Beyond the clinical gaze. Variers’ experiments with colonial modernity
Résumé
Indigenous medical revitalization in Kerala is inextricably linked to the life and times of P S Varier.
Nevertheless, Varier’s activities were not confined to medicine alone. He was also a scholar, poet,
dramatist, musician, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Scholarly analysis on Varier and his experiments
have overlooked these multi-layers of his personality as peripheral to the larger revival movement
within Ayurveda and tried to locate him as rationalist who critically engaged with tradition and thereby
successfully negotiated with western science.
Even in his initial engagement with indigenous medicine there was a frustrating realization that
indigenous medical rationality failed to be defined or defended through the parameters of western
science. Literary traditions in medicine were defended as those that encompassed the science of the east;
nevertheless it further exposed its vulnerability as failing to conform to the epistemic standards of
western science. It is here that Varier, a “good physician”, crossed the boundaries of bodily care to the
care of tradition, seeking to derive strength from it. He was of the realization that ‘the notion of truth’
was not merely a clinical practice, but a political one. Its boundaries were shaped by collectively
defending the practice by his co-physicians, and its strength was derived from an imagined history that
frequently crossed over between myth and tradition, which was legitimated in the last instance from
societal consensus made possible through new modes of communication. This paper attempts to
relocate the revival movement through these diverse frames of the life of Varier as a reflection of the
movement itself and how a new form of indigenous science evolves and takes shape.