April 20, 2008 at 10:06 am (Health, India)
Tags: Anthropology, Ayurveda, Health, Hindi, Mussoorie
Even just being here for a few weeks affords such a privileged insight into people’s lives and their ways of being. Particularly in terms of health, as that’s what I tend to be most attuned to.
There’s a huge reliance on “medicine” here and a really interesting synergy between indigenous explanatory models for disease and an overwhelming faith in allopathic treatment, usually in the form of a pill. The ayurvedic basis of explanations for illness is very perceptible – lots of people are ill at the moment and they attribute it to Mussoorie’s erratic climate and the constant fluctuation between heat and cold, wet and dry.
According to Tasleem, his sore throat was likely caused by the sour mango he ate the night before his symptoms began. People rarely stress a single symptom, though, but rather the interconnection of several. “Bukhar” (fever) and “body ache/pain” are high profile symptoms that get mentioned a lot. Although Habib said that if you go to the doctor with a fever and other symptoms, the doctor will explain that the accompanying aches and pains are as a result of the fever which is the main illness to be treated. He also took some almonds from me one breaktime because they help his body to generate heat.
Kaushal and Aasha have both been unwell with colds and fevers. Finances will only stretch to a very short term cause of allopathic drugs, so Kaushal supplements them with “ghar ke dawai (I think)” (home remedies). For Aasha, Kaushal heated finely chopped garlic in some oil and massaged it into Aasha’s chest and back. She also warmed a paan leaf in the oil and placed it against Aasha’s ribs under her clothes before she slept as a means of drawing out the fever. I wonder if Kaushal would still employ these methods were she financially secure enough to afford allopathic medicine whenever deemed necessary. I’ll try and muster the Hindi to ask her.
The most intriguing thing for me though was Kaushal describing a year-long period of serious illness she suffered when her kids were small. She told me about the huge amount of pressure she was put under by her husband’s family – particularly by her mother-in-law, a situation which persists years later. She had a toddler and a baby yet was expected to prepare food for the entire extended family on a daily basis, as well as undertaking whatever paid work she could find outside the home. After several months of this routine, she explained, she became weaker and weaker until eventually “[her] blood finished” (which I can’t remember how to reproduce in Hindi, but it involves “khoon” and “khatam” – “mera khoon khatam ho gaya” ?)
She didn’t elaborate much on the symptoms, but she did say that her brother had to give her a bottle of blood and that she slowly recovered. Amazing. Her blood finished. I’m so curious to know what that means for Kaushal. And I’m so inspired to witness first hand examples of culturally influenced experiences of health and disease. Three years of anthropology readings brought to life.
And the role of language in the framing, understanding and expression of subjective experience couldn’t be more clear. In English, “my blood finished” is grammatically nonsensical and conceptually alien. But in Hindi, in Mussoorie, in the life of my friend Kaushal, it is a very real and traumatic phenomenon that deprived her of her health for months on end.
We’re endlessly fascinating, we humans.
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March 26, 2008 at 9:02 am (Health, India)
On the Saturday of the weekend at the boys’ home, we were picked up for a day at St Luke’s Leprosarium, about 45 minutes away. The day was touchingly arranged by the director of the centre for 45 years, the wonderfully eloquent Dr Jeyabalan, and everything was coordinated by his right-hand man, physical therapist, sociologist, ex-patient and all-round superman, Jesu Raj. The Neem Tree website explains all about the hospital and what a wonderful project it is, providing treatment for leprosy sufferers, care for their children, and education programmes that work towards alleviating the stigma that persists around a disease that maintains its biblical plague-like connotations particularly in rural villages, in spite of it being eminently curable if caught in time. You can read the stories of other visitors, too, all of whom have been as touched by the dedication of the staff and the smiling courage of the patients and their families as I was. Again, I want to go back, to spend more time with the patients, learning about who they are beyond the physical deformities that leprosy has bequeathed them and which, for the social world from which they come, are all that is required to define them.
It’s a visit perhaps better explained through pictures – watch this space.
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March 8, 2008 at 12:17 pm (Health, India)
On the way to the waterfalls yesterday, we stopped at a local ayurvedic hospital to enquire about treatment for a condition Katy has (and whose debilitating symptoms leave us with quite similar – and equally quickly depleted - energy levels, one thing that has made it very easy for us to relate to and feel comfortable with each other this week). It was a real pleasure to experience a truly indigenous health centre – tiny and somewhat neglected, but again partially supported by the church – especially given my own experience of ayurveda in Britain, and Katy’s in the more tourist-orientated set-ups that line the Keralan coast. The hospital has a program of ayurvedic psychiatric treatment which really intrigues me – again, I could spend months just observing the life of the centre. I see PhD topics everywhere I go.
The doctors’ suggestion to Katy of a 21 day live-in course of intensive treatment led to a discussion later about our respective – and similar – attitudes to our health. I’m tired this week and I feel things wearing me out – having a routine, the constant giving out of energy through the work we’ve been doing, the bus journeys, the traffic, and a sun that genuinely beats you over the head. I’m very aware that I couldn’t do this work longterm and remain confident in the maintenance of my health.
But I do remain confident at the moment; I know that I need a good rest, but I’ll do that tomorrow with a few days at the beach. Because I’m thriving here in so many ways, and I realise that comes from being in the world, engaging with life and with people and feeling myself living. I don’t need a retreat – I don’t need a break from life, I had that for years. Instead, I need to suck out that famous marrow of life, but to do it in a way that is nourishing, not depleting of, my health. And I know how to do that, and here I have the freedom to be as I choose to be, which is ironic in some ways given the extaordinarily exhausting nature of the country, but equally makes perfect sense and mirrors my whole approach to India as one enormous affirmation of Life!
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