Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World by Anne Gerritsen

Author:Anne Gerritsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350195905
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Cleansing the social body

In the backdrop waves of epidemics afflicting Keralam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, soap’s intrinsic cleansing and germicidal properties converted it into an indispensable therapeutic object. Modern medical practitioners began to champion soaps, especially the carbolic and coal tar varieties,90 and Malayali soap companies began to produce them. While medicated soaps were becoming a worldwide phenomenon in the period,91 soap acquired a distinct regional spin in being recast as oushadha soaps by incorporating elements from the varied nattuvaidyam traditions in Keralam such as Ayurvedam, Siddhavaidyam and Vishavaidyam.92 Oushadha soaps claimed to cater to commonly reported skin ailments in Keralam such as leprosy, scabies, eczema and other conditions like arthritis, impure blood and envenomation. Such prescriptions were consistent with the humoral conception of the human body followed by some of the nattuvaidya traditions.93 As the blend of nattuvaidya medicines and novel techniques that enhanced their shelf life, oushadha soaps exemplified the modernization of regional medical traditions.94

Advertisements in Malayalam magazines and secondary literature suggest that nattuvaidya practitioners entered the commercial production of oushadha soaps from the early twentieth century. One of the first companies to manufacture oushadha soaps in Keralam was the Sadananda Soap Works in Kottarakkara (Travancore). Established alongside the Sadananda Avadhootha Asramam, a monastery-cum-clinic, around 1900 by the seer and vaidya (medical practitioner) Sadananda Swami (1877–1924), the company claimed to be the pioneer soap maker in Keralam.95 Sadananda produced soaps infused with Ayurvedic and Siddha oushadhas to treat skin diseases, arthritis and other maladies. The company claimed that its soaps were best-suited for the constitution of ee naatukaar (the people of this land/region).96 By the 1930s, oushadha soap brands proliferated in Keralam. The Malabar Shakti Oushadhasala, established in Kozhikode in 1930, produced Nalpamara Soap (nalpamara being a blend of medicinal herbs). Around the same time, Ramananda Swami (1896–1957), a seer and renowned Siddha vaidya, developed Saseendra Soap from the medical potion he had conceived to treat skin diseases at his Sidhavaidya Asramam in Thrissur. However, C. R. Kesavan Vaidyar created the more successful Chandrika Ayurvedic Soap based on the recipe developed by his guru, Ramananda Swami.97 Launched in the early 1940s as a cottage-scale firm at Vaidyar’s Siddha Ashramam in Irinjalakkuda (Cochin), Chandrika grew from an oushadha to a top vegetable-oil-based toilet soap brand in and outside Keralam within a few decades.98 In 1938, KSI prepared oushadha soaps for an ayurvedic vaidya in Travancore; and soap for snakebite for a member of the Cochin royal house who purportedly testified to its efficacy.99 Udaya Oushadha Soap was another well-known brand in the 1950s, produced by Thottungal Vaidya Niketanam (Thrissur).

Soap, however, became more than an oushadham of the physical body as it came to be absorbed into struggles for social change by subjugated castes in Kerala. Nattuvaidyam being an assortment of diverse social-material practices, vaidyas came from all castes, including those at the margins of caste society. Scholars have foregrounded the critical role played by Ezhavas/Thiyyas, who possessed a rich heritage of nattuvaidyam, in the reconceptualization of regional medical traditions.

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