The Sociologist of Systems | How Professor V. Sujatha Illuminates the Soul of Indian Medicine
NV Paulose, Chairman, Global TV +91 98441 82044
There are people who heal through medicine. And then there are those who heal our understanding of medicine itself. Prof. V. Sujatha belongs to the second kind. She has spent her life exploring how India thinks, feels, and practices health. Her questions go far beyond hospitals and laboratories. She listens to the heartbeat of society, to the ways people make sense of illness, to the quiet trust that keeps ancient healing alive.
In Indian healthcare, where modern clinics stand beside traditional healers, Professor Sujatha has built a bridge of understanding. She does not draw lines between science and spirituality. Instead, she studies how both coexist in the same cultural soil. Her work shows that health in India is not a single road but a living network of many paths. Each path carries memory, faith, and meaning.
Listening to the Many Voices of Healing
At Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she teaches at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Professor Sujatha has created a unique space for dialogue. Her research is deeply rooted in the field. She listens to patients, practitioners, and healers who live far beyond the reach of city hospitals. Through their voices, she uncovers a truth that healing is beyond our basic understanding. It is the restoration of the confidence.
In her studies on medical pluralism, she reveals that Indians often move between many systems of healing. A person may take allopathic medicine for one illness, visit an Ayurvedic doctor for another, and still keep faith in a spiritual healer for comfort. To some, this might look like confusion. But Prof. Sujatha see it as an advantage of wisdom.
Our wisdom is built from generations of lived experience. People do not simply choose medicine. They choose meaning. They seek care that understands their story. Her book Sociology of Health and her paper Health Beyond Medicine explore this subtle dimension of care.
She writes about homeopathy not as an alternative science but as a conversation between healer and patient. What attracts people, she says, is not just the medicine itself but the time, attention, and empathy offered during consultation. Healing here is emotional as much as physical. It is personal, patient, and profoundly human.
The Healer’s Touch: Fieldwork as a Way of Seeing
Professor Sujatha’s scholarship is remarkable because it lives in the field, not just in libraries. She walks with traditional healers and listens to the quiet rhythm of their work. Her study on indigenous bone-setters is one such example. She does not write about them as curiosities of the past but as custodians of a living science. These practitioners work with inherited knowledge, guided by intuition, observation, and community trust. Their practice is not a rejection of modern medicine but a reminder that there are many ways of knowing the body.
Through her research, she gives dignity to professions that history has forgotten. She explores their ethics, their sense of responsibility, and their struggles for recognition. In doing so, she also raises larger questions about power and knowledge. Who decides what counts as medicine? Who has the authority to define healing? Her study on Merchants of Spiritual Medicine takes this inquiry further, showing how healing today is often entangled with commerce, media, and modern aspirations. Yet even in this changing space, she sees the enduring human desire for meaning and care.
Her writing carries the intimacy of storytelling and the depth of sociology. It reflects her belief that understanding people requires walking beside them. By entering their worlds with empathy, she turns observation into participation and research into relationship.
The Politics of Health and the Loss of Belonging
Perhaps the most moving part of her work is her concern for those left behind by progress. She has written powerfully about how development often uproots traditional communities and destroys their ways of living. When farmers, healers, or craftspeople lose their land, they also lose their identity, their food systems, and their natural sources of medicine. What disappears with them is not only livelihood but a way of life that once kept both people and nature in balance.
Prof. V. Sujatha calls this a silent epidemic; a form of social illness that affects entire communities. When the rhythm of local life is broken, health itself becomes fragile. She reminds us that wellness cannot exist apart from justice. Good public health depends not only on hospitals and vaccines but on land, food, and dignity. It depends on whether people are allowed to live with respect and continuity.
Her work, therefore, connects sociology with ethics. It challenges policymakers to see that healthcare is not just a system of delivery but a reflection of social values. When we measure success only in statistics, we miss the invisible wounds; the loneliness, the loss of belonging, and the erosion of community wisdom.
Bridging Traditions: The Future of Indian Healing
In her studies of Ayurveda and Siddha, Professor Sujatha examines how ancient systems of medicine adapt to the modern state. She looks at how they are taught, standardized, and integrated into national health programs. This process, she observes, is both necessary and risky. It brings traditional knowledge into the modern framework but can also strip it of its living essence.
She encourages scholars and practitioners to protect the spirit of these systems; the idea that health is harmony, not just the absence of disease. Ayurveda and Siddha, she reminds us, are not merely collections of herbs or techniques. They are philosophies that link the body to nature, and the individual to the cosmos. To keep them alive, they must be understood as ways of seeing, not just methods of treatment.
By bridging traditional wisdom and modern institutions, her work invites us to imagine a more inclusive healthcare model. A model where old and new do not compete but converse. A model that treats healing as a shared heritage, not as a divided field.
Seeing the Invisible: The Legacy of a Thinker
Professor Sujatha does not offer easy solutions. She does something far more valuable; she teaches us to see what has always been around us. Through her research, she reveals the invisible threads that connect knowledge, culture, and care. She shows that health is not a private matter but a mirror of society. It reflects how we relate to one another, how we value our elders, and how we listen to our environment.
Her writing has inspired many young scholars to approach research with compassion and courage. She has proven that sociology, when done with honesty, can become a form of healing. It can restore what modernity often forgets; that knowledge must serve humanity.
Through her eyes, we learn that true health is not only about the body. It is about belonging, memory, and meaning. It is about a society that remembers how to care; not just to cure.
Beyond State and Culture: Reimagining the Nation with Professor V. Sujatha | Seeing the Nation as a Living Act of Imagination
What is a nation?
Is it a piece of land, a border drawn on a map, or an idea that lives in the hearts of people?
For Prof. V. Sujatha, it is none of these alone. She believes that a nation is not a finished creation but a living process. It keeps growing, shifting, and reshaping itself through time. Every generation reimagines it, and that imagination gives it life. To her, imagination is not fantasy. It is a form of collective thinking, a way in which people give meaning to their shared world. Through this idea, she invites us to look at India not as a fixed structure of government or culture, but as a continuous story shaped by its people. The nation, in her eyes, is not a monument to be guarded but a conversation that never ends.
Two Views that Shaped Indian Sociology
In her reflections on Indian sociology, Professor Sujatha studies how scholars have understood the nation. She identifies two major views that shaped the field over time, both powerful but both limited.
The first is the view that places the state at the centre. This way of thinking treats the modern state as the main engine of progress. It sees governance, law, and order as the foundation of national life. In this picture, citizens become the primary actors, and the state becomes the symbol of modernity. Yet, Professor Sujatha points out that this idea often borrows heavily from European experiences. It assumes that every society must follow the same path from tradition to modernity, from emotion to rationality. In doing so, it overlooks the unique rhythm of Indian society. It fails to see the living layers of community and culture that make India what it is.
The second view emerged as a reaction. It placed culture at the centre. This school of thought argued that India’s strength lies in its traditions, its diversity, and its many ways of life. It saw the state as an artificial construct and culture as the real foundation of society.
But this too has its limits. When culture is treated as something pure and unchanging, it becomes another kind of cage. It forgets that cultures also evolve. They learn, borrow, and grow through time. For Professor Sujatha, both views stop short of seeing the whole picture. One makes the nation mechanical. The other makes it frozen. What is missing is the sense of flow, the sense of movement, the sense that a nation is an ongoing act of imagination.
The Cost of Frameworks and the Power of Labels
Prof. Sujatha is known for her fearless questioning of accepted theories. She uses a vivid image from Greek legend to explain her concern. In the story of King Procrustes, every traveller was forced to fit into an iron bed. If the person was shorter, he was stretched. If taller, parts were cut off to make him fit. She compares this to what happens when scholars try to fit the reality of Indian society into rigid theories. When life does not fit the model, it is trimmed to suit the theory. In this way, entire traditions, crafts, and forms of knowledge are dismissed as outdated or pre-modern. Generations of artisans, farmers, and healers are pushed out of the story of progress.
For her, this is not only an intellectual error but a moral one. It is a way of erasing living experiences because they do not fit a borrowed idea of modernity. It is an act of cutting away the richness of life to make it look neat. She finds strength in Professor Anand Kumar’s idea that every democracy is born with its own disabilities.
This simple thought holds great wisdom. It means that no nation is ever perfect. Each one begins with its flaws, its wounds, and its contradictions. Democracy, therefore, is not a finished goal but a continuing effort to grow, correct, and imagine better.
The Nation as a Living Process
Professor Sujatha offers a different way of seeing. She asks us to think of the nation as a living imagination. It is not something created once and for all. It is something people recreate every day through their work, their art, their struggles, and their hopes. She reminds us that the life of a nation does not only flow through government offices or parliaments. It flows through the hands of the farmer, the voice of the teacher, the craft of the artisan, and the songs of the common people. It is in these small acts of living that the real imagination of a nation grows. To understand India, she says, sociology must begin from the ground. Theories must arise from experience, not from imported categories. Knowledge must grow from listening, not from imposing. A true understanding of the nation should make room for every story, every language, and every form of life. She believes that we must accept the imperfections of our democracy and still continue to nurture it. The flaws we inherit are reminders that we are still in the process of becoming. The nation is not an object to be preserved but a journey to be continued.
A Call for a More Human Vision
Through her work, Professor V. Sujatha offers a fresh language for understanding India. She moves away from rigid debates about state and culture, and instead speaks about the nation as a living space of imagination. She sees it as a conversation between reason and compassion, between policy and experience, between tradition and change. In this vision, every person becomes part of the nation’s story.
The scholar and the street vendor, the artist and the farmer, the city and the village; all share a role in shaping the idea of belonging. None of them need to be trimmed or stretched to fit a single model.
Her view is not romantic. It is deeply realistic. It accepts that nations are built in struggle, and that imagination can be both fragile and powerful. But it also carries hope; the hope that understanding can heal what divisions cannot. Prof. Sujatha reminds us that sociology, at its best, is not only the study of society but also a form of care. It helps us see what is often ignored. It helps us imagine what we might still become. The nation, in her vision, is not just a system or a symbol. It is a living idea; shaped every day by the choices, voices, and dreams of its people.
