By Eleanor Mikkimchi Sangma
Cultures around the world have their own healing practices, diverse and holistic. Many of such practices rely on nature and are rooted in faith. The Garo community has for ages, practised its own natural healing referred to as sam A.chik.
Minoth A Sangma, a natural healer from Allagre, says one cannot be taught how to practice sam A.chik. “You keep experimenting with different ingredients, and the knowledge dawns upon you. Does this one work? Does that? You keep trying if something does not yield the desired result,” he says. Experimenting with such remedies on himself, he is his own guinea pig, his own test subject. He says he gives it to others only after making sure it works.
Sangma treats serious cases of dog bites, snake bites, a.si raka (malevolent gods or spirits talked about in detail in a previous story) and excessive bleeding.
For a dog bite, he says there are three ingredients – me.cheng bite (fruit of prickly ash), the root of a Papaya tree and songru (a herb also used in cooking). The healer mixes these ingredients together and makes a paste out of it. The paste is then applied to the wound four times – the first three times applied within a minute from each other while the last one is kept overnight, bandaged or wrapped in a piece of cloth. This makes sure any and all infections are sucked out of it.
When asked how he knows if the ingredients work, he tells me, “Once you consume it, your body starts feeling its effects. It feels really cool going down. There’s this sense of a burden being lifted. The fog around your mind also starts clearing up.”
Sangma uses his knowledge of natural healing to help his own family as well. His wife, sitting to his left, tells me how for the past couple of months she had not been able to move much. Her nerves have always given her trouble and recently, her condition became even worse. She says the pain has eased up due to her husband’s remedy. Sangma’s wife is not the only person his medicines have helped.
For about three years, his son had been mentally unstable. He would keep picking fights with everyone. If he had an axe in hand, he would swing it at anyone in his vicinity. If there was a piece of wood, that also became a weapon in his hand. Last year, Sangma finally decided to try sam A.chik on him. He would not disclose the sole ingredient to me, but said he made it into a paste and had his son ingest it. “From that moment on, he started recovering and now he is completely healthy,” he tells me.
Besides such serious illnesses, for symptoms that regularly come down on people, such as headaches and stomach aches, the remedy takes only five to ten minutes to start working. “You feed them a piece of nojor dikge (medicinal herb) and the relief is immediate,” he says.
He has jars of these ingredients collected for the sick, who often make late-night visits with sudden illnesses. “At one o’clock, two o‘clock at night, I have to welcome unannounced guests and concoct a remedy for them,” he says. Sometimes, he feels he gets more visits than an actual doctor.
Sangma personally has a love-hate relationship with modern medicine. He says he does not visit doctors much. However, for more serious illnesses such as Cancer and such, he says going to the doctor would be the best option. There is no compulsion of any kind; it is just a matter of preference.
“The medicines do not work for everyone though. They only work on select individuals,” he says. For healers, it is easy to determine this. “For people whose blood accepts the medicine, the effect is immediate. If it does not work even after three attempts, then you know their blood rejects it. Then they have to go to the doctor.”
For years, I had heard that a person who is on A.chik sam cannot take modern medication at the same time; something about the two cancelling each other out. He says that is not true. “If you consume one right after the other, then there obviously might be some side effects. But a person can take the two on the same day, just not immediately after the other,” he explains.
There are certain items that one has to exclude from their diet while on A.chik sam. He tells me it depends on each healer but for his own patients, he only has three items on the list – spices, garlic and citrus. Some forbid meat, while others exclude almost everything under the sun till there is not much option left for the sick, except for rice and select greens. “I personally tell them to avoid having just the three mentioned ingredients, because I have seen that these aggravate certain illnesses and cause a person to relapse,” he explains. If a person has to avoid all the food in the world, then they will get even weaker rather than gaining their strength back.
Sam A.chik has been a part of our community since the age of the Songsarek, the Garo animist religion. “These plants that help heal us have been blessed by God,” he says. He adds that we might never know all of them, their existence in thousands; we could be walking past a couple of them each day not knowing the power they hold in their tiny bodies.
When he says God, I hesitate to ask if he means the one true God the Christians believe in or the old gods our forefathers used to worship. I guess either one would work as the answer at some point in time. Whichever it is, faith is at the core of this ancient practice.
He admits there is no guarantee of a miraculous recovery. No one can say it will heal for sure, we just have to rely on our faith.
“We’re not gods, so we can’t say anything with certainty. The healing depends on what God wants,” he says.
Healing by sam A.chik has been practised by both Songsareks as well as Christians. After Christianity came to Garo Hills, the way of practising it went through a change. Unlike our forefathers, Christians do not require any ritualistic sacrifice. In the old days, a medicine concocted in the aftermath of a sacrifice would be extremely potent, Sangma tells me. It could not be touched by just anyone, which is not the case now. Practices change with time, just like faith does. Yet, natural healing is still widely used in Garo Hills, in the rural as well as the urban areas.
In his village, Sangma is the resident natural healer. He does not ask for a fee from people who come seeking relief, most of whom are from his village. He says his services do not extend outside his village for fear of certain people with malicious intentions. There are so many cases of sam kal.aka, where people have fallen sick or met an even worse fate allegedly due to misuse of such practices.
“This practice is important as it retains precious human lives. It keeps people from the clutches of death,” he says. For instance, if an individual has fallen prey to a.si raka, the effect is immediate and often fatal. Sam A.chik is one way to save the person. The main ingredients for this case are dike a.si (medicinal herb), aloe vera and chisik (a variety of medicinal herb), the paste of which is massaged onto the body of the afflicted. If a single spot on their body is left untouched, the illness comes back. He tells me once the medicine worked so well the a.si, still occupying the body of the afflicted, started screaming, “My arm has been cut off! My arm has been cut off!”. The person recovered soon after, memories of his sickness a fever dream.
Natural healing is considered a means for holistic healing – Physical, mental and spiritual. In its essence, it also provides an answer to the question of sustainability.
Sam A.chik has been sewn into the fabric of the A.chik culture. A community that has been closely connected to nature since time immemorial, our healing practices show how dependent and interconnected we are to the world around us.
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