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Literary Review
Medicine man
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A Life of Healing is a sympathetic and often personal reading of the life of P.S. Varier, the founder of the Kottakal-based Arya Vaidyashala, says KAVITA SIVARAMAKRISHNAN.
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ANY mention of research or writing on indigenous medicine makes nowadays for a lively conversation piece. Mention Ayurveda, and people eagerly share their experiences of unctuous oil massages, conversation buzzes about celebrity weight loss and flower power, and worse, most presume that research in the area must lie in the sphere of tourism rather than possibly history.
If awareness of indigenous Ayurvedic medicine has now become embodied in all that is foreign and exotic such as in our own Body shop industry in Kerala, then lay readers need to read Krishnankutty's book simply to be told a story with a difference regarding the reform and revival of Ayurvedic learning and practice in Kerala. This book is in the form of a biography of the life of the founder of the Kottakal-based Vaidyashala, Vaidyaratnam Sankunni Varier (1869-1944). While intended to be an anniversary-commemorating work, it thankfully amounts to more substantial fare.
The author writes the biography as a straightforward birth-to-death sketch of the life and career of P.S. Varier, while simultaneously providing an informed account of his moorings in late19th- and early 20th-century Malabar society. Varier, she narrates, was the pioneering founder of the Vaidyashala through enterprising manufacture and marketing even as he believed in the scientific preparation of Ayurvedic medicine, and espoused the need to introduce professionalised features in medical consultations and practices, primarily by promoting uniform, institutionalised education among indigenous practitioners.
Krishnankutty's reconstruction of Varier is lifted above the humdrum signposting of Varier's profitable expansion of the Vaidyashala by her evident familiarity with the family ties and community networks that shaped his life and work. Varier's life is unfolded as he grew from his gurukul training under one of the old Ashtavaidyan families of Kerala, to his role and obligations as a Varier or ambalavasi caste that was tied closely to temple service or obligations, as well as his responsibilities as the senior-most male member or karnavan of his matrilineal family.
Krishnankutty, in her sympathetic and often intuitive personal reading of his life, therefore draws an engaging account of Varier, shown in his relations with the Vaidyashala staff, his drama troupe and amongst children as an immensely disciplined and correct yet humane physician and paternal figure, more lively perhaps than his diary extracts reveal him to be in his unrelenting notes on his daily accounts of food intake and pulse checks!
In an otherwise even and competently rendered biography Krishnankutty briefly falters as she is tempted to place her subject in a historical colonial tableau, as she alludes to Varier's revival of Ayurveda as an indigenous political response and resistance in cultural terms to the colonial agenda in the introduction of western science and medicine. Yet her own account shows Varier's life and ideas as being not so easy to locate and generalise. In the chapter on the Mapila riots, for instance, we see that Varier's medical service and business gains him the protection of the Mapila rebels, and also see him as a lone voice that asks both the Servants of India League, as well on the British Enquiry on the disturbance, to provide relief not only to affected Hindu families, but also to the families of the Mapila rebels. It shows a man at once devoutly Hindu in his meticulous performance of rites of passage and propitiatory rituals, while able simultaneously to have a vision and judgment much beyond his immediate surroundings that was voiced and reconciled in the vocabulary of a more traditional paternalistic and liberal role and function.
A Life of Healing: A Biography of Vaidyaratnam P.S. Varier, Gita Krishnankutty, Viking, Rs. 395.
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