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< Back to Negotiating Routes:Ecologies Of The Byways 2010

NR 2: Chamba ke Gharelu Nushke aur Muft ki Salah

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The idea of this project was to work with the Henvalvani Community Radio Station in Chamba to produce a radio programme of Gharelu Nuskhe & Muft ki Salah (home remedies and free advice), by and for the community of listeners that this radio station has cultivated in the Henval valley over the past twelve years.

The team at Henvalvani was eager to expand their audience and share content with the online community by setting up a website. As they were unable to afford the costs of a website, the artist was requested to train the team to build and maintain a free blog on which they could upload their radio programmes.

Through interviewing over fifty people from seven different villages in the neighbourhood of Chamba, Chauhan collated a number of home remedies and heath advice from the local community. This was then transferred into audio content that was broken down into 30 clips of 1 minute duration and broadcast over Radio Henvalvani 90.4 MHz, devised as a campaign which addressed the depleting natural habitat and the endangered traditional knowledge of the valley.

Despite ecological deterioration, this belt of the Garhwal Himalayas was still abundant with medicinal plants. There were a number of state supported nurseries for medicinal plants and ayurvedic hospitals, which assisted in maintaining these high numbers. A number of plants that repeatedly came up in conversations between the artist and the local residents and were commonly found in the area were temru, chulu, kala jeera, bhimal, kala bans, haldi, lasan, akhrot, dhatura and dhaniya. Some ayurvedic plants were endangered which to some extent explained why these plants were no longer used in medical treatments, however the artist found that even those in abundance were no longer used for home remedies in the present day.