Negotiating the idea of a healthy body Kerala 1900 1970

Abstract

The idea of health is beyond ailment and cure and it has to be understood against the social, cultural, religious and historical background. It varies from time to time and space to space. With the rise of modern science as a mode of enquiry, the advent of euro-centric modernity, the rise of clinical practice, organised medical education and more specifically with the emergence of the germ theory of disease causation in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, what came to be identified as western medicine or allopathic medicine, backed by European colonialism, western medicine came to acquire a hegemonic dominance over therapeutic practices within the Europe and the non-European world. The change from speculative knowledge to a rational understanding of the human body was based on the ‘new way of seeing’, which Foucault calls the ‘medical gaze’. Beyond the claims of objectivity and rationality, an alliance of objects, words and language emerged to make the shift possible. By the beginning of the twentieth century, with the spread of colonial modernity and the western medical views about the idea of a healthy body in Kerala, the traditional medical systems had to negotiate, accept and adjust to the new language of medicine and the new centres of power. Ayurveda grew as the single representative of the native medical systems and became a major discussant in the negotiation of the idea of a healthy body along with new epistemological principles, centres of colonial and native state power, western medicine, male- female equations, and social reform movements. The main questions addressed in the study include, how the native medical systems redefined the idea of a healthy body in the light of the western medical ideas; how the ‘idea of a healthy body’ formed a space for the competition of socio-political ideologies for domination; and what were the contexts, dynamisms, influences and impacts of these negotiations. The ideas of the twentieth century Kerala about human body and its health developed through these negotiations. The necessity of the concern for public health, the perception of the health of an individual body as a part of the health of the whole nature, universality of the human body, the common structure of the human body beyond all social distinctions, and the infallibility of traditional knowledge systems and their reinterpretation are some of the agreements evolved through the negotiation of the idea of a healthy body. The ideas about health and healthcare that evolved in the social and political context of nationalism and colonial modernity in Kerala were political and cultural developments rather than mere medical ideas.