Long confined to Europe and the United States, pharmaceutical innovation now holds centre stage in India. This article explores innovation in the ayurvedic industry as a form of alternative modernity, which contrasts in key ways with the molecular paradigm that has dominated pharmaceutical research in the North since the mid twentieth century. India offers other ways to pharmaceutical innovation based on forms of knowledge essentially foreign to pharmaceutical screening and biotechnology. The industry reinvents its ayurvedic remedies by borrowing from various orders of medical thought and from techniques that belong to modern galenics and biomedicine as well as Indian traditions. This model represents an innovative mode of knowledge production and accounts for the introduction of an independent pharmacy in a milieu hitherto primarily medical. Essentially based on reverse engineering, this innovation regime involves the reformulation and simplification of ayurvedic preparations in order to create new "traditional" medicines for the biomedically-defined disorders of an international clientele. This article opens prospective avenues for the study of these new drugs, the construction of a global market and of an economy of property rights emancipated from pharmaceutical patents. (English)