The main purpose of this entry is to post a transcript of a short talk I just gave at the regional Fulbright conference in Kolkata. It's on Ayurved, surprise surprise. See below if you want to cut to the chase. But since I'm stuck here in Siliguri on the edge of the Hills for another few hours due to a transportation bandh, I might as well do some rambling. That's what blogs are for, right?

So, rambling on . . . I've just had my first real taste of India. Technically I lived in India for almost 5 months in 2004, but that was Kalimpong, in Darjeeling District, in the hills. It's an area that (as Nepalis love to point out) was once part of Nepal and is still populated almost entirely by Nepali-speakers. Hence the bandh: these "gorkhas" as they call themselves (since they're not, after all, Nepali a citizenship sense) are staging a protest and demanding their own state, to be called 'Gorkhaland.' The movement began in the late eighties with ugly consequences and few tangible gains for any but the movement leaders, but it seems now the next generation wants to take a crack at the cause. The activists/agitators feel with some justification that they have little in common with the rest of West Bengal, the state that now extends a lanky limb of land from its base in Sundarban mangrove jungles flush against the Bay of Bengal and the megalopolis of Kolkata (once Calcutta) to reach up and cradle the rich Timber, Tea and Tourism resources of its hill region. If West Bengal is an elephant's head (I'm not in fact looking at a map at the moment), then Darjeeling district is the covered chafing dish supported by the beast's upwardly-extended trunk, a narrow spit of land more technically known (I've just been informed) as the "chicken's neck." I'll stick to large and majestic mammals, thanks. It's a contradiction, if I may speak for the Gorkhas, that the plate of delights and the hungry elephant should be lumped together without regard for their peculiar relationship. That Bengali elephant is hungry, everyone knows it. But India (and Nepal) is full of such contradictions. If every politically disenfranchised, culturally-marginalized, or linguistically-isolated group in the subcontinent had their own state . . .

I'm (as of 11 March) in Siliguri, as I said, right at the juncture between the elephantine nostrils and the sterling tray. I'll be here until the bandh clears up, which may or may not be as early as 6 AM tomorrow. Last night I was on a train running like an artery up through the snout: the Darjeeling Mail, my first bona fide Indian train, but already I feel like an old hand. India, this part anyway, feels only halfway-foreign after almost 11 combined months in the Darjeeling hills and Kathmandu. If the Nepali language has become a nearly transparent pane for me by now, barely interposing any noticeable structure between words and meaning, then the related north Indian lingua franca of Hindi is growing translucent. Numbers, days of the weeks are all the same as in Nepali, and the most useful linguistic knowledge here is simply knowing which English words work in the Indian context.

Yesterday I woke up in Kolkata, a city that makes commercial Siliguri's half-million look sleepy and provincial. But two mornings ago I woke up in the Sundarban, the largest mess of mangroves in the world. It's a labyrinth of inhopsitable islands where the Ganges and dozens of other rivers finally meet the sea, and it's known for its man-eating Royal Bengal Tigers, but the India side alone (and two-thirds of the Sundarban falls in Bangladesh) is home to over four million people. They live on the clay-soil, flood-prone islands of the region, cultivating rice in fields reclaimed from the mangroves and fishing. They are notoriously battered by cyclones and tortured by the tigers who pick off not just their livestock but people too, like the honey-hunters who steal through the islands of the Preserve to forage their thin, heady honey. They wear masks on the backs of their heads since tigers like to attack from behind. Like much of India, the region is home to a mix of Hindus and Muslims. Unlike in many places, though, in the Sundarban it's hard to tell the difference. Faced with common hardship, the village dwellers have evolved a culture with more in common than apart. Hindu and Mussalman alike worship Ban Bibi, the goddess of the forest, and the various deities associated with the dreaded and revered tiger. Hindu and Muslim alike lead lives that, from a passing ferry or rickshaw, look laborious yet lazily-paced. The landscape is brutal but lush--banana trees and rice paddy and fish ponds--water plentiful in this month.

I was there on an unabashed (well, slightly abashed) tourist mission. I wanted to see this region, to get on a boat and cruise its brackish waterways, see the villages, taste some local food and honey, watch the wildlife. Daydream about the hundreds of tigers that prowl the vastness even if I couldn't see them. And that's exactly what I did for a long, hot, sunburnt day--sandwiched between two days of intensive traveling from/to Kolkata by Bus, Tuk-Tuk, Ferry, rickshaw, and (smaller) Ferry.
All day long the guide tirelessly explained some of the nuances of the unique estuary ecosystem, pointed out black-capped kingfishers and greater egrets and, once, a set of tiger pugmarks in the tidal muck of a mangrove island. Other than that there was no sign of the big felines, but I thought I could feel the tension I've read about that only the presence of a top-of-the-food-chain predator can create. All life wary, silence thick.
After the second night under a mosquito net and the same vehicle sequence in reverse, I found myself back briefly in the equally hot, teeming, ineffable jungle of Kolkata. Some of the hardship of the Sundarbans life comes from human life there being so strictly circumscribed: by the shark and crocodile-infested water, by the threat of the tiger, by the fickleness of the monsoon rains. In Kolkata humanity knows no such bounds, it seems: life and its gritty, grotty accoutrements spill out in every direction, composing a city too big to know or tell. If my quintessential memories of the Sundarbans are of static, hazy green islands lying flat against grey-green water, my memory of Kolkata is buzzing still with the infinite variety of impressions that city bombards you with: a tiny tea shop no more than 2.5' x 2.5' x 3', proprietor crouching inside and making his tea on a charcoal burner on the sidewalk outside; an entire district of typewriter-wallahs copying (forging?)documents along a busy street; legions of street food vendors, and piles of sumptuous flesh-toned sweets; a cavernous communist coffeehouse vibrating with caffeinated nerves, paint fumes and animated conversation. literally hundreds of book stalls lining college street, a city of books. a muslim lane, butchered cow brains quivering in piles, a small mosque every fifty or hundred yards. mosaiced walls. men, mostly men in lungis, on rickshaws, in suits or in almost nothing, walking, squatting, standing, moving through this vibrant labyrinth of a city.

(Ramble off)

Presentation to Fulbright Conference

(To fit my 10-min timeslot I ended up having to cut about a third of what's printed below)


I was going to start by saying that I don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to define Ayurveda in only 10 minutes, and then I remembered that the Carak Samhita, the oldest complete Ayurvedic text, presents a nice compact Sanskrit definition in the form of a sutra. It goes “hitahitam sukham dukham ayus tasya hitahitam. Maanam [duration] ca tacca yatroktam ayurveda sa ucyate:” roughly, “Ayurveda is that which describes what is useful and not useful for promoting a healthy life.” The word Ayurveda itself is Sanskrit for “knowledge of life,” and the tradition includes everything under the sun pertaining to life and its propagation, maintenance, and extension.
Just continuing for a moment with the 2-minute crash course introduction to Ayurveda, if you take the Carak Samhita and flip it open, you might find material on anything from info on what food and daily routine are appropriate for the season of late spring; instructions for Panca Karma, a bodily purification regimen; care of children up to the critical age of 7 years; classification of plants and animals according to their properties; countless herbal formulas, or how to prepare an enema apparatus from an animal bladder and a piece of reed. Later texts include lengthy sections on surgical technique (still first millennium CE) and, quite a bit later, alchemical recipes using mercury preparations for purposes of rejuvenation. Since many of you may be familiar with Ayurveda through yoga, I want to note that the inclusion into the Ayurvedic tradition of Ashtanga yoga (including not just asana pranayama, dhyan or meditation, etc. in pursuit of samadhi) is a comparatively recent development. In other words, until quite recently yoga was practiced for its own sake, i.e. as a means of liberation, and not specifically as a way of attaining health on this plane.
So Ayurveda is ‘knowledge of life,’ and everything pertaining to it. As such, and as a product of a particular civilization and period of history, it is also impossible to disentangle completely from other fields such as religion and Jyotish (astrology). This all-encompassing quality of Ayurveda, its lack of segregation from other areas of knowledge, is precisely what makes Ayurveda so powerful on the one hand—and so powerfully appealing to a Western crowd hungry for holistic traditions and the spiritual promise they hold--and so difficult for modern science to come to grips with on the other. I’ll just note in passing that one problem with trying to conduct clinical research on Ayurveda is that Ayurved recognizes and gives a good deal of importance to intangible, unquantifiable things like an individual’s constitution as determined by the qualities their pulse, and the presence of prana, a sort of vital breath analogous to the Chinese qi. In effect Ayurved recognizes so many variables that the hope of performing a controlled experiment becomes a pipe-dream
So, no surprise, there are fundamental incompatibilities between modern science and classical Ayurveda. How various parties navigate these differences has been one of the themes of my work so far.

Just a couple words about myself before I get into my work so far. . . like many Americans I got into Ayurveda through English-language books by the likes of Robert Svoboda and Vasant Lad (both Vaidyas whom I have a great deal of respect for). These books tend to present Ayurveda as a system of “self-healing,” to quote one of Dr. Lad’s titles, and this is partly because the legal climate in the US means that Ayurved can’t claim its proper status as a medical system complete with actual doctors. As Jean Langford has observed in her book Fluent Bodies, self-healing is a short step from self-help: Ayurveda is growing in popularity in the US as a path to self-improvement and even to greater individuation, which as Langford points out is a unique goal of holistic health movements in the West.
I spent last year studying at Dr. Lad’s Ayurvedic Institute in New Mexico, where the emphasis is on becoming a lifestyle consultant and educator about how to improve one’s physical, mental and spiritual health through Ayurved. I learned a great deal there but it did not exactly prepare me for the sheer diversity of forms that Ayurveda takes in its native Southasian context. I spent the first few months of my Fulbright mostly on surveying this diversity and trying to make sense of it. Without oversimplifying too much, a few broad types of Ayurveda can be delineated using botanical language. The first is the heirloom varieties, the so-called traditional Vaidyas who learn both from texts and orally and never attend a government institution. I won’t have much to say about them today, but ask me in 5 months. Then there are the graduates of the Ayurveda College at Tribhuvan University, whom I mostly think of as vigorous hybrid cultivars. We’ll get to them in a minute. Then there are the new shoots from old roots, to borrow a metaphor from Robert Svoboda. These are the new incarnations of Ayurved that have sprung up in fertile soil in the West. This is the kind of Ayurved I was exposed to and that still informs my own perspective to a large degree. Whereas in the States, Ayurveda’s perceived promise of spiritual self-improvement often seems to trump the merely medical.of Ayurveda, in Nepal Ayurved is still primarily concerned with preventing and treating illness, i.e. with medicine, If Ayurved on the ground in Nepal looks less than glamorous to a Westerner expecting salvation or at least some insight into his or her own being, let him consider that the local culture has other branches for dealing with those sorts of concerns. Ayurveda may be deeply connected to philosophy and religion, but in its home context it has the luxury of being able to specialize in medicine.
It’s noteworthy that there are a few places in Nepal that purvey this kind the personalized, self-realization brand of Ayurveda that is growing so fast in America. But they are the places that cater to largely to foreigners and upwardly-mobile, westward-looking Nepalis.

Now onto the Ayurveda that I’ve dubbed “hybrid.” This kind of Ayurveda is associated with institutions like Naradevi hospital, the official government Ayurveda hospital in Kathmandu. I’d like to describe briefly what I saw over the course of my observation sessions there, because I think it’s representative of a new and pivotal chapter in Ayurveda’s history.
Naradevi has a public Outpatient Department clinic that also serves as an interning opportunity for students in their final year of training. Every Monday and Thursday people gather in the courtyard and wait to see the senior physician, Dr. D.B. Roka, or one of his team of interns. The clinical model is strikingly Western in many ways. Consultations are quick, for one, since there are so many patients to get through in a few short hours. The doctors and wear white coats and stethoscopes around their necks, and order blood tests and X-rays as necessary. I wasn’t surprised to see that taking of blood pressure is routine, but I was surprised to see that the traditional practice of reading the patient’s pulse is not. The patient consultations happen in Nepali but the diagnosis is in allopathic English, sometimes with the equivalent Sanskrit term glossed by Dr. Roka.
If Langford’s book is a reliable indicator, the biomedical style of Naradevi’s OPD is typical of the Ayurveda practiced in most of India’s institutional settings as well. The pattern as she describes it is “while in the classroom students cram Ayurvedic theory, on the hospital wards they learn primarily which Ayurvedic drugs to prescribe for which biomedical disease categories” (127). And actually, at Naradevi antibiotics and anti-worm medications are routinely used in addition to classical Ayurvedic formulas and modern Ayurvedic patent medicines. Even when herbs are used at Naradevi, they are cited in pseudo-biomedical jargon for their “immunomodulatory effect” (guduchi) or for being an “herbal antibiotic,” and never in the classical terms of rasa virya vipak and prabhav.
Anyway, after a few sessions of observing this pattern in the OPD room again and again, I was beginning to despair of any substantial traces of Ayurvedic thinking or language when it came to understanding a patient’s case. Then an older man came in, complaining of shifting pains in his extremities. The intern on duty, unable to pinpoint any biomedical disease category, nevertheless recognized that the patient’s complaints fit under the Ayurvedic heading of a Vata disorder. (Vata or “wind” is the dry, cold, mobile humor associated with old age, degeneration, pain and stiffness amongst a universe of other resonances.) Thus a diagnosis was possible, albeit a vague one: Vata Vyadhi, increased Vata, read the entry in the log book. His treatment consisted of ashwagandha powder, a nourishing herb that soothes aggravated Vata and strengthens Vata-affected tissues (dhatus). The episode proved to me that Ayurvedic theory is there at the Naradevi OPD, waiting in the shadows like a dusty, disused tool for its moment. For the doctor and his interns, however, the tools of allopathy gleam and glitter with the legitimacy of capital-S Science and it’s no surprise that those allopathic tools are the ones they reach for first. Of course the doctors are the first ones to point out that it is the patients too who demand the easy-to-take pills and syrups that patent and allopathic drugs provide, preferring them over Ayurveda’s messy powders and bitter-tasting tablets.
The hybridization or fusion of Ayurved with biomedicine is visible in more ways than the processes of diagnosis and treatment. At the end of every OPD session the office is flooded with drug reps from the patent medicine companies peddling their products and handing out free samples. Some of the very structure of the biomedical industry has taken hold in an ostensibly Ayurvedic zone. Looking at the products these companies are pushing is an extremely interesting exercise: there’s not much time to get into it but basically they are modern-looking syrups and capsules made with Ayurvedic herbs and marketed in a way that both looks to modern science for legitimacy (in that they refer to clinical trials etc. and use allopathic language) and claim to remedy such ills of modernity as toxins in the air, food and the water supply.
There’s plenty more to say but I’m about out of time. I’d like to wrap up by milking this comparison of this allopathy-heavy brand of Ayurved to a hybrid cultivar just a little more: like hybrid plants, the Ayurveda practiced at Naradevi is vigorous, but like hybrids, it is unlikely to “come true” from seed. When you plant the seed of a hybrid tomato the tomato you get will look nothing like the one you got the seed from. An allopathy-ayurved hybrid is likely to be equally unstable, and already the strain seems to be reverting to the tendencies of its allopathic side.
As in farming, here too genetic diversity is crucial. The hybrids are bearing fruit, but in the march of progress we had better remember the trusted older varieties as well.