In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room by Aarathi Prasad

There is a young Ashtavaidya who is trying very hard to preserve the traditions. He’s studying at an Ayurveda college. There is not much of the real tradition left.’ Anna knew better than most how threatened the history of Ayurveda had become. She’d been devastated to discover that the palm-leaf manuscript that Achudem spoke of in the Malabaricus had recently been thrown away by his family. ‘It seems to have been suspended in the main house in a hanging basket and they weren’t sure what it was, so they put it in the rubbish. It was very sad,’ she said, clearly frustrated. Perhaps even more sad is the fact that the loss of Achudem’s treasure is by no means an isolated case.
    What Anna was saying reminded me of something van Rheede had written in the Hortus Malabaricus : that, even in 1678, the use of Indian plants ‘whose curative virtues were proclaimed by indigenous physicians as having been famous for extreme antiquity was rapidly approaching its end’.
    A further reason for the demise of the Ashtavaidya’s work – which would have been a problem even when van Rheede was searching for collaborators in seventeenth-century India – had also emerged from Anna’s research. The traditional education of the old Indian medical scholar-practitioners was exclusive, sometimes dependent on royal patronage and extremely long and demanding. Generally, such instruction was given only to men who were members of an existing practitioner’s family or of a high caste. A wealthy sponsor would also be vital in order to support what could be fifteen years of rigorous one-to-one apprenticeship. Students would receive training in not only healing practices (study of the medical texts, diagnosis and preparation or medicine formulations) but also logic, astrology and additional periods of meditation and memorisation and recitation of classical texts.
    This unwieldy system persisted until the nineteenth century, when a European-style fixed curriculum was introduced, with specialist subject teachers, a set training period and qualifying exams. Successful candidates would receive a medical certificate and a licence permitting practice. Ayurvedic and other traditional medical colleges in India still operate with a standardised syllabus that includes Western disciplines – anatomy, physiology, biochemistry – ostensibly so that the old and new can interact with ease. Although this streamlined system has turned out large numbers of traditional medical physicians and widened the availability of their services, the inclusion of Western practices is considered by many to have undermined the philosophy behind Ayurvedic medicine.
    Still, things have been worse. In 1822 the British Raj outlawed the integrative approach pioneered by de Orta and colonial India’s various fledgling medical institutions would teach only the separate disciplines, rather than pushing for the pluralism which had been so effective.
    Unsurprisingly, under the British, European medicine was to supplant all others. The English politician Thomas Babington Macaulay was the architect of this change. An uncompromising modernist and the son of a missionary, he considered the ‘pagan’ Indian systems of medicine to be both backward and slowing the progress of Anglicisation. Despite the protests of British Orientalists, he decreed that Ayurveda as a system of medicine was to end. At the new Calcutta Medical College, only one system was to be taught as medicine.
    IT IS UNDERSTOOD that much of Vedic medical anatomical knowledge arose as a result of animal sacrifice, rather than opening the human body. Far pre-dating that, such information was gathered from hunting and butchering. India’s 20,000-year-old Mesolithic art repeatedly portrays so called ‘X-ray’ animal images on the walls of rock shelters: complex drawings of boar and cattle showing organs in place. Later came the substantive surgical works