TAMIL SIDDHA MEDICINE

A major issue in defining Siddha medicine is its relatively recent status as a Tamil cultural heritage marker. In the last 50 years, a great deal of the promotion of Siddha medicine has been couched in the language of the Tamil revivalist notions of ancient Tamil history, the importance of the Tamil language, and other essentialist discourses. Part of the reason Siddha medicine is linked with Tamil heritage is the fact that many of the original palm-leaf manuscripts written about Siddha medicine are written in Tamil.

The politics of identity; linguistic, cultural, or otherwise, have been explosively polarized for centuries in South India. In the 1960’s, one man even performed self-immolation while screaming “Death to Hindi! May Tamil Flourish!” (Ramaswamy 1997). These 20th century issues have their roots in the ongoing clashes between different socio-economic groups, especially along divisions of caste, ethnicity, and religious practice.

Two early 20th century critiques show an even greater range of perspective on the way which Siddha medicine is located within Indian culture. Purnalingam Pillai, a literary historian, writes a mixed review of the Siddhas and their works:
“They are most popular works in Tamil and there is no pure Tamilian, educated or uneducated, who has not committed to memory at least a few stanzas from one or another of them… Their aim was to get at the eternal light… They were haters of the Aryan social fabric, religious rites, and the Vedic authority and were addicted to opium eating… they formed the noblest order who viewed the Vedanta and Siddhanta alike”
(Zvelebil 1996, 8).

Another early 20th century critique reveals an even more critical perspective of the

Siddha tradition. M. Srinivassa Aiyangar writes:

“They were yogis as well as medical men… Most of them were plagiarists and impostors, while some assumed the names of the great men of antiquity like Agastyar, Kapilar and Tiruvalluvar. Being eaters of opium and dwellers in the land of dreams, their conceit knew no bounds… Their religion was theism; sometimes the stress they laid on the siddhis or powers a man can acquire over nature gave it a secularist colour which occasionally comes very near atheism and may be mistaken for it” (Zvelebil 1996, 8).

These two accounts provide a perspective on the Siddha tradition which speaks to the unorthodox, anti-establishment foundations of the tradition as a whole. They also reveal outsider perspectives of the tradition as a whole, and some of the common accusations made against the Siddhas, or the original practitioners of Siddha medicine.

Within Tamil culture the term Siddha is used to delineate three distinct yet sometimes overlapping groups:
“(1) A group of alchemists and physicians, who have composed in Tamil a vast number of alchemic and medical treatises, both in verse and prose, and who belonged to what is termed cittavaitiyam or ‘Siddha medicine’ and cittaracavaatam or ‘Siddha alchemy’... (2) a group of thinkers and poets who have composed a large but better manageable number of stanzas in Tamil, more or less based on tantric yoga in outlook and religious philosophy and practice, between roughly the 10th-15th Centuries A.D... (3) A few ‘Siddha-like’ poets who have been ‘appended’ to the Siddha school by posterior generation, or who called themselves cittar without properly belonging to the esoteric group itself” (Zvelebil 1973, 18).

From these sources we can summarize that the Siddhas were involved in many activities, especially alchemy, medicine and spiritual practice.
Another way of understanding these Siddhas and their teachings/practice is “a ‘popular’ soteriology, which had little in common with the ‘authorized’ soteriologies of Vedic and classical Hinduism” (White 1996, 3). This is related most closely to the pan-Indian traditions of Tantra. T.N. Ganapathy further explains the position of the Siddhas vis-à-vis Tantra:
“There has been a strong prejudice against Tantra-Yoga, the method adopted by the Siddhas. Furthermore, the doors of Tantric yoga have ever been open to all classes of people, and some of the Siddhas are from the lower strata of society. This led people to hold the view that Tantras were meant for the degenerate and the fallen, and they were considered to be in vogue among the low-class people. To add to all this, the science of healing, to which a number of Siddhas are devoted, was relegated to the class of avidya or false knowledge. What is the need for medicine when disease is caused by the karma of a past life?” (Ganapathy 2003, 14).

Thus there is a distinct affiliation of the Siddha tradition with lower-caste sections of society, due to its connection with tantric philosophy. Further, medical knowledge in itself was devalued because of its ineffectiveness in terms of “healing” karma. That is, Siddha medicine was often viewed as simplistic, low-brow, and even worthless by some segments of Hindu society. The practice of tantra yoga, and thus Siddha medicine, is often considered antinomian and even heretical within orthodox Hinduism.

It is also noteworthy that their influences were not only indigenous to South Asia but also extended beyond those geographical and even religious boundaries:
“Indian tantrism, in its Hindu, Buddhist and Jain varieties, did not emerge out of a void. It was on the one hand influenced by cultural interactions with China, Tibet, central Asia, Persia, and Europe, interactions which had the Silk Road and medieval maritime routes and ports as their venue” (White 1996, 2).

Whatever the true origins of Siddha medicine actually are is in some sense a moot point.

The way the initial formulations and development of Siddha medicine are understood and then discussed is actually a far more interesting topic to examine, especially with a post-colonial lens. Here it appears that the bid for cultural pride is one strategy for gaining patronage in a system where Siddha medicine must “compete” with not only biomedicine but also Ayurveda, Homeopathy and Unani.

Medical anthropology shows that traditions are much more malleable within the context of shifting the way they are represented reveals a great deal about the relationships between practitioners, their culture, religion, language, and other sociological variables that influence healthcare “choices:”
“The practices of doctors, and the decisions of patients, are forged out of a myriad of concerns that are much more complex than straightforward belief that a particular practice ‘works.’ In the context of competing medical systems, the politics of culture and identity are important factors in the bid for medical authority” (Weiss 2003, ii).

These represent some of the factors which might be considered as points of resistance, strategic positions from which Siddha medicine might be seen as having value for its affiliation with Tamil culture. Often this is contrasted with Sanskritic, orthodox, brahminical traditions, thus construed along lines of class, caste, and religious affiliation. In closing, perhaps the strongest iteration of this argument comes through in the voice of a student enrolled in a Siddha medical college:
“Since, I belong to Tamil Nadu, I like to practice, our own system of medicine which is born in Tamil Nadu. I consider Allopathy as a foreign import. As a mark of giving respect to my community, I wish to practice Siddha medicine. I never think/thought/will think of other occupation” (Hausman 1996, 331).