The Forgotten Discoverer of India’s Elixir, Kuttimathan Kani, Dies At 72

On Saturday afternoon, the forests of Agasthyavanam in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram district fell silent. At 72, cancer carried away Kuttimathan Kani, a man who once stood at the crossroads of indigenous wisdom and modern science. For the wider world, he was the once-famous tribal elder who introduced scientists to the wonder plant Arogyapacha — the elusive “elixir herb” of the Western Ghats.

But in his own settlement of Chonampara, deep in the forests, he was remembered differently. A frail father, often too ill to work, struggling to feed a family of four daughters and a sick wife. A man who had tasted international limelight, but returned to a hut patched with tin sheets and poverty.

Here lay the cruel irony of his life: hailed as a pioneer of biodiversity-based science, invited to world summits, celebrated as the face of indigenous resilience — yet condemned to die in neglect, unable to afford even basic healthcare.

The Discovery Born of Hunger

The story begins in the late 1980s, when scientists from the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute (JNTBGRI) were trekking through the Agasthya hills. They needed local guides. Kuttimathan, along with his fellow Kanis — Mallan and Eechan — agreed to lead them through the treacherous terrain.

During the trek, the scientists noticed the men occasionally plucking small fruits from a creeping plant and chewing them. The plant was Arogyapacha (Trichopus zeylanicus travancoricus), known for centuries among the Kanis as a secret ally that quenched hunger and restored stamina during long forest sojourns.

That disclosure, offered in trust and hunger, would later revolutionise herbal pharmacology. Scientists validated its properties and, in 1995, launched a polyherbal formulation called Jeevani. Marketed as an anti-fatigue, immunomodulatory, antioxidant and aphrodisiac tonic, it was hailed as the “ginseng of Kerala”.

For the Kanis, it was simply the herb that kept them alive. For Kuttimathan, who once considered swallowing it to end his hunger-stricken life, Jeevani was both a blessing and a curse — it kept him alive, but robbed him of peace.

Global Fame, Fleeting Smiles

In 2002, when the United Nations hosted the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, Kerala’s Kani Community Welfare Trust was invited to receive the first-ever Equator Initiative Award for “innovative benefit-sharing”.

As secretary of the Trust, Kuttimathan flew to South Africa. For a tribal man who had never stepped outside his forest, it was an extraordinary leap. He shook hands with Nelson Mandela, exchanged pleasantries with the Canadian prime minister, and smiled from the covers of international magazines as a symbol of indigenous pride.

For a fleeting moment, he embodied hope — proof that ancient knowledge could empower the marginalised in a globalised world.

But the applause did not last.

The Collapse of a Dream

The Kerala Kani Community Welfare Trust, envisioned as a mechanism to channel Jeevani’s royalties to the entire Kani community, soon fell into disarray. Mismanagement, lack of transparency, and factionalism tore it apart. Loans were taken against its corpus to buy a jeep, which was later sold off. Accounts went missing. Many settlements felt excluded from consultations. By the mid-2000s, the trust office lay abandoned, its records eaten by dust and termites.

Meanwhile, Jeevani itself stumbled. Though Arya Vaidya Pharmacy in Coimbatore produced the tonic for over a decade, restrictions by the forest department on raw material collection crippled supplies. Traders began smuggling Arogyapacha out of the Ghats. Tribals who tried to cultivate or sell it faced criminal cases and harassment at check-posts. By 2008, the pharmacy pulled out altogether.

With no patents or trademarks secured in India, the formulation slipped into the public domain. Abroad, companies trademarked “Jeevani” under their own labels, triggering outrage over biopiracy. What had begun as the “world’s first benefit-sharing model” ended as a cautionary tale of exploitation and neglect.

A Hero Forgotten at Home

For Kuttimathan and his tribe of 25,000 scattered across the Western Ghats, the so-called “elixir” brought little benefit. A one-time payment of a few thousand rupees, a brief trickle of royalties, and then silence.

Back home, laminated photographs of Mandela and Johannesburg hung crookedly on the walls of his hut. They mocked his reality: a life reduced to free ration kits, foraged roots, and occasional day wages. His wife Vasantha battled illness, his daughters faced poverty, and his own body withered from cancer.

“The scientists exploited our ignorance,” he once said bitterly. “They kept us in the dark.”

TBGRI’s former director, P. Pushpangadan, dismissed him as a drunkard. The state — which had once paraded him before the world as a symbol of tribal knowledge — ignored his descent into obscurity.

Lessons Squandered

Kuttimathan’s tragedy was more than personal; it symbolised India’s systemic failure to treat indigenous knowledge with fairness.

Environmental activist S. Usha, who studied the Kani community extensively, observed: “Kuttimathan’s story is a parable of how the state views tribal knowledge — as a resource to be extracted, not a partnership to be honoured.”

Conservationist Thomas Lawrance added, “Everybody else exploited the innocence of these tribals. Though they were paraded before the whole world as the traditional protectors of the rare plant, greed and flawed visions ruined the process of making Jeevani sustainable.”

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which India signed in 1992, had called for exactly the kind of access-and-benefit-sharing model Jeevani was supposed to pioneer. But bureaucratic apathy, scientific opportunism, and political indifference turned that promise into betrayal.

A Legacy in Shadow

Today, the vines of Arogyapacha still wind around mossy rocks and rivulets in Agasthyavanam. They whisper a story — not of vitality, but of betrayal.

Kuttimathan leaves behind his wife, Vasantha, and four daughters — Subhashini, Surabhi, Sudarshini and Sugathakumari. He also leaves behind an unfinished legacy: of a plant that could have transformed his people’s future, and of a model India abandoned when it mattered most.

His life forces a brutal question: if a man who shook hands with Mandela and gifted the world an “elixir” could die hungry and forgotten, what hope remains for other guardians of traditional knowledge?

As his obituary is written, the gods of the forest he once revered seem to have fallen silent.

“Kuttimathan Kani’s passing is a great loss to the forest community. He is a flag bearer of indigenous knowledge, having brought Arogyapacha to mainstream medical systems and thus offering help to so many. We need many more Kuttimathan Kanis in our modern-day society to inform us of the valuable traditional knowledge before it is lost forever. Our deep condolences and salutes to this great man,” said Prakriti Srivastava, a former principal chief conservator of forests in Kerala, now a New Delhi-based conservation expert.