mukharji - vishalyakarani

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Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing,Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plantsin Colonial Bengal, 1890–1940

Projit Bihari Mukharji

The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 73 / Issue 01 / February 2014, pp 65 - 87DOI: 10.1017/S0021911813001733, Published online: 02 January 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021911813001733

How to cite this article:Projit Bihari Mukharji (2014). Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing,Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 1890–1940 . TheJournal of Asian Studies, 73, pp 65-87 doi:10.1017/S0021911813001733

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Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing, Embedded Traditions, and MultipleHistoricities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 1890–1940

PROJIT BIHARI MUKHARJI

This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying his-torically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following late-colonial efforts to identify a medicinal herb mentioned in some versions of the Ramayana,this paper argues for a historicist analysis of the process of “retro-botanizing.” In sodoing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of “tradition,” the “factualized”and “embedded.” Finally, it blurs the allegedly watertight distinction between historicaland mythic pasts. Instead of trying to distinguish these pasts ontologically, I argue thatit is more productive to see specific pasts in relation to the sorts of futures theyproduce, that is, their respective historicities.

SCHOLARS, WHENEVER THEY HAVE occasion to write about plants in myth, lore, ritual,history, or elsewhere, often gloss the plant’s cultural name with a botanical name pro-

vided in parentheses. The practice, no doubt, is intended to promote intelligibility andallow readers to identify the exact plant being spoken of. Yet, unwittingly it reproducesa problematic divide—that between “nature” as an ahistorical universal and “culture”as a historical and geographic variable. The botanical name therefore seems to be avalid and legitimate gloss for any and all plant identities, irrespective of when andwhere the other, “non-botanical” name derives from. It will therefore, in most cases,be considered perfectly legitimate to gloss a discussion of, say, flowers in Sanskritkavya, medieval Persian qasida, Greek myth, early Chinese bencaos, or Thai templegardens with the suitable botanical names of the flowers being referred to.

Historians of science, however, have long established that botany—just like any otherform of human knowledge—is also historically contingent. Its knowledge is marked, likeall scientific knowledge, by historical specificities. Moreover, like other forms of humanknowledge, the acceptance of its accuracy or precision is as much a political question as itis an epistemic one. Yet, when scholars gloss discussions of plants with botanical names,they overlook both the complicated ways in which scientific knowledge has been vali-dated, and indeed, its historical specificities. Nowhere is this more in evidence than indiscussions of the histories of medicinal plants. Plants, such as Cinchona, are mentionedas having been used and exchanged among multiple communities existing in distinctive

Projit Bihari Mukharji ([email protected]) is Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in the Department ofHistory and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 73, No. 1 (February) 2014: 65–87.© The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911813001733

historical and geographical moments, and yet the botanical name “Cinchona” remainsahistorically fixed, stable, and unproblematic.

My intention in this article is to pry open the gap between “cultural” and “botanical”names of plants. By demonstrating the political, contested, and technologically specificways in which botanical names and cultural ones come to be equated, I want to reintro-duce an element of contingency in the very act of equating. By insisting that the “natural”and the “cultural” are both historical, I want to open up the seemingly automatic, prede-termined gesture of glossing a cultural identity by a botanical one to historical inquiry. Iwant to reclaim the possibility of historical inquiry as a way of not only historicizing thenatural but also reimagining the relationship between “scientific” and “traditional” knowl-edges in less hierarchic ways.

I

One of the most iconic episodes in the Ramayana, the older of the two Indic epics,comprises of Hanuman, the divine monkey, flying to a far-off destination to fetch a mir-aculous medicine that alone could revive the slain hero, Lakshmana, the beloved youngerbrother of the god-king, Rama. Unable to find the exact medicine and eager to get backbefore dawn when the medicine would become redundant, Hanuman, it is said, broughtthe entire mountain back with him. The episode has long been memorialized in paintings,prints, stories, proverbs, and statues, and it celebrates Hanuman’s superhuman strengthas well as his commitment and devotion to his master, Rama (Goldman 2006). What hasremained somewhat obscure, however, is the nature of the medicine that he sought.

Different versions of the Ramayana—and there are numerous tellings and retellingsof it—often disagree on the name and nature of the medicine Hanuman sought. Despitethis disagreement, in nineteenth-century Bengal, most people had come to identify themedicine as an herb called “Vishalyakarani.” The Sanskrit etymology of the word simplymeant “that which extracts arrows [thorns].”Medical practitioners or Kavirajes in Bengalused the plant called “Vishalyakarani” as a hemostatic, that is, a medicine to stop bleeding.It was said to be enormously effective in controlling both internal and external bleeding.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the British Indian government,under pressure from both a fledgling nationalist movement and some sections of themedical establishment, set up a committee to investigate the medicinal plants ofBritish India, the Vishalyakarani was submitted by a Calcutta Kaviraj for investigation.After some initial enthusiasm, to the committee’s surprise, the plant was identified asone known to botanists as the Eupatorium ayapana—a Brazilian weed, allegedly intro-duced to South Asia barely a hundred years before.

The consequences of the identification were complex. The committee itself droppedthe herb from further investigation since it was clearly not “indigenous.” Those seeking torevive traditional medicine at the time also ignored the plant, most probably owing to itsalleged Brazilian origins. Numerous other, lay Bengalis, however, continued to use andextol the virtues of the plant. Eventually it was this persistence of popular usage thatwould produce a new, robust future for the plant in the mid-1930s. Before movingforward to that future, I would argue that the very process of identification of

66 Projit Bihari Mukharji

Vishalyakarani as the E. ayapana deserves closer scrutiny. How exactly and by whatprocess were the two identities—Vishalyakarani and E. ayapana—equalized?

II

It is this process whereby a modern, botanical name came to be equated with anolder, “traditional” one that I want to call “retro-botanizing.” I take my cue here from his-torians of medicine who have written about “retro-diagnosis.” The discussion of retro-diagnosis has been conducted at two overlapping levels. On the one hand, it has beenused to critique a certain historiographic tendency to read contemporary disease asequivalents of older, pre-modern, and pre-biomedical designations. Thus the historio-graphic equation of “runs” to “cholera,” “French Pox” to “syphilis,” “Burdwan Fever”to “Kala-azar” and “leishmaniasis,” and so forth (Elmers 2004; Lindemann 2010). Theargument against retro-diagnosis here has tended to emphasize the mismatch betweenthe two categories being equated and the often fundamentally different assumptions(such as “humors” and “germs”) that are indispensable to any historically sensitive under-standing of either category. Any such equation, it has been pointed out, leads to anachro-nistic redefinitions of the categories being equated (Stein 2009). Sociologist of scienceBruno Latour, however, has gone a step further. He has raised an even more fundamentalontological question. Aside from the historical practicalities of using documentation pro-duced for “runs” to write about “cholera,” Latour has posed the more fundamental ques-tion of whether modern scientifically discovered entities can indeed be retrospectivelythought to exist before the scientific discovery itself. He first posed the question withregard to retro-diagnostic claims that the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II died of tubercu-losis (Latour 2000). Latour asked whether it was ontologically and epistemically valid tospeak of tuberculosis in the context of pharaonic Egypt. In a later version of the sameposer, Latour asked, “were there microbes before Pasteur?” (Latour 1999).

Latour’s answer was that the past was “retrofitted” (Latour 2000). This “retrofitting,”Latour points out, is an active process that requires the coming together of a vast array ofdifferent actors. In order to make the claim that the pharaoh Ramses II died of tubercu-losis, for example, his mortal remains had to be extracted from their tomb, flown to Paris,and examined in a high-tech laboratory involving cutting-edge scientific equipment andleading scientists. By drawing attention to this active process of “retrofitting,” Latourargued that such retrospective claims must always be judged within the chains ofactors and networks that validate and establish such claims. The mistake, he suggested,was to consider these claims as being universally valid without connecting them to thespecific actor-networks that materialize them.

Wonderfully elegant as Latour’s solution is, willy-nilly it posits a friction-free processof “retrofitting.”He does not consider more contentious cases where distinctive attemptsat retrofitting produce different pasts. The moment one introduces conflict and contesta-tion between actors and into networks, new questions arise: questions that are essentiallyquestions of power, such as: Who gets to retrofit whose past? Are there contests over theretrofitting? How do rival attempts to retrofit jostle with each other?

This is where science studies could benefit from an Asian studies inflection. In anilluminating recent intervention, Warwick Anderson (2012) has argued that for

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana 67

postcolonial science studies “Asia is method,” that is, Asian case studies are more thansimply yet another set of particular cases, instead they bring with them the obligationand the methods to fundamentally rethink science studies in less essentialized andmore relational ways. South Asianists have long been interested in contested pasts andhave sought to develop ways of understanding these alternative pasts in less essentialistand more relational ways. A wealth of studies (e.g., Ali 1999; Banerjee 2006; Banerjee-Dube 2007; Chatterjee and Ghosh 2002; Skaria 1988) has pointed to the contestedand politicized existence of a multiplicity of pasts. In the realm of histories of SouthAsian science too, more particularly, there is a small but sophisticated body of literatureon the political constructions and contests over the past (Abraham 2006; Alter 2008;Arnold 1999; Attewell 2003; Chakrabarti 2000; Raina 1998; Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramak-rishnan 1995; Kavita Sivaramakrishnan 1999).

In part, these studies engaging the plurality of pasts, their politics, and so forth havebuilt upon a set of much more general trends not restricted to South Asia alone. Mostprominent among these larger trends have included a new and renewed interest in indi-vidual and collective memory (LaCapra 1998; Le Goff 1992; Nora 1989; Ricoeur 2006;Winter 1995), a postcolonial critique of disciplinary history’s political implications(N. Bhattacharya 2008; Chatterjee 1993; Nandy 1998; Pandey 2006), and a more histori-cally sensitive and critical approach to distinctive forms of temporality (Ali 2013; Rao,Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2003).

More generally, South Asian and British imperial history have both recently wit-nessed an increased interest in botany. These have included a large number of studieson plant transfers, networks of knowledge, the politics of circulation, and so on(Arnold 2008; Brockway 1979; Chakrabarti 2010; Desmond 1992; Drayton 2000;Endersby 2008; Headrick 1988; Jardine, Secord, and Spary 1996; Noltie 1999, 2002;Philip 2004; Raj 2007; Scheibinger 2004). This new literature, though nowhere addres-sing the issue of retro-botanizing, allows the larger, complex, and political relationshipbetween botany and empire to be understood more fully. A small corpus of works hasalso investigated the slightly later entanglement of nationalism and botany, particularlythrough the career of Sir J. C. Bose, while an even smaller corpus has looked at the cul-tural politics of imperial botany (Arnold 2000, 174–75; Lourdusamy 2004, 100–43; Nandy1998, 17–87). Most recently, some works have explored the conjunction of botany and“indigenous” medical traditions in South Asia (Attewell 2007; Mukharji 2009b). Nearlyall these studies, however, are situated in the nineteenth century.

More importantly, many (though not all) of these studies, willingly or not, fall prey tothe very tendency of retro-botanizing that I am trying to problematize. Thus, scholarscritical of the imperial cocktail of power, knowledge, and commerce eventually still fre-quently contribute towards the naturalization of botanical names and the relative margin-alization of cultural identities of plants. Non-Western identities of plants are oftenreduced to a component of “local knowledge,” while the “local knowledge” itself is under-stood as a form of “practical rationality” (Philip 2004, 9). This “practical rationality”expressed as “local knowledge” is either suppressed and forgotten (Scheibinger 2004)or appropriated and globalized by European science (Grove 1995). None of this “localknowledge” as “practical rationality,” however, has the power to challenge the stable bota-nical designation.


Plant names in other languages and at other times are not merely hollow linguisticvessels waiting to be filled by the reality of botanical names. They constitute their ownrealities. Realities—to those who experience those realities—are not simply “local” ver-sions of some higher, truer reality, nor are they simply “practical rationalities.” Theyare elements within larger cosmological structuring of experience. Retro-botanizing refi-gures that very cosmological universe within which plant identities are embedded. Anexcellent example of this refiguration emerges upon comparing A. K. Ghosh and S. N.Sen’s (1971) writings on Vedic and post-Vedic botany and Daud Ali’s (2012) fascinatingexploration of botanical technology and garden culture in the twelfth-century text Man-asollasa. Though working from an identical corpus of texts, and often even the same texts,such as the Brihatsamhita and the Sarangadharpaddhati, Ghosh and Sen (1971) presentthe plants, glossed throughout by their Latin botanical names, as perfectly modernized,“natural” objects. They even discuss plants “manufacturing food” in their leaves. Ali(2012), on the other hand, carefully implicates the plant identities within a web of pro-minent entanglements with astrological and complex aesthetic concerns, which in turntouch upon the very articulation of royal political power. These astrological, aesthetic,and political concerns are not secondary or superficial window dressing on some morefundamental “natural” identity, but rather signals towards a wholly distinctive frame forexperiencing and conceptualizing plant identities, namely one where plant identitiesare capable of being putatively linked to planetary movements, part and parcel of abroader set of aesthetic concerns and capable of representing royal power. Ghosh andSen’s (1971) presentation does not merely misrepresent the plant identities of Vedicand post-Vedic India, but rather fundamentally alters them by inserting them into avery different and modern cosmological universe where plant identities are conceptual-ized in a radically different way. The retro-botanizing tendency that reduces nonmodernplant identities to “practical rationalities” expressed as “local knowledge” are reminiscentof Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) critique of “glossaries” in area studies monographs. AsChakrabarty points out, the “rough translations” that made up such glossaries were notonly “approximate and thereby inaccurate,” but also meant to fit the rough-and-readypractice of colonial rule itself. “To challenge this model of ‘rough translations,’” saysChakrabarty, “is to pay critical and unrelenting attention to the process of translation”(Chakrabarty 2000, 17).

It is in this process of translation that relationships of domination and subordinationbecome visible. It is here that the smooth process of retrofitting that Latour describedacquires its colonial crinkles. Chakrabarty points out that what emerges through attentionto the process of translation is neither the utter meaninglessness of the translation, nor itsperfect match of two terms, but rather a partially opaque relationship “we call ‘differ-ence’” (Chakrabarty 2000, 17). Retro-botanizing, then, is the denial of differencebetween two plant identities wrapped in distinctive “spatio-temporal envelopes.”1 It isa false claim to transparent translation that overlooks the opacity of difference thatlurks in-between the two plant names. In its denial, retro-botanizing also masks the

1The phrase “spatio-temporal envelope” is used by Latour (2000) to emphasize the contextualspecificity in which propositions—including propositions of identities—are made.


political, contingent, and reversible relationship between the two names of a plant andpresents it as an automatic, predetermined, and unmediated equivalence.

III

It is with these larger historiographic contexts in mind that we must return to 1896.When the Indigenous Drugs Committee (IDC) met for the first time in Calcutta onJanuary 9, 1896, it was Surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. P. McConnell, rather thanthe sole Indian member, Kanailal Dey, who raised the possibility of asking eminentlocal Kavirajes and Hakims for their opinions on various local drugs. Dey respondedby asking McConnell if he had any specific Kavirajes or Hakims in mind. Upon McCon-nell’s naming an eminent local physician, Dey flatly declared that “he had no faith in thegentleman concerned but could bring to the meeting others who were held in higheresteem” (Report of the Indigenous Drugs Committee 1899, 2–3). What this simpleexchange at the very outset demonstrates is that the discussion in the IDC was notnecessarily polarized by any discernible nationalist sentiments. About a month later onFebruary 18, however, McConnell presented a letter he had received from one Amulya-charan Basu, whom he described as “a gentleman who had considerable practical knowl-edge in the uses of certain indigenous drugs” (14). Basu’s letter gave the names of ten“indigenous” drugs as well as brief descriptions of the specific medicinal uses of eachherb and the usual dosage (42–43).

In Basu’s list was mentioned a plant called the “Ayapan or Bisalya Karani.” Of it, hewrote: “I do not know the scientific name. I believe it is the best haemostatic known. Ihave used it very successfully in bleeding from the nose, lungs, bowels etc. I prescribethe juice of fresh leaves in teaspoonful doses” (42). The Vishalyakarani’s mythic identityas the herb that revived the dying Lakshmana in the Ramayana has already been noted.Interestingly, this well-known story is never mentioned in the IDC minutes. What isstated in the minutes of February 18 is that the plant, along with another, the Halviva(Andrographis paniculata), occasioned some discussion among the members present.The minutes are silent on what the discussions were about, but we are told that theplant was spoken of as a “haemostatic of considerable merit” (14). Sometime duringthese discussions, the plant also seems to have been identified as the Blumea lacera—even though, once again, it is not clear who identified it or how.

It was more than two years before this identification of the Vishalyakarani as theBlumea lacera began to come undone. Speaking at a meeting of the IDC on April 15,1898, George Watt, an authority on Indian economic botany, mentioned that what hadled to the plant being identified as the Blumea lacera was the fact that the Blumea hadonly recently been exhibited at the Medical Congress as a “valuable haemostatic, [and]it was presumed that Mr Basu’s might be the same plant” (29). The original identificationhad therefore been simple guesswork. Later, however, in response to a request to sendthe committee some samples of his plant, Basu sent a large quantity of both the crudeplant and the “special preparation employed by him” (29). It was the botanical identifi-cation of these samples that sprung the surprise on the committee. It transpired thatthe Vishalyakarani was not the Blumea lacera, but rather the Eupatorium ayapana—an “American introduced weed . . . common around Calcutta” (30). The identification


dealt a fatal blow to the committee’s enthusiasm for the plant. As an “exotic,” it was nolonger of interest to the committee on “indigenous” drugs. Moreover, it was said thatthough the plant was “in most general use in the vicinity of Calcutta,” elsewhere in thecolony, it was indeed the Blumea that was used for similar complaints (30).

Since it was after all the plant’s “exotic” credentials that killed the interest in it, itmust be asked what it was that convinced the IDC of the plant’s American-ness.Today, such disputes would most likely be solved by mapping gene frequencies and com-paring paleobotanical finds from the two areas. But in the 1890s, both plant genetics—ormore specifically Mendellian inheritance, since the word “genetics” in its contemporarysense was not coined till 1905—and paleobotany were still in their infancy and had no wayof positively identifying the original source of the plant (cf. Muellner 2006). A perusal ofthe contemporary botanical literature on the Eupatorium ayapana is therefore instruc-tive in identifying precisely how the question of origin was determined.

One of the most consulted works on the “useful” plants of India around the 1890swas Sir George Watt’s Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. In it, Watt statedthat the plant was “naturalised” in India and known by its Brazilian name “Aya-pana.”The relevance of the comment is enhanced by Watt’s own involvement in the IDC. Inthe Dictionary, the identity and description of the plant were based solely upon a longlist of citations to other botanical works. Though this fulsome list commenced with refer-ences to the works of Carl Linnaeus and Etienne Pierre Ventenat, these botanical stal-warts were not referenced directly through their own works. Rather, their citationsderived through other, more recent, references, such as J. D. Hooker’s Flora of BritishIndia, W. B. O’Shaughnessy’s Bengal Dispensatory, William Dymock’s Materia Medicaof Western India, Sakharam Arjun’s Bombay Drugs, John Fleming’s Medicinal Plantsand Drugs, Kanailal Dey’s Indigenous Drugs of India, and so forth (Watt 1890, 293).Working backwards from Watt’s list of citations to Hooker’s classic reveals that theplant is described very briefly as “an American plant introduced into Calcutta andother gardens” (Hooker 1882, 244). As the basis of this comment, Hooker cited Ventenatand refuted an alternate identification by Robert Wight. By contrast, in O’Shaughnessy(1841, 422–23), not only is there a much more extensive description of the plant, butalso, more cogently, it is stated to belong to both “Brazil and Bengal.” This dual originthesis was once again reiterated by Kanailal Dey in 1867 (Dey 1867, 53). In 1873,Heber Drury still maintained a tacit duality by stating that “some botanists believe itto have been introduced into India from the Isle of France and others that it is anative of the country” (Drury 1873, 203). Hence, though Watt undoubtedly had pre-cedents for his position in the works of Fleming (1812, 166–67), Waring (1868, 127),Hooker (1882, 244), and Dymock (1885, 424–25), there were also significant precedentsfor an alternate view within his own list of citations in O’Shaughnessy, Dey, and Drury.These alternate views, however, were either silenced or presented in a way that erasedtheir equivocality and hence reaffirmed an authorized, homogenous knowledgethrough a seemingly seamless citation protocol.

In fact, the long presence of the plant in Bengal and other parts of India togetherwith the acceptance of the American origin story had led to the development of a trans-mission narrative in some of the writers. Though Hooker and Watt made no mention ofthis, the transmission narrative was continually repeated in Fleming, Drury, Dymock, andWaring. According to this narrative, the plant originally hailed from the banks of the


Amazon River as well as from Cayenne. Thence it was brought to the “Isle of France”(Mauritius), where it acquired a considerably inflated reputation as a panacea. Sub-sequently, it was brought to India fromMauritius. In a slightly different transmission nar-rative furnished by William Roxburgh’s (1814, 61) Hortus Bengalensis, the plant wasbelieved to have been introduced into the Royal Botanic Gardens of Calcutta byCaptain B. Blake in 1801.

The seemingly definitive decision on the plant’s “exotic” status and its consequentomission from the IDC’s scope were hence principally grounded in a series of mutuallyinterlocking and reconfirming textual references: Watt cited Ventenat, Hooker, Dymock,O’Shaughnessy, Fleming, Waring, etc.; Dymock quoted Ventenat, Louis Bouton, Waring,and Whitelaw Ainslie; Waring in turn quoted Ventenat, Bouton, and Ainslie; and Ainsliein turn once again cited Ventenat, and even made an attempt to merge the via-Mauritiusstory with Captain Blake’s story.

IV

More remarkable than the citation-based nature of the IDC account was its choice toexclude certain texts. The most prominent exclusion, undoubtedly, was that of theRamayana itself. No reference was ever made to the Vishalyakarani’s connection withthe Ramayana and never was it considered that a perusal of that text might be important.But where the exclusion of the Ramayana may still be rationalized on the grounds of ahard distinction between “scientific” and “mythic” texts,2 what is more inexplicable isthe exclusion of a lengthy paper on the plant by Dr. Jagadbandhu Basu, MD, FCI (1893).

Dr. Basu’s account had appeared in 1893, three years before the Vishalyakarani camebefore the IDC, in Chikitsa Sammilani, one of the best-known and most respectedBengali medical periodicals of the day. Both Kavirajes and Daktars (Bengali biomedicalphysicians) used to contribute to this journal.3 Since at least two members of the IDC,McConnell and Dey, were well-acquainted with the Bengali medical world, it is safe toassume that they would have been aware of the publication. Dr. Basu’s paper is valuablefor two important reasons. First, he quoted exact lines from the Ramayana of Krittibas (c.fifteenth century) that described the plant. Basu explained that this description was fairlyaccurate. Second, he gave extensive case histories, including names of well-knownpatients, who had benefitted from the use of Vishalyakarani in a variety of hemorrhagicconditions. Thus, not only did Basu’s paper provide a clinical report of the drugs’ oper-ation, but his quotation from the Ramayana—if correct—would have undoubtedlyproved the antiquity of the local knowledge of the plant’s medicinal virtues. If nothingelse, Basu’s paper should have forced the IDC to examine the accuracy or indeed thevery fact of the Ramayana reference. The next year, in 1894, another Bengali scientist,Purnachandra Saha, a lecturer in horticulture and agriculture and a retired curator ofthe Hughli Botanic Gardens, included the plant in his book on “Hindu medicinal

2Precisely such arguments were indeed explicitly used in other medicinal contexts to explain awaythe divergence of premodern Indian texts from retrospective European accounts. Cf. Hamlin(2009, 43).3For the genealogy of the term “daktar,” see Mukharji (2009a).


plants.” Describing it, he explained: “[I]t is said that when Lakshmana had been injuredby the powerful arrow (shakti-shel), Hanuman had brought this herb from the distantGandhamadan mountain, to revive him” (Saha 1894, 24). In 1895, Dr. G. C. Bagchee,another Bengali Daktar, presented a paper at the Indian Medical Congress on “BengalHaemostatic Plants,” which once again made prominent mention of E. ayapana andgave details of its use. Interestingly, the English reports of the paper did not refer tothe name “Vishalyakarani” (The Chemist and Druggist 1895). The paper, however, waswidely reported in German journals (e.g., Beckurts and Weichelt 1896, 11) and there,occasionally, the name “Bisalya Kroani” was mentioned as having been used byBagchee (Koehne 1897, 360). That these prominent accounts were consistently and com-pletely ignored during discussions at the IDC was a testament to the eloquent exercise ofcolonial privilege. Schiebinger (2004, 31–32) has argued that such willful construction ofblindness was a central feature in the construction of colonial botanical knowledge andhas urged historians to undertake the task (“agnotology”) of uncovering such deliberatecultivations of ignorance.

Even after the IDC’s verdict on the foreignness of the plant, Bengali faith in itremained unabated and accounts continued to surface from time to time. One of themost fulsome of these was a lengthy anonymous letter that appeared in a popular dom-estic magazine,Grihasthya Mangal, as late as in 1929. This letter, which seemed blissfullyunaware of the alleged Brazilian origin of the plant, enthusiastically called the botanicalestablishment’s attention to the virtues of the plant. Structurally, the letter was almostidentical to Basu’s paper in 1893. It commenced by reiterating the plant’s Ramayani iden-tity and went on to cite actual observed cases of success. It then developed a themewhich, though mentioned by Basu too, was more redolent in the late 1920s—that ofpotential financial savings for both the nation and the family. Interestingly, the letteralso contrasted the “indigenous” Vishalyakarani with the “Hemamilis vaginica [probablyHamamelis virginiana or Witch-hazel] which is born in America and therefore acquiring[which] is both difficult and expensive” (Pratyakshya Drasta [1336 BE] 1929, 250–51).What makes this letter so interesting is that, despite showing a nodding acquaintancewith biomedicine, it virtually ignored the Brazilian-origin thesis. This is particularly sig-nificant since, after the IDC verdict, a number of other authors restated the hegemonicIDC position. For instance, Kanailal Dey, when he reissued his book on indigenous drugsin 1896, changed the dual-origin theory he had stated in 1867 and flatly called the plant a“native of Brazil” (Dey 1896, 124). In 1908, The Calcutta Journal of Medicine, a promi-nent Daktari journal, reproduced an article from the British Lancet that explicitly repu-diated the E. ayapana’s identification as Vishalyakarani and mocked the unreliability ofindigenous botanical knowledge (Sircar 1908, 161). K. M. Nadkarni restated the Amer-ican origin of the plant in 1908 and then subsequently again in 1927. The position wasclearly well-aired, and the author of the letter would likely have seen it in one book onindigenous medicine or the other, had he or she consulted any.

By stark contrast, while knowledge, usage, and accounts of the plant’s medicinalpowers as a hemostatic continued to surface, it was almost completely absent from thenumerous texts on medicinal plants written conspicuously within the Ayurvedic tradition.The best known of these was, of course, Udoy Chunder Dutt’s Materia Medica of theHindus (1877). Compiled, as it was, from “Sanskrit Medical Works,” it did notmention the Vishalyakarani at all, perhaps because it did not occur in strictly “medical”


works. Subsequently, a number of influential books appeared on the subject, particularlyin the years following the IDC verdict, and all of them followed Dutt in ignoring theVishalyakarani. Among these maybe counted Bholanath Mukhopadhyay’s ([1293 BE]1886) Dravyagun Darpan, Kaviraj Birajacharan Gupta’s (1908) Vanaushadhi Darpan,and Kaviraj Debendranath Sengupta and Upendranath Sengupta’s ([1333 BE] 1926)Dravyagun. None of these texts, of which the last two were particularly influential andwidely used, mentioned the Vishalyakarani.

What these diverse Indian attitudes towards the plant demonstrate is the selective-ness of the practice of deliberate ignorance. The IDC’s decision was clearly founded upona deliberate blindness to the Ramayani identity of the plant. Especially significant herewas the complete silence in the IDC proceedings about Dr. Basu’s prominent essay onthe plant. Once the decision had been taken, however, a different set of practices of ignor-ance was operationalized. Ayurvedic authors, at this time engaged in energetic venturesintended to reformat Ayurvedic plant knowledge along botanical lines, ignored the plantdespite the fact that it was a prominent part of the everyday practice of local Kavirajes.Some prominent Bengali daktars, such as Dr. Dey and Dr. Sircar, were also quick toadopt the IDC’s position. In Dey’s case, this led him to alter his own earlier publishedposition. Yet, significantly, unlike the Ayurvedists, neither Dey nor Nadkarni ignoredthe plant. They acknowledged its Brazilian origins but continued to include it in theirworks on Indian indigenous plants. Other, less prominent medical practitioners withlimited exposure to “Western science,” such as the anonymous letter-writer of 1929, con-tinued to vigorously defend the use of the plant in total ignorance of the Brazilian-origintheory. Thus different groups enacted different types of ignorance at different times andwith different results.

V

Even before the IDC verdict, the virtues of the Vishalyakarani had been more pro-minently espoused by those Indians who were trained in “Western” sciences, rather thanby Ayurvedists. It has already been noted that Dey in 1867, Bose in 1893, and Saha in1894 wrote of it. This difference was possibly an early indication of the strong relianceof reformist Ayurveda upon Sanskrit textual sources, rather than on everyday practice.By contrast, it was the very everyday availability of the plant in medical practice thatexposed and attracted authors such as Dey, Bose, and Saha, none of whom showedany marked interest in high Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts. Hence, notwithstanding the lossof interest in the plant by British botanists and Ayurvedists, Indians trained in“Western” medicine and sciences retained their interest in it despite what the IDCdecided. As noted, Dey, though he was himself party to the IDC’s verdict and changedhis views on the plant’s origin in later editions of his locus classicus, significantly didnot remove the plant altogether from these later editions. While it was odd to includea plant he now acknowledged as being Brazilian in a book on the indigenous drugs ofIndia, Dey had always held a very liberal interpretation of what was “indigenous,” andhis choice undoubtedly facilitated the persistence of Vishalyakarani’s medicinal repu-tation among Indians trained in “Western” sciences.


In 1908, another Indian, Dr. K. M. Nadkarni, a trained biomedical physician, fol-lowed Dey’s usage in accepting that the plant was “a native of Brazil” but nonethelessincluding it in his work on “indigenous” medicine (Nadkarni 1927, 346). Explaining hisreasons for having chosen to write on indigenous plants, Nadkarni wrote that “thestrong spirit of Swadeshism [i.e., the political movement for boycotting foreign goodsand services and using only Indian-made commodities] suddenly evoked in me by thewave of Swadeshi spirit that swept over Bengal during the days of the Bengal Partition,the deep sense of glaring evidence of chronic poverty all around us and the annual loss ofnearly two crores of rupees to India for importing costly foreign medicines” were themain reasons he had chosen to write the book ( ii). Ever since R. C. Dutt (1902) haddeveloped the thesis of an “economic drain” through colonialism, it had been repeatedad infinitum in the nationalist press. In fact, by the 1870s, says Manu Goswami (2004,227), the idea of “economic drain” had become common in the vernacular press. Inthe hands of authors like Nadkarni, this potent and emotive logic of nationalism cameto be embodied in the purchase of foreign drugs. Consequently, the interest in “indigen-ous drugs” became closely linked to the ebb and flow of nationalist sentiment. The for-tunes of Nadkarni’s own book amply demonstrated this. Nadkarni had complainedbitterly that since the Partition of Bengal had been annulled soon after the publicationof his book, the Swadeshi angst had disappeared, resulting in many copies of his bookremaining unsold, thus inflicting a significant financial loss on him that drove him toseek support from the very British government he opposed. Yet, despite the generoussupport from Sir Charles Pardey Lukis, the director general of Indian Medical Services,his book remained unsold. Finally, the anti-colonial upsurge of 1919 unexpectedly cameto his aid. His books, which had remained unsold at Rs 4/- per copy, now sold out at Rs 7/-per copy. Clearly, patriotism was not without its profits. But more importantly, patentlywhat drove the market in books on indigenous drugs in the twentieth century was nation-alist fervor (Nadkarni 1927, ii–iii).

Other Indians devoted to science and national uplift too adopted this topic. In 1918,J. C. Ghosh, then a government pharmaceutical chemist who would go on to receive aknighthood and become one of Nehru’s key scientific advisors, published a pamphletfor the establishment of a triangular partnership between the government, scientists,and capitalist entrepreneurs to undertake the scientific exploitation of indigenousdrugs (Ghosh 1918). So powerful was this cluster of ideas and arguments around econ-omic drain, the need for scientific study of indigenous drugs, and its potential for nationaluplift, that even M. K. Gandhi, who was usually opposed to centralized government con-trols and high science, believed that “there should be an agency that can say with certaintywhat these herbs [i.e., medicinal herbs used by villagers] are and what is their quality”(Gandhi 1939, 82). He reckoned this alone would finally stop the expensive drain ofscarce national resources on foreign medicines.

It was perhaps as much through the influence of such arguments as through the chan-ging fashions of the scientific world and the rapid Indianization of the scientific establish-ment in post-WWI India that scientific interest in indigenous drugs grew exponentially.The decade of the 1920s saw an unprecedented spike in the number of scientists inIndian laboratories who were working with indigenous plants. Not all of these were med-icinal plants. Many were the potential source of dye-stuff, but many others were investi-gated for their potential medicinal uses. The decade witnessed such investigations in


university laboratories in Guwahati, Dhaka, Calcutta, Allahabad, Madras, and Bangalore.Numerous plants, such as Decalepis hamiltonii, Anacardium occidentale Linn., Pongamiaglabra Vent., Azadirachta inidica, Pinus longifolia, Boswellia serrate Roxb., Pinus excels,and Cupressus torulosa Don., to name but a few, were investigated by teams of scientistspredominantly comprised of Indian scientists in Indian universities (Mitter 1939).

New research on the Vishalyakarani began in the mid-1930s in one of the flagshipcenters of nationalist Indian science, the Bose Institute in Calcutta. This new research,however, drew directly upon the mythic past of the plant. This was apparent in both theexplicit statements of the scientists and the nature of the research questions investigated.British botanists, till they lost interest in the plant in the wake of the IDC, had usuallyharped on the plant’s medicinal value as “a good simple tonic, stimulant and diaphoretic,”as well as noting its occasional use in treating snake bites (Watt 1890, 293). Nadkarni (1927)too, while giving a somewhat expanded description of the medicinal uses of the herb, hadgenerally stuck to the overall remit outlined by the British botanists. The broad outlines ofthis remit had been derived not from Indian ideas, but rather from the plant’s medicinalhistory in Mauritius. Authors, such as Waring (1868) and Nadkarni (1927), had mentionedhow the plant had once acquired an almost panacea-like reputation on the island and hadeven been used to treat cholera before its reputation imploded. Eventually, it had achievedthe status of a stimulant and tonic and was popular as a tea, akin to chamomile, the usage ofwhich was also imported to France from Mauritius. By contrast, the Indian reputation, asseen in both Dr. Basu’s paper and Kaviraj Basu’s report to the IDC, drew upon the plant’smythic past to emphasize its value in stopping bleeding. When scientific research into theplant’s medicinal properties revived in the mid-1930s, it was precisely this anti-bleedingpotential that the researchers sought to test. The research was conducted by a group ofBengali scientists comprised of P. K. Bose, P. B. Sen, N. C. Nag, K. N. Bose, and A. C.Roy. In one of several papers published by the group over the next decade, the groupclearly stated that while the E. ayapana was widely used for a range of different ends indifferent parts of the world, in Bengal it was known principally as a “haemostatic agent, par-ticularly to stop internal bleeding” and that this is what had motivated them to test the drugfor its hemostatic potential (Bose and Sen 1941).

Finally on March 20, 1937, P. K. Bose, working together with B. B. Sarkar, reportedin the prestigious scientific journal Nature that by using experiments conducted onrabbits, they had been able to prima facie demonstrate “the haemostatic action of twosubstances [i.e., Ayapin and Ayapanin] isolated from the leaves of Eupatoriumayapana Vent., a decoction of which has long been a popular remedy against variouskinds of haemorrhage in Hindu medicine” (Bose and Sarkar 1937, 515). Ironicallythen, even as Ayurveda—frequently accepted as being synonymous with “Hindu medi-cine”—spurned its connections with Vishalyakarani, emergent Indian traditions of“Western” science rearticulated and relegitimized Vishalyakarani’s medicinal reputationin the name of “Hindu medicine.”

VI

By 1941, P. K. Bose and P. B. Sen, writing in the Annals of Biochemistry and Exper-imental Medicine, emphatically stated that “[f]rom the results reported in the paper it


should appear that the use of Eupatorium ayapana in Ayurvedic system of medicine isperfectly justified” (Bose and Sen 1941, 316). Yet, the irony that none of the eminentAyurvedic authors of the day mentioned this drug makes it obvious that the Ayurvedicauthors and the scientists clearly did not derive their information from the same source.

The obvious question that follows is that if the Indian scientists did not acquire theirinformation about Vishalyakarani’s medicinal value in Ayurvedic texts, where did theypick up the information from? One predictable source would have been the Ramayanaitself. In the 1890s, biomedical physicians, such as Dr. Basu, were indeed quoting fromthe Ramayana instead of any Ayurvedic text. The Ramayana, however, is seldom cited asan Ayurvedic text, and despite the increasingly “Hindu” identity of Ayurvedic medicinefrom the late nineteenth century onwards, reformers were at pains to present it asa “science” and demarcate its canonical sources from more general textual sourcesof Hindu piety. From the circumstances, it seems fairly clear that Ayurvedicphysician-scholars and Indian scientists were operating with and within two distinctgenres of “tradition.”

For the Ayurvedists, “tradition” was increasingly structured, organized, and definedthrough the identification of a classical Sanskrit medical canon and framed by a politics ofHindu-ness, indigenousness, and “scientificity” (see Hardiman 2009; for Bengal, seeMukharji 2005). This genre of tradition was purveyed in a range of medical andpopular texts and journals written by Ayurvedic authors. In the foreword to the firstedition of his immensely successful book, Ayurved Vijnana, Kaviraj Binodlal Sen wrotein 1887 that “there are many hurdles on the path of recovery and true improvement ofthis almost-lost Ayurveda. Amongst these, so long as the major texts are not availablein vernacular languages and a proper school for teaching them is not established, noimprovement is possible” (B. Sen [1337 BE] 1887, 3). Sen further explained that textssuch as Charaka and Susruta (two of the most canonical classical works on Ayurveda)were difficult to find or to comprehend. Moreover, no one book contained all the necess-ary material, and what was worse was that all of them contained much information thatwas “not particularly important” for students. All this ruled out self-teaching and madethe reading of the classical texts within carefully calibrated pedagogical institutions una-voidable. Nearly a generation later, another reformist Kaviraj, Sudhansubhushan Sen,complained that while “Ayurveda was the property of the Sanskrit language, [and] itcould not live without Sanskrit,” barring a handful of erudite practitioners who readthe classics, everyone else who practiced Ayurvedic medicine had acquired their knowl-edge from the reading of Bengali translations (S. Sen [1321 BE] 1914, 2). Despite thevery different positions of these two authors on the pedagogical value of translations,they and most other authors agreed that the Ayurvedic tradition was fundamentallylocated in a body of classical Sanskrit texts and its proper dissemination dependedupon a closely controlled pedagogical process that would provide access to those classicaltexts.

By the late nineteenth century, such an approach to “tradition” that harped on a“proper” reading of a handful of classical texts was not unique to Ayurvedic or evenmedical texts. This formulation of “tradition” owed much to the forms of Orientalismthat evolved since the eighteenth century. David Ludden (1993) points out thatdespite the late nineteenth-century nationalist redeployments of such knowledge,much of it originated as “colonial knowledge” and served colonial agendas. Yet, its


substance was seldom understood in utilitarian terms and was seen rather through the“Enlightenment rubric of objective science”: “Orientalism as a body of knowledgedrew material sustenance from colonialism but became objectified by the ideology ofscience as a set of factualised statements about a reality that existed and could beknown independent of any subjective, colonizing will” (Ludden 1993, 252). Adheringto Ludden’s terminology, one might thus say that the combination of text and the“proper”methods of reading them, through which the Ayurvedic “tradition” was accessedby the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ayurvedists, was yet another exampleof Orientalist factualization and the particular Ayurvedic tradition that was producedthrough this engagement was a “factualized Ayurveda.”

By contrast, the “Ayurvedic tradition” to which scientists like P. K. Bose and P. B. Senreferred was accessed and disseminated along very different routes. This latter traditionwas much less disciplined, and its transmission routes, locations, and narrative contentwere much less stable. It clearly did not derive from the study of actual Ayurvedictexts. Neither did it derive exclusively from the reading of books on “indigenousdrugs,” since, though it frequently quoted from such works, it also regularly sup-plemented the knowledge gleaned from it with an excess best exemplified in the insis-tence on the anti-bleeding powers of the Vishalyakarani. It is seductive to attribute thissupplementary excess to the attractions of the Ramayana, but for yet another problem.

Dr. Jagadbandhu Basu left the best clue about the Ramayana connection through hisquotation of the plant’s description from Krittibas’s Ramayana. Surprisingly, however, thelines quoted by Dr. Basu are not found in the popular published Bengali versions of theRamayana from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this regard, it is ofcourse crucial to note that there were multiple Ramayana narratives available in bothBengal and elsewhere. There were considerable variations, even among the best-knownversions. Most strikingly, Ashutosh Bhattacharya’s standard critical edition of the KrittibasiRamayana does not include the lines quoted by Dr. Basu. In fact, it speaks of four herbsrather than one herb (A. Bhattacharya, n.d., 355). Most of Dr. Basu’s contemporary printededitions that I have been able to access also lacked the lines concerned and spoke of fourherbs, that is, Mritasanjivani, Asthisanchari, Suvarnakarani, and Vishalyakarani (e.g., N.Mukhopadhyay [1339 BE] 1932, 411–14). By contrast, while versions of the ValmikiRamayana (Valmiki [1282 BE] 1875, 261–62) spoke of two herbs (Sanjivani and Vishalya-karani), only versions of theAdhyatmya Ramayana (Vedavyasa [1295 BE] 1888, 202) spokeof a single herb, but left it unnamed; and another, somewhat obscure, local Ramayana(Mandal 1980, 478) replaced the healing herb entirely with enchanted water sprinkledby Shiva. Even the Krittibasi Ramayana itself—the most popular narrative in Bengal—was available in a large number of varied forms. W. L. Smith points out:

Krttivasa’s original Ramayana garnered so much prestige that before long otherpoets began writing new material under his name, and as a consequence anumber of diverse Ramayanas bearing the signature of Krttivasa were in circula-tion. . . . This state of affairs did not come to an end with the introduction ofprinting. . . . [N]ew editors altered the text . . . much in the same way as theirpredecessors had been doing in pre-printing days. As a result, there exists anumber of Ramayanas that are only nominally by Krttivasa, although theyappear under his name. (Smith 2004, 90–91)


Aside from the fluidity of the basic narrative, there was also a thriving commentarial tra-dition attached to the Ramayana that constantly sought to reposition the narrative for itstime, place, and sectarian audience. For the most part they accepted the basic narrative—however seemingly miraculous—as true and sought to explain and elaborate it. Severalcommentators writing on Hanuman’s trip to retrieve the Vishalyakarani, for instance,sought to determine the exact speed at which he flew (Goldman 2006). Such commenta-tors might also well have sought to identify the precise herb Hanuman had brought.

Whereas commentarial elaborations were textual, Smith (2004) draws attention tothe many “semi-oral” ways in which the Ramayana lore circulated. Speaking of howfuture poets were first exposed to the lore, he writes that he “would most likely hearhis first version of the story of Rama sitting on grandmother’s knee and then, as he pro-gressed through life, would come into contact in other forms: folktales, dramatic per-formances, paintings, and sculpture, as well as written versions in his own language,and, if well educated, Sanskrit and even perhaps versions in other languages” (90).Gautam Bhadra (1993) further describes how the rich Bengali tradition of Kathakatha(“storytelling”) provided the crucial link between orality and textuality. Skilled pro-fessional Kathaks swapped manuscripts, interpolated material, embellished descriptions,and constantly sought to make the narratives more engaging, appealing, and relevant totheir audiences. In so doing, they regularly incorporated material from vernacular,ephemeral sources. On the other hand, Bhadra (1993) also points out how these profes-sionalized tellings of the narrative once again circulated outwards and entered domesticsettings where dutiful sons, patriarchs, grandmothers, and school-going youth variously,in their roles as storytellers, further disseminated the lore.

Clearly, this amorphous, evolving, and undisciplined “tradition,” which the youthsoaked up on their way from the cradle to adulthood, was very different from the “factua-lized tradition” of trained Orientalist scholars. The former is more akin to what RolandBarthes called “embodied experience”: an experience acquired unselfconsciously andthrough the whole gamut of one’s bodily senses by virtue of their immersion in a livedcontext (Jay 2005, 383–84). One might call this an “embedded tradition” as opposed tothe “factualized tradition.”

A variety of fragmentary sources suggest that the heterogeneities of the textual tra-dition, which had led the exponents of the “factualized [medical] tradition” to rejectVishalyakarani, were being silently reworked into the image of a single powerful herbcalled Vishalyakarani in the “embedded tradition.” In the course of its discussion, an1833 article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society refers to a description in the LankaKanda of the Ramayana of a single magical plant named Vishalyakarani, described asbearing yellow leaves, green fruit, and red and golden flowers (Journal of the AsiaticSociety 1833, 340). Remarkably, though not identical, this description is fairly close toDr. Basu’s description: “Blue fruits and flowers, yellow leaves/ red-coloured stalks andgolden-coloured creepers” (Basu 1893, 268). By the late nineteenth century, the imageof Vishalyakarani as a single magical herb with the power to revive the dead or dyinghad passed into the embedded common sense of many. For instance, RasasundariDebi, a Bengali housewife who was the first such woman to have written her autobiogra-phy, uses the image as an elaborate metaphor for the way in which her Bhakti sustainedand revived her from the sorrow of losing a son (Debi [1875] 1987, 61). That this


elaborate metaphor could work without further exegesis demonstrates that it must havealready become fairly familiar to people such as Rasasundari.

VII

Recent developments in science studies have engendered the emergence of a newinterest in materialities. This general interest has included “substance histories” (e.g.,Attewell 2010; Nappi 2010), histories of scientific objects (e.g., Daston 1999), and his-tories of scientific instruments (e.g., Turner 1998). Little, however, has been said ofhow time inheres in materials. Contrapuntally, the new emphasis on substances,especially among exponents of Latourian Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), has also encour-aged a marginalization of cultural frameworks within analytical models.4 What the historyof Vishalyakarani shows is that culturally and historically contingent imaginations of thetemporal being of substances are often crucial to the ways in which these substancesare negotiated by research scientists.

The story of Vishalyakarani also demonstrates that cultural pasts of a plant-object arenot mere antiquarian curiosities, just as retro-botanizing is not a transparent and mech-anical action. Retro-botanizing actively negotiates multiple cultural pasts of a plant andattempts to fix a stable identity. The variety of pasts and the different identities theyare entangled with inspire new futures of use. The politics of retro-botanical negotiationsis therefore patently also a negotiation over possible futures for and of the plant.

This should not, however, be seen as an argument suggesting the determination ofthe present by the past. Instead, what I am describing is better seen as a case where evol-ving notions about the past, themselves in the present, constantly reshape the possibilitiesfor the future. The present itself becomes, as a result, an anxious space of constant andmultiple different negotiations between what Reinhart Koselleck (2004) calls the “spaceof experience” and the “horizon of expectations.” Developing Koselleck’s insight, onemight describe the three distinct futures and their attendant pasts of Vishalyakaraniarticulated by the three concerned groups as being three types of “historicities” ratherthan histories. The notion of multiple, distinct historicities, each tied to a different“space of experience”—largely framed by the practices through which the past isaccessed—and the “horizons of expectations” born out of those spaces of experience,has two analytical advantages over the simpler notion of multiple histories. First, andpossibly most importantly, instead of rearticulating the linearity of time by seeking toexclusively judge different varied accounts of the past without reference to the future,the notion of historicities actually seeks to map the pasts in relation to the futures theyproduce. Second, it is more fastidious than any caveats one might make in avoidingthe conceit of describing “what really happened,” that is, uncritical retro-botanizing asa historical protocol.

Indeed, in our present state of knowledge, what really happened in the plant’s pastremains as open as it was in the 1880s and the 1890s. With the adoption of the Conven-tion on Biological Diversity and India’s passing of the Biodiversity Act in 2002, as well as

4For a sympathetic but balanced account of the postcolonial critiques of Bruno Latour’s ANT, seeWatson (2011).


with the constitution of the so-called “Golden Triangle Partnership” by the Governmentof India under the aegis of the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha,there is a new interest in establishing the indigeneity of plants and their medicinaluses. As a result, a handful of scientists in West Bengal have recently begun exploringthe identity of Vishalyakarani once again. Since E. ayapana’s Brazilian origin nowseems to be a fait accompli, these scientists have argued that the original identificationmust have been wrong. An official of the Government of West Bengal, Kana Talukdar(2010, 23), in discussing the different herbs that might be the “real” Vishalyakarani,writes that “Eupatorium ayapana . . . the most well-known, is actually an exotic fromBrazil used to stop haemorrhage. Since the species is not Indian in origin, it cannot bethe original Vishalyakarani.” Such factualized traditions deployed in the service of thenation-state’s developmental agenda are not rare in “Incredible India” (the sloganthe government uses to “market” India as a tourist destination), and it would hardly beworthwhile to point out the quixotic logic that admits the reality of a flying monkey(Hanuman is imagined as having had the power of flight), but shies away from the possi-bility that such a flying monkey may then not have restricted his aerial sojourns to India’spostcolonial state-space. What is worth mentioning though is that there are several per-fectly rational alternatives—not requiring belief in flying monkeys—that might stillenable one to identify Vishalyakarani as E. ayapana.

Even if Captain Blake’s single-handed introduction of the plant in Bengal is dis-missed as a bit of imperial hubris, one might still be able to accept the Vishalyakaranias the American weed. Long before the British rose to political eminence in SouthAsia, from the sixteenth century onwards there was an ever-growing Portuguese presencein Bengal. By 1580, there was a Portuguese settlement in Dhaka, and by 1601, there wereat least three Portuguese churches manned by Dominican fathers. For a while, the Bay ofBengal was fairly described as a Portuguese lake. In the wake of the latter’s colonial pres-ence in Brazil from around the middle of the sixteenth century, is it not perfectly possiblethat an easy-growing weed that develops from twigs that get broken off may have beenaccidentally transferred to Bengal? More tantalizingly, what is there to have preventedit from having been transferred the other way, that is, from Bengal to Brazil? Evenwithout entertaining the latter possibility, if the plant was introduced into Bengalaround the sixteenth century, its hemostatic properties may well have been discoveredfairly soon. Kapil Raj (2007, 42–43) has described how a number of plants, such aspapaya, chili, custard apple, and potato—all introduced by the Portuguese from SouthAmerica in the sixteenth century—were rapidly incorporated into the pharmacopoeiasof Bengal and Orissa. Had this happened for Vishalyakarani, the embedded traditionembodied in the Ramayana tradition may have equally quickly adopted images of thisvaluable plant and attached it to older inchoate stories and descriptions of Lakshmana’smiraculous revival.

Proving the factual accuracy of such an alternate narrative is not my intention. Were Ito engage in it, it too would in reality be inspired by and negotiated through other visionsof the future, that is, yet another act of retro-botanizing. I provide the counter-narrativehere instead as a retort intended to trip up the factualized tradition on its own shoelaces,to mimic its smug authority in a way that then brings out the hollowness of that authorityand the “facts” it purveys. This is also where I differ with existing studies of plant-transfer,such as the Cinchona studies, which are happy to lay out a narrative of dispersal founded


upon a stable retro-botanical identity and a definite and fixed historical chronology.Having thus tripped up and exposed the hollowness of the seemingly watertight demar-cation between “fictitious” myths and “hard” facts, scholars can now proceed to appreci-ate the role of temporal imagination in scientific practice. By undercutting theemotionally and politically charged binarisms of “tradition” versus “science,” “truth”versus “lie,” “science” versus “superstition,” scholars can begin to appreciate scientificpractice through its actual historically specific entanglements with and deployments ofthese binaries. Instead of being caught up in barren disputes about true and falsepasts, researchers can concentrate their attention on how particular imaginations ofthe past—whether called “fact” or “fiction”—are configured and accessed through par-ticular practices of the present and how they engender new possibilities for the future.In other words, what I am arguing for is an engagement with the historicity of plants,rather than their histories.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Monday Workshop Series of theHistory and Sociology of Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, and at theSouth Asia Colloquium Series at Yale University. Comments and suggestions made onboth occasions were most helpful in developing the argument. Manjita Mukharji hasread multiple versions of this paper and helped me sharpen both my writing and argu-ment. I remain indebted to Gautam Bhadra, Pamela Swett, Stephen Heathorn, DaudAli, and Rochona Majumdar for their comments on earlier drafts.

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