Kochhar, Rijul (Author)
The confluence (sangam) of India's two major rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, is located in the city of Allahabad. Ritualistic dips in these river waters are revered for their believed curative power against infections, and salvation from the karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the rivers have mythic valences in Hinduism and other religious traditions. Yet the connection of these river waters with curativeness also has a base in historical microbiology: near here, the British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, in 1896, first described the ‘bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganges rivers on Cholera microbes’, predating the discovery of bacterial viruses (now known as bacteriophages) by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters in sacred writings and folklore, and later elaboration in the work of Hankin, this paper traces an epistemology of time that connects the mythic to the post-Hankin modern scientific, asking how imaginations of the waters’ antibacterial properties are articulated through idioms of faith, filth and the phage. The paper explores how the bacteriophage virus comes to be spoken about within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, among contemporary historians, biologists and doctors, and in the city's museums. At the same time, it traces the phage in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature, to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as a potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Allahabad presents a ‘cosmotechnics’ where faith, filth and phage are inextricably intertwined, generating complex triangulations between natural ecologies, cultural practices and scientific imaginations. Cosmotechnics therefore opens up novel avenues to reimagine the phage as a protean object, one that occupies partial and multiple spaces in the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad today.
...MoreArticle Neeraja Sankaran (2020) Introduction: Diversifying the Historiography of Bacteriophages. Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (pp. 533-538).
Article
Köhler, Piotr;
(2015)
The Romantic Myth about the Antiquity of Folk Botanical Knowledge and Its Fall: Józef Rostafiński's Case
(/isis/citation/CBB001551789/)
Article
Morris, Amy;
(2013)
Geomythology on the Colonial Frontier: Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, and the Claverack Giant
(/isis/citation/CBB001320743/)
Article
Francesco Luzzini;
(2015)
Il mistero e la bellezza. La Fonte Aretusa tra mito, storia e scienza
(/isis/citation/CBB123469201/)
Article
S. N. Venugopalan Nair;
Darshan Shankar;
(2016)
Knowledge Generation in Āyurveda: Methodological Aspects
(/isis/citation/CBB204824703/)
Article
A. Raghuramaraju;
(2016)
Debate as a Methodology of Knowledge Production in Pre-Modern India
(/isis/citation/CBB227982620/)
Article
R. Champakalakshmi;
(2016)
In Search of the Beginnings and Growth of Knowledge Production in Tamil
(/isis/citation/CBB168865911/)
Article
C. Rajendran;
(2016)
Inference as a Means of Valid Knowledge in Indian Epistemological Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB280815324/)
Article
M. S. Valiathan;
(2016)
Caraka’s Approach to Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB383933474/)
Article
M. R. Raghava Varier;
(2016)
Origins and Growth of Āyurvedic Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB318583608/)
Book
Sanford, A. Whitney;
(2012)
Growing Stories from India: Religion and the Fate of Agriculture
(/isis/citation/CBB001201779/)
Book
Stuckrad, Kocku von;
(2010)
Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities
(/isis/citation/CBB001201627/)
Thesis
Roberto Jesus Diaz;
(2019)
Scientific Islanders: Pacific Peoples, American Scientists, and the Desire to Understand the World, 1800-1860
(/isis/citation/CBB909704817/)
Article
Colin Bos;
(2022)
John Augustus Abayomi Cole and the Search for an African Science, 1885–1898
(/isis/citation/CBB760577508/)
Article
Harkishan Singh;
(2015)
Kanny Lall Dey– Pioneer Proponent of Indigenous Drugs
(/isis/citation/CBB490684547/)
Book
Fischer-Tiné, Harald;
(2013)
Pidgin-Knowledge: Wissen und Kolonialismus
(/isis/citation/CBB001551249/)
Book
Anna Greenwood;
Harshad Topiwala;
(2015)
Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895-1940: The Forgotten History
(/isis/citation/CBB796041613/)
Article
Mukharji, Projit Bihari;
(2014)
Vishalyakarani as Eupatorium ayapana: Retro-botanizing, Embedded Traditions, and Multiple Historicities of Plants in Colonial Bengal, 1890--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB001450394/)
Article
Lyons, Martyn;
(2013)
Celestial Letters: Morals and Magic in Nineteenth-Century France
(/isis/citation/CBB001201417/)
Thesis
Méthot, Pierre-Olivier;
(2011)
Historical Epistemology of the Concept of Virulence: Molecular, Ecological, and Evolutionary Perspectives on Emerging Infectious Diseases in the 19th and 20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001562812/)
Book
Velayutham Saravanan;
(2020)
Water and the environmental history of modern India
(/isis/citation/CBB932612637/)
Be the first to comment!