Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World marks a pivotal turn in three fields: the history of medicine, material history, and the spatial meanings of the Indian Ocean world. The introduction by the editors lays out the intention to centre on medicinal knowledge through circulating objects. While paying attention to the social and political asymmetries that have sharply marked the Indian Ocean world since the 1600s, the editors emphasise the need to move beyond conventional histories of collecting practices or hygiene histories. This is a rich product of a conference and a larger project on therapeutic commodities. It seeks new methodologies for material histories of medicine, and the introductory essay offers a comprehensive overview of disciplinary approaches to material culture by archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists. Drawing inspiration from Arjun Appadurai’s concept of objects acquiring meaning in particular contexts, the editors emphasise two ideas: (a) objects are made of materials; (b) these properties allow us to tell stories about their ‘flows and mutations’ (p. 7). The essays in the volume investigate how mobile objects that traversed the Indian Ocean world were received and interpreted differently across this geography. In the process, there was a sea change in the Indian Ocean, the bodies that produced, consumed, and circulated objects of medicine, and the knowledge networks that made such transmission possible.
Arranged largely chronologically, the volume focuses on the coastal forests of present-day Kerala (Malabar and Travancore on the south-western coast of India), the Coromandel (south-eastern coast), Bengal, and the Andamans, but it also branches out to the leper colonies of the South Pacific islands and the hinterland of Mughal India. We encounter diseased bodies, indigenous botanists, therapeutics, correspondence across imperial and vernacular archives, and ethnographies in urban hospitals and forests. Against a backdrop of shifting political landscapes and a changing material sphere, knowledge networks, mobile objects, and bodies across empires undergird the material culture approach that is central to the volume.
First, the volume investigates how knowledge of medicinal plants proliferated among different communities across the Indian Ocean and along its coasts. Four essays overturn conventional narratives of empires, colonialism, and knowledge-making through the specific lens of ‘bioprospecting’, or the quest for commercially viable compounds extracted from plants and animals. For instance, Pratik Chakrabarti demolishes the idea of early modern European natural history being based largely on empiricism and observation. Instead, Chakrabarti stresses a spiritual and salvation-based exchange with ‘Eastern religions’ as being central to the natural history careers of English and Dutch company agents and Danish pietist missionaries in the eighteenth-century Coromandel region. Similarly, Malavika Binny stresses that bioprospecting was not a symmetrical transplantation of knowledge from the colony to the metropole but an untidy and hierarchical network. Siddha, local tribal or ‘native’ systems, and Unani or Islamic medicine were incorporated into modern Ayurvedic practices and were, in turn, controlled by upper-caste practitioners, all before they made their way into European materia medica. Likewise, Girija K. P. demonstrates how knowledge of the arogyapachak, transmitted orally by indigenous Kannikars of Kerala’s mountainous rainforests, was standardised into textualised, Sanskritic ‘Ayurvedic knowledge’ in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite a ‘Benefit Sharing Model’ applied by state botanists to protect indigenous knowledge, the conflicting interests between government research institutes, pharmaceutical firms, and indigenous communities precluded a fair and equitable patent law. But Kaushiki Das warns us not to interpret modern-day bioprospecting simply as a grand narrative of neocolonialism and power. Instead, Das emphasises a different epistemic violence, one of ‘cultural nationalism’. In this violence, tribal communities are able to leverage bioprospecting endeavours in limited and beneficial ways but also increasingly cede their knowledge systems to the postcolonial state that connives with pharmaceutical companies.
Next, how do objects that are circulated, fragmented, received, and recategorised reshape their material contexts and human bodies around them? Anne Gerritsen’s piece presents a cultural history of the circulating knowledge of the rhubarb plant instead of a linear socio-economic history of the plant’s commercialisation in one place. The ‘entangled itineraries’ of how the plant came to be known across space and time explain the impediments to its commercialisation in India and its lingering appeal as an exotic and distant therapeutic. Applying Bruno Latour’s definitions of object agency, Amrita Chattopadhayay stresses that, owing to their ability to transform bodies through healing, pleasure, and even social cohesion, perfumes in Mughal India illustrate mobile and agentive objects in a social landscape marked by smell. Grishma J. John highlights the proliferation of soap from a luxury item to a cheaply produced commodity in nineteenth-century Kerala. Soap provided the region with a regime of ‘bodily regulation’; to upper castes and colonial officials, it presented a tangible symbol of purity and sanitation; Dalit or oppressed-caste leaders deployed it as an object of resistance against casteist oppression. To explain how the same object can have multiple effects on different social bodies, David Arnold applies the concept of ‘pharmakon’ to the dual capacity of arsenic, nox vomica, and kerosene to be both therapeutic and toxic. As colonial officials debated and identified the levels of toxicity, through the Poisons Act, 1919, to regulate their circulation in the twentieth century, they underscored the need for detailed and precise, yet elusive knowledge of such substances’ effects on the body.
The racial, gendered, and religious subjectivity of such knowledge about the body is a third set of problems explored in the book. Suparna Sengupta’s essay focuses on the penal colonies of the Andamans, where the British Raj’s need for labouring bodies created a new index for health: age. This measurement was heavily racialised: in a bid to ensure continued labour-productivity after their transportation to the penal colony, the age-limit for a ‘young’ and ‘healthy’ male native body was capped at ten years below an Englishman’s body. The presence of younger women was still encouraged to prevent homosexual relationships between men on the islands. Thus, the need to construct new colonial spaces co-created a racialized knowledge about age and health. As Burton Cleetus demonstrates through a reading of petitions by migrants to Ayurvedic clinics in nineteenth-century Kerala, the relationship between new colonial spaces such as tea plantations and infrastructure such as the postal and railway systems also refabricated a modern Ayurveda. This knowledge system imagined the bodies of migrant labourers as plants, plucked out of their native environments and consequently facing bodily irregularities. Similarly, in the leper colonies of Makogai and Quail Islands, the Chaulmoogra tree transformed patient relationships with newly formulated therapeutics, even as the landscape of the islands metamorphosed at the intersection of cross-Pacific and Indian Ocean medical networks. The final essay by Harish Naraindas offers a theoretical rejoinder to all others, arguing in favour of the non-material in the study of the history of medicine. Naraindas argues that the process of ‘biomaterialisation’ of medicine treats the material realm and the body as the core site of medical practice. Similarly, the ‘pharmaceuticalisation’ of non-Western materia medica is a process through which agency attributed to spirits, rocks, or planets creates a distinct hierarchy between objective Western knowledge and Eastern ‘alternatives’.
The essays are rich and varied, but path-breaking definitions of object-agency and indigeneity, when the Indian Ocean world is foregrounded, leave much to be desired. More images of the plants or a map of the locales spotlighted by the essays would also have been welcome additions. Yet, with its extensive bibliography, the volume is a timely and immensely generative addition to the distinct yet interrelated fields of the Indian Ocean world and the history of medicine. New and advanced students in these fields are bound to benefit from the plethora of methodological and historiographical possibilities it offers.
