Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India

Medicine Corner

APT curator Lina Vincent is a Curatorial Associate on “Medicine Corner” a multi-city arts project from Wellcome Collection UK. Medicine Corner explores India’s rich plurality of cultures of medicine, healing and well-being through exhibitions, live public events and educational outreach.

The centrepiece of Medicine Corner is Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India, at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), Mumbai. Through a stunning array of antiquities and contemporary material culture, the exhibition explores the history and modern practice in India of sustaining human health. Exhibits include: sculptures, clothing, textiles, decorative wrestling clubs, manuscripts, intimate personal items such as combs and foot scrubbers, medical instruments, domestic utensils, oil paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, plaques and board games (including a snakes and ladders board from the late 18th century - the game has Indian roots).

Tabiyat takes visitors to four generic locations: The Shrine – to encounter the role of spiritual belief in healing; The Home – examining lifecycle and the family as the key transmitter of values and practical knowledge for living well and living long; The Street – charting public health, the hidden histories of health commerce and cultural practices such as chewing paan; and The Clinic – treating India as a key site in world history for enquiry into the nature of body and mind and for different analytical models of understanding, representing and treating the body. The exhibition takes a multi-faceted approach to its subject, drawing on multiple historical, artistic and ethnographic resources.

It includes magnificent Indian works from the UK, never before exhibited in their land of origin, combining them in novel juxtapositions with material from CSMVS and private collections in India. Contemporary vernacular art has also been specially commissioned and acquired for this richly varied show: an aesthetically seductive, intellectually rich mix of art, science, history and the ordinary made extraordinary. Star exhibits in Tabiyat include the Ayurvedic Man, the only known historical illustration of the interior of the human body as understood in Ayurveda.