(Re)inventing Ayurveda Digitally

For thousands of years Ayurveda( knowledge of life), has been used across South Asia to refer to an eclectic range of healing practices. During the British colonization, Ayurveda had been studied in the medical institutions .The British intention from teaching Ayurveda was to champion European medicine and expose the errors of indigenous knowledge. As a reaction to these intentions, the Ayurvedic practitioners (re)invent Ayurveda into a new medical system. Jean M. Langford in her book, "Fluent Bodies" argues that "Over the course of the last two centuries, Ayurvedic practitioners, like other healers around the globe, have confronted their marginalization in the face of the global ascendance of modern European medicine, or biomedicine, as it is called by anthropologists. Practitioners have met this challenge by reinterpreting and reshaping their knowledge and practice for a modern era. Yet simultaneously, ....they have turn their very marginalization and their struggle against it in into an opportunity to (re) invent Ayurveda." (p. 1) In order to qualify Ayurveda as a medical system," it had to be arranged into college courses, institutionalized in hospital procedures, scientifically proven in clinical research, and ordered into new taxonomies of drugs and disease....For over a hundred years and still today, Ayurvedic practitioners have been working to sustain the uniqueness of their practice even as they give it a modern edge." (p.7)

article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-battle-for-ayurveda-india-is-racing-to-record-the-details-of-its-traditional-medicine-760086.html

Nowadays, Ayurvedic practitioners are fighting different colonialism, "what some have termed" bio-colonialism". In the article"The battle for Ayurveda: India is racing to record the details of its traditional medicine", the reporter Andrew Buncombe states "For several years the Indian authorities have been collating information about hundreds of thousands of plants,cures, foods, and even yoga poses to create a vast digital database of knowledge dating back to up to 5,000 years ago, available in five international languages(Japanese, English, German, French and Spanish). Now, the first part of that database- relating to ayurveda or traditional Indian medicine - has been completed and it is set to launch the fight back against what some have termed "bio-colonialism" ". According to Buncombe, these information has been gathered and interpreted in different languages to guard against theft by the west. To prevent western pharmaceutical giants and others from using this traditional details to create a product for which they then obtain a patent. In 2000, India's National Institute did a study of the US patent database and they found that there were 4,986 patents for products based on medicinal plants. Around 80% of those products were based on plants from India and 50% were already in the traditional medicine.

In the past , the Ayurvedic practitioners met the challenge of the European medicine by reshaping their knowledge and (re)inventing Ayurveda. Today, they are protecting the uniqueness of their practice from the western pharmaceutical corporations by translating Ayurveda medical information to different languages and uploading them to an online database. With this new project they can show the western companies that the product (herbal medicine, yoga pose,..) they want to obtain a patent for it, is already existed in the Ayurvedic traditions. The practitioners are (re)inventing Ayurveda by globalizing its knowledge digitally.


YouTube - Ayurveda - a people´s medicine


Image 1 source: http://www.rajasthanvisit.com/images/digestion-ayurvedic-01.JPG
Image 2 source: www.herbalist-alchemist.com/images/circle.jpg
Image 3 source: www.time.com/time/asia/2006/journey/kerala.html