Sar jo tera chakraye, ya dil dooba jaye... (When my head spins, does my heart sink...) sang the comedian Johnny Walker in the 1957 film Pyaasa , playing an itinerant masseur exhorting passersby to try his special brand of champi , or head massage, to cure everything from a sinking heart to a sinking business.
Decades may have passed since, but the country’s street healers continue to thrive… in the winding bylanes of old Delhi, where fourth-generation bonesetter pehalwans (wrestlers) reside; in Mumbai’s Chor Bazaar, where a street dentist offers tooth extraction for ₹50; in its villages where peddlers of oils and ointments promise to grow your hair or add inches to your child’s height.
“India is a warm-weather culture where a lot of life is lived on the street. I imagine some of these practices, like objects of India’s other material cultures, are as old as the country itself,” speculates Ratan Vaswani, lead curator of Medicine Corner, an arts project that explores the historical and cultural landscape of health and healing in India. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust, London, a global medical charity with a parallel interest in funding arts and humanities projects. “We attempt to cover the big things about human life, such as death and sex; for instance, there’s an ongoing exhibition at the Wellcome Collection about how people studied sex over the centuries,” Vaswani says.
The India-focus was inspired by the sheer diversity of its health systems and practices, which have defied time, and perhaps even globalisation in a way.
“The masseur, the bonesetter, the ear-cleaner... these are professions with a pedigree. There are some picture-paintings of ear cleaners at the Wellcome Collection that are almost 300 years old,” says the UK-based Vaswani. His to-do list on every visit to India includes surrendering his head to a haircut-and-massage combo deal at a street barber’s. “The physicality of it fascinates me,” he says, even as he admits that his London-self would find the service intrusive to the point of assault.
From an ethnographic perspective, India can be an extremely complex landscape to document, especially as health often spills over into territories of faith and the supernatural. BLOT!, an electronic arts collective, is a collaborator on the project and has documented a small fragment of this parallel landscape through an immersive audiovisual montage, which premiered in Chennai in January. Band members Avinash Kumar and Gaurav Malaker recount several interesting encounters: meeting a height-weight doctor who promised height gain in adulthood; a temple priest who doled out free jaundice medicine; a businessman whose family distributes on Sundays a ‘miracle cure’ for kidney stones; a black magic practitioner; and a ‘healing lake’ on the outskirts of Delhi.
“This intersection of faith, medicine and accessibility was interesting for us to explore,” says Kumar. About the suitability of an AV medium for such ethnographic documentation, he concedes that they were anxious not to trivialise the perils of quackery, or end up entertaining rather than educating. “But within these conflicts reside crucial aspects of contemporary media and civic engagement; if artists do not take up eccentric and challenging agendas for their work, where will the pride, the responsibility and celebration of local culture emanate from?”
Medicine Corner attempts to link the worlds of visual art and health. ‘Healers of Dharavi’, Medicine Corner’s first exhibition at the ongoing Dharavi Biennale in Mumbai, brings together four self-taught sign painters to create oil-on-canvas portraits of local healers: from an amulet-maker, a general practitioner and a dentist to a ‘healer of gupt rog (sexual diseases). It goes a step further to highlight “how people perceive their own illnesses and seek treatment for them,” says Supriya Menon, the exhibition’s curator.
In a developing country like India with poor access to affordable healthcare, it is impossible to view these practices in isolation.
India has one doctor for every 1,500 people (World Health Organisation). A parallel health ecosystem, therefore, acquires a certain legitimacy among the people. “India’s inequalities are striking, to the point of being grotesque. Most people cannot afford healthcare. So I am interested in the ways in which people try and make sense of their circumstances,” Vaswani says, adding that such a project would inevitably overlap with other issues, including social inclusion and gaps between knowledge systems, among others.
In a natural progression, the project will next explore home-based health practices, such as planting medicinal tulsi plants, and scientific and medical knowledge systems that predate colonial times. Not limited to informal medicine, it will also capture advances in affordable healthcare today.