BackA show on Dharavi’s healers
These paintings reveal how the slum makes room for practices of all kinds
Premium(Raju Hittalamani)
Vidya Gajakosh sits in her 200 sq. ft clinic in Anna Nagar, Mumbai, every day from 10am-2pm, including Sundays. A week ago, the 47-year-old completed a course on surgery for piles—a common condition in women, all residents of Dharavi, who make up the bulk of her patients. Gajakosh has been a practising Ayurvedic doctor for 18 years and her clinic is located in a narrow lane just off Dharavi’s arterial 90 feet road. Gajakosh, who has been treating women from the neighbourhood, recognizes that the bulk of their problems arise out of infrastructure problems. Uncovered drains that run along the houses imply diseases like tuberculosis; shared and unclean toilets imply several medical conditions in the genitalia; lack of clean, drinking water supply to many houses in Dharavi (a sprawling slum that extends over 500 sq. km in the heart of Mumbai) implies that women simply don’t drink enough water, which leads to constipation and therefore painful anal-rectal conditions. But what’s worse, says Gajakosh is their apathy. “We can keep telling them to boil water, or drink more liquids. But they have to recognize this themselves."
Lately, her patients have been coming up to her with a smile. “We saw your painting up at Shama Hall," they tell her. Gajakosh is one of the eight healers in Dharavi whose portraits have been hung in a room as part of the Dharavi Biennale, a month-long series of exhibitions, performances and workshops to engage with the residents of Dharavi. The biennale is the brainchild of SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action), a Mumbai-based non-government organization. Healers Of Dharavi—the exhibition of portraits of doctors, including Gajakosh, bone-setters, homoeopaths and acupressurists, among others—is part of Medicine Corner, a 15-month initiative started in January by UK-based curator Ratan Vaswani for Wellcome Collection, the cultural division of Wellcome Trust, a UK-based medical charity organization that funds research around the globe, including in India. Medicine Corner will culminate in an exhibition at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya and will include few portraits from Healers, besides 19th century water colours of Indian forms of healing (Trades And Occupations Of India by Colonel James Skinner) that form part of the trust’s collection.
“We wanted to explore the idea of healing and not create a hierarchy of medical practices, where some are ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’. The exhibition acknowledges that Dharavi makes space for all practices to coexist—formal as well as informal," says Supriya Menon, exhibition curator and project assistant for Medicine Corner. Not only are the healers residents of Dharavi, the painters of these portraits are artists from the locality, too. Some, like Dilip Thawal, a signboard painter who painted Gajakosh, used oil on canvas for the first time. Others like Mahendra Vartak, who painted a portrait of Mohammed Salim, a 44-year-old bone-setter, used to be a painter of Bollywood posters and now assists at a government-run tuberculosis centre in Dharavi.
Salim, a resident of Gandhi Nagar in Dharavi, came to Mumbai from Lucknow a decade ago. He learnt the art of bone-setting here, from a family of traditional bone-setters in Bhiwandi, he says. His shop, just down the road from the office of Rajinikanth Fans Association, can barely accommodate two people at a time. The shelves on the wall have jars filled with all sorts of herbs and seeds, and large glass jars with massage oils of different colours. “I only treat people if they come to me with minor problems like a sprain or an ache," he says, but adds that if someone with a broken bone asks for his help, he would not send them away. He is training his 18-year-old son to follow in his footsteps.
“The residents of Dharavi deal with agonizing medical decisions because of the lack of funds and limited resources. However even if there are hospitals offering free treatment, the question to ask is if they have faith in the treatment. People go to get treated by someone they trust," says Vaswani, who asked locals about what drove their decision to visit healers. “Vishwaas was a word I heard a lot. It implies both, trust and confidence."
The paintings are a testimony to that.
Healers Of Dharavi is on till 7 March, 10am-7pm, at Sharma Building, Near Sai Hospital, 90 Feet Road, Dharavi, Mumbai.
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