She was Glinda in a sari. Early that morning, she had glided ethereally across the courtyard with her fellow healing goddesses, their feet bare, their flowing white garb edged in gold. The bird trills reverberated off the palace walls.
“Please sit,” she said prayerfully. Soon, thick warm sesame oil infused with medicinal herbs began to permeate my meager muslin thong. She breathed heavily, karate-chopping the oil with the edges of her hands. She gently pummeled me with poultices, hot bundles of herbs resembling bouquets garnis. In the background, I heard oil sizzling. I felt a strange compulsion to go fry myself in a wok.
There is a sign at the entrance to Kalari Kovilakom, the more-than-150-year-old palace in the state of Kerala, India, now known as the Palace for Ayurveda, that says “Please Leave Your World Here.” But, having encountered elephants ambling along the highway from the airport, you already have. You have taken the Order, the humble oath of four-star asceticism. You have agreed to forsake all known forms of vacation decadence (rice gruel for dinner, anyone?), to give up meat, alcohol, caffeine, leather accessories, naps, sunbathing, swimming and mindless frivolity in order to purify and balance your whacked-out body and soul.
PHOTOS: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
You are here to immerse yourself in ayurveda, the 3,500-year-old herb-based healing tradition that still flourishes in the daily life of India.
Within the palace's teak-columned halls, with exquisite images of gods and goddesses carved into the ceiling, you are less tourist than nun.
For pilgrims with deep pockets wanting an authentic immersion into this ancient medical system, including a radical purification and detoxification treatment known as pancha karma, the Kalari Kovilakom — which markets itself as combining “the indulgence of a palace with the austerity of an ashram” — is the real deal. Since the 1970s, “ayurveda tourism” has drawn Lonely Planet acolytes and Rough Guiders, especially young Germans, to the thatched-hut beaches of southern India, lured by the promise of US$5 massages.
But with the re-imagining of this historic rajah's palazzo by the Casino Group the ante has been considerably upped.
Daybreak finds K. Narayayanan Nair, an ayurvedic chef whose first language is Malayalam, the native language of Kerala, standing barefoot in the kitchen roasting chapatis over an open flame. His vessels are copper, stone and clay. “Aluminum can harm the nature of food,” he explained.
The palace lies in “the land of the cloud-capped hills” in the remote Palakkad district against the Western Ghats, the otherworldly mountains bordering Tamil Nadu. Kalari Kovilakom is not exactly a hotel, not exactly a hospital and not exactly a spa, but a weird hybrid with a Mother Superior aura (in accordance with strict ayurvedic principles the establishment requires a minimum 14-day stay).
Along with more conventional upscale resorts like the Kumakarom Lake Resort, nestled in the backwaters south of Cochin, the historic outpost of spice traders on the Arabian Sea, the new ayurveda luxe taps into the country's growing wave of medical tourism. But instead of a new kidney, ayurvedists — longevity-seekers who are already deeply into the present moment — come to Kerala to detoxify and purify with ayurvedic doctors, the new yogis, for whom mind, body and spirit have been fused for more than 3,000 years.
In 1887, the British administrator William Logan wrote of a native medical system in which the universe, including the human body, is formed by five great elements — space, air, fire, water and earth. Then, as now, Logan observed, ayurveda, which means “knowledge of life” in Sanskrit, was designed to “restore health and establish the digestive powers and likewise create intellectual brightness, personal beauty, acuteness of the senses, and prolongation of life.”
Ayurveda can be difficult to grasp for non-Indians, with hundreds of levels of practice, from learned to folk. It is part of the country's medical system, with 2,100 ayurvedic hospitals, 196 medical colleges and a dozen major pharmaceutical companies. These join storefront village pharmacies overflowing with dusty medicine bottles and gnarled roots. Even the luxury-tourist experience ricochets wildly, from by-the-book, purer-than-thou abstinence worship to sybaritic resorts where a hit of ayurveda can be had before a poolside gin and tonic.
Catatonic with jet lag, I arrived at Kalari Kovilakom as the first installment of a two-week trip to India in which I would dip in and out of Ayurveda World. Traveling solo, I chose Kerala not just for ayurveda, which has deep roots here, but also for its tropical cuisine, its history of progressive politics, its 91 percent literacy rate and, not the least, the sensuousness of a culture where even trucks are works of art.
My Kalari brethren were committed to at least two weeks of pancha karma, albeit without the more extreme purges involving induced vomiting and blood-letting.
Rudram Amma Sreelatha, one of two staff doctors, began, as is customary, with a lengthy consultation to determine the elements, or doshas, of my native constitution — a process she refers to as “diagramming the person.”
“Are you tired or fresh when you wake up?” she asked with probing eyes.
“Do you remember your dreams?”
“How is your sexual life?”
Then it was on to Raj Shekhar, the palace's gifted yoga instructor.
“Do you prefer foods that are sweet, sour, salt, bitter or chilly?” he wanted to know.
“Have you had any traumas in childhood?”
Five years of therapy had suddenly collapsed into a single morning. And it wasn't even lunchtime.
Ayurvedic doctors like Sreelatha diagnose illnesses and imbalances through darsana, observing the way a person moves, walks and behaves; sparsana, touching; and prasna, interrogating.
The big idea of ayurveda, said to have divine origin, is that health is a state of balance between body, mind and consciousness. Its sister discipline is yoga, which, before it became an industry, was also a science dating back to the Vedic period. One's constitution is said to be composed of three doshas — vata (air), pitta (fire) and kapha (water) — encoded in every cell. Initial treatment includes a prescribed diet (supplemented with herbs both ingested and applied), yoga, meditation and massages to prepare the body for elimination of agni, or waste. Pancha karma, a specialty of Kerala and no stroll through the park, includes a stamina-challenging sequence of enemas.
“We are not treating part by part and organ by organ,” Sreelatha explained kindly. “We consider the body and soul.”
Soon I found myself spread-eagled in a muslin loincloth as the beatific 24-year-old Sreeni Gopi lit a candle, said a prayer and anointed the crown of my head with sandalwood paste. With another therapist — there are usually two or more — she began kalari uzhichil, a massage that harks back to kalari payattu, the traditional Keralan martial art that once flourished at the palace and employed ayurveda for optimum health.
On a table shaped vaguely like a human being, hollowed slightly to capture oil, my spine was a cobra unfurling. Then Gopi led me to what appeared to be a gigantic cabinet, actually an herbal steam bath. Sweat mingled with oil as I sat in a Victrola cabinet of steam.
My vata imbalance — sapping my creativity and “native pitta fire” — melted away under ladlefuls of warm water mixed with green gram, a slightly exfoliating lentil. The goddess, in the act of bathing, had returned me to an infant state.
Mornings unfolded simply, with music from nearby Hindu temples the reveille of India. Yoga began in a deeply shaded sanctum; the heat seemed almost a living being. Breakfast, a steamed rice-flour pancake with a plantain cooked with coconut and brown sugar, arrived ceremoniously on a brass tray, eaten, as is traditional, with the hands.
In India, and especially Kerala, a relatively rural state with a tropical climate that makes love to practically anything that grows, ayurveda is part of the warp and weft of daily life. When babies are born, their first foods are rice and green gram, known for balancing all three doshas. Spices in the Indian larder, including tumeric, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and cardamom, all have medicinal properties. In earlier days, mothers and grandmothers made oil for different kinds of ailments from ghee, coconut and sesame, and even Bangalore tech execs still routinely apply oil to the head before work.
In monsoon season, many Indians go for a “tune up,” when the air is humid and the skin is thought to be more permeable. “Whenever your mother said, ‘this is good for this’ and ‘that is good for that’ she was teaching you ayurveda,” said Joseph Joseph, the manager of Kalari Kovilakom, which has a special kitchen for herb preparation.
In Aranmula, a picturesque hamlet on the Pamba River, Hari Kumar Bhasker runs the NSS Ayurveda Hospital, where a portrait of Lord Dhanvantari, the physician of the gods, hangs in the entrance hall. Outside are demonstration gardens lush with ayurvedic plants — holy basil (for fever, skin lesions); brahmi (memory); ashoka trees (mental acuity), Indian gooseberry (an anti-oxidant). He has received financing from the UN and the Indian government to conserve and cultivate medicinal plants.
At the Vijnana Kala Vedi Cultural Center in Aranmula, an innovative school dedicated to Keralan traditional arts, including dance and mural painting, Bhasker teaches a three-week “Ayurveda 101” to students like Kim Berley, a 28-year-old Sacramento waitress, who is convinced that ayurveda is the next yoga — “a way of balancing yourself with your own body and the elements around you,” she said.
Students learn about rejuvenative marmalades and how to prepare decoctions. “In Ayurveda, our medicines aren't made in glass-walled laboratories with air conditioning,” Bhasker said in the hospital's dispensary, pointing out bottles of nerve tonic. “We cook our medicines. There are no standard protocols. It's intuitive on the part of the doctor.”
Many Indians combine allopathic medicine and ayurveda, going to an “English” doctor for serious illnesses and to an ayurvedic practitioner for arthritis, hypertension and other chronic conditions. But the lack of standardization is one reason why ayurvedic doctors are not allowed to practice medicine in the US.
With ayurveda tourism booming, the Keralan government has been working to regulate and rate ayurvedic resorts, so the creed is not diluted by unscrupulous operators without professional training. Traditionally, ayurvedic medicine was passed down from father to son, uncle to nephew, but now it is professionalized, with physicians like Sreelatha earning advanced degrees from five-year ayurvedic medical schools.
But some purists take a dim view of ayurveda tourism all together. “They are doing the safest things, with very little medicinal value,” said C.K. Krishnan Nair, an associate professor at the Government Ayurveda College in Tripunithura. “They make money. It's that simple.”
On the way to Kumarakom Lake Resort, accompanied by George Joseph, an astute cultural observer and steely-nerved driver, we passed women with jasmine garlands in their hair, open-air trucks bursting with warty brown jackfruit, markets where men balanced green bundles of curry leaves on their heads, their aromatic trail hanging in the moist air. By a narrow bridge we saw a road sign I took to heart. “Hurry Causes Worry,” it said.
The resort is situated on the backwaters, a languorous tropical labyrinth of lakes, lagoons and shady channels brimming with village life, navigable by dugout canoe or traditional Keralan longboat, called a kettu vallam. Kumarakom Lake mixes no-nonsense ayurveda and palm-fringed restaurants with piped-in Glen Campbell and Kingfisher beer. Fishermen drift past in dugout canoes propelled by poles. The contrasts that make India India are here in abundance.
Like Kalari Kovilakom, Ayurmana at Kumarakom Lake plays up its historic pedigree: its “heritage” building, which was moved to the resort from its original location, is said to be the ancestral home of renowned ayurvedic practitioners.
I actually had a vision of Dick Cheney when I finally experienced sirodhara, a signature ayurvedic treatment that Sreelatha and others had cautioned could lead to emotional meltdown. Warm oil is released above you in a steady pendulum stream, your forehead a windshield and the oil, the wiper.
Feelings of deep panic were eventually supplanted by one of utter defenselessness in which, I was certain, all dark information about my past could be gleaned. Sirodhara struck me as an immensely powerful tool for extracting secrets.
I spent my last day in India at an open-air market in Cochin, marveling at snake gourds and silvery barracudas for sale. For some reason — maybe the heat and dust — after feeling buoyant the entire trip, I almost fainted, transformed into one of those Halloween masks in which the eyes pop out of their sockets.
Weak and woozy, I made my way to Ernakulam, to the branch there of India's most celebrated ayurvedic hospital and health clinic network, Arya Vaidya Sala Kottakkal.
The doctor on call, V.K. Vinod Kumar, who was barefoot, took my blood pressure and pronounced it low. He told me to lay off masala and oily food. He said I needed more sleep. He wrote me two prescriptions.
As a final suggestion, he recommended that in the summer season, I have sex once every 15 days, and in the winter, every 3 days — at least.
I left India reinvigorated, with a lighter heart. I was dreaming of December.
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