ABSTRACT
Pre-modern Ayurveda is a health tradition based on Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies. This chapter examines Ayurveda’s modernisation in colonial India, its career in independent India, and recent developments resulting from Ayurveda’s passage to the late-capitalist contexts of North America and Western Europe. The revivalist movement found institutional expression in the All India Ayurveda Mahasammelan or Ayurvedic Congress, established in 1907. Most revivalists believed that Ayurveda would come into its own once India gained independence and Indians took over the governance of the country. Western audiences became increasingly aware of Ayurveda since the closing decades of the twentieth century. Most scholars see the pre-modern forms of practice as representing ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ Ayurveda as compared to the modernised variants. In keeping with the trend already established in India, most popular writers on Ayurveda in the West too follow an inclusive approach – combining biomedical and humoral frameworks in innovative ways.
