cooling mudpacks: the aesthetic quality of therapy 181
allopathic medicines, are seen as “heating,” a quality which can be dangerous,
destabilizing and adverse to mental health. Velupillai emphasizes the vegetar-
ian nature of the local diet (referring even guiltily to taking “perhaps a little”
milk and buttermilk which are considered only marginally vegetarian) and
refers to taking oil baths, which are akin to the picchu treatment patients at the
GAMH found aesthetically agreeable. Many people in Kerala today do eat
meat and fi sh and also smoke and drink, but recall that patients at the GAMH
were required to give up these indulgences while undergoing treatment.
Regardless of whether the emphasis on gentleness is a modern or (post)
colonial innovation, it is something that clients of ayurveda appreciate. Th is
is perhaps a case of eff ective maneuvering around the hegemony, in terms of
funding and government support, of allopathic medicine. Ayurveda empha-
sized nonviolent approaches to health and illness and attracted some patients
away from allopathy. Or it may have been the case that ayurvedic practitioners
realized that in relation to allopathy they need to emphasize what they do best,
to promote practices that they felt were more unique to ayurveda. It is possible
that ayurveda never developed or emphasized invasive interventions for acute
problems in the way that allopathy did. Several healers and non-medical spe-
cialists in Kerala depicted allopathic medicine as more appropriate for acute
and traumatic illness and injury while claiming that ayurveda excels at treating
chronic problems that take time to develop and to treat. Indeed, as we will see
later, the speed of onset of a problem and the speed of the process of therapy
are reshaping some people’s relations to these two medical practices.
Th us healing systems continually realign in relation to one another, which
is not to say that they are merely constructed or lacking in unique features
of knowledge and practice. And this type of readjustment in this medically
plural environment is not new. While in the colonial and postcolonial period,
ayurveda and allopathy, and their promoters, react to each other, in an earl-
ier period, ayurvedic practitioners adapted methods from the Islamically-
associated unani medicine in north India (Leslie 1976). While healers are
infl uenced by, or resist, other medical practices, people with illnesses who navi-
gate these systems respond to and call for realignments, as we saw in the case
of patients who discontinued allopathic psychiatric care because of concerns
about unpleasant or dangerous eff ects of treatment. Th ese patients basically
vote with their feet, which is something that occurs more often in a med-
ically plural society, and can have an impact on the nature of medical prac-
tice.^15 Allopathic practitioners might be tempted to reinvent their practice to
emphasize more gentle treatments, but they may be concerned that allopathy
might lose its distinction as a fast, invasive, and, at times, heroic medicine,
especially for acute and infectious cases.