The reason this exists
I grew up in the UK, in my grandparents' house.
I was the oldest of the cousins, which mostly meant I was around for everything. I watched my grandmother look after the younger ones — the babies especially. Every evening there was a massage. Oil warmed between her palms, the baby laid along her legs, the same slow movements in the same order, the same low talking all the way through.
I didn't think of it as a technique. It was just what happened at that time of day. What I remember is the calm — the way the whole house seemed to settle around it.
Then I left. London for work, then New York. Career took over the way it does. I started a family in the States.
Nobody decided this
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I noticed something about how we were raising my daughter.
Her upbringing was becoming Western. Not because we chose it — we never sat down and decided to raise her that way.
It happened because that was what was available.
Every app, every book, every leaflet from the pediatrician, every article that surfaced at three in the morning — all of it came from roughly one place and said roughly the same things. Track the feeds. Watch the wake windows. Follow the curve.
None of it was wrong. Most of it was useful. But there was nothing in any of it my grandmother would have recognized, and nothing in it that would tell my daughter anything about where she comes from.
That's how culture actually goes. Not in a decision. In a thousand small defaults, because the resources that happen to exist belong to somebody else.
What I went looking for
I wanted the thing my grandmother did. I couldn't find it taught properly anywhere.
What I found instead: baby massage apps bundled with feeding trackers. Certification courses at $790. Video libraries teaching a Westernized version of the practice without ever mentioning that it's Indian. And a great deal of confident advice on social media that turns out to be wrong, and occasionally unsafe.
So I went and did the work. I read the classical sources, the ethnographic surveys, and the clinical trials — including some very large ones run in Bangladesh, India and Nepal that almost nobody in the West seems to cite.
Two things surprised me.
The first is that this practice is where Western baby massage came from. An American woman learned it at an orphanage in northern India in 1973 and built a training organization now taught in around seventy countries. A French doctor photographed an Indian woman doing it in 1976 and named his book after her. Nobody recorded who she was.
The second is that some of what gets passed down isn't safe. Not the practice itself — the careful version and the traditional version are closer than you'd think. But some habits that have grown up around it are genuinely risky, and the research is fairly clear about which.
What this is, and what I'm not
Nani's Hands is the massage my grandmother did — written down carefully, checked against the research, and made easy to follow on a phone at eleven at night.
I should be straight about what I am. I'm not a doctor. I'm not an Ayurvedic practitioner. I wasn't taught this properly — I was the oldest cousin who watched, moved away, and came back to it years later as a parent trying to get it right.
What I've done is the reading. We've been honest on this site about where the evidence is strong and where it isn't. Every number we quote traces to a source. Where the tradition and the research disagree, we say so plainly rather than quietly leaving it out.
If we've got something wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
The bigger thing
Massage is a small thing. It takes five minutes.
But it's the earliest thing. Before language, before food, before any part of a culture that needs explaining — there's touch, and the way you're held, and the sound of someone's voice doing the same thing every night.
If my daughter takes one thing from where our family comes from, I'd like it to start there.
And if you moved away too — for university, for work, for a better life, the way most of us did — this is for you. You made the right decision. This part didn't have to go with it.
Free. No email needed.