Empirical aspects of healing among Indian tribes: A study with special reference to the nicobarese of car nicobar and the Jaunsarese of Jaunsar-Bawar (Uttarakhand)

All cultures have a set of ideas for defining and treating disease, ways of prescribing cures, or easing pain and for making statements about the probable outcome of disease. Disease and cure systems are two sides of same coin and are individual biological responses directed and shaped for the most part by cultural ideas learned in the course of being socialized. Realm of cure plays very important role in achieving complete physical, mental and social well being. Every society has its own typical system/method of curing diseases i.e. line of treatment varies from culture to culture due to “social determinants”, age and place. Tribal system of healing, indigenous as well as traditional, falls under the category of sacred and secular sub sectors, indicating its roots in both religious (e.g. Shamanism) and empirical (e.g. herbalism) or “Ethno-medicine”. Tribal medicine system to a large extent depends on success of magico-ritual significance or magico-logical performances which give a way to magic, ritual, sorcery, witchcraft and healers, shamans, medicine men, Baki (Jaunsar-Bawar), Tamiluono, Totarong (Car Nicobar) etc. Indigenous/tribal medicine system looms large on the fact that cause in itself would bring about a cure and are pronounced to be based on hit and trial methods. This paper is an out come of empirical study among Jaunsari and Nicobari tribes and is an attempt to discuss the salient features of traditional/indigenous medicinal systems and concept of diseases prevailing between two distant tribes of India, one residing in mountainous region (Uttaranchal) and the other in island region (Nicobar). The paper is based on the field data collected from twelve Jaunsari villages of Jaunsar-Bawar and twelve Nicobari villages of Car Nicobar Island.