ABSTRACT
The chapter elaborates the historicising process through which Ayurveda acquired the status of prime alternative health practice of India from amongst heterogenous ayurvedas. Prose (rather than verse form), text, language, literacy and caste played a decisive role in the separation of practices into regional vernacular and national Sanskrit. Later on, newly constructed geographical boundaries also augmented these restrictive classifications of practices. Multifarious ways of knowing in vaidyam were reduced into a singular form of knowledge by standardising curriculum, courses, texts and certificates. A culture that privileges memory and improvisation and designed mnemonic devices to preserve knowledge was destabilised by enforcing a particular kind of literacy where writing and a rational understanding were important. The history of Ayurveda written by practitioners and proponents in the first half of the twentieth century followed the protocols of Orientalism and derived from texts written in the nineteenth century by travellers, Indologists, colonial officials and medical practitioners. Majority of the scholarship produced until 1990s endorse a sophisticated version of Orientalism where textual tradition is prioritised. The chapter also delineates how these interactions refashion the earlier authority of upper-caste Brahmins by producing a collaboration of them with Sudras, the next upper-caste communities in the hierarchy.
