“Science and religion in traditional Indian medicine: the laws of nature and the individual in Western AyurVedic practice”

Traditional medicine (especially ayurvedic medicine) was taken by Indian nationalismas a synecdoche for traditional culture. In the face of European claims for scientific andtechnologic pre-eminence, Indian thinkers such as Aurobindo, Vivekananda,Radakrishnan, accepted European representations of Indian thinking as mystic andintuitive, to define it as distinctive of Indian identity, as much effective as Westernscientific discourse and complementary to it. Ayurvedic medicine was regarded bysome scholars as the leading field where the Indian ability to produce scientificallyeffective knowledge expressed itself. Reinterpretations of traditional medical conceptsby means of biomedical theories helped to ground in natural prescriptions, instead ofsocial rules, given by ayurvedic texts. This accounts for the increasing interest thatayurvedic medicine arouses in Western countries, especially among those who wishvalues to be reintroduced into biomedical theory.