| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Jean M. Langford. Fluent Bodies: Ayurvedic Remedies for Postcolonial Imbalance. (Body, Commodity, Text.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 311. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95.
This is an important book. Jean M. Langford provides an insightful description of how different ayurvedic traditions developed and coexisted in both colonial and independent India. This is significant precisely because far too many historians—particularly those involved in detailed analyses of ayurvedic texts—tend simplistically to present specific Sanskrit tomes as the products of an all-encompassing, unchanging, and water-tight "system" (often describing them as far more important they were likely to have been). What is generally ignored, as a result, is the very complex nature of ayurvedic practice, which is influenced by a host of political, social, and economic influences—something that becomes strikingly apparent when one researches vernacular texts and conducts interviews with the wide range of practitioners working in the diverse nations that constitute the subcontinent. Langford's work shows, quite powerfully, why it is useful to study different working traditions, especially in an increasingly globalized world, wherein various "internationalized" forms of ayurveda are now on offer, generally in response to certain forms of demand emanating from the developed world.	1
The author's formidable linguistic, analytical, and writing skills shine through in this book. Her descriptions of interactions with different practitioners, of their views and their working practices, and, not least, of the resilience of arguments and stances visible in the colonial period are compelling and instructive. At the same time, Langford quite consciously pays particular attention to the postcolonial story, describing its complexities imaginatively, and alerting readers to trends that politically charged treatises tend to ignore.	. . .

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