Conclusion: Ayurveda’s Indian Modernities

Abstract

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.