Where East Meets West

Shops closed, windows were shuttered, and even the bazaars were half deserted in teeming Lucknow (pop. 500,000), capital of Uttar Pradesh province. Students stormed through the streets, set up loudspeakers outside the Council House, bombarded a captive audience of state legislators with fiery exhortations. On their way to another demonstration, a group collided head-on with short-tempered police: brickbats flew, steel-tipped lathis flailed, shots were fired. A passing water carrier was killed; the wounded totaled 31.

Cause of the strife was a medical dispute that is symptomatic of modern India : should aspiring healers be taught the medicine of the ancient, mystical and slow-to-change East or the medicine of the modern, scientific, restlessly changeful West? India has more licensed practitioners of native medical systems (96,000) than of Western medicine (92,000); the vast majority of these engage in ayurveda (Sanskrit for "the science of life") and bitterly resent the encroachment of Western medicine.

The Nature of Heat. One of the greatest exponents of ayurveda is Uttar Pradesh's chief minister, Dr. Sampurnanand. A graduate of Allahabad University, Sampurnanand (who has no first name) majored in mathematics, physics and chemistry, rates the title of doctor only on the strength of honorary degrees collected from fawning provincial universities. Sampurnanand dabbles in ayurveda himself, often prescribing ayurvedic remedies for friends. Four years ago his government set up the State Ayurvedic College in Lucknow, dedicated to the proposition that students should learn both the ayurvedic and Western medical systems.

State's 87 students soon found themselves totally bewildered. In the mornings they trooped to King George Medical College to join its 1,200 fulltime students in the study of the foundations of modern medicine--bacteriology, pathology, anatomy, diagnosis, and eventually, treatment. But in the afternoons they hiked back across town to the ayurvedic college. There they memorized the 2,000-year-old Sanskrit verses in which this medical lore is frozen.

The more they learned of Western medicine, the more bewildered they became. What they learned in the morning was contradicted in the afternoon. In medical school they found themselves treated as fledgling quacks; in ayurvedic school they found their questions brushed off. One student asked: "Does it really do any good to bake this medication over a fire of cow dung rather than some other fuel?" Replied the teacher: "You must have faith in what you are taught."

The student's faith was supposed to extend to 1,000 or more herbs, minerals, metals and even precious stones listed in the ayurvedic pharmacopoeia. (The gems were once favored by the practitioners who list themselves in India's telephone books as "sex splst," were supposed to increase virility. With the republican leveling-down, few patients can afford ground-up precious stones, or even pearls. So they settle for sea shells. But they still flock to the ayurvedic sex splst.)

Move en Masse? The ayurveda students found that they had no faith in such teachings, and they struck, protesting that they could not live half East and half West and demanding admission to medical school on a fulltime basis. "We are the world's most confused people," wailed one. Dr. Sampurnanand replied by setting up a commission with himself as chairman, and the commission decided that ayurvedic and Western medicine would not mix. Conclusion: the students would have to drop their Western studies. With that, two ayurveda students began hunger strikes. Responding to this form of protest, made classical for Indians by the example of Gandhi, Lucknow University students heeded the ayurvedics' call for a citywide general strike, got into last week's riots.

Under such pressure, Dr. Sampurnanand craftily conceded that if all 87 ayurveda students wanted to, they could go over en masse to King George Medical College. But the 87 could not achieve unanimity. Furthermore, King George had no room for them and did not think highly of their qualifications anyway. At week's end East was still locked with West in the streets of Lucknow.

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