New Diseases, Newer Categories: Ayurveda’s Engagement with Epidemics in Travancore

Abstract

The advent of Western modernity in India, as a by-product of British colonialism, brought about considerable strain within Indian medical traditions. Indigenous medical traditions which were operating within the broad humoral theory of disease causation came to be subjected to the logic of biomedicine. By the late nineteenth century, as the British in India consolidated their state systems and the princely states modelled their administrative structures in accordance with the British state, there was an increased acceptance of biomedical standards against indigenous medical norms. This was further accentuated by the fear of epidemics, which suggested that diseases spread from person to person and could affect large geographic areas bringing death and suffering in its wake. Disease control and management had, therefore, become a major concern for both the state systems in the British presidencies and in the princely states. The prevalence of contagious diseases offered a challenge to reorganize the public health systems of the states, yet they also provided an opportunity to legitimize state sovereignty over the bodies of its subjects. Diseases that were previously seen as localized and situated within culturally specific locales were now increasingly subjected to the governing mechanisms of the state. This paper examines how the medical bureaucratization of Travancore, in the south-western part of the Indian subcontinent, affected local healthcare traditions in the face of expanding fear of epidemics, ultimately led to the reshaping of indigenous medical systems.