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While surveying textual sources, iconography, and other historical evidence for the development of Hanuman's popular cult, this chapter also interrogates the explanatory narratives that have been constructed around this evidence by earlier scholars. After examining attempts to locate Hanuman's origins in pre-Vedic religion or in the Rig Veda, and in the cult of yakshas or earth-spirits, it examines the role of the wind (Hanuman's legendary father) in Ayurveda, and Hanuman's additional kinship with Shiva and Shaivism. It then traces the development of Hanuman's persona over roughly two millennia from the Valmiki Ramayana to the Rama tales in the Puranas, in the literature of Jainism, and in vernacular language epics. Interrogating a recent and influential theory that Hanuman's cult reflects a Hindu response to the excesses of Muslim hegemony, the chapter reexamines three historical periods that often figure in this argument: the late Vijayanagara empire, the early Maratha kingdom, and the “warrior ascetics” of the Ramanandi sadhu order in the late Mughal Empire and early colonial periods. It is argued that the apparent efflorescence of devotion to Hanuman in each of these contexts reflects a more complex range of historical and social factors than has generally been recognized.

This chapter sets aside the work of the intellectual and cultural elites. It identifies the cultural productivity of the lower classes of Hindu society, including women, low castes, magicians and sorcerers, medical practitioners, and others. Much of this material comes from texts like the Atharvaveda, Rig Vidhana, medical literature, and Tantra. The underlying assumption, that religious values are embedded within practical affairs, is carefully examined.

This chapter focuses on the emergence of pharmaceutical drugs in China. The drugs from the rest of the world came via long trade routes to China and a pharmaceutical book for the first time was compiled at the request of a government and published in 659. It listed 850 individual drugs and many of them were from distant lands. One of the drugs, theriac, once developed by Mithridates as protection against poisoning and, in changing compositions, played an important role in European pharmacy until the nineteenth century. Indians and Nestorians from Persia also came and introduced eye treatments hitherto unknown in China, among them the cataract operation. Sun Simiao, perhaps the most influential Chinese physician and author of all time, focused on the Indian Ayurveda and the humors doctrine of the distant Mediterranean in his writings. Buddhist ideas were also familiar to him. He had collected thousands of prescriptions for all possible illnesses and the prescriptions were obviously effective.

This chapter considers the largest social compass that siddha practitioners have claimed as their own—that of Indian traditional doctors. In opposition to British medical imperialism and later Western biomedicine supported by the Indian state, siddha doctors have joined forces with practitioners of the other two major traditional medical systems in India, ayurveda and unani, to argue for the inadequacy of Western biomedicine in healing Indian bodies. They have formulated an autonomous space of Indian medical practice and knowledge, ascribing a radical uniqueness and relativism to their knowledge that renders it immune to the critiques of biomedicine.

This is an exploration of the utopian elements of accounts of the history of siddha medicine. Siddha practitioners and authors of Tamil revivalism often locate the origins of siddha medicine on a primordial, utopian island called Kumari Kandam or more commonly Lemuria. They describe this island as a place where pure Tamil traditions flourished and where siddha medical knowledge was at its most effective, unadulterated by non-Tamil traditions. Later, with the rising of the seas, Aryans descended on the Tamil lands from the north, bringing an end to the harmonious society and pure sciences of the Tamils. In these utopian medical narratives, the other, sometimes biomedicine but more commonly ayurveda, plays the role of the destroyer of utopia. This demonization of ayurveda emerges out of broader Tamil nationalist and revivalist formulations of Tamil civilization as a protest against the homogenizing project of the Indian state.

The chapter begins with famous biographical incidents: the teaching death's universality to a mother and the pacification of a bandit, Angulimāla. Chittadhar recounts villainous acts toward the Buddha by Devadatta. Although Devadatta was swept up in the enthusiasm that led many of the Buddha's relatives to join the sangha, he is eaten away by jealousy. While Devadatta offers to take over leadership of the sangha, citing the Buddha's advanced age, Siddhārtha declines derisively. So Devadatta attempts to kill him but in every instance fails. Also blended into this story are two other historical accounts. The first is the story of the Ayurveda physician and Buddhism supporter Jīvaka. The second story is of how Devadatta influenced Prince Ajātashatru to mistreat, depose, then eventually kill his father, the Buddha's patron, King Bimbasāra. Ajātashatru's repentance and rejection by his mother adds to the emotions conveyed. The chapter ends with Devadatta's demise.

This chapter examines Ayurveda education in India and the reproduction of indigenous knowledge in a pluralist culture. The story of indigenous knowledge systems such as Ayurveda, especially in the last century, has been one of power struggles resisting the authority, prestige, and the hegemonic tendencies of biomedicine, while selectively co-opting the rival’s therapeutic knowledge and practices in order to be relevant and contemporaneous. Today, Ayurvedic education both contests and collaborates with biomedicine, providing an interesting instance of simultaneous reproduction of plural knowledge systems. Contemporary Ayurvedic education raises several questions pertinent to sociology of education (SoE) in India. Having schooled in the biomedical sciences, how do students make the necessary cognitive shift into the Ayurvedic body of knowledge and its conceptual categories? How do modern Ayurveda colleges organize and realize these conceptual shifts and cultural transitions? The author analyses the role of culture in medicine and in education, and describes the educational and cultural processes of knowledge reproduction in the modern institutions of traditional medicine. This chapter also discusses the curricular and extra-curricular strategies used by Ayurveda colleges to address the marginalization of Ayurveda and the dominance of biomedicine. It also considers how Ayurvedic education contests the binaries between two knowledge systems and attempts to counter the power hierarchies ensuing from them.

This chapter provides general information about the different interpretations and applications of rationalism by the members, activists and representatives of ANiS. It is shown how ANiS manages to unite intellectuals and activists in one organisation through a process in which abstract debates and philosophical distinctions work alongside concrete social activities with immediate practical relevance. It is argued that for the average member, ideological rejections of practices such as Ayurveda or Astrology, portrayed as “pseudo-sciences”, are less important than the relevance of rationalism in their everyday lives as exemplified by their experience of fearlessness and a sense of invulnerability.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, the presence of South Asian Indians in the United States and Canada has been felt in all major walks of life. The Indian immigrant community and its first-generation descendants are a relatively affluent minority in North America. Like most immigrants, Indian immigrants remain tied to their traditional preferences for food and cuisine. In a landscape of adaptation and acculturation, sexuality presents the main challenge for Indians, particularly to the parents of adolescent children. While the community is diverse, with many regional differences, most Hindus in the United States patronize Western medicine, especially in acute illness. Still, their native assumptive system regarding the body and health and illness derived from the principles of Ayurveda continues to thrive. Strategies adopted by Hindus when seeking help and healing may not appear to a non-Indian to be what is ordinarily understood as religious healing. For an Indian, however, religion typically means more than a connection with a deity or a religious order.

In the concluding reflections, the research findings of the preceding chapters are summarized. The position of ayurvedic ethics within a broader South Asian context are discussed, arguing that pan-ayurvedic medical ethics are closely linked to brahmanic prescriptions, but are also influenced by Buddhist thought.

The introduction states the aim and scope of the book, the methodological approach, and introduces the questions that are examined in the following chapters. It includes a survey of literature on medical ethics in Ayurveda, and a discussion of source texts (both primary and secondary) and their translations.

This chapter provides an introduction to the Asian medical system, which is intrinsically dynamic and continually evolving. Public interest in Asian medicine was stimulated in the early 1970s when the People's Republic of China promoted its integrated system of Chinese and Western medicine as an exemplar of Maoist enterprise. The medical systems of contemporary Asia—Ayurveda, Unani, and Chinese medicine—are intellectually coherent. Each system consists of beliefs and practices connected by an underlying logic, and each is underpinned by a coherent network of assumptions about pathophysiology, and therapeutics. While it is reasonable to discuss Asian medical systems in the same way that one reasons about humoral or allopathic systems, it is important to identify the cultural features that distinguish between the classic, literate medical system of a given Asian society and its local appearances. This chapter also provides an overview of the study, which discusses the ongoing evolution of Ayurveda as a professionalized system of knowledge in a modern state.

This chapter describes the tenets of four indigenous systems of healing in India, as its practitioners use it and as they appear in the texts. The four systems are as follows. Firstly, Ayurveda, a classical Sanskrit system of medicine based on texts composed in North India between the time of Christ and ad 1000. Secondly, Tamil Saiva bhakti, a devotional worship of Siva in Tamil Nadu, which is inspired by the poetry of the Tamil Saiva saints. Modern Saiva gurus are often approached for solutions to life problems, including illness. Solving such problems through both mystical and rational means is their service to the world. Thirdly, Siddha medicine, a system of medicine in Tamil Nadu based on the writings of certain yogis. Finally, Trance healing by mediums of the smallpox goddess Mariamman, which is a tradition that claims no written texts as its own, priding itself instead on its grass-roots character.

Ayurveda possesses a highly abstract metatheoretical framework for explaining diseases, similar in form to theories in the social sciences and psychoanalysis. The highly abstract metatheoretical framework, unlike philosophical and religious speculations, does not exist without empirical verification, but is grounded in well-recognized procedures of validation and experimentation. Although Ayurveda is a science in its sense of the term, there are no professional scientists of Ayurveda, that is, those whose main role is the generation of scientific knowledge through research. Ayurveda practitioners are physicians and their science emerges out of their medical practice. But it is also obvious that some are more interested than others in the practice of science in the course of their practice of medicine. This chapter presents interviews of such out-of-the-ordinary individuals. It selects a small number of physicians from a variety of backgrounds, including Dr. W. A. Fernando.

What does it mean to speak of memory and forgetting? What is the relationship between memory and bodily, social, and economic power? Are there other processes of embodiment—more critical than the anxiety of old age and the experience of senility that soak up the act of forgetting? This chapter considers such third-person constructions. Ayurveda literally suggests the authoritative knowledge of longevity; all eight branches of medicine are seen as critical to a clinical practice preserving and extending one's years. Memory in both professional and popular literature and representations of Alzheimer's becomes the necessary and sufficient index of the embodiment of aging, how one worries about ending up.

The classic formulation of medical traditions in ancient Greece seems uniquely suited for mapping the world of the extraordinarily diverse Muslim societies. This chapter outlines an approach to the analysis of these medical systems. Presenting a comparative study of Greco-Islamic medicine, it describes the symbolic dimensions of Greco-Islamic medicine (the counterpart to Ayurveda and classical Chinese medicine) concentrating on ethnographic rather than historical aspects of its integration into local Muslim cultures. It discusses some aspects of the symbolic organization of Islamic medicine, which seem particularly important for analyzing how Greco-Islamic medicine is integrated into local cultures and for comparing forms of medicine in diverse Islamic societies. It also discusses the cultural authority of Islamic medicine and biology, using a perspective as a vantage to explore their relation to codes of power, sexuality, and the sacred and to consider medical revivalism.

The chapter traces the non-European roots of specialized knowledge production in the ancient times as illustrated by the civilizations of the Indian and the Chinese regions. Examining the archaeology and ethno-archaeology of remains of the civilizations in the valleys of the Indus and Yellow rivers, we try and capture the earliest knowledge in crafts production technology such as architecture, metallurgy, lapidary, and ceramics. Orally transmitted Vedic knowledge, eschatology, metaphysics, grammar, phonetics, astronomy, the post-Vedic systems of thought, Ayurvedic knowledge, architecture, nature of metallurgical texts, the Indian and Chinese textual traditions, and epistemological traces constitute other contents of the chapter. This chapter underscores the early India’s methodologically distinct aphoristic structure of stating truth as astute observations generalized as self-validated principles, the logic of which corresponds to that of mathematical equations or formulas. It discusses the history of mathematical astronomy. A distinct epistemic shift is explicit in India’s astronomy of fourteenth to sixteenth centuries CE. Mādhava of Sangamagrāma (c. 1340–1425 CE) in Kerala marks the beginnings of this shift through his path-breaking mathematical advances in conceptualizing infinite series. The chapter ends with a concise discussion of the Chinese history of knowledge systems across the material cultures