From Desired Futures to Market Realities: Examining Policy Imaginaries and Strategies in the Globalization of Ayurveda

Chithprabha Kudlu^*

• Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), Vienna, Austria

This paper examines the relationship between Indian policy discourses on the globalization of traditional medicine and the realities of global herbal drug markets. The origins of the economic, political, and techno-scientific imaginaries underlying India’s policies are traced, and the Ayurveda Biology Mission, a flagship project aimed at integrating traditional knowledge with modern scientific research, is assessed. This analysis reveals multiple ironies in how India’s herbal export ambitions intersect with policy narratives, and also in how regulatory demands and market imperatives sidelined the broader aims envisioned in the Indian government’s science initiative. As the emphasis gradually shifted toward meeting international compliance standards and gaining footholds in new markets, it redirected resources away from truly innovative forms of research and toward the validation of existing knowledge for purposes of market certification.Those on the frontline of Indian medicine healthcare delivery are caught between the growing external demand for evidence, confusion over the form such evidence should take, and the pressing needs of their patients, for whom timely access to remedies takes precedence over scientific proof of efficacy. The institutional processes that foreground bioscientific imaginaries ignore the crucial evidence base accumulated through everyday clinical practice. At the same time, the agency of Indian medicine practitioners and manufacturers finds expression through alternative imaginaries embedded in institutions and markets. These imaginaries, shaped by dynamic interactions between practitioners, manufacturers, and consumers, have deep historical roots in prescription and production practices. Interpreting these through the lens of symbolic and performative economies highlights the dynamic tensions between bioscience’s structural dominance in the global health order and alternative imaginaries embedded within market realities.