On a mission to preserve traditional wellness secrets

January 29, 2017 12:27 am | Updated 12:27 am IST

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Whether you have facial acne or a heavy sun tan, your grandmother most likely has a traditional remedy for it. Yet, many of us choose to resort to store-bought items that promise a quicker fix.

What we don't realise is that if such tendency prevails for long, these traditional remedies may become completely lost to the future.

It is this realisation that motivated V. N. Roy, vice-chairman of the School of Wellness, a centre for the study of spa management and therapy at Jagathy, to undertake the mammoth task of creating a repository of the indigenous knowledge regarding beauty and wellness.

"Over 35 per cent of the techniques and products used in the beauty and spa industries are of Indian origin," Mr. Roy says. "Yet they are not recognised to be Indian due to the lack of clear documentation."

Over 4 lakh recordings

To address this concern, between 2003 and 2009, Mr. Roy helmed an initiative to document traditional beauty and healing practices across the country, wherein close to 2000 people conducted field research in teams of 200 to collect a total of around 4,32,000 audio recordings of such information.

The researchers scoured the states of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and the north-eastern states, using the help of local volunteers to encourage the elderly folk in these regions to share their knowledge.

Mr. Roy was assisted in this endeavour by a 17-member team of experts in ayurveda, botany and agricultural sciences, led by Dr. Nesamony, of the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS), along with a number of other doctors.

Decoding, a challenge

However, the task is nowhere near complete, as the voice records have to be transcribed, translated into English and entered into the database. Further, the names of all plants, leaves, flowers and so on have to be recorded in their botanical terms in order to eliminate duplication of information.

This is a huge challenge given the sheer amount of data on hand, as well as the difficulty in understanding the various local dialects, Mr. Roy says. There is also a need to modify the practices to suit modern needs.

Although efforts for decoding and documentation are underway, they have been proceeding at a rather slow pace. Nevertheless, Mr. Roy plans to plough ahead with the task, hoping to put the repository to good use soon through the School of Wellness.

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