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Article ID: CBB928582628

What’s in a name? William Jones, ‘philological empiricism’ and botanical knowledge making in eighteenth-century India (2022)

Menon, Minakshi (Author)

South Asian History and Culture
Volume: 13
Issue: 1
Pages: 87-111

DOI: 10.1080/19472498.2022.2037826

URI: https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2022.2037826

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Materia medica Philology Terminology and nomenclature Botany Colonialism Sanskrit 18th century India Roxburgh, William Linnaeus, Carolus Jones, William

‘What is Indian Spikenard?’, asked the eighteenth-century orientalist, Sir William Jones (1746–1794), in a famous paper, ‘On the Spikenard of the Ancients,’ published in Asiatick Researches, Volume II (1790). The question serves here as a point of entry into Jones’s method for creating culturally specific plant descriptions to help locate Indian plants in their Indian milieu. This paper discusses Jones’s philological method for identifying the jaṭāmāṁsī of the Sanskrit verse lexicon, the Amarakośa, and materia medica texts, a flowering plant with important medicinal properties and great commercial value, as the ‘Spikenard of the Ancients’. Philology, for Jones, was of a piece with language study and ethnology, and undergirded by observational practices based on trained seeing, marking a continuity between his philological and botanical knowledge making. The paper follows Jones through his textual and ‘ethnographic’ explorations, as he creates both a Linnaean plant-object – Valeriana jatamansi Jones – and a mode of plant description that encoded the ‘native’ experience associated with a much-desired therapeutic commodity. The result was a botanical identification that forced the jaṭāmāṁsī to travel across epistemologies and manifest itself as an object of colonial natural history. In the words of the medic and botanist, William Roxburgh (1751–1815), whose research on the spikenard is also discussed here, Jones’s method achieved what ‘mere botany’ with its focus on the technical arrangement of plants could not do.

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Article Minakshi Menon (2022) Indigenous knowledges and colonial sciences in South Asia. South Asian History and Culture (pp. 1-18). unapi

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