Title: Ayurveda made modern : political histories of indigenous medicine in North India, 1900-1955 /
Authors: Berger, Rachel, 1979-
Year: 2013
Subjects: Politics; History, 20th Century; Colonialism history; Medicine, Ayurvedic history; Medicine, Ayurvedic India, North History; Medicine, Ayurvedic Political aspects India, North.; Traditional medicine India, North History; Traditional medicine Political aspects India, North.; Ayurveda; India; Indien
Abstract: This book explores the ways in which Ayurveda, the oldest medical tradition of the Indian subcontinent, was transformed from a composite of 'ancient' medical knowledge into a 'modern' medical system, suited to the demands posed by apparatuses of health developed in colonial India. It examines the shift between an entrenched colonial reticence to consider the Indigenous Medical Systems as legitimate scientific medicine, to a growing acceptance of Ayurvedic medicine following the First World War. Locating the moment of transition within the implementation of a dyarchic system of governance in 1919, the book argues that the revamping of the 'Medical Services' into an important new category of regional governance ushered in an era of health planning that considered curative and preventative medicine as key components of the 'health' of the population. As such, it illuminates the way in which conceptions of power, authority and agency were newly configured and consolidated as politics were revamped in the late colonial India.
Contents: Introduction: Ayurveda in Motion -- 1. Historicising Ayurveda: Genealogies of the Biomoral -- 2. Situating Ayurveda in Modernity, 1900-1919 -- 3. Embodying Consumption: Representing Indigeneity in Popular Culture, 1910-1940 -- 4. Ayurveda's Dyarchic Moment, 1920-1935 -- 5. Planning through Development: Institutions, Population, and the Limits of Belonging -- 6. Reframing Indigeneity: Ayurveda, Independence and the Health of the Future -- Conclusion: Ayurveda's Indian Modernities.