Issac Mathai: Guru of the Holistic

One of the first things that strike you about Issac Mathai is that he is disarmingly direct. He is also Malayali to the bone—he loves his fish curry, breaks into Chemmeen songs and doesn’t tire of watching the rain from his 30-foot porch. A homoeopath and a holistic health expert, Mathai is the architect of an oasis of wellness in Whitefield, Bengaluru, named Soukya. Frequented by the platinum elite of society, the retreat, nearly two decades old and sprawled over 30 acres, is not entirely manicured—there remains a certain rusticism that evokes his home district of Wayanad in Kerala. Tumults of flowers become landing pads for dragonflies and smaller winged creatures; java apple, guava, jamun and gooseberry trees spill the secrets of the seasons; long, low stone buildings give the place an air of willing exile. “Kerala Congress leader Oommen Chandy was here during his term as chief minister. When he saw the guava tree outside his cottage laden with fruit that had been allowed to ripen and fall naturally for the benefit of the birds, he became child-like with excitement and couldn’t help himself from plucking and eating them,” says Mathai, 61. “We let nature do 50 per cent of the healing—in fact, you don’t have to come here, you could just as well go to the Western Ghats. The rest is achieved with yoga, organic food and medicines to treat a diagnosis arrived at through human inquiry and insight—something that modern allopathic practice tends to overlook.”

The window in his Dyson-cooled chamber in one of the administrative blocks at Soukya frames a bird-ruffled bottlebrush and a grand gulmohar beyond—his favourite tree in the campus. “When I conceived of Soukya as a bountiful garden of Eden, I told a friend and he said there is a limit to bullshitting. Actually, my dream was a third of what we have today,” he says. How the son of an Orthodox priest, growing up in Sulthan Bathery assisting his mother at her homoeopathy practice after school, became a healer of renown treating the rich and the famous of the world, is a tale of sheer enterprise and steady pragmatism. For most of his life, Mathai has been following the coastline of what we call alternative medicine like a cartographer, collecting driftwood to piece together different approaches to treating illness. You could be on beta blockers for your heart, but why not practise yoga alongside to calm your body and mind, and take Ayurvedic remedies to treat the underlying chronic condition, he argues. And while there is no doubt you must take the coronavirus vaccine, should you polemically oppose attempts to boost the immune system with homoeopathic drugs like Arsenicum Album, recommended by several state governments for prophylactic use during the pandemic after experts like Mathai advised the Ministry of AYUSH on the protocol? “We had distributed homoeopathic drugs to 40,000 employees of Suzlon and they reported a remarkably low incidence of Covid-19. We have since distributed the medicines to 2.5 lakh people, many of them slum dwellers in Bangalore.”

“To the rich, I do not want to be a cheap doctor—I have charged up to $10,000 for a consult, and asked for a Concorde to take me to a patient in an emergency. The larger dream I have, though, is to take holistic medicine to the community,” says Issac Mathai, founder, Soukya

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It was as a student at the ANSS Homoeo Medical College in Kottayam, “hoping to take the easy way out and join mother’s practice,” that Mathai first began to practise transcendental meditation and yoga—they have since become a part of his daily personal wellness routine. He also happened to train with an allopath who was experimenting with holistic medicine. Postgraduate studies in London further opened doors for the young Mathai in ways he had scarcely imagined: he soon went from teaching yoga to make his rent while assisting a doctor for a weekly wage of £25 to working with the 101 Clinic where George Harrison, Tina Turner and Sting were patients. The boy from Wayanad, attired smartly in a suit, had no inkling of their celebrity. Othered by their immense wealth and fame, Mathai says they were taken in by their everyday interactions with him, the Indian who never skimmed giddily along their star personas. “Compared to white men, I must have sounded like a philosopher,” he jokes. Harrison taught him a valuable lesson, he says: that in our interminable pursuit of wellbeing, we all want to be treated, respected and valued as a human first. “Whether we are hosting superstar Rajinikanth at Soukya or teaching yoga to royalty, we keep a level head.”

Mathai extracts two medicine kits from a drawer, one an assortment of tubes and bottles in a zippered look-through plastic pouch, the other a structured black hard case with identical slim containers stacked inside. “These are basic medicines to treat common ailments. I sell the same medicines to affluent clients and give them away for free to thousands of locals at our community clinic in Hoskote,” he says. A five-bedroom suite at Soukya, with your own private garden and what Mathai claims are “the best bathrooms in the country,” can set you back by as much as ` 7 lakh per night. The presidential suite costs ` 1.5 lakh a night. Royals from the Middle East and England, and heiresses, businessmen and politicians with private jets have been known to run up crores in bills. “We have treated extreme psychiatric cases where we had to delve deep into the patient’s mind to identify the root of what was manifesting as a physical or mental ailment,” says Mathai. Rape victims, women who had fled abusive marriages, patients with lung fibrosis and heart failure, and celebrities who must conceal their ailments from the prying eyes of the world—Soukya has seen it all. It has become a yearly tradition for some, but with just 25 rooms, it can only remain a model for the best India can offer the world. “It could not have happened anywhere but in Bangalore,” he says. “A boy from Wayanad felt right at home in the garden city.” In 1989, when Mathai, all of 29 years old, organised the first international conference on holistic health and medicine in Bengaluru, the delegates included the Dalai Lama and pioneering neurosurgeon Dr RM Varma. “I had no inhibitions. I believed in my ideas and did not hesitate to pick up the phone and call the best minds in India.” The idea of a holistic centre in Bengaluru began to take shape in his mind. After he married Suja, a nutritionist and an aesthete who has shaped the design sensibilities of Soukya, in 1990, the two began to raise money and chase permissions. “I lost some clients, as they were displeased with my passionate, and sometimes insistent, requests to invest in my dream project. Looking back, I regret doing that, but I was truly desperate at that point and needed all the help I could get,” he writes in his book, Holistic Healing: A Doctor’s Guide to Rediscovering Health and Happiness, Naturally (2014). He has authored another book on women’s health and is working on a third, based on patient stories “beyond your wildest imagination.”

MATHAI’S OWN STORY is the wildest of them all. He has treated Prince Charles, who spent his 71st birthday at Soukya with his wife, and other British royals and is in the process of establishing a holistic clinic at a National Health Service hospital in London—“a project Prime Minister Narendra Modi is keen on.” “People tell me I am materialistic. To the rich, I do not want to be a cheap doctor—I have charged up to $10,000 for a consult, and asked for a Concorde to take me to a patient in an emergency. The larger dream I have, though, is to take holistic medicine to the community through the Sahaya Holistic Integrative Medical Centre in Jayanagar, Bangalore, that can be replicated throughout the country, and our rural holistic health centre on the outskirts of the city where we not only track and treat over 30,000 people, but also work to introduce them to yoga, better food habits and the importance of hygiene. We have seen encouraging preliminary results from our community engagement—the prevalence of lifestyle diseases among the cohort is lower and there is yet a lot more we can do.”

Frequented by the platinum elite of society, Soukya, nearly two decades old and sprawled over 30 acres, is not entirely manicured—there remains a certain rusticism that evokes Mathai’s home district of Wayanad in Kerala

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Mathai is exploring Portugal for his second world-class holistic health retreat. Just back from a trip to Munnar, a part of Kerala he had not visited before, he says he is not foolish enough to put his money where his heart is. “I wouldn’t set up a venture in communist country,” he says, adding ironically that his father contested an Assembly election as an independent with the support of the communists. When the late Reverend Father Mathai Nooranal came to inaugurate Soukya, he was disappointed the buildings were single-storeyed. “He would have liked to see the five-storey Sahaya buildings come up,” he says.

From solitary annual retreats in Assisi and trips to Rishikesh and Mt Kailash, to an idyllic life with Suja and their three children at the Soukya campus, Mathai has certainly slowed down, even if his list of clients continues to lengthen. “By the time I was 35, I had seen it all. I had jet-setted to the South of France, treated Tina Turner on tour at exotic locales, and got my first Mercedes-Benz in the UK. I remember running after a Benz as a child growing up in a small town where we didn’t see many luxury cars then. I had always dreamt of wearing suits and owning a Benz.” Were he not so fond of suits, he jokes, he could have been a successful guru. “I am spiritual and I encourage patients to pray to the god they believe in. We have a hilltop chapel here inspired by the Greek Orthodox style, and I truly believe the abundance we have at Soukya is thanks to God’s grace. But I am a doctor, not a mystic—I do have a gift and it is knowing where to knock.” His faith in low-tech modes of inquiry, and his philosophising, tinge the conversation with a drop of the transcendental, but he is quick to point out that he is all too human—from sensing the caprice of history while treating a member of Mountbatten’s family, to being swept up in the Malayali triumphalism of a doctor from a tribal district in Kerala hobnobbing with Middle Eastern royalty. “When I was fresh off the boat in London, a patient complained that she could not understand my accent. Many people have since asked me why my English hasn’t improved. I don’t mind them, but I have never attempted to change my accent. English does not equal intelligence.”

Mathai enjoys people-watching at airports and often turns it into an act of medical sleuthing. “It is fascinating how much one can tell from observing people—they could be arthritic, at risk of heart disease, or sleepless; the body gives them away. So much so that when you pronounce your diagnosis, you can almost sound like a baba,” he says. Sometimes, when he digs deeper, the “miracle” quotient shoots up even more. Examining a woman who found herself inexplicably bedridden, he diagnosed her with lead toxicity and treated her with “my mother’s 10-rupee homoeopathic medicine” after she revealed that she had holidayed at a damp old castle in Wales—“it had ancient lead plumbing.” “When the trauma is psychological, you have to dig a lot more. A good doctor is like a mirror—this is why there are so many mirrors at Soukya—reflecting the state of health of the patient,” says Mathai. “But he must also go deep into the image and explore what went wrong.”

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