India to institute Siddha faculty on erstwhile Tiger terrain

India is expected to come up with a centre for Siddha, an ancient Tamil medicine system. The center will be instituted in a Sri Lankan university whose growth was interrupted by the civil war.

As New Delhi gets ready to tie up with Colombo post-LTTE, it plans to foot the whole bill for the founding of the faculty, to be situated on the Trincomalee campus of Eastern University. Tenders for the needed infrastructure have already been issued by The Indian high commission in Colombo.

The LTTE has substantial power in the university’s catchment’s area that boasts a large Tamil populace.

An Indian foreign ministry source here said, “Many Tamils live in the university’s reach area and some of them practice Siddha medicine. So, the centre will be a help to them.”

Claimed to be world’s oldest medicine system, Siddha is the result of the trio traditional Indian medicine systems. The two are Ayurveda and Unani.

A government source here said, “As the system originated in India, we have considerable expertise in the field. We have institutions like the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha, which comes under the ministry of health and family welfare.”

The mythology says a group of saints known as Siddhars got the knowledge of the system from Shiva and Parvathi and started putting it into practice. The basic theory of three humours in Siddha is quite like the Ayurveda’s. But a big difference between the two sciences are that Siddha talks about the prevalence of vatham, pitham and kapham in adulthood, childhood and old age correspondingly, while the Ayurveda talks about their reverse order. Siddha medicines are related to herbal, inorganic or animal products.