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Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing,


Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plants
in Colonial Bengal, 18901940
Projit Bihari Mukharji
The Journal of Asian Studies / Volume 73 / Issue 01 / February 2014, pp 65 - 87
DOI: 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, 18901940 . The
Journal of Asian Studies, 73, pp 65-87 doi:10.1017/S0021911813001733
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The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 73, No. 1 (February) 2014: 6587.
The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2013 doi:10.1017/S0021911813001733

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retrobotanizing, Embedded Traditions, and Multiple


Historicities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 18901940
PROJIT BIHARI MUKHARJI

This article critically examines the assumptions and processes involved in identifying historically distinctive plant identities by their Latin botanical names. By following latecolonial 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 so
doing, it also distinguishes between two different forms of tradition, the factualized
and embedded. Finally, it blurs the allegedly watertight distinction between historical
and mythic pasts. Instead of trying to distinguish these pasts ontologically, I argue that
it is more productive to see specific pasts in relation to the sorts of futures they
produce, that is, their respective historicities.

CHOLARS, WHENEVER THEY HAVE occasion to write about plants in myth, lore, ritual,
history, or elsewhere, often gloss the plants cultural name with a botanical name provided in parentheses. The practice, no doubt, is intended to promote intelligibility and
allow readers to identify the exact plant being spoken of. Yet, unwittingly it reproduces
a problematic dividethat between nature as an ahistorical universal and culture
as a historical and geographic variable. The botanical name therefore seems to be a
valid and legitimate gloss for any and all plant identities, irrespective of when and
where 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 Sanskrit
kavya, medieval Persian qasida, Greek myth, early Chinese bencaos, or Thai temple
gardens with the suitable botanical names of the flowers being referred to.
Historians of science, however, have long established that botanyjust like any other
form of human knowledgeis also historically contingent. Its knowledge is marked, like
all scientific knowledge, by historical specificities. Moreover, like other forms of human
knowledge, the acceptance of its accuracy or precision is as much a political question as it
is 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 validated, and indeed, its historical specificities. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in
discussions of the histories of medicinal plants. Plants, such as Cinchona, are mentioned
as having been used and exchanged among multiple communities existing in distinctive

Projit Bihari Mukharji (mukharji@sas.upenn.edu) is Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in the Department of
History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Projit Bihari Mukharji

historical and geographical moments, and yet the botanical name Cinchona remains
ahistorically 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 specific
ways in which botanical names and cultural ones come to be equated, I want to reintroduce 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, predetermined gesture of glossing a cultural identity by a botanical one to historical inquiry. I
want to reclaim the possibility of historical inquiry as a way of not only historicizing the
natural but also reimagining the relationship between scientific and traditional knowledges 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 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 Hanumans superhuman strength
as well as his commitment and devotion to his master, Rama (Goldman 2006). What has
remained somewhat obscure, however, is the nature of the medicine that he sought.
Different versions of the Ramayanaand there are numerous tellings and retellings
of itoften 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 committees surprise, the plant was identified as
one known to botanists as the Eupatorium ayapanaa 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 Eupatorium ayapana

67

Vishalyakarani as the E. ayapana deserves closer scrutiny. How exactly and by what
process were the two identitiesVishalyakarani and E. ayapanaequalized?

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 retrodiagnosis 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 2004; Lindemann 2010). 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 2009). 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 2000). 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 1999).
Latours 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 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 Latours 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 (2012) has argued that for

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Projit Bihari Mukharji

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 1999; Banerjee 2006; BanerjeeDube 2007; Chatterjee and Ghosh 2002; Skaria 1988) 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 2006; Alter 2008;
Arnold 1999; Attewell 2003; Chakrabarti 2000; Raina 1998; Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan 1995; Kavita Sivaramakrishnan 1999).
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 1998; Le Goff 1992; Nora 1989; Ricoeur 2006;
Winter 1995), a postcolonial critique of disciplinary historys political implications
(N. Bhattacharya 2008; Chatterjee 1993; Nandy 1998; Pandey 2006), and a more historically 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 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 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 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 2000, 17475; Lourdusamy 2004, 10043; Nandy
1998, 1787). Most recently, some works have explored the conjunction of botany and
indigenous medical traditions in South Asia (Attewell 2007; Mukharji 2009b). 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 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 local
knowledge as practical rationality, however, has the power to challenge the stable botanical designation.

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

69

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. Realitiesto those who experience those realitiesare 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.
Sens (1971) writings on Vedic and post-Vedic botany and Daud Alis (2012) 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 (1971) 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
(2012), 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
Sens (1971) 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 Chakrabartys (2000) 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 2000, 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 2000, 17). Retro-botanizing, then, is the denial of difference
between two plant identities wrapped in distinctive spatio-temporal envelopes.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

The phrase spatio-temporal envelope is used by Latour (2000) to emphasize the contextual
specificity in which propositionsincluding propositions of identitiesare made.

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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 McConnells 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, 23). 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). Basus 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 (4243).
In Basus 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 Vishalyakaranis 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 Basus 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

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

71

dealt a fatal blow to the committees 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 plants exotic credentials that killed the interest in it, it
must be asked what it was that convinced the IDC of the plants 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 geneticsor
more specifically Mendellian inheritance, since the word genetics in its contemporary
sense was not coined till 1905and paleobotany were still in their infancy and had no way
of positively identifying the original source of the plant (cf. Muellner 2006). 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 Watts 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 Watts 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. Hookers Flora of British
India, W. B. OShaughnessys Bengal Dispensatory, William Dymocks Materia Medica
of Western India, Sakharam Arjuns Bombay Drugs, John Flemings Medicinal Plants
and Drugs, Kanailal Deys Indigenous Drugs of India, and so forth (Watt 1890, 293).
Working backwards from Watts list of citations to Hookers classic reveals that the
plant is described very briefly as an American plant introduced into Calcutta and
other gardens (Hooker 1882, 244). As the basis of this comment, Hooker cited Ventenat
and refuted an alternate identification by Robert Wight. By contrast, in OShaughnessy
(1841, 42223), 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 1867, 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 1873, 203). Hence, though Watt undoubtedly had precedents for his position in the works of Fleming (1812, 16667), Waring (1868, 127),
Hooker (1882, 244), and Dymock (1885, 42425), there were also significant precedents
for an alternate view within his own list of citations in OShaughnessy, 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

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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 Roxburghs (1814, 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 plants exotic status and its consequent
omission from the IDCs scope were hence principally grounded in a series of mutually
interlocking and reconfirming textual references: Watt cited Ventenat, Hooker, Dymock,
OShaughnessy, 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 Blakes 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 Vishalyakaranis 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,2 what is more inexplicable is
the exclusion of a lengthy paper on the plant by Dr. Jagadbandhu Basu, MD, FCI (1893).
Dr. Basus 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.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. Basus 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 Basus paper provide a clinical report of the drugs operation, but his quotation from the Ramayanaif correctwould have undoubtedly
proved the antiquity of the local knowledge of the plants medicinal virtues. If nothing
else, Basus 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
2

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

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

73

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 1894, 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 1896, 11) and there,
occasionally, the name Bisalya Kroani was mentioned as having been used by
Bagchee (Koehne 1897, 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 (2004, 3132) 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 IDCs 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
establishments attention to the virtues of the plant. Structurally, the letter was almost
identical to Basus paper in 1893. It commenced by reiterating the plants 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 1920sthat 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, 25051).
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 1896, 124). In 1908, The Calcutta Journal of Medicine, a prominent Daktari journal, reproduced an article from the British Lancet that explicitly repudiated the E. ayapanas identification as Vishalyakarani and mocked the unreliability of
indigenous botanical knowledge (Sircar 1908, 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 plants 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 Dutts Materia Medica of the
Hindus (1877). 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

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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 Mukhopadhyays ([1293 BE]
1886) Dravyagun Darpan, Kaviraj Birajacharan Guptas (1908) Vanaushadhi Darpan,
and Kaviraj Debendranath Sengupta and Upendranath Senguptas ([1333 BE] 1926)
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 IDCs 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. Basus 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 IDCs position. In Deys 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 IDCs verdict and changed
his views on the plants 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 Vishalyakaranis medicinal reputation among Indians trained in Western sciences.

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

75

In 1908, another Indian, Dr. K. M. Nadkarni, a trained biomedical physician, followed Deys usage in accepting that the plant was a native of Brazil but nonetheless
including it in his work on indigenous medicine (Nadkarni 1927, 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 (1902) 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 (2004,
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 Nadkarnis 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 1927, iiiii).
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 Nehrus 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 1918). 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 1939, 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

76

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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 1939).
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 plants 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, 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 plants medicinal
history in Mauritius. Authors, such as Waring (1868) and Nadkarni (1927), 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. Basus paper and Kaviraj Basus report to the IDC, drew upon the plants
mythic past to emphasize its value in stopping bleeding. When scientific research into the
plants 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 1941).
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 1937, 515). Ironically
then, even as Ayurvedafrequently accepted as being synonymous with Hindu medicinespurned its connections with Vishalyakarani, emergent Indian traditions of
Western science rearticulated and relegitimized Vishalyakaranis 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

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

77

should appear that the use of Eupatorium ayapana in Ayurvedic system of medicine is
perfectly justified (Bose and Sen 1941, 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 Vishalyakaranis 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 2009; for Bengal, see
Mukharji 2005). 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 1887 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] 1887, 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] 1914, 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 (1993) 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

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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 1993, 252). Adhering
to Luddens 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 plants description from Krittibass 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 Bhattacharyas 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. Basus 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 [1339 BE] 1932, 41114). By contrast, while versions of the Valmiki
Ramayana (Valmiki [1282 BE] 1875, 26162) spoke of two herbs (Sanjivani and Vishalyakarani), only versions of the Adhyatmya Ramayana (Vedavyasa [1295 BE] 1888, 202) spoke
of a single herb, but left it unnamed; and another, somewhat obscure, local Ramayana
(Mandal 1980, 478) replaced the healing herb entirely with enchanted water sprinkled
by Shiva. Even the Krittibasi Ramayana itselfthe most popular narrative in Bengal
was available in a large number of varied forms. W. L. Smith points out:
Krttivasas original Ramayana garnered so much prestige that before long other
poets began writing new material under his name, and as a consequence a
number of diverse Ramayanas bearing the signature of Krttivasa were in circulation. . . . This state of affairs did not come to an end with the introduction of
printing. . . . [N]ew editors altered the text . . . much in the same way as their
predecessors had been doing in pre-printing days. As a result, there exists a
number of Ramayanas that are only nominally by Krttivasa, although they
appear under his name. (Smith 2004, 9091)

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

79

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 miraculousas true and sought to explain and elaborate it. Several
commentators writing on Hanumans trip to retrieve the Vishalyakarani, for instance,
sought to determine the exact speed at which he flew (Goldman 2006). Such commentators might also well have sought to identify the precise herb Hanuman had brought.
Whereas commentarial elaborations were textual, Smith (2004) 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 grandmothers 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 (1993) 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 (1993) 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 ones bodily senses by virtue of their immersion in a lived
context (Jay 2005, 38384). 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. Basus description: Blue fruits and flowers, yellow leaves/ red-coloured stalks and
golden-coloured creepers (Basu 1893, 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] 1987, 61). That this

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Projit Bihari Mukharji

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 2010; Nappi 2010), histories of scientific objects (e.g., Daston 1999), and histories of scientific instruments (e.g., Turner 1998). 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.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 (2004) calls the space
of experience and the horizon of expectations. Developing Kosellecks 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 experiencelargely framed by the practices through which the past is
accessedand 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 plants past
remains as open as it was in the 1880s and the 1890s. With the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity and Indias passing of the Biodiversity Act in 2002, as well as
4

For a sympathetic but balanced account of the postcolonial critiques of Bruno Latours ANT, see
Watson (2011).

Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana

81

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. ayapanas 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
(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 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-states 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 Indias
postcolonial state-space. What is worth mentioning though is that there are several perfectly rational alternativesnot requiring belief in flying monkeysthat might still
enable one to identify Vishalyakarani as E. ayapana.
Even if Captain Blakes 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 latters 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 (2007, 4243) has described how a number of plants, such as
papaya, chili, custard apple, and potatoall introduced by the Portuguese from South
America in the sixteenth centurywere 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 Lakshmanas
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

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Projit Bihari Mukharji

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 pastwhether called fact or fictionare 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.

Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Monday Workshop Series of the
History and Sociology of Science Department, University of Pennsylvania, and at the
South Asia Colloquium Series at Yale University. Comments and suggestions made on
both occasions were most helpful in developing the argument. Manjita Mukharji has
read multiple versions of this paper and helped me sharpen both my writing and argument. I remain indebted to Gautam Bhadra, Pamela Swett, Stephen Heathorn, Daud
Ali, and Rochona Majumdar for their comments on earlier drafts.

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