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hyperraslity

60,735 просмотров • 1 месяц назад •via X (Twitter)

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Whenever we talk about traditional Indian knowledge system, there is an elephant in the room we often shy from addressing. Why does Vrikshayurveda - a corpus of plant science older than almost any living intellectual tradition - still have to justify its existence every time it enters a room? Why, after thirty centuries of farmers using neem, does India hold no position of leadership in neem research? Why, when a tribal community in Andhra Pradesh is using 420 species of medicinal plants with documented efficacy, does the nearest IIT estimate ten years and twenty lakhs INR (~21K USD) per plant per application to validate what farmers have already spent generations refining? In my podcast with AV Balasubramanian (AVB), we explored many of these gnarly questions. AV Balasubramanian is one of the leading pioneers of deploying the wisdom of Vrikshayurveda in Indian Agriculture. He is the co-founder of the Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS) in Chennai, one, besides conserving 170+ traditional rice varieties, of the most serious institutional efforts to apply Vrikshayurveda -- the classical Indian science of plant health - to modern day challenges in sustainable agriculture. His background is unusual even by the standards of people who do unusual things. A biochemistry and biophysics training at premier Indian institutions, a PhD abandoned in the US in 1982 in favour of a deep interest in exploring Science rooted in the Indian tradition, a decade as a student and teacher of Yoga at Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram under the direct lineage of T. Krishnamacharya and T.K.V. Desikachar, and eventually a decades-long collaboration with the Patriotic and People-Oriented Science and Technology (PPST) group, the intellectual collective that, more than any other, attempted to recover the epistemological foundations of Indian science rather than merely its recipes. AVB could have made a career from positioning traditional knowledge as a cultural heritage to be preserved. He didn’t. He has made a career of asking whether it works, under what conditions, for which problems, and how to scale it. His field team used a principle from Vrikshayurveda -- that bitter taste is an indicator of pesticidal potential -- to crack a fruit-and-shoot borer problem on brinjal that neem had failed to solve. His experiments with Ayurvedic storage forms (arkas, thailas, arishtas) have demonstrated that shelf life -- the most commonly cited limitation of natural bioprotectants -- is a solvable problem, using technology the Ayurvedic drug industry has operated for over a century. It’s unalloyed joy to hear when AVB speaks. He speaks with scientific precision (while warning of the dangers of epistemic fascism) and carries his passion for Indian knowledge system with a scientist’s penchant for rigor. What made this conversation personal was not just the fact that he studied Yoga under the same lineage I have been studying since 2013. It was our shared love and passion for Indian Knowledge systems. In the first part of this wide-ranging chat, AVB and I engage in philosophical throat clearing, exploring the context of Vrikshayurveda, before engaging with the the content of Vrikshayurveda. I started off the dialogue with a fundamental question. Traditional Indian medical and philosophical frameworks seem to rest on categories like vata, pitta, kapha that have not changed in millennia. A modern scientist looking at that would say: if your categories never change, is it really science? In response, AVB shared a beautiful analogy he had read from Captain Srinivasa Murthy. Imagine you make a list of every group that has tried to invade or conquer India over thirty centuries. You can list them in chronological order -- Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Portuguese, British, and so on. Or you can classify them differently: those who came by land, those who came by sea, those who came by air. The second classification not only subsumes everything that happened in the past but is capable of accommodating anything in the future. An Ayurvedic physician examining a patient is doing exactly this. When he looks at a complex of symptoms and asks whether the primary doshic imbalance is vata, pitta, or kapha, he is using a classification scheme that exhausts the universe of discourse.

Venky Ramachandran

27,148 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад