Living with illness uncertainty: nature cure caregiving in Kerala, South India

Abstract: First promoted in India as part of M.K. Gandhi’s anti-colonial project, nature cure (prakr̥ti jīvanaṁ) draws on the metaphor of vitality to frame the body as having a natural wisdom—a vital force—that works to restore health and balance. In Kerala, South India, patients forge mentorships with nature cure healers to repair their ill bodies, revive the toxic environment, and respond to moral collapse. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this paper offers a person-centred analysis of one practitioner, Dr Vinod, as he instils trust in two chronically ill patients facing uncertain futures. First, I demonstrate the limits of public categorisations of alternative medicines in India for representing the multiplicity of healers and their care strategies. Despite nature cure being outwardly centred as a mode of self-healing, Dr Vinod does not engage liberal conceptions of autonomy and independence, nor does he solely critique biomedicine. Rather, Dr Vinod attends to patients’ histories and the specific arrangements of kinship, caste, class, and gender shaping their vulnerabilities, to transform feelings of doubt into those of trust amid illness uncertainty. In this way, alternative healers hold the capacity to reconfigure socially embedded lives. Second, to illuminate how naturopathic care tactics reveal the relational dimensions of illness experience, I draw on and expand the work of philosopher Havi Carel. Carel argues that bodily doubt shapes the experience of chronic illness in three ways: loss of faith in one’s body, loss of transparency, and loss of continuity. Engaging with Cheryl Mattingly’s approach to narrative phenomenology, I demonstrate how Dr Vinod moves a step further, asking how articulations of illness and loss are inherently intersubjective. Empathetic to his patients’ social worlds, Dr Vinod gently intervenes in their lives, forging therapeutic ties to support them—all the while outwardly claiming that the locus of healing lies in the self.

Keywords: care, nature cure, naturopathy, alternative medicine, illness experience, illness narratives, Kerala, South India

Article posted to the Journal of the British Academy, volume 11, supplementary issue 6 (Exploring Medical Mistrust: From Clinic to Community)