Paper short abstract:

Traditional Indian medicine is a paradigmatic case in which different conceptions of nature and the ways to know it are matched. From pre-independence nationalist rhetoric up to our days, the spiritual and the scientific discourse have met to ground in nature’s laws the modern individual’s necessity to express him/herself.

Paper long abstract:

Traditional medicine (ayurveda) was taken by Indian nationalism as a synecdoche for traditional culture. In the face of European claims for scientific and technologic pre-eminence, Indian thinkers such as Aurobindo, Vivekananda, Radakrishnan, accepted European representations of Indian thinking as mystic, intuitive, visionary, in order to define it as a way to know reality distinctive of Indian identity, as much effective as Western scientific discourse and complementary to it.

Ayurvedic medicine was regarded by some scholars as the leading field in which Indian ability to produce scientifically effective knowledge expressed itself.

Reinterpretations of traditional medical concepts by means of biomedical theories helped to ground in natural, instead that in social rules, prescriptions given by ayurvedic texts. This accounts for the increasing interest that ayurvedic medicine arouses in Western countries, especially among those who wish values to be reintroduced in biomedical theory.

I argue, by the results of an inquiry among ayurvedic practicians in Turin, that reinterpretations of ayurvedic medicine introduce in a pre-modern cosmology a romantic, expressive conception of the human nature, as defined by Charles Taylor.