Berger - Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900-1955

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

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This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial history while also exploring the recent developments in former colonial states where residues of empire can still be found. The books provide in-depth examinations of empires as competing and complementary power structures encouraging the reader to reconsider their understanding of international and world history during recent centuries.

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Tony Ballantyne

ORIENTALISM AND RACE

Aryanism in the British Empire

Peter F. Bang and C.A. Bayly (editors)

TRIBUTARY EMPIRES IN GLOBAL HISTORY

James Beattie

EMPIRE AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANXIETY, 18001920

Health, Aesthetics and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia

Rachel Berger

AYURVEDA MADE MODERN

Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 19001955

Robert J. Blyth

THE EMPIRE OF THE RAJ

Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 18581947

Roy Bridges (editor)

IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND AFRICA

Studies Presented to John Hargreaves

Kit Candlin

THE LAST CARIBBEAN FRONTIER, 17951815

Hilary M. Carey (editor)

EMPIRES OF RELIGION

Nandini Chatterjee

THE MAKING OF INDIAN SECULARISM

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Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, c. 184095

T.J. Cribb (editor)

IMAGINED COMMONWEALTH

Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English

Michael S. Dodson

ORIENTALISM, EMPIRE AND NATIONAL CULTURE

India, 17701880

Jost Dlffer and Marc Frey (editors)

ELITES AND DECOLONIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Bronwen Everill

ABOLITION AND EMPIRE IN SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA

Ulrike Hillemann

ASIAN EMPIRE AND BRITISH KNOWLEDGE

China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion

B.D. Hopkins

THE MAKING OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN

Ronald Hyam

BRITAINS IMPERIAL CENTURY, 18151914: A STUDY OF EMPIRE AND EXPANSION

Third Edition

Iftekhar Iqbal

THE BENGAL DELTA

Ecology, State and Social Change, 18431943

Brian Ireland

THE US MILITARY IN HAWAII

Colonialism, Memory and Resistance

Robin Jeffrey

POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING

How Kerala became a Model

Gerold Krozewski

MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE

British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 194758

Javed Majeed

AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAVEL AND POST-NATIONAL IDENTITY

Francine McKenzie

REDEFINING THE BONDS OF COMMONWEALTH 19391948

The Politics of Preference

Gabriel Paquette

ENLIGHTENMENT, GOVERNANCE AND REFORM IN SPAIN AND ITS EMPIRE 17591808

Sandhya L. Polu

PERCEPTION OF RISK

Policy-Making on Infectious Disease in India, 18921940

Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

IRISH AND INDIAN

The Cosmopolitan Politics of Alfred Webb

Ricardo Roque

HEADHUNTING AND COLONIALISM

Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 18701930

Jonathan Saha

LAW, DISORDER AND THE COLONIAL STATE

Corruption in Burma c. 1900

Michael Silvestri

IRELAND AND INDIA

Nationalism, Empire and Memory

John Singleton and Paul Robertson

ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALASIA 19451970

Julia Tischler

LIGHT AND POWER FOR A MULTIRACIAL NATION

The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation

Aparna Vaidik

IMPERIAL ANDAMANS

Colonial Encounter and Island History

Jon E. Wilson

THE DOMINATION OF STRANGERS

Modern Governance in Eastern India, 17801835

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Ayurveda Made Modern

Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 19001955

Rachel Berger

Associate Professor, Department of History, Concordia University, Canada

Rachel Berger 2013

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For Nitika

Preface and Acknowledgements

I have found, over the years, that studying Ayurveda invites enquiries as to the nature of my connection to the subject matter, fixed on ideological and spiritual axes. The assumption is that one has come to Ayurveda through an experience of practice, either as practitioner or lay follower, and has a personal commitment to the field. I have disappointed enquirers for over ten years with my claim to a simply academic commitment to Ayurveda and to its politics and its challenges to governance, no less rather than the intricate machinations of its internal logics. I am most acutely aware of the ways in which this book pays little notice to these substantial changes and instead uses Ayurveda to ask other questions.

I came to this project through a deeper engagement with the politics and experiences of womens health in colonial and postcolonial India. I spent the last days of my undergraduate degree working as Research Assistant to the formidable scholar and activist Shree Mulay, who introduced me to the ways in which gender was deployed and entangled in the ongoing saga of development in the subcontinent. I marvelled at the activist struggle that she and her comrades were involved in to disentangle the rights of women and all subject citizens from the neoliberal experiments that violated their bodies and their autonomy. Searching for deeper answers about the contemporary context of Indian health politics, I spent my early years of graduate study uncovering the broader themes that connected gender and sexuality to ideologies of health, first in the secondary literature and later on in Hindi primary source material. I was well steeped in early twentieth-century recountings of gynaecology, obstetrics and birth control, in juxtaposition with readings of critical theory that engaged postcolonial and poststructuralist approaches to the body in its colonial context.