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 miraculous medicine that alone could revive the slain hero, Lakshmana, the beloved younger brother of the god-king, Rama. Unable to find the exact medicine and eager to get back before dawn when the medicine would become redundant, Hanuman, it is said, brought the entire mountain back with him. The episode has long been memorialized in paintings, prints, stories, proverbs, and statues, and it celebrates Hanuman's superhuman strength as well as his commitment and devotion to his master, Rama (Goldman Reference Goldman2006). What has remained somewhat obscure, however, is the nature of the medicine that he sought.

Different versions of the Ramayana—and there are numerous tellings and retellings of it—often disagree on the name and nature of the medicine Hanuman sought. Despite this disagreement, in nineteenth-century Bengal, most people had come to identify the medicine as an herb called “Vishalyakarani.” The Sanskrit etymology of the word simply meant “that which extracts arrows [thorns].” Medical practitioners or Kavirajes in Bengal used 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 the medical establishment, set up a committee to investigate the medicinal plants of British India, the Vishalyakarani was submitted by a Calcutta Kaviraj for investigation. After some initial enthusiasm, to the committee's surprise, the plant was identified as one known to botanists as the Eupatorium ayapana—a Brazilian weed, allegedly introduced to South Asia barely a hundred years before.

The consequences of the identification were complex. The committee itself dropped the herb from further investigation since it was clearly not “indigenous.” Those seeking to revive traditional medicine at the time also ignored the plant, most probably owing to its alleged Brazilian origins. Numerous other, lay Bengalis, however, continued to use and extol the virtues of the plant. Eventually it was this persistence of popular usage that would produce a new, robust future for the plant in the mid-1930s. Before moving forward to that future, I would argue that the very process of identification of Vishalyakarani as the E. ayapana deserves closer scrutiny. How exactly and by what process were the two identities—Vishalyakarani and E. ayapana—equalized?

II

It is this process whereby a modern, botanical name came to be equated with an older, “traditional” one that I want to call “retro-botanizing.” I take my cue here from historians 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 been used to critique a certain historiographic tendency to read contemporary disease as equivalents of older, pre-modern, and pre-biomedical designations. Thus the historiographic equation of “runs” to “cholera,” “French Pox” to “syphilis,” “Burdwan Fever” to “Kala-azar” and “leishmaniasis,” and so forth (Elmers Reference Elmers2004; Lindemann Reference Lindemann2010). The argument against retro-diagnosis here has tended to emphasize the mismatch between the two categories being equated and the often fundamentally different assumptions (such as “humors” and “germs”) that are indispensable to any historically sensitive understanding of either category. Any such equation, it has been pointed out, leads to anachronistic redefinitions of the categories being equated (Stein Reference Stein2009). Sociologist of science Bruno Latour, however, has gone a step further. He has raised an even more fundamental ontological question. Aside from the historical practicalities of using documentation produced for “runs” to write about “cholera,” Latour has posed the more fundamental question of whether modern scientifically discovered entities can indeed be retrospectively thought to exist before the scientific discovery itself. He first posed the question with regard to retro-diagnostic claims that the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II died of tuberculosis (Latour Reference Latour and Daston2000). Latour asked whether it was ontologically and epistemically valid to speak of tuberculosis in the context of pharaonic Egypt. In a later version of the same poser, Latour asked, “were there microbes before Pasteur?” (Latour Reference Latour1999).

Latour's answer was that the past was “retrofitted” (Latour Reference Latour and Daston2000). This “retrofitting,” Latour points out, is an active process that requires the coming together of a vast array of different actors. In order to make the claim that the pharaoh Ramses II died of tuberculosis, 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 and leading scientists. By drawing attention to this active process of “retrofitting,” Latour argued that such retrospective claims must always be judged within the chains of actors 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 the specific actor-networks that materialize them.

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

This is where science studies could benefit from an Asian studies inflection. In an illuminating recent intervention, Warwick Anderson (Reference Anderson2012) has argued that for postcolonial science studies “Asia is method,” that is, Asian case studies are more than simply yet another set of particular cases, instead they bring with them the obligation and the methods to fundamentally rethink science studies in less essentialized and more relational ways. South Asianists have long been interested in contested pasts and have sought to develop ways of understanding these alternative pasts in less essentialist and more relational ways. A wealth of studies (e.g., Ali Reference Ali1999; Banerjee Reference Banerjee2006; Banerjee-Dube Reference Banerjee-Dube2007; Chatterjee and Ghosh Reference Chatterjee and Ghosh2002; Skaria Reference Skaria1988) has pointed to the contested and politicized existence of a multiplicity of pasts. In the realm of histories of South Asian science too, more particularly, there is a small but sophisticated body of literature on the political constructions and contests over the past (Abraham Reference Abraham2006; Alter Reference Alter2008; Arnold Reference Arnold and Ali1999; Attewell Reference Attewell and Selin2003; Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2000; Raina 1998; Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan Reference Sivaramakrishnan1995; Kavita Sivaramakrishnan Reference Sivaramakrishnan and Ali1999).

In part, these studies engaging the plurality of pasts, their politics, and so forth have built upon a set of much more general trends not restricted to South Asia alone. Most prominent among these larger trends have included a new and renewed interest in individual and collective memory (LaCapra Reference LaCapra1998; Le Goff Reference Le Goff, Rendall and Claman1992; Nora Reference Nora1989; Ricoeur Reference Ricoeur, Blamey and Pellauer2006; Winter Reference Winter1995), a postcolonial critique of disciplinary history's political implications (N. Bhattacharya Reference Bhattacharya2008; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee1993; Nandy Reference Nandy1998; Pandey Reference Pandey2006), and a more historically sensitive and critical approach to distinctive forms of temporality (Ali Reference Ali2013; Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam Reference Rao, Shulman and Subrahmanyam2003).

More generally, South Asian and British imperial history have both recently witnessed an increased interest in botany. These have included a large number of studies on plant transfers, networks of knowledge, the politics of circulation, and so on (Arnold Reference Arnold2008; Brockway Reference Brockway1979; Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2010; Desmond Reference Desmond1992; Drayton Reference Drayton2000; Endersby Reference Endersby2008; Headrick Reference Headrick1988; Jardine, Secord, and Spary Reference Jardine, Secord and Spary1996; Noltie Reference Noltie1999, Reference Noltie2002; Philip Reference Philip2004; Raj Reference Raj2007; Scheibinger 2004). This new literature, though nowhere addressing the issue of retro-botanizing, allows the larger, complex, and political relationship between botany and empire to be understood more fully. A small corpus of works has also investigated the slightly later entanglement of nationalism and botany, particularly through the career of Sir J. C. Bose, while an even smaller corpus has looked at the cultural politics of imperial botany (Arnold Reference Arnold2000, 174–75; Lourdusamy Reference Lourdusamy2004, 100–43; Nandy Reference Nandy1998, 17–87). Most recently, some works have explored the conjunction of botany and “indigenous” medical traditions in South Asia (Attewell Reference Attewell2007; Mukharji Reference Mukharji, Pati and Harrison2009b). Nearly all these studies, however, are situated in the nineteenth century.

More importantly, many (though not all) of these studies, willingly or not, fall prey to the very tendency of retro-botanizing that I am trying to problematize. Thus, scholars critical of the imperial cocktail of power, knowledge, and commerce eventually still frequently contribute towards the naturalization of botanical names and the relative marginalization of cultural identities of plants. Non-Western identities of plants are often reduced to a component of “local knowledge,” while the “local knowledge” itself is understood as a form of “practical rationality” (Philip Reference Philip2004, 9). This “practical rationality” expressed as “local knowledge” is either suppressed and forgotten (Scheibinger 2004) or appropriated and globalized by European science (Grove Reference Grove1995). None of this “local knowledge” as “practical rationality,” however, has the power to challenge the stable botanical designation.

Plant names in other languages and at other times are not merely hollow linguistic vessels waiting to be filled by the reality of botanical names. They constitute their own realities. Realities—to those who experience those realities—are not simply “local” versions of some higher, truer reality, nor are they simply “practical rationalities.” They are elements within larger cosmological structuring of experience. Retro-botanizing refigures that very cosmological universe within which plant identities are embedded. An excellent 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 (Reference Ali, Ali and Flatt2012) fascinating exploration of botanical technology and garden culture in the twelfth-century text Manasollasa. Though working from an identical corpus of texts, and often even the same texts, such as the Brihatsamhita and the Sarangadharpaddhati, Ghosh and Sen (Reference Ghosh, Sen, Bose, Sen and Subbarayappa1971) present the plants, glossed throughout by their Latin botanical names, as perfectly modernized, “natural” objects. They even discuss plants “manufacturing food” in their leaves. Ali (Reference Ali, Ali and Flatt2012), on the other hand, carefully implicates the plant identities within a web of prominent entanglements with astrological and complex aesthetic concerns, which in turn touch upon the very articulation of royal political power. These astrological, aesthetic, and political concerns are not secondary or superficial window dressing on some more fundamental “natural” identity, but rather signals towards a wholly distinctive frame for experiencing and conceptualizing plant identities, namely one where plant identities are capable of being putatively linked to planetary movements, part and parcel of a broader set of aesthetic concerns and capable of representing royal power. Ghosh and Sen's (Reference Ghosh, Sen, Bose, Sen and Subbarayappa1971) presentation does not merely misrepresent the plant identities of Vedic and post-Vedic India, but rather fundamentally alters them by inserting them into a very different and modern cosmological universe where plant identities are conceptualized in a radically different way. The retro-botanizing tendency that reduces nonmodern plant identities to “practical rationalities” expressed as “local knowledge” are reminiscent of Dipesh Chakrabarty's (Reference Chakrabarty2000) critique of “glossaries” in area studies monographs. As Chakrabarty points out, the “rough translations” that made up such glossaries were not only “approximate and thereby inaccurate,” but also meant to fit the rough-and-ready practice of colonial rule itself. “To challenge this model of ‘rough translations,’” says Chakrabarty, “is to pay critical and unrelenting attention to the process of translation” (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000, 17).

It is in this process of translation that relationships of domination and subordination become visible. It is here that the smooth process of retrofitting that Latour described acquires its colonial crinkles. Chakrabarty points out that what emerges through attention to the process of translation is neither the utter meaninglessness of the translation, nor its perfect match of two terms, but rather a partially opaque relationship “we call ‘difference’” (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2000, 17). Retro-botanizing, then, is the denial of difference between two plant identities wrapped in distinctive “spatio-temporal envelopes.”Footnote ¹ It is a false claim to transparent translation that overlooks the opacity of difference that lurks in-between the two plant names. In its denial, retro-botanizing also masks the political, contingent, and reversible relationship between the two names of a plant and presents 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 on January 9, 1896, it was Surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel J. F. P. McConnell, rather than the sole Indian member, Kanailal Dey, who raised the possibility of asking eminent local Kavirajes and Hakims for their opinions on various local drugs. Dey responded by asking McConnell if he had any specific Kavirajes or Hakims in mind. Upon McConnell's naming an eminent local physician, Dey flatly declared that “he had no faith in the gentleman concerned but could bring to the meeting others who were held in higher esteem” (Report of the Indigenous Drugs Committee 1899, 2–3). What this simple exchange at the very outset demonstrates is that the discussion in the IDC was not necessarily polarized by any discernible nationalist sentiments. About a month later on February 18, however, McConnell presented a letter he had received from one Amulyacharan Basu, whom he described as “a gentleman who had considerable practical knowledge 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 each herb and the usual dosage (42–43).

In Basu's list was mentioned a plant called the “Ayapan or Bisalya Karani.” Of it, he wrote: “I do not know the scientific name. I believe it is the best haemostatic known. I have used it very successfully in bleeding from the nose, lungs, bowels etc. I prescribe the juice of fresh leaves in teaspoonful doses” (42). The Vishalyakarani's mythic identity as 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 is stated 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 the plant was spoken of as a “haemostatic of considerable merit” (14). Sometime during these 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 the Blumea 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 had led to the plant being identified as the Blumea lacera was the fact that the Blumea had only 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 identification had therefore been simple guesswork. Later, however, in response to a request to send the committee some samples of his plant, Basu sent a large quantity of both the crude plant and the “special preparation employed by him” (29). It was the botanical identification of these samples that sprung the surprise on the committee. It transpired that the 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 no longer of interest to the committee on “indigenous” drugs. Moreover, it was said that though the plant was “in most general use in the vicinity of Calcutta,” elsewhere in the colony, 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, it must 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 comparing paleobotanical finds from the two areas. But in the 1890s, both plant genetics—or more specifically Mendellian inheritance, since the word “genetics” in its contemporary sense was not coined till 1905—and paleobotany were still in their infancy and had no way of positively identifying the original source of the plant (cf. Muellner Reference Muellner2006). A perusal of the contemporary botanical literature on the Eupatorium ayapana is therefore instructive in identifying precisely how the question of origin was determined.

One of the most consulted works on the “useful” plants of India around the 1890s was Sir George Watt's Dictionary of the Economic Products of India. In it, Watt stated that 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. In the Dictionary, the identity and description of the plant were based solely upon a long list of citations to other botanical works. Though this fulsome list commenced with references to the works of Carl Linnaeus and Etienne Pierre Ventenat, these botanical stalwarts were not referenced directly through their own works. Rather, their citations derived through other, more recent, references, such as J. D. Hooker's Flora of British India, W. B. O'Shaughnessy's Bengal Dispensatory, William Dymock's Materia Medica of Western India, Sakharam Arjun's Bombay Drugs, John Fleming's Medicinal Plants and Drugs, Kanailal Dey's Indigenous Drugs of India, and so forth (Watt Reference Watt1890, 293). Working backwards from Watt's list of citations to Hooker's classic reveals that the plant is described very briefly as “an American plant introduced into Calcutta and other gardens” (Hooker Reference Hooker1882, 244). As the basis of this comment, Hooker cited Ventenat and refuted an alternate identification by Robert Wight. By contrast, in O'Shaughnessy (Reference O'Shaughnessy1841, 422–23), not only is there a much more extensive description of the plant, but also, more cogently, it is stated to belong to both “Brazil and Bengal.” This dual origin thesis was once again reiterated by Kanailal Dey in 1867 (Dey Reference Dey1867, 53). In 1873, Heber Drury still maintained a tacit duality by stating that “some botanists believe it to have been introduced into India from the Isle of France and others that it is a native of the country” (Drury Reference Drury1873, 203). Hence, though Watt undoubtedly had precedents for his position in the works of Fleming (Reference Fleming1812, 166–67), Waring (Reference Waring1868, 127), Hooker (Reference Hooker1882, 244), and Dymock (Reference Dymock1885, 424–25), there were also significant precedents for 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 erased their equivocality and hence reaffirmed an authorized, homogenous knowledge through a seemingly seamless citation protocol.

In fact, the long presence of the plant in Bengal and other parts of India together with the acceptance of the American origin story had led to the development of a transmission narrative in some of the writers. Though Hooker and Watt made no mention of this, the transmission narrative was continually repeated in Fleming, Drury, Dymock, and Waring. 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. Subsequently, it was brought to India from Mauritius. In a slightly different transmission narrative furnished by William Roxburgh's (Reference Roxburgh1814, 61) Hortus Bengalensis, the plant was believed to have been introduced into the Royal Botanic Gardens of Calcutta by Captain B. Blake in 1801.

The seemingly definitive decision on the plant's “exotic” status and its consequent omission from the IDC's scope were hence principally grounded in a series of mutually interlocking 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 Ainslie in turn once again cited Ventenat, and even made an attempt to merge the via-Mauritius story with Captain Blake's story.

IV

More remarkable than the citation-based nature of the IDC account was its choice to exclude certain texts. The most prominent exclusion, undoubtedly, was that of the Ramayana itself. No reference was ever made to the Vishalyakarani's connection with the 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 a hard distinction between “scientific” and “mythic” texts,Footnote ² what is more inexplicable is the 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 came before the IDC, in Chikitsa Sammilani, one of the best-known and most respected Bengali medical periodicals of the day. Both Kavirajes and Daktars (Bengali biomedical physicians) used to contribute to this journal.Footnote ³ Since at least two members of the IDC, McConnell and Dey, were well-acquainted with the Bengali medical world, it is safe to assume that they would have been aware of the publication. Dr. Basu's paper is valuable for 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 fairly accurate. Second, he gave extensive case histories, including names of well-known patients, who had benefitted from the use of Vishalyakarani in a variety of hemorrhagic conditions. Thus, not only did Basu's paper provide a clinical report of the drugs' operation, but his quotation from the Ramayana—if correct—would have undoubtedly proved the antiquity of the local knowledge of the plant's medicinal virtues. If nothing else, Basu's paper should have forced the IDC to examine the accuracy or indeed the very 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 of the Hughli Botanic Gardens, included the plant in his book on “Hindu medicinal plants.” Describing it, he explained: “[I]t is said that when Lakshmana had been injured by the powerful arrow (shakti-shel), Hanuman had brought this herb from the distant Gandhamadan mountain, to revive him” (Saha Reference Saha1894, 24). In 1895, Dr. G. C. Bagchee, another Bengali Daktar, presented a paper at the Indian Medical Congress on “Bengal Haemostatic Plants,” which once again made prominent mention of E. ayapana and gave details of its use. Interestingly, the English reports of the paper did not refer to the name “Vishalyakarani” (The Chemist and Druggist 1895). The paper, however, was widely reported in German journals (e.g., Beckurts and Weichelt Reference Beckurts and Weichelt1896, 11) and there, occasionally, the name “Bisalya Kroani” was mentioned as having been used by Bagchee (Koehne Reference Koehne1897, 360). That these prominent accounts were consistently and completely ignored during discussions at the IDC was a testament to the eloquent exercise of colonial privilege. Schiebinger (Reference Schiebinger2004, 31–32) has argued that such willful construction of blindness was a central feature in the construction of colonial botanical knowledge and has urged historians to undertake the task (“agnotology”) of uncovering such deliberate cultivations of ignorance.

Even after the IDC's verdict on the foreignness of the plant, Bengali faith in it remained unabated and accounts continued to surface from time to time. One of the most fulsome of these was a lengthy anonymous letter that appeared in a popular domestic magazine, Grihasthya Mangal, as late as in 1929. This letter, which seemed blissfully unaware of the alleged Brazilian origin of the plant, enthusiastically called the botanical establishment's attention to the virtues of the plant. Structurally, the letter was almost identical to Basu's paper in 1893. It commenced by reiterating the plant's Ramayani identity and went on to cite actual observed cases of success. It then developed a theme which, though mentioned by Basu too, was more redolent in the late 1920s—that of potential financial savings for both the nation and the family. Interestingly, the letter also contrasted the “indigenous” Vishalyakarani with the “Hemamilis vaginica [probably Hamamelis 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 acquaintance with biomedicine, it virtually ignored the Brazilian-origin thesis. This is particularly significant since, after the IDC verdict, a number of other authors restated the hegemonic IDC position. For instance, Kanailal Dey, when he reissued his book on indigenous drugs in 1896, changed the dual-origin theory he had stated in 1867 and flatly called the plant a “native of Brazil” (Dey Reference Dey1896, 124). In 1908, The Calcutta Journal of Medicine, a prominent Daktari journal, reproduced an article from the British Lancet that explicitly repudiated the E. ayapana's identification as Vishalyakarani and mocked the unreliability of indigenous botanical knowledge (Sircar Reference Sircar1908, 161). K. M. Nadkarni restated the American origin of the plant in 1908 and then subsequently again in 1927. The position was clearly well-aired, and the author of the letter would likely have seen it in one book on indigenous medicine or the other, had he or she consulted any.

By stark contrast, while knowledge, usage, and accounts of the plant's medicinal powers as a hemostatic continued to surface, it was almost completely absent from the numerous 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 the Hindus (Reference Dutt1877). Compiled, as it was, from “Sanskrit Medical Works,” it did not mention the Vishalyakarani at all, perhaps because it did not occur in strictly “medical” works. Subsequently, a number of influential books appeared on the subject, particularly in the years following the IDC verdict, and all of them followed Dutt in ignoring the Vishalyakarani. Among these maybe counted Bholanath Mukhopadhyay's (Reference Mukhopadhyay[1293 BE] 1886) Dravyagun Darpan, Kaviraj Birajacharan Gupta's (Reference Gupta1908) Vanaushadhi Darpan, and Kaviraj Debendranath Sengupta and Upendranath Sengupta's ([1333 BE] Reference Sengupta and Sengupta1926) Dravyagun. None of these texts, of which the last two were particularly influential and widely used, mentioned the Vishalyakarani.

What these diverse Indian attitudes towards the plant demonstrate is the selectiveness of the practice of deliberate ignorance. The IDC's decision was clearly founded upon a deliberate blindness to the Ramayani identity of the plant. Especially significant here was the complete silence in the IDC proceedings about Dr. Basu's prominent essay on the plant. Once the decision had been taken, however, a different set of practices of ignorance was operationalized. Ayurvedic authors, at this time engaged in energetic ventures intended to reformat Ayurvedic plant knowledge along botanical lines, ignored the plant despite 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 to adopt the IDC's position. In Dey's case, this led him to alter his own earlier published position. Yet, significantly, unlike the Ayurvedists, neither Dey nor Nadkarni ignored the plant. They acknowledged its Brazilian origins but continued to include it in their works on Indian indigenous plants. Other, less prominent medical practitioners with limited exposure to “Western science,” such as the anonymous letter-writer of 1929, continued to vigorously defend the use of the plant in total ignorance of the Brazilian-origin theory. Thus different groups enacted different types of ignorance at different times and with different results.

V

Even before the IDC verdict, the virtues of the Vishalyakarani had been more prominently espoused by those Indians who were trained in “Western” sciences, rather than by Ayurvedists. It has already been noted that Dey in 1867, Bose in 1893, and Saha in 1894 wrote of it. This difference was possibly an early indication of the strong reliance of 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 that exposed and attracted authors such as Dey, Bose, and Saha, none of whom showed any marked interest in high Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts. Hence, notwithstanding the loss of interest in the plant by British botanists and Ayurvedists, Indians trained in “Western” medicine and sciences retained their interest in it despite what the IDC decided. As noted, Dey, though he was himself party to the IDC's verdict and changed his views on the plant's origin in later editions of his locus classicus, significantly did not remove the plant altogether from these later editions. While it was odd to include a plant he now acknowledged as being Brazilian in a book on the indigenous drugs of India, Dey had always held a very liberal interpretation of what was “indigenous,” and his choice undoubtedly facilitated the persistence of Vishalyakarani's medicinal reputation among Indians trained in “Western” sciences.

In 1908, another Indian, Dr. K. M. Nadkarni, a trained biomedical physician, followed Dey's usage in accepting that the plant was “a native of Brazil” but nonetheless including it in his work on “indigenous” medicine (Nadkarni Reference Nadkarni1927, 346). Explaining his reasons for having chosen to write on indigenous plants, Nadkarni wrote that “the strong spirit of Swadeshism [i.e., the political movement for boycotting foreign goods and services and using only Indian-made commodities] suddenly evoked in me by the wave 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 of nearly two crores of rupees to India for importing costly foreign medicines” were the main reasons he had chosen to write the book ( ii). Ever since R. C. Dutt (Reference Dutt1902) had developed the thesis of an “economic drain” through colonialism, it had been repeated ad infinitum in the nationalist press. In fact, by the 1870s, says Manu Goswami (Reference Goswami2004, 227), the idea of “economic drain” had become common in the vernacular press. In the hands of authors like Nadkarni, this potent and emotive logic of nationalism came to be embodied in the purchase of foreign drugs. Consequently, the interest in “indigenous drugs” became closely linked to the ebb and flow of nationalist sentiment. The fortunes of Nadkarni's own book amply demonstrated this. Nadkarni had complained bitterly that since the Partition of Bengal had been annulled soon after the publication of his book, the Swadeshi angst had disappeared, resulting in many copies of his book remaining unsold, thus inflicting a significant financial loss on him that drove him to seek support from the very British government he opposed. Yet, despite the generous support from Sir Charles Pardey Lukis, the director general of Indian Medical Services, his book remained unsold. Finally, the anti-colonial upsurge of 1919 unexpectedly came to 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, patently what drove the market in books on indigenous drugs in the twentieth century was nationalist fervor (Nadkarni Reference Nadkarni1927, 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 a knighthood and become one of Nehru's key scientific advisors, published a pamphlet for the establishment of a triangular partnership between the government, scientists, and capitalist entrepreneurs to undertake the scientific exploitation of indigenous drugs (Ghosh Reference Ghosh1918). So powerful was this cluster of ideas and arguments around economic drain, the need for scientific study of indigenous drugs, and its potential for national uplift, that even M. K. Gandhi, who was usually opposed to centralized government controls and high science, believed that “there should be an agency that can say with certainty what these herbs [i.e., medicinal herbs used by villagers] are and what is their quality” (Gandhi Reference Gandhi1939, 82). He reckoned this alone would finally stop the expensive drain of scarce national resources on foreign medicines.

It was perhaps as much through the influence of such arguments as through the changing fashions of the scientific world and the rapid Indianization of the scientific establishment 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 in Indian laboratories who were working with indigenous plants. Not all of these were medicinal plants. Many were the potential source of dye-stuff, but many others were investigated 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., Pongamia glabra Vent., Azadirachta inidica, Pinus longifolia, Boswellia serrate Roxb., Pinus excels, and Cupressus torulosa Don., to name but a few, were investigated by teams of scientists predominantly comprised of Indian scientists in Indian universities (Mitter Reference Mitter1939).

New research on the Vishalyakarani began in the mid-1930s in one of the flagship centers 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 the explicit 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 usually harped 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 Reference Watt1890, 293). Nadkarni (Reference Nadkarni1927) too, while giving a somewhat expanded description of the medicinal uses of the herb, had generally stuck to the overall remit outlined by the British botanists. The broad outlines of this remit had been derived not from Indian ideas, but rather from the plant's medicinal history in Mauritius. Authors, such as Waring (Reference Waring1868) and Nadkarni (Reference Nadkarni1927), had mentioned how the plant had once acquired an almost panacea-like reputation on the island and had even been used to treat cholera before its reputation imploded. Eventually, it had achieved the status of a stimulant and tonic and was popular as a tea, akin to chamomile, the usage of which was also imported to France from Mauritius. By contrast, the Indian reputation, as seen in both Dr. Basu's paper and Kaviraj Basu's report to the IDC, drew upon the plant's mythic past to emphasize its value in stopping bleeding. When scientific research into the plant's medicinal properties revived in the mid-1930s, it was precisely this anti-bleeding potential that the researchers sought to test. The research was conducted by a group of Bengali 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 group clearly stated that while the E. ayapana was widely used for a range of different ends in different parts of the world, in Bengal it was known principally as a “haemostatic agent, particularly to stop internal bleeding” and that this is what had motivated them to test the drug for its hemostatic potential (Bose and Sen Reference Bose and Sen1941).

Finally on March 20, 1937, P. K. Bose, working together with B. B. Sarkar, reported in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that by using experiments conducted on rabbits, they had been able to prima facie demonstrate “the haemostatic action of two substances [i.e., Ayapin and Ayapanin] isolated from the leaves of Eupatorium ayapana Vent., a decoction of which has long been a popular remedy against various kinds of haemorrhage in Hindu medicine” (Bose and Sarkar Reference Bose and Sarkar1937, 515). Ironically then, even as Ayurveda—frequently accepted as being synonymous with “Hindu medicine”—spurned its connections with Vishalyakarani, emergent Indian traditions of “Western” science rearticulated and relegitimized Vishalyakarani's medicinal reputation in the name of “Hindu medicine.”

VI

By 1941, P. K. Bose and P. B. Sen, writing in the Annals of Biochemistry and Experimental 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 is perfectly justified” (Bose and Sen Reference Bose and Sen1941, 316). Yet, the irony that none of the eminent Ayurvedic authors of the day mentioned this drug makes it obvious that the Ayurvedic authors 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 their information about Vishalyakarani's medicinal value in Ayurvedic texts, where did they pick up the information from? One predictable source would have been the Ramayana itself. In the 1890s, biomedical physicians, such as Dr. Basu, were indeed quoting from the Ramayana instead of any Ayurvedic text. The Ramayana, however, is seldom cited as an Ayurvedic text, and despite the increasingly “Hindu” identity of Ayurvedic medicine from the late nineteenth century onwards, reformers were at pains to present it as a “science” and demarcate its canonical sources from more general textual sources of Hindu piety. From the circumstances, it seems fairly clear that Ayurvedic physician-scholars and Indian scientists were operating with and within two distinct genres of “tradition.”

For the Ayurvedists, “tradition” was increasingly structured, organized, and defined through the identification of a classical Sanskrit medical canon and framed by a politics of Hindu-ness, indigenousness, and “scientificity” (see Hardiman Reference Hardiman2009; for Bengal, see Mukharji Reference Mukharji2005). This genre of tradition was purveyed in a range of medical and popular texts and journals written by Ayurvedic authors. In the foreword to the first edition of his immensely successful book, Ayurved Vijnana, Kaviraj Binodlal Sen wrote in Reference Sen1887 that “there are many hurdles on the path of recovery and true improvement of this almost-lost Ayurveda. Amongst these, so long as the major texts are not available in vernacular languages and a proper school for teaching them is not established, no improvement is possible” (B. Sen [1337 BE] Reference Sen1887, 3). Sen further explained that texts such 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 necessary material, and what was worse was that all of them contained much information that was “not particularly important” for students. All this ruled out self-teaching and made the reading of the classical texts within carefully calibrated pedagogical institutions unavoidable. Nearly a generation later, another reformist Kaviraj, Sudhansubhushan Sen, complained that while “Ayurveda was the property of the Sanskrit language, [and] it could not live without Sanskrit,” barring a handful of erudite practitioners who read the classics, everyone else who practiced Ayurvedic medicine had acquired their knowledge from the reading of Bengali translations (S. Sen [1321 BE] Reference Sen1914, 2). Despite the very different positions of these two authors on the pedagogical value of translations, they and most other authors agreed that the Ayurvedic tradition was fundamentally located in a body of classical Sanskrit texts and its proper dissemination depended upon a closely controlled pedagogical process that would provide access to those classical texts.

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 even medical texts. This formulation of “tradition” owed much to the forms of Orientalism that evolved since the eighteenth century. David Ludden (Reference Ludden and Breckenridge1993) points out that despite 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 knowledge drew material sustenance from colonialism but became objectified by the ideology of science as a set of factualised statements about a reality that existed and could be known independent of any subjective, colonizing will” (Ludden Reference Ludden and Breckenridge1993, 252). Adhering to 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 accessed by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ayurvedists, was yet another example of Orientalist factualization and the particular Ayurvedic tradition that was produced through this engagement was a “factualized Ayurveda.”

By contrast, the “Ayurvedic tradition” to which scientists like P. K. Bose and P. B. Sen referred was accessed and disseminated along very different routes. This latter tradition was much less disciplined, and its transmission routes, locations, and narrative content were much less stable. It clearly did not derive from the study of actual Ayurvedic texts. Neither did it derive exclusively from the reading of books on “indigenous drugs,” since, though it frequently quoted from such works, it also regularly supplemented the knowledge gleaned from it with an excess best exemplified in the insistence on the anti-bleeding powers of the Vishalyakarani. It is seductive to attribute this supplementary excess to the attractions of the Ramayana, but for yet another problem.

Dr. Jagadbandhu Basu left the best clue about the Ramayana connection through his quotation of the plant's description from Krittibas's Ramayana. Surprisingly, however, the lines quoted by Dr. Basu are not found in the popular published Bengali versions of the Ramayana from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this regard, it is of course crucial to note that there were multiple Ramayana narratives available in both Bengal and elsewhere. There were considerable variations, even among the best-known versions. Most strikingly, Ashutosh Bhattacharya's standard critical edition of the Krittibasi Ramayana does not include the lines quoted by Dr. Basu. In fact, it speaks of four herbs rather than one herb (A. Bhattacharya, n.d., 355). Most of Dr. Basu's contemporary printed editions that I have been able to access also lacked the lines concerned and spoke of four herbs, that is, Mritasanjivani, Asthisanchari, Suvarnakarani, and Vishalyakarani (e.g., N. Mukhopadhyay Reference Mukhopadhyay[1339 BE] 1932, 411–14). By contrast, while versions of the Valmiki Ramayana (Valmiki [1282 BE] Reference Bhattacharya1875, 261–62) spoke of two herbs (Sanjivani and Vishalyakarani), only versions of the Adhyatmya Ramayana (Vedavyasa [1295 BE] Reference Vedavyasa and Tarkaratna1888, 202) spoke of a single herb, but left it unnamed; and another, somewhat obscure, local Ramayana (Mandal Reference Mandal1980, 478) replaced the healing herb entirely with enchanted water sprinkled by 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:

Aside from the fluidity of the basic narrative, there was also a thriving commentarial tradition attached to the Ramayana that constantly sought to reposition the narrative for its time, 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. Several commentators writing on Hanuman's trip to retrieve the Vishalyakarani, for instance, sought to determine the exact speed at which he flew (Goldman Reference Goldman2006). Such commentators might also well have sought to identify the precise herb Hanuman had brought.

Whereas commentarial elaborations were textual, Smith (Reference Smith and Bose2004) draws attention to the many “semi-oral” ways in which the Ramayana lore circulated. Speaking of how future poets were first exposed to the lore, he writes that he “would most likely hear his first version of the story of Rama sitting on grandmother's knee and then, as he progressed through life, would come into contact in other forms: folktales, dramatic performances, 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 (Reference Bhadra1993) further describes how the rich Bengali tradition of Kathakatha (“storytelling”) provided the crucial link between orality and textuality. Skilled professional Kathaks swapped manuscripts, interpolated material, embellished descriptions, and constantly sought to make the narratives more engaging, appealing, and relevant to their audiences. In so doing, they regularly incorporated material from vernacular, ephemeral sources. On the other hand, Bhadra (Reference Bhadra1993) also points out how these professionalized tellings of the narrative once again circulated outwards and entered domestic settings 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 youth soaked up on their way from the cradle to adulthood, was very different from the “factualized tradition” of trained Orientalist scholars. The former is more akin to what Roland Barthes called “embodied experience”: an experience acquired unselfconsciously and through the whole gamut of one's bodily senses by virtue of their immersion in a lived context (Jay Reference Jay2005, 383–84). One might call this an “embedded tradition” as opposed to the “factualized tradition.”

A variety of fragmentary sources suggest that the heterogeneities of the textual tradition, which had led the exponents of the “factualized [medical] tradition” to reject Vishalyakarani, were being silently reworked into the image of a single powerful herb called Vishalyakarani in the “embedded tradition.” In the course of its discussion, an 1833 article in the Journal of the Asiatic Society refers to a description in the Lanka Kanda of the Ramayana of a single magical plant named Vishalyakarani, described as bearing yellow leaves, green fruit, and red and golden flowers (Journal of the Asiatic Society 1833, 340). Remarkably, though not identical, this description is fairly close to Dr. Basu's description: “Blue fruits and flowers, yellow leaves/ red-coloured stalks and golden-coloured creepers” (Basu Reference Basu1893, 268). By the late nineteenth century, the image of Vishalyakarani as a single magical herb with the power to revive the dead or dying had passed into the embedded common sense of many. For instance, Rasasundari Debi, a Bengali housewife who was the first such woman to have written her autobiography, uses the image as an elaborate metaphor for the way in which her Bhakti sustained and revived her from the sorrow of losing a son (Debi [1875] Reference Debi1987, 61). That this elaborate metaphor could work without further exegesis demonstrates that it must have already become fairly familiar to people such as Rasasundari.

VII

Recent developments in science studies have engendered the emergence of a new interest in materialities. This general interest has included “substance histories” (e.g., Attewell Reference Attewell, Ernst, Digby and Mukharji2010; Nappi Reference Nappi, Ernst, Digby and Mukharji2010), histories of scientific objects (e.g., Daston Reference Daston1999), and histories of scientific instruments (e.g., Turner Reference Turner1998). Little, however, has been said of how time inheres in materials. Contrapuntally, the new emphasis on substances, especially among exponents of Latourian Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), has also encouraged a marginalization of cultural frameworks within analytical models.Footnote ⁴ What the history of Vishalyakarani shows is that culturally and historically contingent imaginations of the temporal being of substances are often crucial to the ways in which these substances are negotiated by research scientists.

The story of Vishalyakarani also demonstrates that cultural pasts of a plant-object are not mere antiquarian curiosities, just as retro-botanizing is not a transparent and mechanical action. Retro-botanizing actively negotiates multiple cultural pasts of a plant and attempts to fix a stable identity. The variety of pasts and the different identities they are entangled with inspire new futures of use. The politics of retro-botanical negotiations is 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 of the present by the past. Instead, what I am describing is better seen as a case where evolving notions about the past, themselves in the present, constantly reshape the possibilities for the future. The present itself becomes, as a result, an anxious space of constant and multiple different negotiations between what Reinhart Koselleck (Reference Koselleck and Tribe2004) calls the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectations.” Developing Koselleck's insight, one might describe the three distinct futures and their attendant pasts of Vishalyakarani articulated by the three concerned groups as being three types of “historicities” rather than histories. The notion of multiple, distinct historicities, each tied to a different “space of experience”—largely framed by the practices through which the past is accessed—and the “horizons of expectations” born out of those spaces of experience, has two analytical advantages over the simpler notion of multiple histories. First, and possibly most importantly, instead of rearticulating the linearity of time by seeking to exclusively 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 they produce. Second, it is more fastidious than any caveats one might make in avoiding the conceit of describing “what really happened,” that is, uncritical retro-botanizing as a historical protocol.

Indeed, in our present state of knowledge, what really happened in the plant's past remains as open as it was in the 1880s and the 1890s. With the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity and India's passing of the Biodiversity Act in 2002, as well as with the constitution of the so-called “Golden Triangle Partnership” by the Government of 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 medicinal uses. As a result, a handful of scientists in West Bengal have recently begun exploring the identity of Vishalyakarani once again. Since E. ayapana's Brazilian origin now seems to be a fait accompli, these scientists have argued that the original identification must have been wrong. An official of the Government of West Bengal, Kana Talukdar (Reference Talukdar2010, 23), in discussing the different herbs that might be the “real” Vishalyakarani, writes that “Eupatorium ayapana . . . the most well-known, is actually an exotic from Brazil used to stop haemorrhage. Since the species is not Indian in origin, it cannot be the original Vishalyakarani.” Such factualized traditions deployed in the service of the nation-state's developmental agenda are not rare in “Incredible India” (the slogan the government uses to “market” India as a tourist destination), and it would hardly be worthwhile 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 possibility that such a flying monkey may then not have restricted his aerial sojourns to India's postcolonial state-space. What is worth mentioning though is that there are several perfectly rational alternatives—not requiring belief in flying monkeys—that might still enable one to identify Vishalyakarani as E. ayapana.

Even if Captain Blake's single-handed introduction of the plant in Bengal is dismissed as a bit of imperial hubris, one might still be able to accept the Vishalyakarani as the American weed. Long before the British rose to political eminence in South Asia, from the sixteenth century onwards there was an ever-growing Portuguese presence in Bengal. By 1580, there was a Portuguese settlement in Dhaka, and by 1601, there were at least three Portuguese churches manned by Dominican fathers. For a while, the Bay of Bengal was fairly described as a Portuguese lake. In the wake of the latter's colonial presence in Brazil from around the middle of the sixteenth century, is it not perfectly possible that an easy-growing weed that develops from twigs that get broken off may have been accidentally transferred to Bengal? More tantalizingly, what is there to have prevented it from having been transferred the other way, that is, from Bengal to Brazil? Even without entertaining the latter possibility, if the plant was introduced into Bengal around the sixteenth century, its hemostatic properties may well have been discovered fairly soon. Kapil Raj (Reference Raj2007, 42–43) has described how a number of plants, such as papaya, chili, custard apple, and potato—all introduced by the Portuguese from South America in the sixteenth century—were rapidly incorporated into the pharmacopoeias of Bengal and Orissa. Had this happened for Vishalyakarani, the embedded tradition embodied in the Ramayana tradition may have equally quickly adopted images of this valuable plant and attached it to older inchoate stories and descriptions of Lakshmana's miraculous revival.

Proving the factual accuracy of such an alternate narrative is not my intention. Were I to engage in it, it too would in reality be inspired by and negotiated through other visions of the future, that is, yet another act of retro-botanizing. I provide the counter-narrative here 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 authority and 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 demarcation between “fictitious” myths and “hard” facts, scholars can now proceed to appreciate the role of temporal imagination in scientific practice. By undercutting the emotionally and politically charged binarisms of “tradition” versus “science,” “truth” versus “lie,” “science” versus “superstition,” scholars can begin to appreciate scientific practice through its actual historically specific entanglements with and deployments of these binaries. Instead of being caught up in barren disputes about true and false pasts, researchers can concentrate their attention on how particular imaginations of the past—whether called “fact” or “fiction”—are configured and accessed through particular 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.