From the hallowed hallways of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi to the rustic village towns of Malabar, Indudharan Menon’s journey in pursuit of knowledge has been long and fascinating. For over 40 years he has been researching Kerala’s healing traditions in the company of some of its last great practitioners.
On a recent visit to Thiruvananthapuram, Indudharan recounted his journey, a scattershot story mingled with strands of Kerala’s intellectual history, much of which is inaccessible to us now.
Indudharan was born in 1952 into the Anakkara Vadakkath tharavadu of Malabar, the house of such legends as A.V.Kuttimalu Amma, Ammu Swaminadhan, Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, Mrinalini Sarabhai and others. His parents, G.Susheela and T.V.Kunhi Krishnan, were freedom fighters, literary figures and social reformers.
In the early 1970s, Indudharan moved to Delhi to study Physics and later philosophy at the St. Stephens College. Finishing his degree, the young Indudharan was all set to go abroad and study with Herbert Marcuse, one of the big daddies of existentialism.
Life took a detour after a chance meeting with Shulapani Varier. “He found my roadmap for the future rather absurd” recalls Indudharan. Shulapani questioned “the need to venture so far when there was so much to learn right here.”
Sceptical, but all too eager to experiment with life, Indudharan decided to defer his foreign plans. It was the start of an eventful journey.
The next several years were spent studying tantra and mantra-sastra in the quintessential gurukula way with several traditional scholars in Kerala. Knowledge of these was once considered as essential in the training to become a physician as it involved techniques to tame the mind and heighten awareness.
Later Indudharan approached the legendary polymath Poomully Neelakantan Namboodiri to learn the darshanas and hathayoga. Aram thampuran, as Poomully was famously known, was a no-nonsense guru. He had only a handful of disciples. To be one of them was a great honour.
“He was encyclopaedic in his understanding of traditional sciences. We would start discussing yoga. In an instant he would switch to samkhya, and before long, the discussion would have turned to music. Unless you were quick on the uptake and had done your homework, he would show you the door,” recollects Indudharan.
The longest phase of his learning was under Vaidyamadham Cheriya Narayanan Namboodiri. Vaidyamadham belonged to the grand lineage of ashtavaidyas, a tradition unique to Kerala. It emerged from an amalgam of the classical eight-partite (ashta-anga) Ayurveda, which had its genesis in Northern India, and folk healing practices of Kerala. During his three decades-long association with Vaidyamadham, Indudharan studied in-depth the text Ashtanga Hrudayam and had the chance to also observe its practices from close quarters.
In the olden days, the training to become an ashtavaidya physician started with memorising the text Ashtanga Hrudayam . The students were also taught Sanskrit, poetry, philosophy, the rules of reasoning and argument, all of which they believed served one’s function as a physician.
After a long apprenticeship phase, they were sent for a year of retreat to the family temple where they recited Ashtanga Hrudayam daily and reflected on its teachings.
“As much as it was a medical training, for the ashtavaidyas, it was also a way of life. Being a physician under this tradition meant training the mind to be both analytical and intuitive” explains Indudharan.
In the years since he began researching, Indudharan was witness to these traditions undergo radical changes. To align with modern education, the old ways of learning had given way to contemporary institutionalised approaches. Such a shift also marked the end of an era in the history of these healing traditions.
“The ashtavaidya and folk systems of medicine required students to dedicate a decade or more to master the art of healing. The world we have arrived at today has no tolerance for such training. While global spa-Ayurveda, pandering to new age fantasies, brings economic gains, the real knowledge of traditional medicine is slipping away,” feels Indudharan.
Currently a scholar-in-residence at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, at sixty-two Indudharan is still on his research into Kerala’s time-honoured healing practices.
“I came into it at a time when much of this knowledge had started evaporating. The grand old men I came in contact with were dying flames. Now that they are gone, Ayurveda has changed hands. It stands the risk of getting reduced to a system subaltern to modern biomedicine and business,” he feels.
