Of late, there has been a big surge in grandiloquent claims about Ayurveda and Indian traditional medicine (TM). Even though, like many Indian children, I grew up seeing my mother subdue my cough with tulsi concoctions and bathe my wounds in the leaf-juice of some shrub, the relentless aggrandizement we have today is something entirely different. But then my academic training in the humanities came to my rescue, and has helped me at least process better the claims and assertions.
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A common element of how people talk about TM is the disregard for the dynamism and complexity of social and cultural change. There is an impression today of Ayurvedic compendiums like the ‘Charaka Samhita’ having been standard textbooks that dictated how medicine was practiced in the past. But in reality, the content of these treatises, as well as practice on the ground, were always in flux.
Focus on Sanskrit samhitas
Practitioners in the past – as practitioners today – were always open to the larger world of medicine around them, picking ideas from and offering insights to others. For example, pulse-based diagnosis (nadipariksha) entered Ayurvedic practice only after the 13th century. Ayurvedic treatises have assumed their textbook-like physical form only in recent centuries, after the advent of mass printing. In the past, few vaidyas would have ever possessed and utilised an entire volume, and variation between both the beliefs and the prescriptions of different vaidyas was the norm.
Another exasperating element is the skewed focus on the Sanskrit samhitas as the embodiment of Indian TM. In the post-Manusmriti world, Brahminical caste injunctions exerted significant influence on healthcare. Vaidyas, who were upper-caste, had access to medical texts but usually avoided “pollution by touch”, staying away from surgery or tending to wounds. But vaidyas were also small in number, and the vast majority of medical practitioners and care providers in India came from diverse backgrounds, and with no access to literacy or the classical medical texts.
It is no wonder, then, that the celebrated procedure of nasal reconstruction that British officials witnessed in 1793 was at the hands of a ‘Shudra’ surgeon. In the domains of childbirth and infant care, women from Dalit communities (daai) were the major practitioners and knowledge-makers. To many such everyday forms of care, when we add the practice of hakims and shamans and the medical world of Adivasi and other communities, it becomes clear that throughout Indian history, most of the healthcare on the ground occurred outside the rarefied world of the Ayurvedic compendia.
Indian communities’ knowledge
Nevertheless, the dominance of Ayurveda and its samhitas in the mainstream discourse indicates that, in the eyes of popular TM advocates, some forms of TM are better and more important than others. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that a consistent complaint of Indian TM advocates is the superiority claims of “Western medicine” over “Indian medicine”. On the one hand, we seethe, rightly, at derogatory characterisations of Indian knowledge-systems, but on the other, we look down upon the knowledge-systems of many Indian communities themselves.
It explains why our TM discourse is replete with efforts to valorise 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, elite commentators could only conjure “namaste” as a non-touch greeting to sell internationally, while greetings like the salaam were sidelined. It also explains why, despite people in modern-day Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and India all sharing the same histories, we insist on calling Ayurveda and other forms of knowledge “Indian” rather than “South Asian” or something similar.
Hindu and Brahman exceptionalism permeate our TM discourse, and masquerade as Indian exceptionalism in the global context. The sample claim in this domain goes something like: “Our ancient rishis had already decoded the secret to life when Europeans were still living like barbarians.” Note that Indian TM advocates often compare Indians to only white Euro-Americans, to the exclusion of the rest of the world.
In this discourse, there is much emphasis on Ayurveda’s “holistic” nature focusing on disease prevention and lengthening life. But a holistic approach to health and medicine is not an Indian or Hindu invention, and was in fact common across societies and civilisations worldwide, including in the European region (e.g. Hippocratic medicine).
Factually inaccurate
Another oft-overlooked feature is that while indeed mainstream modern biomedicine has for long suffered from a reductionist approach, many preventive and holistic healthcare interventions today (like chlorinated water supply and nutrition science) would be impossible without modern understandings of the body. In a tragic irony, tens of millions of Indians remain malnourished and without basic health amenities like clean water, even as the elite and the political classes, with access to all that, wax eloquent about TM and its life-enhancing properties.
Much of the public discourse on traditional medicine in India is factually inaccurate and bereft of historical common sense. Increasingly, it is becoming less about medicine and more about India, mirroring the tall, arrogant tales of Euro-American scientific supremacy. It is as if we joined in and took advantage of the global movements against Euro-American dominance not with the intention to create a more egalitarian world order, but to simply replace their form of supremacy with ours.
There are of course better and more inclusive ways of thinking about the past. An oft-neglected fundamental fact is that wisdom and skill are not marked by any modern categories of nation and religion, but are basic human attributes that have been concretely present in all societies and civilisations across time. We also tend to forget the tremendous interconnectedness of the world in the premodern era: people and cultures have always exchanged materials, ideas, and practices and learned from one another. So instead of thinking in terms of the history of Indian or Chinese medicine, historians have urged us to think in terms of the history of human knowledge, marked by a vibrant, global flow of ideas, while noting how and why this flow was rarely symmetrical or on equal grounds.
In India, we have for too long misused history in our hunt for boast-worthy points or to find answers to questions about “who was better” or “who got there first”. These are comic, childish approaches, and we need to change course before all that remains of history for us is hollow, desolate bombast.
Kiran Kumbhar is a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine’s History of Medicine department. He can be reached at kirankumbhar@mail.harvard.edu.
