ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s an Ayurvedic physician in Kerala reoriented his practice of pañcakarma, a classic purification regimen, to address what he perceived as the cultural ills of his European, North American, and Australian patients. In developing massage strokes designed to dissolve psychological defences and draw suppressed emotional pain to the surface, he was not simply adopting New Age idioms into his practice in order to satisfy the neo-Orientalist desires of his foreign patients for a psycho-spiritual cure. He also turned the tables on colonial characterizations of Indian bodies and subjectivities as pathologically porous and dependent, by diagnosing his white patients with troubled interiority and hyper-independence resulting from lonely childhoods and excess materialism.
