantity, and variation between both beliefs and the prescriptions of different vaidyas was the norm.
Another troubling element is the focus on Sanskrit codices as the embodiment of Indian TM. In the post-Manusmriti world, brahmanical caste injunctions exerted a significant influence on health care. Vaidyas, who were upper caste, had access to medical texts, but they generally avoided “pollution by touch”, abstained from surgery or caring for wounds. But Vaidyas were also few in number, and most medical practitioners and care providers in India came from diverse backgrounds, and did not have literacy or access to classical medical texts.
So it’s no surprise that the famous nasal reconstruction procedure that British officials saw in 1793 took place at the hands of one. ‘Shudra’ surgeon, In the area of childbirth and child care, women from Dalit communities (Midwife,He was a prominent practitioner and knowledge-maker. To many such everyday forms of care, when we add the practices of hakims and shamans and the medical world of tribal and other communities, it becomes clear that throughout Indian history, most health care took place at the grassroots level. Outside Rare World of Ayurvedic Compendium.
knowledge of Indian communities
Nevertheless, the dominance of Ayurveda and its codes in mainstream discourse indicates that, in the eyes of popular TM proponents, some forms of TM are better and more important than others. This would not be notable but for the fact that a frequent complaint of Indian TM proponents is the claim of superiority of “Western medicine” over “Indian medicine”. On the one hand, we are rightly angered by the derogatory characterization of Indian knowledge systems, but on the other, we ourselves look down upon the knowledge systems of many Indian communities.
This explains why our TM discourse is filled with attempts to value the invisible entities of “Prakriti” and “Dosha” from Ayurvedic texts, while the tangible skills of Dalit midwives are ignored. Or why, during the early COVID-19 pandemic, specific commentators could only adopt “namaste” as a non-tactile greeting to sell internationally, while salutations like salam were sidelined. It also explains why modern Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and India all have similar histories, despite the fact that we refer to Ayurveda and other forms of knowledge as “Indian” rather than “South Asian” or something similar. Insist on. ,
Hindu and Brahmin exceptionalism pervades our TM discourse, and emerges as Indian exceptionalism in the global context. A sample claim in this domain goes something like this: “Our ancient sages already understood the secret of life when Europeans were still living like barbarians.” Note that Indian TM proponents often compare Indians only to white Euro-Americans, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
In this discourse, much emphasis is placed on the “holistic” nature of Ayurveda, with its focus on disease prevention and prolongation of life. But the holistic approach to health and medicine is not an Indian or Hindu invention, and was in fact common in societies and civilizations around the world, including the European region (such as Hippocratic medicine).
factually incorrect
Another often overlooked feature is that while indeed mainstream modern biomedicine has long suffered from a reductionist approach, many preventive and holistic health care interventions today (such as chlorinated water supplies and nutritional science) are based without a modern understanding of the body. would be impossible. A sad irony is that millions of Indians are malnourished and deprived of basic healthcare facilities like clean water, while the elite and political class, who have access to all these facilities, speak volumes about TM and its life-enhancing properties .
Much of the public discussion on traditional medicine in India is factually incorrect and devoid of historical common sense. Increasingly, it is becoming less about medicine and more about India, mirroring tall, egotistical tales of Euro-American scientific supremacy. It is as if we join and take advantage of global movements against Euro-American hegemony, not with the intention of creating a more egalitarian world order, but of changing the pattern of their hegemony from ours.
Of course, there are better and more inclusive ways of thinking about the past. An often neglected basic fact is that knowledge and skill are not marked by any modern categories of nation and religion, but are basic human qualities that have been solidly present in all societies and civilizations throughout all times. We also forget the tremendous interconnectedness of the world in the pre-modern era: people and cultures have always exchanged materials, ideas and practices and learned from each other. So rather than thinking in terms of the history of Indian or Chinese medicine, historians urge us to think in terms of a history of human knowledge marked by a vibrant, global flow of ideas, while looking at how this flow And why was it rarely symmetrical. or on a similar basis.
In India, we have long abused history in search of glory points or to find answers to questions like “who was better” or “who got there first”., These are ridiculous, childish approaches, and we need to change course before what remains of history becomes hollow, desolate bombast for us.
Kiran Kumbhar is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He can be reached at kirankumbhar@mail.harvard.edu.