Brahmanizing Ayurveda: Caste and Class Dimensions of Late Colonial Ayurvedic Movement in Upper India

Abstract

The emergence of cultural and political nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century India along with the racial discrimination and imperialist motifs inherent in Western medicine triggered medical revivalist/reformist movement around the same time. At the forefront of this medical revivalist movement was the organized efforts to make Ayurveda as a ‘true’ representative of ‘time-tested’ ‘authentic’ ‘indigenous’ healing culture of India thereby posing it as the ‘rightful’ claimant of the ‘national healing system’.