In 1911 a young Indian doctor was kitted out by the patent medicines millionaire and obsessive collector Henry Wellcome, to go back to India and collect material relating to the ancient practice of Ayurvedic medicine.
The task was supposed to take him a year: 11 years later Paira Mall was still wandering south-east Asia, staying in towns, hermitages, remote villages and settlements, and sending back crate upon crate of medical instruments, books, fabrics, dried herbs, sculptures, cheap popular prints and ancient paintings.
He was still hard at work through the first world war, but unable to send back the material he was collecting: crates began to arrive in London by the score as soon as he could arrange shipping again.
The letter recommending Mall to Wellcome described a man “with a rather remarkable career” who had been brought up “by an English lady” to become a missionary, but had instead turned to medicine. “He states that he has a great faculty for languages and speaks and writes German, French, Italian, Sanskrit, Persian, Hindustani, Punjabi, Arabic and some Japanese.”
In 1918 a letter from Wellcome’s assistant suggested that he should leave India “and search through Ceylon, Burmah, Sumatra, the Straits Settlements, all the adjacent islands, Siam, Java, Borneo, Formosa and the Philippines etc”.
His travels, and some of the treasures and curiosities he sent back, will be traced for the first time in Ayurvedic Man, an exhibition opening at the Wellcome Collection this month. The curators have pored through the archives to find and display his many letters and the responses from Wellcome and his staff for the first time.
Despite being equipped with a salary of £250 a year, and a waterproof bag containing a complete travelling kit including a folding camp bed, chair and table, and two Jaeger rugs – the camera, he reported, was not well made and had to be sent for repair after a day’s use – he wrote regular plaintive letters back asking for more money. Equally regularly, notes were added saying that his pleas had been rejected.
One letter, as he was about to undertake a 45-day trek across mountains and plains, points out that since there will be no banks or telegraph offices, he needs an advance. “As the journey will be expensive on account of the transport difficulties, the amount for three months should not be less than three hundred pounds. Some of the passes I have to cross are 21,000ft above the sea level.”
In November 1911 he wrote of meeting with Indians in Lucknow whose families had been practising as healers for 1,000 years. “I am also negotiating for an apothecary’s shop in the Punjab, and I think I shall be able to buy one very cheap,” he writes. “I am afraid I shall have to cable for remittance.”
He disappears from the Wellcome archives in the early 1920s, possibly after one request too many for more money. The curators and archivists have been unable to discover any more of his story – he was back in London and would only have been in his mid 50s by then – and hope that the exhibition may turn up more information about what happened next to a remarkable man.
- Ayurvedic Man, free, Wellcome Collection London, 16 November 2016 - 8 April 2018
