34 chapter
questionnaire. Informants were given the option of returning a questionnaire
because follow-up interviews were hard to arrange, especially since many
informants did not have telephones and were no longer visiting the treatment
center where we originally interviewed them. Also, some patients lived a great
distance from Trivandrum, where Biju, Kavitha and I were based.
Although we interviewed a substantial number of women, circumstances
led us to include more male informants. Because I and two of my assistants,
Biju and Benny, were male, it was generally easier for us to interview men.
Male informants probably felt more comfortable talking to us, and norms
of public interactions between men and women, especially among strangers,
made it occasionally diffi cult to approach women for interviews. It was eas-
ier to interview female informants with my assistant Kavitha, who is female.
However, because of restrictions on women traveling and staying out late and
the fact that Kavitha lived farther from our Trivandrum-area research sites, it
was necessary to conduct more interviews with Biju. Benny lived in northern
Kerala and assisted only with interviews at the Government Ayurveda Mental
Hospital. Th e gender of the informant did not always correspond to the gen-
der of the assistant who accompanied me. Sometimes I visited a research site
with Biju or Kavitha, depending on who was available that day, and we chose
people to interview based on who had time and was willing. Th ere were thus
several occasions when Biju or Benny and I interviewed female informants
and Kavitha and I interviewed men.
Th e assistance of Biju, Kavitha and Benny was invaluable. Th ey had an
excellent, almost therapeutic, rapport with the patients we interviewed, and
they raised important insights regarding the healing systems we examined and
the lives of the people we spoke with.
Th is study considers the aesthetic quality of healing in a medically plural-
istic environment through chapters that move from the more ethnographic to
the more analytical. Chapter 2 (“Th ree Th erapies of South India”) depicts the
three systems of healing that are the focus of this study. Ayurvedic medicine
is presented in terms of the offi cial, text-based theories of ayurveda as well
as observations of actual practice in clinics and hospitals. I discuss specifi c
methods for the treatment of psychopathology in ayurveda, and in doing so I
build the groundwork for understanding the aesthetic experience of patients
who undergo these treatments. Allopathic medicine is alleged to be highly
standardized, and ideally it is practiced in the same manner in every part of
the world. Although there is signifi cant uniformity in allopathic medicine, this
chapter highlights unique features of allopathic psychiatry as it is practiced
in India, such as the major involvement of the family in treatment. Finally,
the rituals and routines one undergoes for illness at Chottanikkara temple,