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. The result is that  soonwill then ayurveda dwindle into oblivion. 68The danger is even worse than it might seem.It is not just that the benefits ofayurveda would barely endure in the context of biomedicine.The vaidyas proposea grim fantasy in which  Western chemists analyze and lay bare the qualities ofindigenous drugs  for their industrial enterprise. Discovering the value of thesepreparations, they will proceed to export Indian medicines in vast quantities, mak-ing them unavailable for use in India.69 Their fear is not simply that tradition willbe corrupted, transformed, or obliterated, but that it will be stolen and enjoyed bythose who are other, depriving its rightful owners of their medical heritage.Indian independence did not bring the enthusiastic acceptance of indigenousmedicine that practitioners had anticipated.In line with the Indian Congress Party semphasis on the scientific, technological, and industrial progress of the Indiannation, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, set the agenda forthe scientific scrutiny of indigenous disciplines.Speaking about the GovernmentCollege of Integrated Medicine in Madras, he wrote:  The so-called conflict bet-ween Ayurvedic and modern medicine has to be studied and resolved.The onlyright approach has to be one of science, that is, of experiment, trial and error.Increating space for traditional medicine 37whatever type of medicine we may deal with, we cannot profit by its study unlesswe apply the methods of science.In this there should not be many conflicting meth-ods but various aspects of one scientific approach. 70 This nationalist confidence inthe potential of Western science derives in part from an awareness of the globaldiffusion of scientific knowledge.Thus, Srinivasalu Naidu, M.D.and former deanof the College of Integrated Medicine, argues that  India should evolve a systemof medicine consistent with world opinion.India cannot be secluded in matters ofmedicine and cannot be content with what patriotism and emotion would stimu-late people to adopt. 71 Indians with biomedical training ascribe patronage of a sys-tem of medicine that looks at ancient texts for perfect knowledge to patriotism, notto the pursuit of the objective, rational truth of science.Such patriotism, they argue,will lead to an isolated India, whereas the development of biomedicine will preservefor India a place among the great nations of the world.The high status of India onthe world stage will be won at the expense of its native forms of medical practice, aprice worth paying in the view of these educated, biomedical doctors.For many indigenous practitioners, however, the integration of medical sys-tems would be tantamount to admitting the inferiority of their own practices, andwould initiate the demise of their vocations.Indeed, many defenders of culturalpurity have asserted that the decay of traditional medicine began with the intro-duction of foreign culture into India.In his response to the questionnaire preparedas part of the 1923 Madras Report of the Committee on the Indigenous Systems ofMedicine, Pandit V.Ponnuswami Pillai of Kumbakonam wrote about the  reasonsfor the decay of indigenous traditions :  As a result of the spread of foreign civili-zation in India from the West, and because of the recent lust [for that civilization]that has unfortunately taken hold of the Indian people, some perverse beliefs havetaken root in their minds, changing many of their habits and customs.The people sbelief in and appreciation of ancient principles and texts have decreased.Theseare the primary causes of the decay of our native (cut
ca) medicine. 72 Far frombenefiting Indian medicine, the mixing of healing traditions will lead to the dete-rioration of Indian medicine and its abandonment by the Indian people.The onlyway to stem this decay, in the logic of cultural purity, is to maintain its distancefrom ideas deemed to be foreign.According to many siddha practitioners, the weakness of Tamil society in resist-ing this medical imperialism is due to the lack of unity among Tamils [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]