Ambikapur (Chhattisgarh): This is perhaps the only hospital in the world where sorcerers don the role of doctors, albeit, without official sanction.
Tribal healers, called “Baigas” or “Gunias” in local parlance, cast spells to treat patients, admitted in the state government-run Medical College Hospital in north Chhattisgarh town of Ambikapur. This hardly generates curiosity among the visitors or the hospital workers.
For, the staff knows the Baigas as being the “family doctors” of these patients and cannot be separated from them.
“The patients, particularly those hailing from interior villages in the tribal region, are often accompanied with Baigas, whom they treat as their family doctors, to the hospital. They prefer to be under the ‘care’ of doctors as well as the tribal healers simultaneously in the hospital,” a doctor serving in the hospital told before this newspaper requesting anonymity.
The people in the backward region have hardly any access to medical facilities. These sorcerers belonging to the primitive tribe of Baiga serve as physicians in the adivasi villages of north Chhattisgarh districts such as Ambikapur, Surajpur, Jashpur, and Koriya.
Ambikapur Medical College and Hospital is considered a lifeline for around 25 lakh people, mostly tribals, living in these four districts of north Chhattisgarh. Each village in the region has one or two Baigas who cater to the health needs of the local population and are treated as “family doctors”.
“Tribal healers are part of the local tradition. Hence, it is hard to separate the Baigas from the tribals. Often, sick tribals come to the hospital along with the Baigas so that the latter continue to attend them even if they are treated by the doctors,” Dr Anil Prasad of Ambikapur Medical College Hospital told this newspaper. He, however, said the sight of Baigas treating the ailing tribals in the hospital has, of late, become infrequent, due to spread of education in the region.
“The present tribal generation, being modern and educated, has shunned the Baigas and relies only on the doctors for treatment,” he added.
There are two kinds of tribal healers here. While one section acquired traditional knowledge of healing the sick with different herbs found in the forests, the others are nothing but quacks who feign to treat the sick by making unusual movement of their hands and mumbling some “mantras”.
People in tribal villages commonly suffer from water-borne diseases such as diarrhea, dysentery, and jaundice. Besides malaria, snake bites also take a heavy toll on lives of the tribals in the remote areas in the region.The adivasis, for generations, have been depending on Baigas in their villages to save them from these diseases owing to lack of access to medical facilities.
“Patients being treated by Baigas, often succumb to their diseases due to lack of timely medical aid. Still, the tribals’ faith in the Baigas has remained unshaken,” Ambikapur-based ethnologist Anchal Ojha told this newspaper.
The hospital has also been witness to strange scenes of the kin of the patients, who die during medical treatment, bringing the Baigas from their villages to make the dead alive.
The sorcerers perform black magic on the dead inside the premises of the hospital without an eyebrow being raised. Such scenes are common and do not shock anyone.
In some cases, patients who get discharged from the hospital after a long stay are seen hiring black magicians to make them immune to the spells of the spirits of those who died in their wards.
“Most of these cases do not come to our notice. Whenever we come across incidents of patients being treated by Baigas in the hospital, we try to convince them that they should shun such practices and rely on the doctors,” Dr Prasad said.
But, the Baigas continue to prowl the hospital. Doctors say the centuries old faith in tribal healers will not crumble in a few months or years.
