This article examines the process by which an occupational field that consisted of traditional intellectuals, hereditary practitioners and religious specialists attempted to reorder the public status of their learning and began to emerge with a self-conscious, corporate identity. Situated in colonial Punjab in the 1930s, it traces the responses of Ayurvedic practitioners or Vaids to the ideas and assumptions buttressing scientific, Western medicine and its validation of colonial rule. It argues that indigenous practitioners began to construct a discourse on indigenous science in the public sphere in Punjab that was mediated by the vernacular press and by newly formed corporate bodies. The attributes of Ayurvedic learning were gradually recast in the political idiom of language-based alignments and the claims of a tradition of indigenous science in turn legitimized a unified, singular Hindu nation. However, this process was constantly challenged by alternative interpretations of its vocabulary and competing political affiliations and interests.
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