HIV awareness poster from the late nineties
Photo : Tabiyat
HIV awareness poster from the late nineties Photo : Tabiyat

Between mortality and moksh

An exhibition on medicine and healing highlights Indian attitudes towards health.
The Ayurvedic Man. Probably 18th century CE<br />Photo : Wellcome Library, London
The Ayurvedic Man. Probably 18th century CE
Photo : Wellcome Library, London
(This article is a part of the web-exclusive series from our latest issue 'At the cost of health'. More from the print quarterly here.)
In recent educational discourse in India, advancements in science and technology have been appropriated in an attempt to aggrandise the idea of India through its supposed achievements – few real and many imagined. The idea of ancients working with nuclear and genetic technologies is wishful thinking, but other claims seem more probable. Scholars have repeatedly lamented this re-imagination of the histories of Indian society and their progress, emerging from land that roughly falls within the borders of modern, independent India. They suggest that such fanciful endeavours gloss over actual Indian achievements, ideologies and knowledge streams.
It is through this lens that we must view 'Tabiyat: Medicine & Healing in India', at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) – an exhibition that seeks to explore the history of medicine and wellness-seeking behaviour in India. Produced by The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity based in the UK, 'Tabiyat' is part of their three-city event called 'Medicine Corner', which explores medical practices and healing within the multiple cultures that make up India. According to curator, Ratan Vaswani, 'Tabiyat' looks at various cultural ideas of medicine over time. The exhibits are divided into quarters that go beyond specific schools or stream of medicine. Rather, it is based on segregations that suggest a larger societal mindset when it comes to dealing with illness and misfortune. For Vaswani, these quarters represent locations within which certain transactions of healing are carried out: 'The Home', 'The Shrine', 'The Clinic' and 'The Street'. But besides these broad categorisations, the exhibition lacks the curatorial initiative to contextualise each artefact within the larger narrative of medicine and healing in the Subcontinent. This lack of curatorial guidance was only partly mitigated by the exhibition walk-through lead by Vaswani, on request. Near the entrance are exhibits which suggest that Ayurveda, as Indian knowledge-system, was hugely affected by Buddhist traditions. On one side of this entrance area are the 'Home' and 'Shrine' sections, which seek to document health in the context of communities superstitions, and lifestyle improvements over the ages. While the 'Home' exhibits include a table of auxiliary hygiene implements, and action figures performing Yoga, the 'Shrine' displays items of belief including an elaborate taveez (charm to ward of the evil-eye), votive offerings for good fortune and so on. On the other side of the entry lies the more 'scientific' or commercially-oriented sections. The 'Clinic' examines scientific treatises, philosophies and methods, while the 'Street' section displays objects pertaining to traditional remedies and skills (ear cleaners!), which are bartered for a livelihood.
Endangered traditions
Set up in the Premchand Roychand Gallery of the CSMVS, the exhibition begins with a display of medicinal plants and herbs such as aloe vera, tulsi, curry leaves and more. While common in rural areas, these traditional articles of hygiene and health, which were once abundant in home medicine, now exist only as fashionable, edible accessories to elite urban lifestyles, sold by brands that either claim to be saviours of an ancient lifestyle or equate them with class and purity. These endangered articles of India's healing traditions are accompanied by two sets of recent images: that of members of Meghalaya's Garo tribe preparing plant-based medicine, and images of people living in the urban centre of Mumbai using the rural oral care champion, datun (twigs of meswak trees chewed on for cleaner teeth and gums). Next to these are video exhibits commissioned and produced by Wellcome for the Dharavi Biennale, which includes snapshots of local healers from various communities that live in the larger Dharavi settlement in Mumbai.
It is an interesting exercise to view the exhibition from the perspective of exclusion: of selves, voices, and entire sections of people as seen in contemporary times, to recognise and engage with the experience of the local. The inclusion of the Garo tribe, and of the datun, again used by tribal, rural and also migrant labour populations in cities like Mumbai, draws our attention to how these populations and their methods are largely ignored by mainstream society. They are a reminder of everyday lives of communities co-existing in a tacit contract with nature; something modern considerations of hygiene often ignore, or alternately, put an incredible premium on. This view also considers an exploration of the history of Ayurveda, which Vaswani attests is absolutely Indian in its origin but is also heavily influenced by Buddhism (in opposition to recent attempts to suggest that all Indian traditions are also necessarily Hindu traditions). Since the distant past depicted in these paintings, Buddhism in India has gone through its own long, sometimes violent and eventually, extremely political journey, where it is taken up by the marginalised. There seems to be a thread connecting the spiritual ideology of the Buddha with the physical processes of Ayurveda; where Buddhism aims to achieve moksha (a release from the cycle of rebirth), Ayurveda aims for mukti (a release from cycles of pain and suffering). Hints to these links are seen in a copy of a 1940s Li Gotami fresco from Tibet (part of the CSMVS permanent collection) or in paintings depicting the use of cannabis as pain medication.
Ascetics smoking ganja have become the mainstay of travel photography in India, and cannabis a source of frantic parental internet searches. While clearly not a call to return to the drug-fuelled seventies, these images attempt to draw the dialogue back to local, indigenous healthcare. In this respect, it is interesting to note that while India draws its anti-narcotic laws from Western notions of medicine that complicates cannabis use in traditional treatments, there is an upsurge in the Western acceptance of cannabis products as a form of relief treatment in cases of cancer and mental health. Similarly, the healers of Dharavi are practitioners of Ayurveda and other local techniques that are often excluded from the mainstream but are often the only forms of treatment for working class poor, who for a variety of reason – from economic considerations to the ineptitude in government clinics – eschew mainstream allopathic treatments.

Some of the 'women-themed' exhibits, while outwardly championing women's agency in creating social change, confuses glorification with actual progress in women's rights

One of the objects used by the 'Healers of Dharavi', which draws the eye, is the nearly extinct artefact called rakt-bahuli also known as rakt-chandanachibahuli (red-sandalwood doll). Loaned from Sunanda Pawar, a compounder working with an Ayurvedic doctor working in the settlement, the bahuli or doll is an object fashioned out of the heartwood of red sandalwood (rakta-chandan) trees. It is accompanied by a video of Pawar demonstrating its usage. The rakt-bahuli is rubbed against a small stone board till it bleeds a red sandal paste that is said to provide relief from pain, inflammation, diarrhoea and other illnesses (depending on who you speak to). Red sandalwood is such an undocumented product that its presence in the exhibition reminded me of the large number of undocumented, untested indigenous medicines that have been blindly replaced by antibiotics. A redress of sorts, though limited in its scope, has been undertaken by Indian Council of Medical Research, in collaboration with other government bodies, by conducting clinical trials of Ayurvedic formulations for a variety of diseases like diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis.
Strangely, the rakt-bahuli was exhibited at the confluence between 'The Home' and 'The Shrine' sections. While it may have a religious connect, it is better contextualised when seen as a healing custom, which has shifted to the street from the interiors of traditional clinics, akin to other practices like street-side naturopathy, or bone-setting, which finds its local roots in akhadas.
'Invisible' women
The presence of Pawar's rakt-bahuli is also important because it is the presence of an actual woman (one of the few) in 'Tabiyat' outside 'The Home' section. The exhibition doesn't ignore women, but only references spaces that women are 'seen' in. Women are represented through objects of hygiene and shringar (beauty enhancements), posters from prohibition-hungry Maharashtra that recreate mandalas as realistic images that frown upon alcohol-induced domestic violence; or the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) sponsored, pro-woman content popularising condom usage from the late '90s, which was part of the long-drawn AIDS and HIV awareness movement in India.
Some of these 'women-themed' exhibits, while outwardly championing women's agency in creating social change, confuses glorification with actual progress in women's rights. Take the AIIMS sponsored, traditionally-styled HIV awareness poster from the late nineties, which put a couple in the foreground of their home. The door is locked, and the woman holds a (fairly oversized) condom out to the man, suggesting the door will be unlocked once he accepts the use of protection. The message seems great, considering India's HIV awareness programme has worked out exceptionally well compared to other countries, having demonstrated an overall reduction of 57 percent in estimated annual new HIV infections in the last decade. While the programme helped sex workers to create communities and community collectives to promote sex worker rights, including the compulsory use of 'Nirodh' condoms – manufactured and distributed by the government for free – these activities were targeted at specific populations (sex workers, truckers, children of sex workers, lower class areas which see an influx of NGOs). The rest of the country's population has retreated behind arguments around 'immorality' when it comes to sexual activity and condom usage as opposed to engaging in dialogue to promote responsible, healthy sexuality.
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