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

Abstract

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.