Posts Tagged ‘colonialism’
MORE MEHTA:
MORE MEHTA:
Drugs and hatha yoga have the same aim: to help us lead healthier lives.
India has given the world yoga for free. No wonder so many in the country feel that the world should return the favor by making lifesaving drugs available at reduced prices, or at least letting Indian companies make cheap generics.
And yet, the very international drug companies that so fiercely protect their patents oppose India’s attempts to amend World Trade Organization rules to protect its traditional remedies.
BABA: But what does this really mean to “protect” its traditional remedies? Will the village vaidya have to pay the Indian Government or even worse, get permission from them, to make his triphala churan for his patients. Maybe in that case it would be easier to buy Dabur brand, or Pfizer or Longs brand. The system is flawed, I don’t believe you get anywhere playing one part of it against the other. continue reading…
Baba’s response to an editorial in the New York Times
Baba’s response to Suketu Mehta’s editorial in the New York Times
NYT: …that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages.
BABA: It is for the colonizer of knowledge to create sausages out of the living animal. Sausages have a bigger market than pigs and cows.
NYT: …the forefront of the patenting of traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas…
BABA: Indian culture is very old and has been dealing with logic and rational thinking for millennia. Indians are very intelligent. Look what they did to the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy, the pinnacle of enlightenment thinking when it came to the human “science” of politics. They ate it alive. It more resembles Swiss cheese than anything British. I’d be proud. continue reading…
Colonial Enterprise in India
Consider the colonial enterprise in India against the backdrop of the European ”enlightenment” in which there was first a mapping of the physical universe (Geometry is the language of God – so go out there and measure!), and then a mapping of the human universe, in which the subject of knowledge of the first exercise becomes also the object of knowledge in the second. An Authority was established that represents another culture, including its knowledge, from the outside; that is the colonial enterprise.
Indian culture was mapped extensively by its colonial rulers, largely by missionaries. It’s botanicals and medicines, treatments and magic, healers and their systems were catalogued and exported to the West. The colony was “farmed” for whatever resources might be valuable. This slice of intellectual capital brought almost immediate great health benefits to the west and enormous financial rewards as it spawned a pharmaceutical revolution.
Even though small pox vaccination (subcutaneous insertion of dried pustules from previous year infections) was banned by the British rulers in India in 1802 on “humanitarian” grounds, the knowledge of it certainly didn’t escape them. From the mid 18th century, countless studies and volumes of research on knowledge deemed theologically incorrect, contributed to huge advances in immunology, surgery, and the establishment of what we now call modern medicine.
