The Study of Gurukula: South Indian Traditional Medical Education and Its Classical Texts

FAIN: FB-56351-12

Anthony Cerulli
University of Wisconsin, Madison (Geneva, NY 14456-3301)

The traditional institution of medical education in South India is the gurukula, "family of the teacher." Students in a gurukula study with a teacher (guru), while living with the teacher’s family (kula); they study texts from the classical Sanskrit "canon" of Ayurveda and vernacular classics. This project introduces urgently needed research on the history of the gurukula, which is moribund in South India, save a few locations in Kerala. Looking at two modes of expression in the teacher-student relationship—Sanskrit orality and vernacular commentarial writing—I link the modern history and fate of the gurukula to the promotion of biomedicine during British colonialism. I consider the portrayal of the gurukula in Government Ayurvedic Colleges as archaic and inviable in the globalized medical arena, and the Indian government’s reimagining of classical Ayurveda as an indigenous, precolonial science, which is packaged as the banner of India’s contribution to the global scientific community.

Associated Products

Medical Texts and Manuscripts in Indian Cultural History (Book)
Title: Medical Texts and Manuscripts in Indian Cultural History
Editor: Anthony Cerulli
Abstract: xx
Year: 2013
Publisher: New Delhi: Manohar
Type: Scholarly Edition
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India (Book)
Title: The Practice of Texts: Education and Healing in South India
Author: Anthony Cerulli
Abstract: The Practice of Texts examines the uses of the Sanskrit medical classics in two educational institutions of India’s classical life science, Ayurveda: the college and the gurukula. In this interdisciplinary study, Anthony Cerulli probes late- and postcolonial reforms in ayurvedic education, the development of the ayurvedic college, and the impacts of the college curriculum on ways that ayurvedic physicians understand and use the Sanskrit classics in their professional work today. His fieldwork in south India illuminates the nature of philology and ritual in the ayurvedic gurukula and showcases how knowledge is exchanged among students, teachers, and patients. The result, Cerulli shows, is that the Sanskrit classics are presented and applied differently in the college and gurukula, producing a variety of relationships with these texts among practitioners. By interrogating the politics surrounding the place of the Sanskrit classics in ayurvedic curricula, this book reveals a spectrum of views about the history and tradition of Ayurveda in modern India.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383548/the-practice-of-texts
Access Model: Open Access
Publisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520383548
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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