Of late, there has been a big surge in grandiloquent claims about Ayurveda and Indian traditional medicine (TM). Even though, like many Indian children, I grew up seeing my mother subdue my cough with tulsi concoctions and bathe my wounds in the leaf-juice of some shrub, the relentless aggrandizement we have today is something entirely different. But then my academic training in the humanities came to my rescue, and has helped me at least process better the claims and assertions.
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A common element of how people talk about TM is the disregard for the dynamism and complexity of social and cultural change. There is an impression today of Ayurvedic compendiums like the ‘Charaka Samhita’ having been standard textbooks that dictated how medicine was practiced in the past. But in reality, the content of these treatises, as well as practice on the ground, were always in flux.
