ABSTRACT
The transition of Ayurveda into an organized medical practice in the princely state of Travancore was accompanied by the emergence of the state as an organized institution for control and regulation. The close relationship between the emerging state system and the increasing attempt by the princely state to lay claim to the idea of the indigenous was possible only by the creation, codification and extension of knowledge forms and practices to the emerging social elites to which the state reframed its forms of legitimacy and control. It was increasingly argued that medical practices of the subcontinent emerged from the classical texts and that contemporary medical practices of the indigenous society emerged from the classical Sanskrit texts of which the Brahmans were its possessors. Nevertheless, in the emergence of the Travancore as a significant entity, the state appropriated the domain of the religious and claimed that knowledge traditions were not to be confined to a specific caste, but rather were to be extended to the community as a whole. In the new logic of knowledge and its dissemination, contemporary medical traditions were seen to be degenerate expressions of the classical tradition. Thus, in its emergence as a modern state system, the Travancore state disseminated classical medical tradition to castes below the Brahmans and created institutional forms towards its regulation and control. Constrained by the institutional mechanisms of the state, indigenous medical traditions were subjected to accommodations, adaptations and structural transformations, which had serious implications on the very idea of the indigenous.
