Nirāmayatā: Healing and Wellbeing at the India International Centre, New Delhi

On 6–7 October 2026, three members of the Suśruta Project, Dominik Wujastyk, Jason Birch and Kenneth Zysk, took part in the international conference Nirāmayatā (निरामयता): Healing and Wellbeing in South Asian Texts and Practices, held at the India International Centre (IIC) in New Delhi. We were the guests of the IIC–International Research Division (IRD) and its Executive Director, Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan, who conceived the conference and invited us to speak.

The IRD and the SAMHiTA programme

The International Research Division grew out of the IIC-Asia Project, which from 1997 onward held annual conferences on the cultures of Asia, for many years under the guidance of Dr Kapila Vatsyayan. Since 2022 the Division has run SAMHiTA (South Asian Manuscript Histories and Textual Archive), a programme supported by the Ministry of External Affairs to inventory, catalogue and digitise South Asian manuscripts held in libraries and archives outside India. Its knowledge partners include the PANDiT project, the Old Indian Institute at Oxford, SOAS, the Wellcome Collection, the Royal Danish Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

The Nirāmayatā conference was organised by the IRD in collaboration with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the Bharat ki Soch Foundation, within the framework of SAMHiTA. Its aim was to look at Indian and wider Asian medical traditions through manuscripts and living practice: how medical knowledge was produced, circulated and transformed, and how it moved between Sanskrit, Tamil, Persianate, Tibetan and Southeast Asian traditions. Over two days, six sessions brought together historians, philologists, practitioners of Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Sowa Rigpa, and biomedical scientists.

Our presentations

Keynote address. After the inaugural addresses by Shri K. N. Shrivastava (Director, IIC), Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan, Shri Anil Rajput (Bharat ki Soch) and Shri Shyam Saran (President, IIC), Dominik Wujastyk gave the keynote address, “Achieving Healthiness and the Absence of Illness in Ayurveda.” The title takes up the theme of the conference itself, since nirāmayatā means “freedom from disease.”

Dissection in the Suśrutasaṃhitā. In the first session, “Texts and Concepts on Medical Thought,” chaired by Prof. G. G. Gangadharan, Kenneth Zysk spoke on “What Medical Literature Can Reveal: Dissection in the Suśruta Saṃhitā, Internal and External Transmission.” The Suśrutasaṃhitā’s instructions for preparing and examining a human body in the Śārīrasthāna are unique in early Indian literature, and raise questions both about how this knowledge was passed on within the medical tradition and about its relations with knowledge from outside it.

Suśruta on preserving health. In the afternoon session, “Mind and Body in Asian Medical Traditions,” chaired by Dr S. Irfan Habib, Jason Birch spoke on “From Svastharakṣaṇīya to Svasthavṛtti: How Suśruta’s Chapter on Preserving a Person’s Health Changed.” The paper traced how the Suśrutasaṃhitā’s teaching on keeping a healthy person healthy was reshaped over the course of the work’s transmission.

Other contributions

Our papers sat alongside a wide range of others. Among them were Dr S. A. S. Sarma on Gāruḍa Tantra traditions of snakebite medicine in Kerala; Dr Mehsaan Barawaz on the Persian Majmūʿah-i Żiyāʾī and the meeting of Unani and Ayurvedic learning; Dr Padma Gurmet on Sowa Rigpa; Sugi Lanus on herbal and ritual healing in Balinese lontar manuscripts; Dr Annamma Spudich on European documents about South Indian medicine in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries; and Prof. Nupur Dasgupta on regional environmental knowledge in Cakrapāṇidatta’s Dravyaguṇasaṃgraha and Mādhavakara’s Paryāyaratnamālā. A session on traditional and modern medicine, with Prof. Bhushan Patwardhan and Prof. Rama Jayasundar, and a closing round table on future directions for traditional knowledge, chaired by Vaidya Rajesh Kotecha, brought the perspectives of science and public policy into the discussion.

Thanks

We are very grateful to Dr Sudha Gopalakrishnan and the staff of the International Research Division for their invitation, their careful organisation and their generous hospitality. The day after the conference, on 8 October, we also visited the Ministry of Culture and Gyan Bharatam, the national manuscript mission; that visit is described in a separate post.