The Languages of Science, the Vocabulary of Politics: Challenges to Medical Revival in Punjab

This article examines the ideas and processes that shaped the construction of an alternative and complementary agenda for ‘indigenous’ Ayurvedic medicine in British colonial Punjab, in response to the consolidation of western medical authority and intervention. Located in the early twentieth century, this study analyses the growing movement amongst indigenous practitioners to recast and legitimise the moorings of their learning and practice as they addressed the political ideologies and structures that buttressed colonial medicine, such as its claims to represent a ‘scientific’ rational-critical tradition and its projection of the civilising and modernising claims of colonial rule. While Ayurvedic ‘revival’ has been broadly associated with a movement of Hindu political-cultural nationalism and revival, this study argues that there were important challenges in ethnic, cultural-political alignments that constantly undermined and punctuated the broader agenda of Hindu cultural-political mobilisation that was emerging in these years in urban centres across North India. Based on a cache of little-known vernacular tracts and pamphlets and with interviews with hereditary Ayurvedic practitioners, this study explores the ideas and vocabulary employed by a minority of Sikh practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine in Punjab, as they sought simultaneously to contest and reformulate the claims both of ‘western’, scientific medicine and that of ‘indigenous’ Hindu Ayurvedic learning.