One day in December, S.B. Vimala, a 62-year-old teacher arrives at the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy's (AVP) four-acre campus in Coimbatore for a follow-up consultation with her doctor, K.G. Raveendran. Her walk is steady and although she slurs a bit while talking, it is difficult to imagine that this is the same person who first came to AVP in a wheelchair, unable to move, talk, even eat, and incontinent. That was in April this year; in February, Vimala suffered a brain haemorrhage and collapsed; she spent a month in a hospital that ensured she was alive (and only just). By June, however, the lady, a diabetic who suffers from hypertension, was on her feet again.

Not very far from where Vimala is meeting with Raveendran, a ritual is in progress to propitiate Dhanvantari, the Hindu God of healing. This is a fire-ritual, where offerings are made to the concerned God or Goddess in the name of Swaha, the wife of the fire-God Agni; Namboodri priests from Kerala are feeding the fire with 108 herbs, and patients sit around inhaling the aromatic, medicinal smoke and listening to the chanting.

It's hard to associate a scientist like P. Ram Manohar with a milieu that seemingly involves miracle cures and magical rituals. Conversely, the very fact that AVP boasts a Head of Research would seem to indicate that the cures are far from miracles, and the rituals, not a bit magical. And Manohar is involved in a project that, if successful, could take ayurveda and AVP, not necessarily in that order, global. The specifics: a grant (of a mere Rs 1.2 crore; then, it is a start) from the US' National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop long-term collaborations between researchers at AVP and those at top American universities such as John Hopkins. It is Ram Manohar's view that the US can no longer afford to ignore ayurveda; he claims 45 per cent of the medicines sold in the US fall under the "alternate medicine" category. And nothing is really as alternative as ayurveda.

Do inhale: Herbs being fed to the fire during Dhanvantari Homam

An Ayurvedic Renaissance

It doesn't involve bloodletting. Nor does it leeches. Yet, ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of medicine, has never gained the First World's acceptance. Part of this has to do with issues related to the industry's fragmented nature in India, issues such as documentation, standardisation and safety. Mired in these problems, miracles (not certified, though) have gone unnoticed. In Kerala, the southern Indian state renowned for its ayurvedic treatments, there are hospitals that have made a name for identifying and treating snakebites (far faster than any known allopathic methods), and those that have a far better record than better-known names at curing people of fairly serious eye diseases such as glaucoma. AVP, stresses its current head P.R. Krishna Kumar-he is the son of the pharmacy's founder P.V. Rama Variar and the largest shareholder in the company-has "now got an opportunity to change this".

Krishna Kumar is a pious-looking 53-year-old who usually dresses in white and sports a vermillion mark on his forehead. His words hint at the larger purpose behind the study, the revival of ayurveda itself.

The men on a mission and the beneficiary: (Above) Arya Vaidya Pharmacy's Head P.R. Krishna Kumar (left) with Head of Research Ram Manohar; (Right) AVP physician K.G. Raveendran (far right) with S.B. Vimala (L), who has made a seemingly miraculous recovery from a brain haemorrhage

As would merit an exercise of this magnitude, the study involves research along three dimensions: literary (locating, studying and cataloguing books on the subject); field (documenting living traditions and traditional practices); and experimental. And that's in the first phase. Krishna Kumar is expecting a second grant from NIH that will help the cause of scalability; he expects India's Ayurveda Inc. to be part of this. "It (the industry) has already realised the importance of this grant," says Krishna Kumar. "The Kerala (based) companies have formed a cluster for joint co-operation." Kerala, of course, is the fount of ayurveda. Of the 900 companies into the business in the state, three or four do business worth a few hundred crore rupees every year. Yet, experts such as Ram Manohar believe that 95 per cent of ayurveda's secrets are lost to us for ever.

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