Ghee, turmeric, aloe vera: nation’s new soft power
WITH AYURVEDA TRENDING GLOBALLY, INDIA MAKES A BOLD PUSH TO RECLAIM ITS HERITAGE
ndia is planning a medicinal revolution — and it starts with ancient wisdom.
Many here believe that the West has plundered the country’s 3,000-yearold tradition of holistic healing to sell expensive aloe vera face creams or $6-a-cup of turmeric-flavoured “golden milk.” Now Narendra Modi, India’s 67-year-old yogaloving prime minister, wants to reclaim — and capitalise on — those medical traditions, known as Ayurveda.
Documented in ancient texts, Ayurveda emphasises prevention over cure and prescribes healthy living practices and herbal remedies.
International brands like Aveda and Lush borrow from Ayurveda to develop skincare products while trendy coffee shops and juice bars in American cities repackage India’s village remedies into turmeric lattes and ashwagandha smoothies. Food bloggers are raving about ghee (clarified butter).
“All over the world, a parallel movement is going on for traditional medicine,” said Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha, secretary of Modi’s recently launched Ministry of AYUSH, an acronym that stands for ayurveda, yoga, unani, siddha and homeopathy, all traditional medicines. “India should lead. Not just to earn money, but also because it is our responsibility toward the world.”
Disputed territory
But Ayurveda’s efficacy is often disputed. Modi’s critics associate the Ayurveda push with his Bharatiya Janata Party’s Hindu nationalist ideology. Many of Ayurveda’s most prominent supporters have links with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu supremacist organisation.
To relaunch Brand Ayurveda, India’s government agencies have filed dozens of international patents, started research programmes at top Indian universities and sent experts to develop Ayurveda courses at colleges around the world. Delegates in 25 countries have set up “information cells” to spread awareness about traditional Indian knowledge.
In rural India, an agricultural effort accompanies the Ayurveda push.
Officials are running educational programmes and providing seeds, saplings and subsidies to farmers to meet the government’s target of increasing the cultivation of medicinal plants threefold, to cover 120,000 hectares of land.
Plants that farmers once considered weeds are being revived to cater to new demand for their medicinal properties.
Reviving Ayurveda is one of Modi’s flagship policies and part of his rhetoric of restoring India’s past glory to achieve prosperity in the future.
Modi argues that since colonial times, the West has promoted modern medicine and big pharmaceutical companies’ interests over traditional alternatives.
As a result, he says, Indians neglected their heritage while Western companies mined Ayurvedic traditions for miracle cures, filed patents and sold products without crediting India.
“Our grandmothers’ remedies have become the intellectual property rights of other countries,” Modi said, addressing an audience in New Delhi on Ayurveda Day in October last year.
Reclaiming and promoting Ayurveda has practical benefits, too, said Rajiv Vasudevan, a chairman of the Ayurveda core group at the Confederation of Indian Industry. Promoting Indian expertise could bring foreign cash and has “soft-diplomacy” benefits, he said.
“We are a proud nation, we have a rich history, and we have something to share with the world,” he said.
Contentious issues
In January, lawmakers tried to pass a new bill in Parliament that would allow practitioners of Ayurveda, homeopathy and other alternative health-care systems to prescribe modern medicine after completing a three-month course. The plan addressed the chronic shortage of doctors in rural India, lawmakers argued, but the Indian Medical Association held protests to stop the bill.
“Suppose you have a shortage of pilots. Would you allow a rickshaw driver to fly the plane?” said Arun Gupta, president of the Delhi Medical Council and a member of the rival Aam Aadmi Party. The bill is under review.
Critics also argue that some of the “traditional” practices the government is promoting aren’t Indian at all. Unani and homeopathy — both promoted by Modi’s AYUSH ministry — originate in Greece and Germany, respectively, and many countries have competing claims on the discovery of aloe vera’s medicinal properties.
But for others, like Vasudevan, Ayurveda’s resurgence symbolises India’s rising star. “We’ve had our entire history ignored,” he said. “Ayurveda’s resurgence coincides with the resurgence of Indianness.”