The Unbecoming Ghost: Spectropolitics in the Making and Unmaking of <scp>BHU</scp>'s <i>Bhoot Vidya</i> Ayurveda Certificate Program
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay examines the controversy surrounding the Bhoot Vidya certificate program proposed by the Faculty of Ayurveda at Banaras Hindu University in 2019. Drawing on media coverage, curricular materials, and government policy, I analyze how the debate reveals broader tensions in the politics of contemporary Ayurveda, nationalism, and decolonization in India. I situate bhūtavidyā within its classical textual foundations and modern projects of Ayurvedic revitalization, highlighting how colonial transformations, orientalist framings, and selective appropriations of tradition persist in institutional discourse. The program's fraught reception, marked by criticism of foreign media and the disavowal of ghost‐related etiologies, exposes the spectropolitical stakes involved in defining legitimate knowledge. I argue that the proposed program embodies a form of modernity in which ghosts are simultaneously invoked, denied, and repurposed for nationalist projects. The case illustrates how hauntological analysis may help better understand contested negotiations of authenticity, authority, and belonging in Indian medical and political life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".