Ayurvedic medicine amplified and transformed earlier notions about different deha prakritis (bodily natures) in the nineteenth century through interactions with European ideas about different types of bodily constitutions. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ayurveda further explicitly incorporated this braided constitutionalism into a set of claims marking its distance and superiority from Western-style biomedicine. It did so by accenting its ability to bridge the bodily and the mental: a claim that would eventually come to be called ‘holism’. All this however, remained scaled to the level of individual patients. This began to shift in the interwar years. As Ayurvedic physicians looked ahead to carve out a role for themselves in a new, decolonized state health system they sought to scale up the ideas about constitutional differences to the level of national population. While persistently drawing on the notions of “psychosomatic” health that were then popular in certain biomedical circles, Ayurvedic physicians used new scaling tools such as standardized clinical questionnaires and new statistical methods. In the process it bureaucratized the psychosomatic and anticipated the recent development of new medical disciplines like Ayurgenomics. Whereas the invocation of the language of psychosomatic medicine continues to frequently authorize claims by both practitioners and social scientists of Ayurveda being “holistic”, the incorporation of modern Ayurveda within a postcolonial state-apparatus has refigured such holism and its attendant psychosomatic traits into a highly bureaucratized form.
