Power and Politics of Knowledge: Investigating Traditional Medicine Episteme

Taken a clash of cultures at the face value, Modernity in all its manifestations has attempted to displace the so-called ‘traditional’ episteme. Presumably beyond-political, there is a multi-layer contestation among knowledge systems—indigenous, ‘traditional’, modern et all, for the ‘modern’ episteme adopted by the modern nation-states questions the epistemological foundations of the ‘traditional’ knowledge. Medicine offers exemplary insights into the politics of knowledge and rewards us with a different perspective of power. The contestation between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ is a tussle between two epistemes rather cultures. ‘Traditional’ is not a homogenous entity and is tremendously plural where each component is distinctively different fighting for a space of its own. The struggle for recognition and quest to capture the space among the different (and distinct) knowledge systems expands the study of the “political” to peripheries otherwise deemed apolitical.
The present paper examines the two policy documents viz. WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy (2002) and India’s National Policy on Indian Systems of Medicine (2002). The selection of the documents is deliberate to have an insight how a ‘modern’ international institution like WHO look at and strategize ‘traditional’ healthcare and similarly to examine India’s stand who has a distinction of having immense diversity in healthcare practices though its healthcare policy exhibits a clear disregard to her own cosmologies for it also officiates the ‘modern’. The whole cry of WHO for ‘internationally accepted norms and standards’, ‘rational use’, and adoption of ‘modern’ techniques are deeply political. If there is a contestation between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ medicine at one level, there is a deep friction between traditional medicine and folk practices of health care at another.