Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance (review)

For a long time the dominant framing of the problem of tradition versus modernity was that of imagining an untouched tradition as a site of purity and authenticity, and then either showing how it was transformed or documenting the sites on which resistance to modernity occurred. Due to the powerful hold of this model—itself an indication of how social science functioned as an ideology of the modern—Jean Langford started her project with some such aim. It is evidence of her superb linguistic and ethnographic skills that she allowed her experience in the field to redefine her problem, so that the question becomes not so much how Ayurveda as a cultural artifact was modified by historical forces, but rather how modern modes of knowledge are reworked through Ayurvedic ideology and practice. As a result, this book breaks new ground in our understanding of not only Ayurveda as a practice of healing but also its transformation into a national symbol through which the humiliation of colonialism is sought to be overcome. Langford's text is a layered description of the dispersed sites over which Ayurveda is being reconstructed in contemporary India. The triple distinction of discourse, institutional logic, and pedagogy informs the way in which she conducted her fieldwork and organized much of her writing. Although this is not explicitly stated in the text, the analytical frame bears the imprint of Foucault's ideas on how to render emergent forms of the social. The innovations in methodology and the writing are impressive.

I have two criticisms of the book. First, I wish that the author had engaged more thoroughly with the implications of global programming in the training of traditional practitioners for the emerging disease scenarios among low-income groups in India. It is now sufficiently clear that the aim of training traditional practitioners in some biomedicine does not lead to the triage functions that they were expected to perform; instead, there is a proliferation of pharmaceutical products such as antibiotics through the medium of practitioners who use both traditional and modern medicines. Thus a reading of WHO documents on the role of traditional medicine in bringing health to the poor would have been very interesting in the light of Langford's field materials—especially because low-cost alternatives are presented in the guise of respect for national traditions. Second, I wish that she had given some attention to the achievements of Indian medical professionals in constituting the field of colonial biomedicine, because this would have complicated her notions of mimesis. Overall, though, this is a splendid achievement.