From the biomoral to the biopolitical: Ayurveda's political histories

Abstract

This article presents a political reading of the history of Ayurveda in modernity, focusing on its deployment as a political force, while concurrently exploring its role in subject formation around issues of colonization, citizenship, nationalism and the politics of belonging. In it, the politics of Ayurveda are hinged upon two conceptual poles: firstly, the construction of the biomoral in discussions of Ayurveda and, secondly, the absorption of Ayurveda into the inherently modern project of late colonial biopolitics. While scholars have employed the biomoral as a way to think about Ayurveda's dismissal from the formal realm of the state, I argue instead that it was the process of determining Ayurveda's biomorality that created a counterpart to the allopathic intervention. I then map out the formal absorption of Ayurveda into the context of state medicine in the interwar United Provinces, a process that reveals the pragmatics of the diarchic and post-diarchic transformation of regional politics. Finally, I explore the appropriation of Ayurveda by the Congress party in the United Provinces after 1938, and its incorporation into the larger project of population management envisioned as an essential component of its biopolitical projects in the region. Ayurveda's institutional infrastructure was co-opted into practices of surveillance and strategies for ‘development’ – loosely conducted as the distribution of resources – and justified the excesses and neglects of the new political order. At the same time, the strong association of Ayurveda with the Hindu majoritarian community in the United Provinces resulted in the further marginalization of Unani medicine – and Muslims – from the systems of health care and the benefits of citizenship.

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