What do a 1990s Nirodh poster, the first known anatomical Ayurvedic drawing, the game of Snakes & Ladders, and your grandmother’s remedy for the cold have in common? They’re all exhibits at the newly-opened ‘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 in India.
Produced by The Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity based in the UK, ‘Tabiyat..’ is part of their three-city event ‘Medicine Corner’ that explores medical practices and healing within the multiple cultures that make up India. Set up in the Premchand Roychand Gallery of the CSMVS, the exhibition opens with a display of medicinal plants and herbs such as aloe vera, tulsi and more, accompanied by images of traditional wellness such as rural oral care champion, ‘datun’ (twigs of meswak trees chewed on for cleaner teeth & gums).
According to curator Ratan Vaswani, who walked us through the exhibit, ‘Tabiyat’ looks at various cultural ideas of and around medicine over time. The view also includes an exploration of the history of Ayurveda, which Vaswani says is absolutely Indian in its origin but heavily influenced by Buddhism; 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 (release from the cycle of rebirth), Ayurveda aims for mukti (release from cycles of pain & 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.
The exhibition is further divided into quarters that go beyond specific schools of medicine to become more socially revealing 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.
While seeming self-explanatory, these locations are full of interesting reveals, thanks to the Wellcome Trust’s library and collection of medicinal items and the CSMVS’s permanent collection. Take, for instance, The Home. On one table is a collection of skin-care rituals from chandan, to a Forest Essentials skin cream. On another, traditional items of hygiene from a Sikh comb to a foot scrubber. An old (original, really) game of Snakes and Ladders takes up some display space. As Vaswani suggests, the game was originally used by parents to explain illness and physical maladies as misfortune in a very karmic. Interestingly, modernity repackaged this game of misfortune as a game of luck, where your future doesn’t quite depend on what you do or don’t do, and instead, you’re left hoping for the inanimate dice to behave.
However, ‘The Home’ also focuses on the homemaker and her care. A Pestonjee Bomanjee painting (from the 1800s) that shows a Parsi woman in her last hours attended to by a priest to that 90s Nirodh poster — commissioned by AIIMS for AIDS awareness programmes —which uses traditional means of picture-making to propose the use of prophylactics while also giving the woman the upper hand by making her the person holding the condom. It’s interesting to note that India has demonstrated an overall reduction of 57 per cent in estimated annual new HIV infections in the last decade. There’s also a ‘patachitra’ about female foeticide instead of the usual mythology, yet another traditional method employed to tell the story of a modern female issue.
The Shrine is, as the name suggests, about faith and faith healing. Here, Vaswani has everything from Sitaladevi (the pox-goddess aka Goddess of sores, ghouls, pustules and diseases, worshipped across India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan) whom you must worship for healthy, poxless children to chadars bought from the Haji Ali Dargah and votives offerings from Mount Mary Church in Bandra. The Shrine symbolises, in a way, a will to live and prosper, so much so that unscientific belief in higher powers continues to exist as a contemporary of medical science.
Similarly, The Clinic shies away from any pretence at the spiritual. Of incredible interest here is the first known anatomical drawing in Ayurveda: the Ayurvedic Man. Unlike other representations of the human body, this one, which takes aesthetic inspiration from Tibetan drawings of the human body, and has extracts dealing with anatomy and embryology from a classic Ayurvedic work called Bhâvaprakâœa by Bhâvamiœra (1650 – 1690). This image is flanked by its Mughal-inspired predecessor as well as its Western medicine-influenced successor, adding another layer to all the Indian history we know.
The Clinic is also complemented by The Street, which in many small towns and villages is about wandering medicine men, street-side bone-setters (an interesting offshoot of the wrestling akhada tradition) and many more. There’s also the Jaipur foot, a rubber-based artificial limb that revolutionised prosthetics owing to its affordability, developed wholly in India in the 1960s and currently used the world over.
‘Tabiyat’ thus has the audience encountering so many previous editions of thoughts we subscribe to today about medicine, healing and being well, about holistic approaches to life and the interconnectedness of the physical and spiritual body. If the aim is to force multiple re-thinks, this exhibition is spot-on. You go in expecting one thing, you come out wondering where your ideas about your own decisions of wellness are from.
Tabiyat: Medicine & Healing in India will be on view at the Premchand Roychand Gallery, CSMVS, from today till 28 March. See csmvs.in for details on related events.
(The author is a freelance writer)
‘Tabiyat’ has the audience confronting schools of thought we subscribe to about medicine
