MRD

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Ayurveda originated over 5,000 years ago in India and was an integral part of Vedic culture. Ayurveda is composed of the Sanskrit words Ayur (defined as life) and veda (defined as science). Once India was forced under colonial rule, the government considered Western medicine as the only valid medical practice and Ayurvedic practitioners were forced to change their practices (Mukharji 2016). After gaining independence, there was a resurgence of Ayurveda and journals such as An International Quarterly Journal of Research in Ayurveda (Ayu) and the Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine (J-AIM) are helping document this post-colonial Ayurveda. 

Colonialism had profound, long-lasting effects on India and is part of the reason that Ayurveda today isn’t the same as Ayurveda 5,000 years ago. By analyzing these journals, we can get a better understanding of what Ayurvedic research is in today’s world. Before colonialism, Ayurveda was a practice focused purely on healing. However, now Ayurveda has adopted this Western medicine mindset of needing extensive research to prove its effectiveness. This has in turn contributed to a culture of toxicity as many researchers plagiarise and fabricate details to have their article published. I wanted to do this literature review to understand how Ayurveda has shifted throughout time and what postcolonial Ayurveda looks like. I chose these two specific journals because of their popularity and their different approaches. Ayu is an older journal which has more general practices while J-AIM is a newer, trans-disciplinary platform. Comparing these two can tell us a lot about what modern Ayurveda is but also how it’s changed even within a period of 20 years. Additionally, these journals can tell us about how Ayurveda will look in the future specifically in the US. Given these journals cater to a more Western audience when it comes to clinical research, these publications could help Ayurveda become certified in the United States and become more well recognized. Throughout this process I have read through almost every article in both journals and have gained an understanding of their similarities and differences. With each article I tagged information about the author, the institution, the treatments, variables measured, and other critical information. 

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Ayu is a peer-reviewed open-access journal that was established in 1964 that aims to cover a wide variety of topics regarding Ayurveda. It is published quarterly by the Institute for Post Graduate Teaching & Research in Ayurveda. The first issues of Ayu were published online in 2010 after this  journal partnered with Medknow Publications (Chandola 2010). Prior to this, Ayu was strictly on paper which prevented the wide spread of knowledge and recognition. The mission of Ayu is to “encourage ayurvedic baseline researchers and scholars to publish their work in a scientific way” (Chandola 2011). In terms of articles published, Ayu reached its peak number of articles published in the  period 2010 - 2012. Ever since then, the numbers have been slowly declining and the last article published was in 2019 (Fig. 1).