Sivaramakrishnan takes the Punjab as the arena for her analysis, beginning with the time preceding its annexation by the British in the mid-nineteenth century until just before the Partition of India and the formation of Pakistan. The author's main task is to unravel the complex strands of identity politics that shaped the corporatization, professionalization and representation of Ayurveda in the region. The first three chapters set the scene in terms of changing patronage patterns for indigenous medicine under the British administration and the rise of urban publicists. The political contexts of Ayurvedic revival are pursued through detailed analyses of the fall-out from the plague epidemic, debates surrounding the regulation of medical education and practice and contestation over collective representation, the formation of a literary canon, and language politics. Throughout the narrative, the politicized and contested nature of Ayurvedic mobilization is at the fore. Demonstrating the benefits of a regionally centred study, a significant outcome is that she renders obsolete the common idea of an India-wide revival of Ayurveda as a “Hindu” science. Rather we see how Sikh practitioners reconstructed Ayurveda as “Desi Baidak” in a fashion that precisely denied this religious dimension.
The analysis is sustained by thorough archival work and the scrutiny of vernacular language sources. The author's familiarity with Hindi, Urdu and Gurmukhi, the principal languages of the region, give her the tools to examine conjointly different streams of mobilization and give the reader an entry point to the broader politics of language and print culture in colonial India. Concerning archives, one wonders whether the study would be complemented by research conducted in the archival holdings now in Lahore, but pertaining to pre-Partition Punjab, to which the author seems not to have had access, and in all likelihood could not.
The “recasting” of the title is pursued at several levels in the work, but one dimension that is lacking concerns the “potions”. The relationships between forms of practice, such as diagnostics and therapeutics, and the changing social and political representations of indigenous medicine in these times and in this region remain obscure. Did the pursuit of a rationalized form of Ayurveda, advocated by some practitioners, and illustrated in this work by the projects to edit certain key Ayurvedic texts, parallel an editing out of certain practices, deemed “unscientific” in the new, modernizing milieux? Did the new institutional spaces for Ayurveda accommodate learning how to diagnose through pulse examination, for instance? More also could have been written about the changing commodification and consumption of products branded as Ayurveda from the late nineteenth century, and the role that the middle classes had in these processes. One other key element in the revival of indigenous medicine in other parts of India concerned the shifting gender profile of professionalizing indigenous medicine in urban areas, whether in the form of birth-attendant training schemes or attention to reproductive health. But gender hardly features in Sivaramakrishnan's analysis.
The importance of this work needs to be seen in the context of other works in the field. In this regard its regionalism is an advantage, while also possibly a limitation. The author's sensitivity to the political contexts of revivalism in the representations of Sanskritic and regional traditions of Ayurveda is welcome and of great importance, but the bigger picture on indigenous medicine in South Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will not be found in this work alone.