The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad
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...
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| Format: | Article |
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Royal Society Publishing
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128370 |
| _version_ | 1811096044370395136 |
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| author | Kochhar, Rijul |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society Kochhar, Rijul |
| author_sort | Kochhar, Rijul |
| collection | MIT |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T16:37:27Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/128370 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T16:37:27Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Royal Society Publishing |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1283702022-10-02T08:33:00Z The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad Kochhar, Rijul Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society 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. National Science Foundation (Grant 1946917) 2020-11-05T21:13:09Z 2020-11-05T21:13:09Z 2020-07 Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 0035-9149 1743-0178 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128370 Kochhar, Rijul. "The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad." Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 74, 4 (July 2020): 625–651 © 2020 The Author(s) http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019 Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use. application/pdf Royal Society Publishing Rijul Kochhar |
| spellingShingle | Kochhar, Rijul The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title | The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title_full | The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title_fullStr | The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title_full_unstemmed | The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title_short | The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad |
| title_sort | virus in the rivers histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in allahabad |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128370 |
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