In the Bonesetter's Waiting Room by Aarathi Prasad Page A

of Sushruta, whose texts include a systematic method for the dissection of the human cadaver. But by the nineteenth century, human dissection was not performed as part of the training of Ayurvedic doctors.
    ALTHOUGH THERE WERE ARABIC translations of the Sushruta Samhita , made in the eighth century, the work was not readable in English until 1907. Macaulay read neither Arabic, nor Sanskrit. This must have contributed to his conclusions as outlined in his ‘minute on education’, where he described India’s offerings as including ‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school …’ And so, in 1836, Macaulay famously ordered a fifty-gun salute at the new College to celebrate what was publicised as the first post-mortem dissection of a human body performed by an Indian. Despite the circus, and political and practical challenges, practitioners of Ayurveda and other Indian medical systems didn’t give up the fight. Encouraged by the growing strength of nationalist voices towards the 1940s, and in response to the hostility of the colonial policy toward Indian medicine, traditional therapists joined forces and specialised colleges of ‘indigenous medicine’ were established.
    I had a very personal interest in wanting to understand the story of Indian medicine because of my grandfather’s involvement in both Ayurveda and post-independence health policy, and an academic one in wishing to understand whether Ayurvedic theory and modern science could really be happy bedfellows. After nearly seventy years of independence, and twenty years after the establishment of the government department for Indian systems of medicine for which my grandfather had striven, I was keen to find out where the long struggle between autonomy and integration stood in the twenty-first century.
    I arranged to meet an old friend in Bangalore who had trained as an Ayurvedic doctor at a college affiliated to the medical university of Chennai. Anusha had grown up in a house obliquely opposite mine in the Caribbean, before moving to the States in the late 1980s and then to India. There she became fluent in Hindi and learnt Tamil and scholarly Sanskrit so that she could work with ancient Ayurvedic texts. On returning to the States she’d researched complementary and integrative medical therapies with colleagues at Boston University School of Medicine and at the Harvard School of Public Health, which had pointed her towards her main area of interest: Ayurvedic research and development.
    Before we met in India, Anusha mentioned that she had been working as a consultant for L’Oréal India in Bangalore. I was curious about what a French cosmetics company would be doing with Indian medicinal herbs. I discovered that, in April 2013, it had opened a research facility in Bangalore’s fashionable Whitefield neighbourhood, attracted by the city’s reputation for bioinformatics (analysing and storing biological data) and phytochemistry (chemical analysis of the substances derived from plants). In the words of Laurent Attal, the company’s executive vice-president of research and innovation, ‘This Research and Innovation centre is a tribute to India’s scientific excellence. It is designed to become a laboratory of innovation for Indian beauty and a source of inspiration for the rest of the world.’
    L’Oréal India’s initial bridge products between traditional beauty routines and modern technology had included rudimentary fusions with familiar Indian beauty regimes – Garnier Shampoo plus Oil; Maybelline Colossal Kajal – but their interest in working with Ayurvedic specialists was part of a three-year investment programme costing approximately £110 million, designed to uncover the secrets of plants used in Ayurveda that might turn up leads to improved cosmetics. It looked like L’Oréal was