A Trip to Kolkata, January 2005
In July 2004 I completed 4 long years of studying
homoeopathy at Allen College in Chelmsford. Two of my fellow students and I
promised ourselves that if we survived this arduous course we would treat
ourselves to a trip to India to see how homoeopathy is practised there and in
January of this year the promise at last became a reality!
We arrived in Kolkata at 4 am to be welcomed in traditional
Indian style by our friend Dr Banerjea from the Bengal Allen Medical Institute
with garlands of fragrant jasmine. This first early morning sight of the city
which was to be our home for 3 weeks was the first of many shocks to the
senses. A huge yellow moon hung luminous in the night sky and through the dark
gloom of the dilapidated city streets it was clear that there were many
homeless people sleeping on the streets which at that time of night were
relatively empty apart from wild dogs, goats and even the occasional stray cow.
The car, obeying no obvious traffic regulations, followed a zig zag path to the
hotel through the myriad of potholes.
In the morning we were woken at 5am by the call to prayers
at the local mosque, ‘Allah akbar’. A significant proportion of the population
is Moslem, the remainder being Hindu (the largest group), Christian, Sikh,
Buddhist and Jain. The streets soon filled with the soon to be familiar sounds
of daily life in Kolkata: stall holders setting up their little kiosks selling
drinks, tobacco, betel leaf, sachets of mouth cleansing spices and seeds, rickshaw
pullers ringing their hand bells, dogs barking, people chatting, working,
singing, laughing and always the sound of car horns beeping. During the day
time there is never more than a 2 second gap of silence between one car horn
sounding and the next.
We fell into a routine of either walking to the institute
every day or taking a taxi on lazy days at a cost of 50 rupees (about 70p) for
a 10 minute journey. The walk took us through the poultry market where the
pavements are crowded with coops of chickens. Small boys wheeled bicycles
festooned with live chickens hung by their feet from the handlebars while
beautiful women in their saris looking like birds of paradise against the grey
asphalt squatted in groups by the kerb plucking, cleaning, dressing the dead
ones. No part of the bird is discarded: even the feathers are washed and sorted
and dried. Further on there was a fish
market and fruit and vegetables all laid out on the crowded pavements in the
busy rush hour full of commuters, schoolchildren walking to school by
themselves, chai sellers, sugar cane juice sellers, coolies bearing huge
circular baskets on their heads. The volume and diversity of traffic on the
streets is incredible and crossing the road is fraught with peril as cars,
trucks, taxis, buses, trams, motorbikes bearing whole families of four,
bicycles, rickshaws and handcarts all jostle for space in this crazy city. One
day I had been trying to cross the road unsuccessfully for several minutes when
a traffic policeman took pity on me and stopped the traffic dead for a few
seconds so I could cross. It could only happen in India! We witnessed several
accidents in the brief time we were there, fortunately none serious.
The pavements are
also the home for many people especially newly arrived refugees from rural
areas who gravitate to the city to find work. Whole families live, eat, and
sleep on the pavement and in the day time can be seen washing themselves and
their children at standpipes preserving their modesty by washing with their
clothes on. Although such people are usually desperately poor they rarely ask
for money and seem at pains to preserve their standards of hygiene and self
respect. Small children are often cared for by older siblings while the adults
try to earn some money to provide food for the family, playing happily only
yards from the busy traffic.
At the institute the days were spent seeing patients either
there or travelling to the clinics in various slum areas. One of the slums was
in Arpuli Lane not far from the Institute in Creek Row. There has been a free
homoeopathic clinic here for several years and the Institute also provides milk to the children funded by donations
raised in England which provides essential nutrients for families who may be
lucky to get one meal a day of rice and dahl. The slum is an area of concrete
dwellings divided by narrow alleyways. A typical dwelling is roughly the size
of a large broom cupboard, about 6ft square divided into an upper and lower
area by a wooden platform. The upper area is for sleeping and the lower area is
for cooking and preparing food. For cooking people either use little portable
cookers called chulas or simply dig a hole into the earthen floor and fill this
with live coals. Whole families are expected to share this cramped space.
Washing and toilet facilities are communal for the whole slum and men and women
have to learn to avert their eyes from each other to avoid embarrassment.
Seeing patients was a revelation. For a start there is no
concept of privacy in India When we saw
patients there would be at least 10 other people standing at the doorway to
watch and listen. No one seems to mind! In India people go to see the
homoeopath as here we would go to our GP. It is a very popular form of health
care because the medicines are so much cheaper for patients to buy and as in
the UK it also attracts people who either have not responded well to
conventional treatment or who don’t want to take medicines with harmful side
effects. We saw an incredible range of health problems being treated by
homoeopathy alone including asthma, diabetes, cancers of all kinds, depression,
head injuries, TB, arthritis, psoriasis, ovarian fibroids, angina and
hypertension and even a patient suffering from schizophrenia. Many of the
patients suffer from varying degrees of malnutrition and diseases such as
rickets and parasitic infections eg worms and scabies are common. TB is very
prevalent also The majority of patients had
responded really well to homoeopathic treatment including the lady with
schizophrenia who had managed to drastically reduce the conventional medication
which she had been receiving for several years to control her psychotic
symptoms.
At the Institute clinic we saw patients who had travelled
hundreds of miles to see Dr Banerjea due to his reputation for treating very
difficult cases. These included a woman who initially came in 1987 with a
diagnosis of incurable brain tumour. She had become progressively more and more
disabled experiencing typical symptoms of loss of sensation down one side of
her body, severe headaches and blurred vision. A scan had shown the existence
of large tumour which would be very difficult and dangerous to remove with poor
expectations of recovery. This I found of especial interest as I have seen
first hand the damage that such life
saving surgery can do as my sister was operated on to remove a benign brain
tumour six years ago and has suffered a permanent degree of disability as a
result.
The patient opted to
try homoeopathy. Within a few months of beginning treatment she had begun to
show good signs of improvement and eventually made an astonishing, full
recovery. She has since become the proud mother of two children and makes an
annual journey to see Dr Banerjea for a check up and to thank him for the miracle
of her life.
For me Kolkata was
an extraordinary and unforgettable
experience; I had expected to feel pity
for the poor people who live in these conditions but seeing the excited,
smiling faces of the children, the strong sense of community and belonging, the
depth of faith and hope in the slum and
the warmth of the welcome which we received
I wondered how much their lack of material wealth mattered to them. And
what was so extraordinary about this beautiful country was that the less people
appeared to have the more they were willing to share.
Written by my dear friend and Homeopath Zoe Bethall
