Digital Rare Book:
A catalogue of Indian medicinal plants and drugs, with their names in the Hindustani and Sanscrit languages
By John Fleming
Published by J. Cuthell, London - 1812

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‘A Catalogue of Indian Medicinal Plants and Drugs’ (1812) is an English compendium of useful medicines reflecting the rapid rise of economic botany under the British East India Company.

Medicines from the bazaar

In 1810, John Fleming, an East India Company surgeon-botanist, published ‘A Catalogue of Indian Medicines’, which collected and listed indigenous medicines found in the bazaars or markets of India.

Fleming’s ‘Catalogue’ was among the first to draw attention to ‘bazaar medicines’ as well as those substances that could be considered poisonous (for example, Datura). His original intent had been to provide physicians newly arrived in India with the Sanskrit and Hindustani names of drugs, including their properties.

Fleming’s text was important as a precursor for the spate of catalogues of Indian medicine that followed, advocating the use of bazaar medicines as substitutes for British drugs or as potential cures for diseases not yet fully understood.

Chief among these catalogues was Whitelaw Ainslee’s ‘Materia Medica of the Hindoostan’ (1813). The six massive volumes offered botanical and English names for products, but also local names in Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit and Dakhni for those that could not be identified botanically.

Other catalogues quickly followed. But this identification and classification of Indian materia medica created a framework of standardised pharmacological knowledge that wrenched botanical plants from their cultural contexts to insert them into chemical formularies.

There are of course some examples of ‘inclusion’ of local materia medica into official pharmacopeia. One of the best known is chaulmoogra – seed and oils – that was used by hakeems and vaidyas as a cure for leprosy and incorporated within the British pharmacopeia, after which the German company Bayer obtained a patent for an extract of the oil.

But there have been far more examples of their exclusions and marginalisations. The plant Vishalyakarani disappears from the record – and bazaars – once the attempt is made to isolate its active ingredients. Similarly, Swietenia febrifuga vanishes as a cheap viable alternative to cinchona once the principle, cinchonine, was isolated from the original cinchona bark.

Heritage wars

A century later, these conflicts over Indian materia medica remain in post-colonial India.

In 1997 the Indian government fought and won a costly legal battle to revoke a US patent for the medicinal use of turmeric to heal wounds, a therapeutic property well known in India for generations. The legal defense relied heavily on references to turmeric and its medicinal properties in Ayurvedic texts.

Largely to prevent future patent appropriations of medicinal heritage, the state launched the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), perhaps the largest traditional medical knowledge compilation in the world. And what was once oral and intangible became an exhaustive database of codified medico-botanical knowledge, which ironically opens Indian medical heritage to new problems of exclusion, marginalisations and claims of ownership. The colonial cycle continues in a post-colonial age.

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