Rachel Berger

From the biomoral to the biopolitical: Ayurveda's political histories

This article presents a political reading of the history of Ayurveda in modernity, focusing on its deployment as a political force, while concurrently exploring its role in subject formation around issues of colonization, citizenship, nationalism and the politics of belonging. In it, the politics of Ayurveda are hinged upon two conceptual poles: firstly, the construction of the biomoral in discussions of Ayurveda and, secondly, the absorption of Ayurveda into the inherently modern project of late colonial biopolitics. While scholars have employed the biomoral as a way to think about Ayurvedas dismissal from the formal realm of the state, I argue instead that it was the process of determining Ayurvedas biomorality that created a counterpart to the allopathic intervention. I then map out the formal absorption of Ayurveda into the context of state medicine in the interwar United Provinces, a process that reveals the pragmatics of the diarchic and post-diarchic transformation of regional politics. Finally, I explore the appropriation of Ayurveda by the Congress party in the United Provinces after 1938, and its incorporation into the larger project of population management envisioned as an essential component of its biopolitical projects in the region. Ayurvedas institutional infrastructure was co-opted into practices of surveillance and strategies for ‘development’ – loosely conducted as the distribution of resources – and justified the excesses and neglects of the new political order. At the same time, the strong association of Ayurveda with the Hindu majoritarian community in the United Provinces resulted in the further marginalization of Unani medicine – and Muslims – from the systems of health care and the benefits of citizenship.

South Asian Tissue Economies

Chak views Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, two individuals who played a dominant role in the creation of Pakistan, as Muslim revivalists. Much attention is given to the ways in which both traditionalist and secularist figures and institutions have undermined Pakistan, either through the development of the constitution or mistreatment of minorities. To add to our understanding of the role of the Pakistani military, Chak argues that the failure of both traditionalists and secularist superstructures facilitates military intervention and dominance in Pakistani politics (141). The case of Pakistan is thus marked by the inability of the political leadership “to construct a political order that recognizes the foundational aspects of political culture in Muslim polities and then apply it” (151). In the conclusion, Chak reaffirms the need for an Islamic ethic that determines political culture in Muslim societies, arguing that its absence is one of the primary causes for insurrection and political unrest. Unlike trends that see Islam as simply playing an instrumentalist role in Muslim societies, the primary strength of the book lies in its ability to take Islamic political culture seriously – not positing it as something that is incomplete in relation to its Western variant, but has a strength and direction of its own. Nonetheless, the book could have benefited from further evidence of a number of generalized statements and further elaboration of a number of theoretical points. For one, can we really see the support of the Muslim League during one critical election before Partition as a desire amongst Muslims for an Islamic polity, or was it a support that was given in response to increasing Hindu majoritarianism? Furthermore, if the Muslim masses indeed yearn for revivalism, how do we understand that many Indian Muslims did not in fact, support the Muslim League and aligned themselves with the secular-nationalist Indian National Congress? From what it might appear, then, it is not just the leadership that has taken traditionalist or secularist approaches, and the Muslim masses are on the whole revivalist, but that the three strands exist in society on a deeper level and are a result of entanglements and processes that have been centuries in the making. This makes the quest for ideological coherence all the more difficult.

Historicizing Ayurveda: Genealogies of the Biomoral

Over the course of ancient and post-classical Indian history, ‘Ayurveda’ evolved from a textual term for the knowledge of life into a medical tradition with a literary canon, recognized health practices, and practitioners asserting their expertise and expecting elevated social status. The pre-colonial development of Ayurveda reflected a holistic approach to the natural world, uniting beliefs about the physical structure of matter with metaphysical and religious insights. In Ayurvedic texts, medicine is closely associated with philosophy and ethics; similarly, medical practice was located within a wider context of ritual and social behaviour. Ayurveda gained coherence and influence as a collection of medical practices that were in harmony with, and indeed reinforced, both Sanskritic learning and the structure of the Indic societies that sustained it.

Conclusion: Ayurveda’s Indian Modernities

It is tempting to end this monograph by asserting that the government intervention into the state of Ayurveda, particularly as represented by the recasting of the vaid as political actor and the absorption of Ayurveda into the biopolitical practices of the state, resolved the tension between the poles of traditional medicine and medical modernities. Theoretically, it did: in the nineteenth century, Ayurvedic practitioners were deemed responsible for the sorry state of their tradition; but from 1919, Ayurveda was modernized and made relevant to the functioning of the state through the professionalization of the vaid. Vaids did the social and cultural work necessary in the Hindi public sphere to gain legitimacy as the new arbiters of tradition. Medical policy and medical institutions were developed to focus on their professional development as doctors, as legislators and as men of science. At the same time, the creativity around planning that was possible in the dyarchic moment was quickly rigidified into a more formalized biopolitics of late colonialism by the mid-1930s. These post-dyarchic institutions were anchored by the politics of health in the era of proto- and actualized Congress governance.

Reframing Indigeneity: Ayurveda, Independence and the Health of the Future

In this chapter, we will examine the evolving politicization of Ayurveda as the era of colonial rule came to an end and Indian bureaucrats and citizens shifted from imagining postcoloniality to defining independence. The Second World War wrought the mass disavowal of the possibilities for empire in South Asia, where cooperative and capitulative politics had shifted against a future in Empire, and in which nationalist politics had ceased to make possible the functional carrying out of large-scale imperial policy. The most prominent political movement throughout the war had been, of course, the Gandhian Quit India movement, which began in August 1942 as a response to Britain’s unilateral decision to bring India into the war, and became the nationalist articulation of anti-colonial sentiment and action. Over the course of its three years, over one hundred thousand people were imprisoned, at times shutting down realms of governance crucial to the manoeuvrings of Empire. Most importantly, the positions that Gandhi and the Congress were able to take against Empire led to swifter and more absolute forms of decolonization.

Planning Through Development: Institutions, Population and the Limits of Belonging

In this chapter, we explore the Congress government’s attempts to move beyond the scope of the professionalization of vaids and to engage with a more meaningful revamping of the health infrastructure of the United Provinces. In the previous chapter, the rise of the practitioner as the arbiter of ‘traditional’ systems was made evident through the unravelling of health policy based mostly on his or her credentials as a subject of ‘modern’ medical professionalism. Ayurveda was introduced to the government through the traditional medical practitioners consulted by their lowest-ranking servants: the right to claim sick-leave had also resulted in the necessity of a doctor’s consultation; vaids were of use to the government in so far as they could participate in its bureaucracy by providing this service to its newest employees. Government policy through the late 1930s had focused on the certification and registration and regulation of vaids, therefore cementing them as the mode through which the state encountered Ayurveda.

Situating Ayurveda in Modernity, 1900–1919

In this chapter, I consider the processes by which indigenous medicine was marginalized and then resurrected by the colonial state from the late nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth. In these discussions, the romanticization/vilification of the indigenous medical systems finally came to an end and was replaced by the beginnings of serious, systemic enquiry into the state of medical life in the sub-continent. The Medical Department found that myriad networks, relationships and experiences of Public Health policy were heavily reliant upon indigenous cultures of physicality, practices of extra-biomedical medicine and pre-colonial patterns of medical consumption. Ayurveda in the nineteenth century had focused primarily on scientific texts and their (re)production and had been more concerned with pandits than with practitioners; however, the Medical Department’s new, more pragmatic view of medical systems in action forced the focus to turn to the interactions between doctors and patients. Situating practitioners at the centre of discourse marked a profound shift in the way in which Ayurveda was conceptualized, both by the state and by the new practitioners.

Embodying Consumption: Representing Indigeneity in Popular Culture, 1910–1940

In Chapter 2, we saw the ways in which a composite tradition called the indigenous medical systems came to have a more complicated meaning in the eyes of the state, as the GOI encountered – and was forced to contend with – its reliance on the employment of native medical practitioners and indigenous medical practices. The government’s Medical Board unravelled the question of the Indigenous Systems of Medicine by dealing with the position of practitioners within them, a strategy that shifted the state’s focus on textual authority (as made evident through Orientalist writings on Ayurveda) to the lived practice of the indigenous medical systems. The situating of the practitioner at the centre of tradition – and the reliance on the practitioner as arbiter of the state of the medical system – allowed for the state to interact meaningfully with the indigenous medical systems. This had been impossible when Ayurveda was conceptualized as a tradition accessible only in Sanskrit and guarded by individuals who circulated in spheres virtually uncontrolled by the state. The practitioner ostensibly gave the colonial government access to the current state of the indigenous medical systems, where the Pandit had only been able to provide insight into its theoretical meaning in a broader civilizational context.

Introduction: Ayurveda in Motion

Ayurveda is the oldest ongoing medical system in South Asia, with ancient Indian roots and global contemporary wings. Even the most mainstream international supermarkets contain boxes of Ayurvedic tea; spas and salons offer Ayurvedic massage; and major celebrities the world over advocate Ayurvedic diets and cleanses (characterized, mostly, by deprivation and the robust effects of fibre). Associated with the most primal, basic iterations of a medical logic in the subcontinent, it has come to have an international career built upon the majestic possibilities of its mysterious Eastern depths. In India, too, the contemporary marketplace has revamped Ayurveda into a mode of selling luxury goods, with brands like Kama and Biotique offering pricy elixirs and cosmetics to middle-class (and upper middle-class) consumers wanting to buy into the affects of organic, indigenous health. Moving beyond the realm of self-diagnosis (and cosmetic indulgence), the neighbourhoods of most Indian cities are papered with ads for Ayurvedic practitioners able to cure the whole gambit of modern illness, ranging from AIDS to diabetes to fertility (and everything in between).

Ayurveda’s Dyarchic Moment, 1920–1935

As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, the consolidation of Ayurveda as a singular, unified system of medicine relevant to the lives of ‘modern’ Indians happened, in part, through the identification of the practitioner as the arbiter of the tradition. The GOI’s Medical Department had turned to the experiences of the practitioner when determining policy matters in which the Indigenous Systems of Medicine were implicit. Similarly, the practitioner had emerged as the new Ayurvedic ‘expert’ in the Hindi public sphere, replacing the Brahman Vaid. This chapter explores the ways in which the new authority granted to practitioners was further entrenched through its incorporation into the medical infrastructure of the United Provinces in the 1920s and 1930s, an act which fundamentally transformed the Indigenous Systems of Medicine by recasting them as modern, state-sanctioned structures of bureaucracy and service provision. Vaids and hakims were important subjects of provincial medical reform and became the vehicles through which the Indigenous Systems of Medicine were modernized.