Abstract
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in India witnessed a tremendous growth of vernacular Ayurvedic tracts, journals, pamphlets and public polemics. Incidentally, the consequent Ayurvedic discourse was not merely about the medical aspects of the Ayurvedic healing system. Rather, a careful reading of these published materials on Ayurveda throws immense light on the ongoing debates about sociocultural and religious processes. Interestingly, the social culture manifested by the early twentieth century Ayurvedic discourse was highly communalist, casteist, and gender-and class-biased in its content. In this regard, the present article explores how, in the era of communal polarisation, healing systems acquired religious identities. For example, from the 1920s onwards the cause of Ayurveda was promulgated by many vaids (Ayurvedic practitioners) and publicists by linking it with the broader agenda of ‘Hindu’ revivalism and the consolidation of a ‘Hindu’ religious, cultural and national identity. That is why issues like ‘Hindi prachar’, ‘cow protection’ and the cause of ‘Hindu education’ often formed the subject of vaid campaigns throughout North India. Related to this was the demonisation of ‘Muslim rule’ in India from the apparent perspective of health in the Ayurvedic discourse of the time. Simultaneously, this article argues that this communalisation of the Ayurvedic discourse, besides creating external religious boundaries, also unleashed hegemonic upper-caste and -class ideas that served to homogenise the community internally as well.
Keywords
Against the growing dominance, or more so hegemony, of Western medicine in colonial India, an entire movement had come up to revive ‘indigenous’ healing systems including Ayurveda in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Incidentally, ‘indigeneity’ became a popular theme in late colonial India in the public discourse of the newly emerging reformist elite due to various political and professional reasons. The political reasons were mostly guided by the overall context of colonial rule. The newly emerging reformist elites were desperately trying to forge a separate identity for themselves and ‘indigeneity’ was a handy tool in this quest. 1 Besides political reasons, the reformist elites were also guided by their professional interests in their support of ‘indigenous’ culture, systems or traditions, since with the gradual rise of nationalism claims to ‘indigeneity’ came to acquire a huge commercial potential. However, the category of ‘indigenous’ was quite complex in the Indian context. After all, which cultural artefact, system or tradition truly represented India’s ‘indigenous’ culture, or system, or tradition was/is very hard to determine in a pluralistic society like that of India. In this situation what we see is the syndicalisation of the claims to an ‘indigenous’ culture, system or tradition, where groups or communities or castes or a class with certain vested interests of their own, through a combination of organisation, publicity and politics tried to establish their beliefs as being worthiest for the title of ‘indigenous’. This applied to the case of ‘indigenous’ medicine and the discourse related to Ayurveda and Unani Tibb as well.
Such medical revivalism was not just limited to the issues of health and medicine; rather, proponents and practitioners of ‘indigenous’ healing systems readily interacted and intervened in the making of a nation and various aspects of the society. In other words, the ‘indigenous’ medical discourse(s) exhibit tremendous socio-political content as well as intent. In this regard, the present article, while dealing with the complexity of the idea of ‘indigenous’ medicine, looks at the communalisation of the mainstream Ayurvedic discourse as manifested through the writings and speeches of the prominent Ayurvedic practitioners of the time, including those of the All India Vaidya Sammelan, the largest organisation of practising vaids. Here it should be noted that this article focuses exclusively on the mainstream Ayurvedic discourse particularly emerging out of North India. It nowhere denies the fact that there were various regional Ayurvedic discourses as well as discourses from the margins each of which had its own specificities respectively. That is to say, the Ayurvedic discourse of the time was neither singular nor monolithic. Hence, one should not generalise the conclusions of the article across regions and margins.
Healing practices throughout the world underwent significant epistemological and structural transformations with the onset of modernity. Michel Foucault in his pioneering work The Birth of the Clinic delineates two significant developments in the field of (Western) medicine in the nineteenth century. First was the broader epistemological shift marked by the development of the idea of the ‘medical gaze’ 2 and second was the shift in the utility of medicine marked by ‘a spontaneous and deeply rooted convergence between the requirements of political ideology and those of medical technology’. 3 These two developments, according to Foucault, made modern medicine an important tool of governance/power regimes. Further, medicine during this period in Europe became ‘a social practice instead of an individual one’ and was endowed with ‘an authoritarian power with normalising functions that went beyond the existence of diseases and the wishes of the patient’. 4 Historians like David Arnold have tried to replicate this Foucauldian epistemological model in the colonial setting by looking at the relationship between Western medicine and its involvement in colonial expansion and consolidation. 5 What is missing in such analyses is the study of corresponding development even in the case of ‘indigenous’ systems of healing. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ‘indigenous’ systems of healing like Ayurveda became equally fraught with such sociopolitical overtones and indulged in the pathological classification of the subject population in binary terms.
Deliberating the Idea of ‘Indigenous’ Medicine
Drawing upon the Foucauldian epistemological model, a number of studies have already established the argument that Western medicine was used by the colonial government to colonise the Indian land and body, and that access to Western medical facilities had racial overtones. 6 It was in this context that the revival of ‘indigenous’ systems of healing gained the public attention of the reformist elite in India. The frequent criticism of Indian systems of healing as ‘primitive’, ‘prehistoric’, ‘stagnant’ and ‘non-scientific’ methods of treatment, amounting to ‘quackery’, disgruntled the reformist elite. The revival of a ‘truly’ ‘indigenous’ Indian system of healing, which in their view was superior to the Western system, became crucial to their very identity.
However, the question of which system truly represented the ‘indigenous’ healing system of India was a tricky one. India was the abode of various healing systems ranging from Ayurveda to Unani to Siddha to various other healing practices which did not fall under any ‘system’ (non-systemic healing practices). Out of these, Ayurveda and Unani were the two chief contenders for the aforesaid claim to the status of ‘indigeneity’. Nevertheless, for the time being proponents and practitioners of different healing systems joined hands to fight the growing influence of Western medicine in India. This collaboration between Ayurveda and Unani at the national level was manifested through the writings and deeds of Hakim Ajmal Khan, who was associated both with the Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim League, and was an ‘indigenous’ medical practitioner himself. Ajmal Khan was of the opinion that ‘[I]f we want to take the administration of government into our own hands, we must right all national things, including the indigenous method of healing. Our real progress depends on these things. We fail in serving our country if we are dependent on outside things.’ 7
It was through the constant efforts of people like Ajmal Khan that the Indian National Congress eventually recognised the claim of ‘indigenous’ systems of medicine and passed the following resolution at its 33rd session in December 1918:
Recognising the comparatively dominant prevalence of the Ayurvedic and Unani systems of medicine in India and their undeniable claims to usefulness this Congress strongly recommends to the Government of India the eminent desirability of taking definite steps to secure to them the advantages vouchsafed to the Western system under the present administrative policy of the Government.
8
Ajmal Khan made constant attempts to bring all the practitioners of ‘indigenous’ medicine under one roof through organisations like the All India Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbi Conference. 9 He also established an Ayurvedic and Unani Medical College in Delhi. In many ways, Hakim Ajmal Khan remained the chief torchbearer of the composite movement related to the revival of ‘indigenous’ systems of medicine. His style of resistance matched the ideal moderate nationalist kind of politics which vouched for a unified movement keeping the internal differences of respective practitioners of Ayurveda and Unani at bay.
Nevertheless, nationalist resistance and revivalism nowhere denied the possibility of ‘interaction’ and ‘selective adoption’ between Ayurveda and Western medicine, and it was never merely a question of complete ‘resistance’ or complete ‘acceptance’ of Western medicine and its characteristic traits. In fact, two broad categories can be easily discerned while analysing the ‘indigenous’ resistance against Western medicine. The first category included those who advocated selective adoption from Western medicine to enrich the ‘indigenous’ systems of medicine, by keeping the ‘indigenous’ identity intact. They did not outrightly reject Western medicine and even acknowledged its achievements in the past few centuries. The second category was composed of purists who called for a restoration of the ‘pristine purity’ of the ‘indigenous’ systems of medicine. They were not ready to acknowledge the superiority of Western medicine in any respect.
However, within these two categories there were multiple strands. For example, within purists there were those who denied the medical aspect of Western medicine, but simultaneously adopted its institutional structure to further the cause of ‘indigenous’ medicine. This ambiguity of the revivalist discourse on medicine was analysed for the first time by Charles Leslie in a series of articles. 10 According to Leslie, even while talking of the revivalism of the classical systems of healing, namely Ayurveda and Unani, both the pragmatic ideologues (also known as ‘progressives’, who advocated the induction of new knowledge alongside classical learning) and the purists (also known as ‘conservatives’, who emphasised the literal revocation of Ayurvedic and Unani texts) resorted to techniques which were alien to the classical system, such as the institutionalisation of learning, professionalisation of practice and the manufacturing of standardised remedies in pharmaceutical factories, all of which were traits of the ‘modern’ Western system of medicine. Interestingly, Leslie does not find such deviations in medical revivalism in India to be strange since, according to him, even in Europe, the Renaissance and the ideas of the Enlightenment, while deriving sanctity from classical learning, never literally revived them and often significantly altered classical conceptions. 11
In their revivalist quest, the Ayurvedic practitioners of the time dramatically reshaped and redefined the Ayurvedic system of healing to incorporate the traits on the basis of which Western medicine was claiming its superiority, such as scientificity, standardisation, pharmaceuticalisation, professionalisation and institutionalisation. Thus, a whole lot of ‘new’ vaids came up during the period under consideration who were remarkably different from the vaids of the preceding era.
This went hand-in-hand with a seemingly contradictory trend of Hinduisation of Ayurveda. There was no dearth of Ayurvedic practitioners who flagged the ‘divine origin’ of Ayurveda and tried to confer on this particular healing system a sacred aura. In fact, such contradiction is central to any modern ‘invention’ of tradition and is nowhere surprising. In this regard, the Ayurvedic discourse of the time, besides imbibing certain traits of Western medical discourse, also engaged extensively with the popular templates of Hindu communal consciousness, such as the cow protection movement, the theory of a ‘dying Hindu race’, upholding Sanskrit-based textual traditions, demonisation of Muslims and so on and so forth. It was in this context that the communalisation of the late colonial Ayurvedic discourse took place.
Making of a ‘Hindu’ Healing System and its Manifestations
There are ample historiographical works which deal with the rise and growth of communalism in India, primarily focussing either on its institutional manifestation such as conflicts arising out of communal representation, the Shuddhi–Sangathan movement of Arya Samaj, the revival of Hindu Mahasabha in the 1920s, the emergence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the radicalisation of the Muslim League by the late 1920s–early 1930s; 12 or on high points of communalism in terms of the study of communal riots over the issues of cow protection, playing music in front of the mosque or the zenith of communal riots during Partition. 13 However, if one looks at the early decades of the twentieth century, this was the period when communalism entered into everyday life and penetrated the day-to-day public sphere. In other words, the early twentieth century, especially the period between 1920 and 1940, witnessed the fracturing of a shared syncretic public sphere, and there arose sharper and broader categories of ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ in day-to-day social exchanges and discourse. In many ways, ‘extraordinary’ moments of communal clashes or institutionalised forms of communal violence often emanated out of frictions in day-to-day life and antagonisms.
In this connection, the early twentieth century witnessed intensified communal polarisation even in the field of ‘indigenous’ medicine, when vaids and hakims throughout North India openly sided with communal forces. They stressed Ayurveda/Unani for the broader agenda of Hindu/Islamic revival and the consolidation of Hindu/Islamic religious, cultural and national identity. ‘Indigenous’ healing practices which were envisaged by Ajmal Khan as symbols of the pluralistic culture of India eventually turned into symbols around which communal polarisation could take place. The All India Vaidya Sammelan which was very active in North India particularly fanned the flames of communalisation of the Ayurvedic discourse. Right from its inception, the Sammelan carried religious and communal symbols and overtones, along with its pursuit of Ayurvedic revivalism, and tried to bring them together. This is evident from the fact that the meeting of the Sanatan Dharma Mahaparishada in 1907 was held under the chairmanship of Raja Sahab 14 in Nasik at the same venue of the first congress of the All India Vaidya Sammelan. In fact, the founding members of the All India Vaidya Sammelan such as Shankar Daji Pade and Jagannath Prasad Shukla were also members of the Hindu Sabhas and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, and were actively associated with Hindu communal politics. 15
The Vaidya Sammelan often claimed to be the sole spokesperson of ‘Hindu’ vaid interests and stressed that the concerns and interests of the ‘Hindu’ vaids were different from those of the ‘Muslim’ hakims. This led to suspicion on the part of the Sammelan regarding the activities of the All India Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbi Conference which had been emphasising on the collaboration and cooperation of ‘indigenous’ practitioners of both kinds. In fact, in the discourse of the Sammelan, the All India Ayurvedic and Unani Tibbi Conference was characterised as Vibhishana 16 whose activities, no matter how righteous they might be, should always be handled with care. 17 Actually, the attitude of the Sammelan towards the Conference was similar to the attitude of the Hindu Mahasabha or the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh towards the Indian National Congress. Thus, the Sammelan believed that the Conference was more inclined to appease the ‘Muslim’ hakims. 18
The Sammelan overwhelmingly used the popular templates of Hindu communal consciousness by taking recourse to the concepts of ‘Aryan heritage’, an ‘ancient Hindu Sanskrit-based’ learning of the sages and their sacred writings, the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata, ‘Hindu science’ and so on in its discourse. In fact, the Sammelan made deliberate efforts to associate Ayurveda with the ‘Sanskrit-based’ textual tradition. Besides, it also believed firmly in the philosophy of going back to ‘pristine’ ancient texts. That is why it attempted to replace the vernacular and medieval medical anthologies which were popular among the vaids with the ‘original’ Sanskrit texts such as Charaka, Sushruta and Vagabhatta Samhitas. As a corollary, publication of a ‘standard’ and ‘most authentic’ version of ancient Samhitas and Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia, particularly in Sanskrit, became one of the priorities of the Sammelan. In the Fatehpur session of the Sammelan (1928), Vaidya Yadavji Trikamji Acharya proposed the establishment of an Ayurvedic publishing company to collect, amend, standardise and publish Ayurvedic tracts and remedies.
19
Similarly, Gananath Sen in his presidential address of the 21st session of the Sammelan at Mysore in 1931 emphasised the need for the publication of ‘correct’ and ‘carefully revised’ editions of Charaka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita and other standard works. He also suggested the constitution of the Text Book Committee to publish new text books on Ayurveda either in Sanskrit or in Hindi.
20
In other words, as argued by Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, the Sammelan endeavoured to ensure that ‘the intellectual make-up of the Hindu vaid practitioner had to be anchored in its identification with a Sanskrit-based textual tradition’.
21
This particular aspect was clearly reflected in the following statement of Gananath Sen, president of the Vaidya Sammelan:
Those who want to become vaids simply by reading Lollambraj or Amritsagar (vernacular medical texts popular among the vaids) needed to be warned against [such measures]…. [for] if one Amritsagar and Illajulgurba could make people into vaids then what was the need to take pains over Sushruta and Vagabhatta?
22
A relatively more controversial communal template used by the Sammelan in its attempt to revive Ayurveda was the theory of a ‘dying or degenerating Hindu race’. As P. K. Datta argues, ‘The discursive power of Hindu communalism does not spring exclusively from single texts or even a chain of them as from the swift creation of a popular network of certain tropes, themes, structures of apprehension and reform, at the heart of which functions a single mobile trope to provide the necessary ideological orientation.’ 23 The theory of the dying Hindu race was one such Hindu communal trope which right from its formative moment in the early twentieth century produced a web of thought that ranges from stereotypes to statistical and sociological analyses. The All India Vaidya Sammelan provided this trope with some kind of scientific sanctity by repeatedly invoking it on various platforms. Facts and figures were often quoted by the proponents of the Sammelan to extend the ‘common sense’ around the census to call upon the Hindu communal consciousness and consequent necessity of revival of Ayurveda. 24 In this regard, Kaviraj Jogindra Nath Sen of Calcutta in his presidential address at the 14th session of the All India Vaidya Sammelan, held at Colombo in 1924, stated that the aim of Ayurveda was two-fold—the treatment of disease and the preservation of health. Referring to recent census reports, Sen complained of the ‘terrible state of the health of the Hindus’ of the time. He frequently invoked the works of Colonel U. N. Mukherjee, 25 Kishori Lal Sarkar 26 and Dr Kamakhy Charan Banerjea 27 in his speech. He further argued that in Bengal the number of Hindus in 1911 was 20,945,379; while in 1921, instead of increasing, it came down to 20,809,148, that is, a reduction of about 136,000. At the same time, the Muslim population had been steadily increasing, and had come to represent more than half of the entire population of Bengal. According to Sen, ‘The cause of this gradual decay is to be partially found in the utter disregard, on the part of the Hindus, for the general rules of hygiene as laid down in Ayurveda.’ 28 Thus, links were sought to be established between the pursuit of revival of Ayurveda and a numerically preponderant Hindu race.
From the 1920s onwards, issues like ‘Hindi prachar’, ‘cow protection’ and the cause of ‘Hindu education’ often formed the subject of vaid campaigns. 29 One can cite here the example of Acharya Chandrashekhar Shastri, a famous Ayurvedic practitioner as well as teacher at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). While stressing the sanskritisation of Hindi language, Shastri argued that ‘new words should only be generated when synonymous words are not available in our old Sanskritic repository. It is not only condemnable to use new words, leaving our old Sanskritic words; rather it also embodies our ignorance.’ 30 In fact, while translating modern scientific technologies and concepts into Hindi, the vaids readily resorted to ancient Indian Sanskritic philosophies. 31 So one can see cross linkages between science, language and cultural heritage in the discourse of the Ayurvedic practitioners.
Similarly, many of the Ayurvedic texts published from the United Provinces promoted the ‘cow protection’ movement in a big way. In fact, Yashoda Devi, the famous female Ayurvedic practitioner of Allahabad, authored a pamphlet entitled Gau Pukar (Cow’s Calling) in which the medicinal properties of cow products were enumerated in a lyrical form, and a call for protecting the cow was made to the people of all sects.
32
In another text, Yashoda Devi used the typical phraseology of the cow protection movement when she compared cow’s milk and its properties with nectar (amrit). There is a couplet in this book:
Amrit ka naam hi suna jata hai, kisi ne dekha na piya, Doodh hi amrit hai, doodh se hi sharir ka poshan hota hai.
33
(We have only heard of nectar, but no one has actually tasted it. Milk is real nectar as it nourishes our body).
A similar analogy between nectar and cow’s milk was drawn by the famous Ayurvedic practitioner and activist Shankar Daji Pade in his pamphlet Gorasadi Aushadhi. In the pamphlet he argued that in ancient times, people of all classes, whether rich or poor, were able-bodied, fit and strong because plenty of cow’s milk was available to them. However, with the onset of the rule of go-bhakshak rajas (cow-devouring rulers) 34 the cow’s population and subsequently cow products underwent a steep decline owing to which the contemporaneous Indian populace became mostly short-statured, short-living, emaciated and less fertile. Hence, in the pamphlet he made a call to both the government and the common people to protect the cow and its clan. 35
In fact, cow’s milk became an important ingredient of many of the suggested Ayurvedic remedies by this time. What is noticeable is that it was not just any milk -it was cow’s milk alone which was of utmost importance for such remedies. Ironically, for some of the Ayurvedic practitioners even the colour of the cow mattered. For instance, Pandit Ramprasad Mishra while suggesting an Ayurvedic remedy for infertility stated that if an infertile woman takes the roots of herbs like Mayurshikha (Celosia argentea) and Jeevak (Crepidium acuminatum) along with the milk of a monochromatic cow, she would certainly get pregnant. 36 Similarly, Shankar Daji Pade in the aforesaid pamphlet on Gorasadi Aushadhi enumerates the specific benefits of the milk of yellow, white, red and spotted cows, respectively. 37
The Ayurvedic practitioners also propagated the belief of Hindu communalists which perceived all kinds of ‘decline’ occurring in the medieval period. Pandit Gananath Sen in his presidential address at the third session of the All India Vaidya Sammelan (Allahabad, 1911) traced the downfall of Ayurveda to have commenced from the time of the ‘external aggression’ of Muhammad Ghori, Chengiz Khan and Taimur. As he saw it, this process of the decline of Ayurveda reached its climax during the reign of Aurangzeb—the favourite punching bag of Hindu communalists. According to Sen, Aurangzeb not only demolished Hindu temples, but also desecrated the ancient Hindu texts on science, which in his view was a fatal blow for Ayurveda. 38
Furthermore, some of the Ayurvedic texts openly blamed ‘Muslim rule’ for ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘perverted’ sexual behaviour which lead to manifold diseases. It was part and parcel of a much larger campaign of the demonisation of the Muslims and their rule which was launched during the early twentieth century. 39 As for instance, Arogya Darpan, Vol. III (published from Allahabad in 1898) while criticising anal sex and homosexuality, alleged Muslim rulers of the past for this tendency. It went on to claim that there was a verse in the Qur’an where Prophet Muhammad had ‘advised’ that if a man’s wife was pregnant, he could indulge in homosexual activities to satisfy himself. 40 Similarly, A. G. Vyas’s Su-Santati Shastra does not mention any ‘Muslim’ name in its exemplary list of ‘ideal progeny’ of India. 41 Incidentally, it contains the names of people like Maharana Pratap and Shivaji who fought against the Mughals and had emerged as ‘freedom fighters’ in the ongoing nationalist discourse of the early twentieth century. Following the same communal line, Vinayak Madhav Chingle, while stressing on brahmacharya (celibacy) exhorted the Hindu youth to imagine the pain Maharana Pratap, Veer Shivaji and Maharaja Ranjit Singh would have to bear if they saw that the lioness (metaphor used for the earlier generation) had given birth to jackals (symbolising the early twentieth century ‘Hindu’ youth) who could not defend their own religion. 42 Similarly, another author while stressing good health of the students projected the physical weakness of the Hindu community to be the root cause of the prevailing communal tension and advocated better health and virility of the ‘Hindu’ youth as the solution. 43
Interestingly, these Ayurvedic texts eulogised Lord Hanuman and Bhishma Pitamah for their lifelong brahmacharya and the courage associated with it. Brahmacharya was seen as the greatest asset of a young male and loss of semen was seen as synonymous with death. 44 Here it should be noted that female sexuality was not the only thing which was attempted to be controlled and restricted during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Male sexuality came under scrutiny and restrictions were imposed on it as well, through the emphasis on brahmacharya. 45 Celibacy and self-control were viewed as the most important techniques to discipline one’s own body and to make oneself ‘healthy’ and ‘masculine’ so that one could serve the interests of the broader public and the nation. 46 In fact, various right-wing Hindu organisations made sexual self-control the ‘supreme characteristic’ of a man and one of the essential traits for serving the nation and society. 47 As a result, personal and public interests coalesced with each other in the discourse over brahmacharya. The Ayurvedic discourse of the time also reflected similar concerns regarding sexual self-control/restraint and brahmacharya. One can find endless guidelines for securing a celibate life in the Ayurvedic texts published during this period. One very remarkable feature of the Ayurvedic discourse on brahmacharya was that despite putting severe restrictions on male sexuality along with an uncompromising attack on the so-called ‘wrong’ sexual habits (such as masturbation, night-fall, anal sex and prostitution), the ‘Hindu’ male was rarely held responsible for indulging in these ‘wrong’ sexual activities. In other words, the ‘Hindu’ male was often seen as an innocent entity, contaminated by some external agency—be it ‘Muslim rule’, modern civilisation and institutions, 48 or immoral sexual behaviour of ‘nautch girls’, prostitutes and the lower orders. 49 Nevertheless, brahmacharya and ways and means to preserve semen (viryarakshanopayah) went on to figure as one of the topics of study in the syllabus of the Ayurvedic course conducted by the College of Ayurveda, Banaras Hindu University. 50
Interestingly, attempts were made to shun the popular romantic characterisation of Lord Krishna as well and to retrieve a chaste, celibate deity. In this regard, a reinterpretation of Krishna’s raslila (sensuous dancing) was attempted. It was argued that since Krishna was an ideal brahmachari having firm control over his senses, people of respected families allowed their daughters and sisters to play with him. 51
Moreover, the deification of Dhanvantari as the common ‘professional deity’ of Ayurvedic practitioners and related celebrations of Dhanvantari Mahotsava during the period under discussion also gave a communal tilt to Ayurveda by ritualising many of the Ayurvedic practices. It became more and more a symbol of ‘sacred’ ‘Hindu’ science rather than just a healing system. In fact, this ritualisation of healing practices/systems was another manifestation of the intensified communal polarisation of the Indian social landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. There is hardly any evidence of Dhanvantari being hailed as God of the Ayurvedic practitioners prior to the twentieth century. As argued by Sivaramakrishnan, the initial popularity of Dhanvantari as a professional deity of vaids was clearly because of the support and publicity it received from popular Ayurvedic journals and the leaders of the Vaidya Sammelan. 52
In other words, Dhanvantari Mahotsava became a classic case of the ‘invention of tradition’ 53 in the Indian context where ancient materials were invoked to construct a unique tradition for novel purposes. It forged a collective consciousness and identity amongst the vaids and gave their movement a ‘sacred’ aura. Numerous Ayurvedic journals carried the imprint of Lord Dhanvantari right at the beginning or on the cover page along with ritualistic hymns or mantras devoted to him. In the United Provinces, one very prominent Ayurvedic journal, entitled Dhanvantari, was established in the 1920s. Several Ayurvedic pharmacies also adopted the name Dhanvantari. Ayurvedic educational institutions set up the idol of Dhanvantari, where collective prayers were often offered. 54 Moreover, as pointed out by Madhuri Sharma, by the end of the 1940s each Ayurvedic practitioner used to keep an idol of Dhanvantari and began their daily routine only after praying to him. 55
It is necessary to look at this entire communalisation of the Ayurvedic discourse from another angle as well. The discourse on communalisation in the Indian context focuses primarily on the religious divide, and conflicts and tensions. However, if we analyse closely the process of communalisation, besides creating religious dissensions, it also homogenises a community internally and purges ‘unwanted’ elements from within. In the colonial Indian context, communalisation often led to brahmanisation or upper caste/class control over the community. For example, when the Ayurvedic practitioners emphasised Sanskrit-based learning, it essentially purged those low caste/class practitioners who were dependent on oral traditions and familial experiences (passed on from one generation to the next) for their skills. In fact, the emphasis on classical brahmanical texts in Ayurvedic learning was a strategy designed to wean out the low caste/class practices and influences.
Similarly, the attack on ‘Muslim rule’ for its health-related ‘evil’ practices was particularly directed against the Julahas. So, even among the Muslims, it was the lower classes which were particularly targeted for their supposedly ‘uncontrolled’ sexual behaviour. In fact, Jagannath Sharma (the author of Arogya Darpan) went on to claim that it was precisely when the Muslims handed over their swords and shields to these ‘sexually corrupt’ Julahas that the Muslim rule tumbled and the Marathas and the English emerged as new forces in the subcontinent. 56 Consequently, communalisation, besides creating religious boundaries, also unleashed hegemonic upper caste and class ideas that served to homogenise the communities.
Conclusion
In the late colonial Ayurvedic discourse, there was a constant attempt to blame the ‘others’, namely lower castes/class, Muslims and women, for spreading various diseases resulting in the degenerating health of the ‘Hindu’ male. Thus, the content and reference point of study for the Ayurvedic practitioners of the time was not simply a biological human body; rather it was quite often a ‘Hindu male’ body. In the same course, Ayurveda was thoroughly brahmanised, ritualised and sanskritised, thereby creating a divine aura around it. Such Hinduisation of Ayurveda became handy in providing pseudo-scientific sanctity to various communal tropes as delineated above. At the same time, it also widened the gulf between Ayurveda and Unani in the race for being a truly ‘indigenous’ healing system of India. Nevertheless, as the present article shows, this claim of being a true representative of a ‘time-tested’ ‘authentic’ ‘indigenous’ healing culture of India vis-à-vis Western medicine was fraught with fundamental contradictions and complexities.
The sociopolitical context in which any discourse operates substantially determines the texture of that particular discourse. In this regard, the colonial context and the consequent anti-colonial struggle had huge bearings on the revivalist discourse pertaining to ‘indigenous’ medicine. A careful analysis of a seemingly ‘scientific’ (a status emphatically claimed by its proponents) late-colonial Ayurvedic discourse reveals that it was not an isolated discourse on ‘science’ and medicine, rather it enthusiastically engaged with many of the contemporaneous sociopolitical debates. While reading the Ayurvedic tracts and conference proceedings published during the period under discussion, one can sense this engagement sometimes very explicitly and on other occasions implicitly. In other words, the Ayurvedic discourse of the time contains within itself varied social manifestations. For that matter, such explicit and implicit social manifestations as reflected by the late colonial Ayurvedic discourse was highly communalist, casteist, and gender-and class-biased in its content. The contemporaneous mainstream Ayurvedic discourse was not only about plague, malaria or any other disease; rather, it was also about purdah, brahmacharya, language, caste, class, community, nation and colonialism. Thus, a large chunk of mainstream Ayurvedic practitioners and publicists, swayed heavily by Hindu communal consciousness, were actively involved not just in the ‘reconstruction of a tradition’ but also in reconstructing the society and the nation as a whole along specific lines.