42 chapter
medicine that developed in South Asia and employs medications, dietary pre-
scriptions and other interventions to treat illness. Kerala features ayurvedic
facilities and physicians who specialize in treating mental disorders, and it
is the practices these institutions and individuals engage in that I refer to as
“ayurvedic psychiatry.” Allopathic medicine is alleged to be uniform in its
practice around the world, and there is a lot of truth to this. However, it
should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with ethnographic analyses
of such modernist institutions and their claims to universality that there are
some uniquely Indian or Keralite features of allopathic psychiatry. “Religious
therapies” is a somewhat more reifi ed category when compared to ayurveda
and allopathy. Th e latter two healing systems have institutional histories and
canons of knowledge and practice while the “religious therapies” considered
here are, more precisely, three diff erent therapies: one that is practiced at a
Muslim mosque, another at a Hindu temple and the third at a Christian
church. Th ese therapies do share an emphasis on the role of the divine and a
person’s relation to the divine in healing illness, though they also have their
particular methods for doing so. Th e religious therapies and the two medical
practices also overlap in some ways. For example, ayurvedic psychiatric medi-
cines are sometimes administered at Chottanikkara temple, and counseling at
Vettucaud church resembles the psychotherapy off ered by allopathic psych-
ologists and psychiatrists.
Ayurvedic Psychiatry
Whereas many ayurvedic practitioners in India treat mental illness, or unmāda
rog, simply as an aspect of their general practice, Kerala is notable for ayurvedic
physicians who specialize in psychiatry and ayurvedic facilities that specialize
in the treatment of mental disorders.^1
Summarizing Ayurveda
I am going to go ahead and commit the sin of trying to summarize ayurveda
to provide context for understanding the treatment of psychopathology in this
medical system. When I explain the kind of research I conducted in India,
people unfamiliar with ayurvedic medicine often ask me to briefl y explain how
ayurveda works. Th is question conveys an expectation that ayurveda can be
reduced to easily summarizable ideas and principles. Perhaps this is how we
tend to think about any unfamiliar medical system, but I am sure it would
sound odd to ask the same question about biomedicine.