| The central theme of the dissertation is the development of indigenous modernities in contemporary Ayurvedic medicine in India. I trace the genealogy of Ayurveda through late-colonial and postcolonial contexts, as not simply a set of healing practices but a sign of Indian national culture. Along the way I discover the various ways that practitioners engage, transform, or circumvent the styles of medical knowledge introduced through modern institutional structures. Such structures which typically enforce a particular corporeal discipline, separating disease from social and natural contexts and locating it in bodies which are construed as discrete, docile and enclosed, are reworked in Ayurvedic settings to sustain other discourses of illness, body and personhood. I also consider the interaction between modern institutions and the epistemological bases of Ayurvedic knowledge. Modern technologies of knowledge developed in colonial contexts involve a particular relationship between sign and referent, representation and reality, form and content, language and world. The dissertation describes how contemporary Ayurvedic discourses and practices complicate this binarism at nearly every level. The dissertation suggests that the above binary relationships, when transposed into the Ayurvedic context, operate paradoxically as both signs and parodies of modernity. Finally, I address Ayurvedic trajectories in a transnational era, when Ayurveda becomes a healing force not only for postcolonial scars but for an imagined cultural emptiness at the heart of global modernity. |
