Sri Lanka’s neocolonial wellness tourism: commodifying Ayurveda while erasing its roots and labour
Original framing: “Sri Lanka leans on indigenous healing to grow high-value wellness tourism” — bing news
Dalit and rural healers, who constitute 70% of Sri Lanka’s Ayurveda workforce, are absent from tourism narratives. Their testimonies—such as those from the *2019 Ayurveda Workers’ Strike*—reveal how they are paid 30% less than upper-caste colleagues for identical work, and how their knowledge is patented by foreign companies (e.g., *Swiss Herbal Pharma*’s 2017 patent on a Sri Lankan herbal formula). Women healers, who historically dominated home-based practices, now face sexual harassment in upscale spas, with no labor protections. The silence around these voices ensures the industry’s exploitation remains invisible behind the 'authentic tradition' branding.
Sri Lanka’s Ayurveda tourism is a microcosm of neocolonial extraction, where the violence of historical dispossession is repackaged as 'cultural heritage' to fuel elite wealth and foreign demand.
The erasure of Dalit and rural healers—whose labor sustains the industry—mirrors the broader pattern of Global South knowledge economies, where indigenous practices are commodified while their original stewards are priced out. This dynamic is not accidental but structural: the same colonial medical systems that suppressed Ayurveda now profit from its revival, with the state acting as both enabler and gatekeeper. The trickster irony lies in how 'wellness' tourism, marketed as a return to 'authentic healing,' deepens inequality by turning bodies and ecosystems into tradable assets. To disrupt this cycle, solutions must center land repatriation, labor rights, and climate-resilient ecosystems—while exposing the complicity of Western consumers in perpetuating these hierarchies. The path forward lies not in deeper commodification, but in reclaiming Ayurveda as a *public* good, rooted in justice rather than profit.