Ayurveda

Traditional Indian Systems of 

Healing and Medicine

The politics of ¯ Ayurveda

In 1970, the Indian parliament passed the Indian Medicine Central Council Act (IMCCA), setting up a central council for the indigenous medical systems of ¯ Ayurveda,

Siddha and Unanı

The council is responsible for laying down andmaintaining uniform standards of education and for regulating practice in thesesystems. It also prescribes the standards of professional conduct, etiquette andthe code of ethics for practitioners of Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM). TheIMCCA of 1973 added Homeopathy to the list, changing ISM to ISM & Homeo-pathy. Yoga and Naturopathy (and a number of local health traditions) are re-cognized as ISM by the Indian government, but do not receive the same amountof funding and also are not centrally regulated by the IMCC. Yoga was includedas a research subject in the Central Council for Research in Indian Medicine &Homeopathy (CCRIM&H) founded in 1969 and Naturopathy was added as aresearch subject in 1978, when the CCRIM&H was divided into separate Coun-cils, isolating Homeopathy and

¯Un¯an¯ı

and coupling¯ Ayurveda with

Siddha

and Yoga with Naturopathy. S.K. Mishra outlines these developments in his article“Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha Systems: An Overview and their Present Status”(2001).With the IMMCA of 1970, the Indian government thus for the first time offi-cially recognized¯ Ayurveda,

Siddha and¯Un¯an¯ıas national systems of medicineand at the same time centralized their administration in order to set an all-India standard. The Central Council Act was the result of a series of discussionsconcerning Indian Health policies that were made both before and followingIndian Independence in 1947. P. Brass has pointed out in

The Politics of Ay-urvedic Education

that as early as 1946 a resolution had been passed by theFirst Health Ministers’ Conference, giving recognition to indigenous systems of medicine by recommending that practitioners trained in these systems shouldbe utilized in federal state health programmes. State responses were varied,some giving considerable support to the indigenous systems while others ig-nored the Health Ministers’ recommendation, preferring modern medicine tothe traditional systems. No state government, however, declared¯ Ayurveda orany other indigenous system as its state system of medicine. Debates on the roleand position of indigenous medical systems within Indian health policy have a

long history, which is interlinked with colonial health policies on the one sideand Indian nationalism on the other. Among the indigenous medical systems,¯ Ayurveda takes the first place (followed by 

¯Un¯an¯ı

), as measured by the num-ber of its practitioners, institutions, manufactures and political bodies. Whilethe well-developed infrastructure testifies to its success, the professionalisationand institutionalization of ¯ Ayurveda has been a long and troubled process. Inthe first third of the 19th century, British health and education policy started toemphasize support for the modern system of biomedicine. This resulted in thepatronage of modern medical colleges and hospitals and ultimately produced anumber of practitioners with a superior medical reputation to that of traditionalpractitioners. The direct effects of British policy on indigenous medicine, how-ever, date to a much later period, when Indians were admitted to the biomedicalcolleges and health services were extended to the Indian public. To meet thecompetition of the new system and to show the value of their science, traditionalpractitioners needed to (re)define the theoretical foundations of their medicalsystem and to formulate their professional identity. In the case of ¯ Ayurveda thismeant the birth of a new era, as¯ayurvedic practitioners had never before or-ganized themselves into one uniform body. The traditional education system, which is still predominant in religious teaching and in other disciplines in Indiatoday, had been that of pupilage, i.e. a teacher passing his knowledge down toone or several pupils, often from father to son, or from uncle to nephew. This would lead to the formation of medical lineages or schools, as famous teacherscould have quite a large following. One step towards a modernized¯ Ayurveda,therefore, had to be a break with the educational tradition of pupilage towardsan expanded college system to keep up with the growing number of graduatesand licence holders that the biomedical colleges were producing Another was toform a unified theory of the ¯ayurvedic medical system, to present as the voiceof ¯ Ayurveda at a political and ideological level and to shape the curriculum of the colleges. Following the Orientalist ideology that the “purest” and most ori-ginal forms of ¯ Ayurveda must be found in the oldest texts, it was widely agreedamong the advocates of ¯ Ayurveda that the traditional¯ayurvedic treatises offereda reasonable basis to a common identity and a unified medical system. The goalthen was to restore and to revive the ancient tradition and its presumed pastglory rather than to maintain contemporary traditional practices, which wereoften labelled “degenerate”. Accordingly, a distinction was made between anidealized¯ Ayurveda, based on the classical texts and traditional practice, basedon later texts and folk medicine While Orientalist rhetoric may have played amajor component to the revivalist ideology, it would not be true to say that thedecision to present the teachings of the texts as the basis of ¯ayurvedic theory  was their invention. Traditional families of ¯ayurvedic practitioners had beenusing these texts as the basis of their practice long before official debates onthe theoretical foundations of ¯ Ayurveda started. However, ¯ayurvedic practition-ers not only made use of the oldest treatises, but also of a multitude of textsthat were composed after the classical texts. The numerous publications of later¯ayurvedic texts edited from the late 19th century onwards by ¯ayurvedicscholars like J¯ıv¯ananda Vidy¯as¯agara Bhat .t.¯ac¯arya, J¯ıvar¯ama K¯alid¯asa ´S¯astri, Dat-

tar¯ama Kr.s.n.al¯ala M¯athura and Y ¯adavji Trikamji ¯ Ac¯arya testify that they wereconsidered important.Modern¯ Ayurvedists needed not only to overcome sectarian and regionaldifferences (including language barriers and diverging religious identities) insearch of a uniform identity, but were also confronted with new educationalmethods and technology for diagnosis and research introduced to India by theBritish. The dominant form of ¯ayurvedic education that developed from thisbackground at the end of the 19th century was an integrated or concurrenteducation system, which included both¯ Ayurveda and modern medical subjectsin varying proportions. The basic education in modern medicine was meantto enable students to play a role in public health programmes. The questionof the proportional distribution of ¯ Ayurveda and modern medicine within thecurriculum, i.e. which system should be the main focus of education and whichshould be taught as the complementary system, had from the beginning beena bone of contention among the supporters of the integrated system. Further-more, the concept of the integrated system as such received heavy criticism bothfrom biomedical advocacy groups and from other factions within the¯ayurvedicmovement as having produced practitioners qualified in neither system of medi-cine. The divisions within its support group and the defects of the integratedsystem, made apparent by recurring student strikes and low enrollment num-bers, strengthened the case of the rivaling interest group arguing for a

´ suddha

(“pure”)¯ Ayurveda that would be true to its tradition and ideologically free fromWestern influence. C. Leslie in has pointed out in “Interpretations of Illness:Syncretism in Modern¯ Ayurveda” (1992) how these issues became increasingly politicized, as the ¯ayurvedic movement divided into two main advocacy organ-izations: the¯ Ayurvedic Congress, founded in 1907 and representing the

´ suddha

faction and the Council of State Boards and Faculties of Indian Systems of Medi-cine, founded in 1952 as a result of a split in the¯ Ayurvedic Congress and repres-enting the integrated view. As a voluntary advocacy organization, the Congress was constituted of individual practitioners and of local, provincial ¯ayurvedic as-sociations. Its leading personality was Pandit Shiv Sharma. The Council on theother hand was a “semi-official agency, whose members include[d] the heads of the Ayurvedic Colleges, the members of the state faculties and boards of Indianmedicine, and the directors of Ayurveda in the health administrations of theseveral states”(Brass 1972: 358). The leading personalities of the integratedsystem were Kaviraj Gananath Sen and later Chandragiri Dwarkanath. TheCouncil therefore represented the established educational system, which wouldseem to suggest it was the more powerful organization. However, the membersof the Congress also had considerable political influence and powerful supportin the central government. Thus, in 1962, Pandit Shiv Sharma was able to exerthis influence as the appointed honorary advisor on the decisions made at the an-nual meeting of Central Council of Health. The resulting Vyas Committee reportadvised¯ayurvedic education and practice to be developed on “purely ayurvediclines, involving deep and intense study of the Classical Ayurvedic literature in-cluding its materia medica and pharmacy” and not to include “any subject of modern medicine or allied sciences in any form or language”(Brass 1972: 360).

Although the government of India and the state health ministers ultimately ac-cepted the recommendations of the Vyas Committee, the implementation of thenew policy did not proceed smoothly, due to inconsistent policies regarding theuse of modern technology, resistance on part of the state governments and thelow enrollment numbers of students.The debate on the educational system of ¯ Ayurveda (and of the other Indiansystems of medicine) and its implementation into public health schemes is farfrom resolved even today. Despite all decisions from the government as recor-ded in the various IMCC Acts, the failure of the¯ Ayurvedists to agree amongthemselves on the goals to be pursued and on the appropriate standards foreducation, practice and research has so far lead to the inability of ¯ Ayurveda tocompete with modern medicine and to fulfil its potential as a national systemof medicine.Overviews and more detailed surveys dealing with the politics and epistemo-logical context of ¯ Ayurveda, its eminent advocates and opponents and the mod-ernization of traditional medical systems in general can be found in Mishra(2001); Gupta (1976); Leslie (1992, 1983, 1975, 1998 [1976]a); Brass (1972);Jeffery (1988); Shankar (1995); Stepan (1983); Taylor (1998 [1976]); Zim-mermann (1992); Zysk (2001) and Phillips (1990).

 

http://www.academia.edu/834957/Traditional_Indian_Systems_of_Healing_and_Medicine_Ayurveda