The Ayurveda of Baba Ramdev: Biomoral Consumerism, National Duty and the Biopolitics of ‘Homegrown’ Medicine in India

1. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’, YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEnDhbV5lPg, accessed 23 Mar. 2016].

2. There has been much scholarly discussion over the term ‘medical systems’. Some anthropologists have argued that ‘system’ is a theoretical construction, which undermines the complexity of a range of heterogeneous healing practices. See, for example, Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007). However, I have chosen to use the term ‘system’ since it is commonly used in state and popular medical discourses, pointing to institutionalisation of medical traditions.

3. India is the only country where plural medical traditions are regulated by an independent ministry. Other countries which recognise alternative medicine (Nepal, China, Ghana, etc.) typically only have boards or directorates of traditional medicine, which are overseen by larger ministries of health.

4. Stuart Ray Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev: Modern Yoga Revolutionary’, in Mark Singleton and Ellen Goldberg (eds), Gurus of Modern Yoga (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 351–71; Chandrima Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor: Reviving Faith in Yoga’, in International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 24, no. 9 (2007), pp. 1172–86; and Santanu Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev: The Politics, Economics, and Contradictions of an Indian Televangelist’, in Pradip Ninan Thomas and Philip Lee (eds), Global and Local Televangelism (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012), p. 159.

5. In fact, since 8 Oct. 2015, when I initiated Google Alerts, which delivers new postings on a chosen topic (in my case ‘Ramdev’) to one's email address, not a single day has passed without a posting.

6. ‘Shri Rajiv Dixit and Swami Ramdev on Swadeshi se Swawlambi Bharat—Bharat Swabhiman Andolan’, YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcC-62kAnUg, accessed 22 Nov. 2016].

7. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’, YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEnDhbV5lPg, accessed 23 Mar. 2016].

8. In the words of Chakrabarti, ‘Ramdev presents a remarkably united messaging front’ across his live and online public appearances. Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev’, p. 159.

9. Some studies which illuminate the construction of a link between yoga/Ayurveda and ‘Indian’ identity include Rachel Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern: Political Histories of Indigenous Medicine in North India, 1900–1955 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, pp. 1172–86; Jean Langford, Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

10. For a detailed biography of Ramdev, see Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, pp. 351–71.

11. Ashok Raj, The Life and Times of Baba Ramdev (New Delhi: Hay House Publishers, 2010), p. 109.

12. Ibid. Also see Chandrima Chakraborty, ‘Ramdev and Somatic Nationalism: Embodying the Nation, Desiring the Global’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 41, no. 5 (2006), pp. 387–90; Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev’, pp. 149–70; and M. Pandey, ‘Baba Ramdev: A Cult Brand in the Making’, in Indian Journal of Marketing, Vol. 39, no. 1 (2009), pp. 20–4.

13. ‘Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Aims to Double its Revenue to Rs 10,000 cr in 2016–17’, Business Standard (27 April 2016) [http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/baba-ramdev-s-patanjali-aims-to-double-its-revenue-to-rs-10-000-cr-in-2016-17-116042700061_1.html, accessed 12 July 2012].

14. Sampradaya signifies a system of spiritual knowledge into which a disciple is initiated by his guru and who in turn passes the sacred knowledge on to his own disciple, thus forming a lineage of gurus. See Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Ramdev: Swami without Sampradaya’, The Caravan (1 July 2011) [http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/ramdev-swami-without-sampradaya, accessed 21 Mar. 2016].

15. Ramdev became particularly prominent in the political arena during the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare in 2011. See, for example, R. Harindranath and Sukhmani Khorana, ‘Civil Society Movements and the “Twittering Classes” in the Postcolony: An Indian Case Study’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 37, no. 1 (2014), pp. 60–71.

16. Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, pp. 351–71.

17. Chyawanprash is a jam-like mixture of herbs, berries, honey and clarified butter.

18. Joseph Alter, ‘Yoga Shivir: Performativity and the Study of Modern Yoga’, in Mark Singleton and Jean Byrne (eds), Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 36–48.

19. Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, p. 352.

20. Interview with Sateesh Chawla (pseudonym), Rajpur, Uttarakhand, 13 April 2016.

21. Joseph Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

22. Jaffrelot, ‘Ramdev’.

23. Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev’, p. 149.

24. Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Gujarat Elections: The Sub-Text of Modi's “Hattrick”—High Tech Populism and the “Neo-middle Class”’, in Studies in Indian Politics, Vol. 1, no. 1 (2013), p. 82.

25. ‘Patanjali Ayurved makes South India Foray’, Business Standard (24 April 2012) [http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/patanjali-ayurved-makes-south-india-foray-112042400027_1.html, accessed 14 July 2016].

26. Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, p. 1173.

27. I am sensitive to the views of many Indians, including some of my friends and people I interviewed, who have experienced recovery from illness with the help of Ramdev's medicine or yoga and who defend Ramdev as a courageous man doing good for the country. However, I still maintain that his rhetoric is polarising and exclusionary, as he privileges the Hindu majority. Moreover, he marginalises sexual minorities and promotes a delimiting image of women—issues beyond the scope of the current paper.

28. Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, p. 1172–86. See also Chakraborty, ‘Ramdev and Somatic Nationalism’, pp. 387–90; Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, pp. 351–71; and Alter, ‘Yoga Shivir’, pp. 36–48.

29. Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, p. 363.

30. Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, p. 1174.

31. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’. The literal translation of ‘Ayurved ke gaurav se Bharat ka gaurav badhega’ is ‘From the prestige of Ayurveda, the prestige of India will increase’. However, contextually, Ramdev uses it to refer to India's ‘glorious’ past: Ayurveda is said to have flourished in ancient times when India was ‘great’ (implying that the country was then ‘ruined’ by the Mughals, British colonialism and the Congress Party), so if today Indians want to restore the prestige of their country, they have to first restore the prestige of Ayurveda.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid

34. Jaffrelot, ‘Gujarat Elections’, p. 82.

35. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’.

36. Alter, Yoga in Modern India, p. 143.

37. Ramdev often reminds his followers that he has ‘neither revived nor established’ yoga; ‘it already existed. I just take it to the people. These are traditional sciences practised by our great hermits’. See Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, p. 1180.

38. See Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb; Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Old Potions, New Bottles: Recasting Indigenous Medicine in Colonial Punjab (1850–1945) (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2006).

39. Jaffrelot, ‘Gujarat Elections’, p. 80.

40. ‘Baba Ramdev's Patanjali Noodles, Priced at Rs15, to be Launched Next Week’, Firstpost (9 Oct. 2015) [http://www.firstpost.com/india/baba-ramdevs-patanjali-noodles-priced-at-rs-15-to-be-launched-next-week-2462716.html, accessed 21 Mar. 2016].

41. Ananta Kumar Giri, ‘Rethinking the Politics and Ethics of Consumption: Dialogues with the Swadeshi Movements and Gandhi’, in Journal of Human Values, Vol. 10, no. 1 (2004), pp. 43, 45. On the early history of the Swadeshi Movement, see Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal: 1903–1908 (New Delhi: People's Publishing House, 1973).

42. ‘Shri Rajiv Dixit and Swami Ramdev on Swadeshi se Swawlambi Bharat—Bharat Swabhiman Andolan’, YouTube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcC-62kAnUg, accessed 22 Nov. 2016].

43. Sarbacker, ‘Swami Ramdev’, p. 353.

44. Cited in Joseph Alter, Gandhi's Body: Sex, Diet and the Politics of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 14.

45. Ibid., p. 39.

46. Interview with Jubinji (pseudonym), Rishikesh, 12 Mar. 2015.

47. Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev’, p. 164.

48. Interview with Renuka (pseudonym), Chhotapur, 14 Oct. 2014.

49. Interview with Raju (pseudonym), Chhotapur, 16 Nov. 2014. Seva (service) has both social and religious connotations. It is an important category of social obligation which defines all kinds of relationships: army officers perform seva to the country, children to their parents, worshippers to gods. See Carey Watt, Serving the Nation: Cultures of Service, Association, and Citizenship (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

50. ‘Shri Rajiv Dixit and Swami Ramdev on Swadeshi se Swawlambi Bharat—Bharat Swabhiman Andolan’.

51. Chakraborty, ‘Ramdev and Somatic Nationalism’, p. 388.

52. Ibid., p. 361.

53. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’.

54. Madhulika Banerjee, ‘Power, Culture and Medicine: Ayurvedic Pharmaceuticals in the Modern Market’, in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. 36, no. 3 (2002), pp. 435–67; Maarten Bode, Taking Traditional Knowledge to the Market: The Modern Image of the Ayurvedic and Unani Industry, 1980–2000 (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2008); Nazrul Islam, ‘Indigenous Medicine as Commodity: Local Reach of Ayurveda in Modern India’, in Current Sociology, Vol. 58, no. 5 (2010), pp. 777–98; and Charles Leslie, ‘Indigenous Pharmaceuticals, the Capitalist World System, and Civilization’, in Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, Nos. 69–70 (1989), pp. 23–31.

55. Didier Fassin, ‘Another Politics of Life is Possible’, in Theory Culture Society, Vol. 26, no. 5 (2009), pp. 44–60.

56. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); B. Braun, ‘Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life’, in Cultural Geographies, Vol. 14, no.1 (2007), pp. 6–28; C.L. Briggs and M. Nichter, ‘Biocommunicability and the Biopolitics of Pandemic Threats’, in Medical Anthropology, Vol. 28, no. 3 (2009), pp. 189–98; Fassin, ‘Another Politics of Life is Possible’, pp. 44–60; Rebecca Marsland and Ruth Prince, ‘What Is Life Worth? Exploring Biomedical Interventions, Survival, and the Politics of Life’, in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 26, no. 4 (2012), pp. 453–69; Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, ‘Biopower Today’, in BioSocieties, Vol. 1, no. 2 (2006), pp. 195–218; and Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

57. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), p. 99.

58. Marsland and Prince, ‘What Is Life Worth?’, p. 454.

59. Joseph Alter, ‘Somatic Nationalism: Indian Wrestling and Militant Hinduism’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 28, no. 3 (1994), pp. 557–88; Alter, Gandhi's Body; Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Chakraborty, ‘Ramdev and Somatic Nationalism’, pp. 387–90; and Projit Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine (London: Anthem Press, 2009).

60. Rabinow and Rose, ‘Biopower Today’, p. 203.

61. ‘Indian Civil Servants to Get Free Daily Yoga Lessons’, The Guardian (20 Mar. 2015) [http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/mar/20/indian-civil-servants-to-get-free-daily-yoga-lessons, accessed 21 Mar. 2016].

62. ‘Shri Rajiv Dixit and Swami Ramdev on Swadeshi se Swawlambi Bharat—Bharat Swabhiman Andolan’.

63. Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern, p. 1.

64. There are significant differences between Berger's and Alter's uses of the term ‘biomoral’. Berger deploys it to describe phenomena which are typically glossed as ‘holistic’. She explains that Ayurveda—unlike biomedicine—is biomoral because it is concerned with the issues of body–mind unity (Berger, Ayurveda Made Modern, p. 24.). Quite differently, Alter writes about ‘biomoral politics’ in relation to health, celibacy, vegetarianism or fasting, when the biological body becomes a tool for achieving moral and spiritual perfection (Alter, Gandhi's Body; and Joseph Alter, ‘Nature Cure and Ayurveda: Nationalism, Viscerality, and Bio-Ecology in India’, in Body & Society, Vol. 21, no. 1 (Mar. 2015) [http://bod.sagepub.com/content/21/1.toc, accessed 8 July 2016]. In this article, I follow Alter to illuminate how the body is acted upon through appeals to duty, virtue and social service, producing justifications for consumerism and radical nationalism.

65. Remarkably, the official website of the Ministry of AYUSH explains that Ayurveda is ‘the ancient most health care system which originated with the origin of the universe. With the inception of human life on earth Ayurveda started being applied’! See Ministry of AYUSH, ‘What is the Origin of Ayurveda?’ [http://www.ayush.gov.in/About-The-Systems/Ayurveda/faq/what-origin-ayurveda, accessed 8 July 2016].

66. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. Jaffrelot, ‘Gujarat Elections’, pp. 79–95; and Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, pp. 1172–86.

71. ‘Baba Ramdev's Speech at National Ayurveda Summit 2014, Gandhinagar’.

72. Chakrabarti, ‘The Avatars of Baba Ramdev’, p. 161.

73. Chakraborty, ‘The Hindu Ascetic as Fitness Instructor’, pp. 1172–86; and Chakraborty, ‘Ramdev and Somatic Nationalism’, pp. 387–90.

74. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983); and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).