GV: Mary Rose
MR: Gayathri
GV: I’m going to start with a story.
MR: OK — first, a reminder to our listeners — pls put on your headphones to hear this podcast in 3D…trust me, it’ll be worth it…
GV: In April, a man in Noida, near Delhi, needs to buy medicines for his old parents. He goes to a pharmacy, but the guard won’t let him in. Prove that you don’t have coronavirus, the guard says.
MR: how can he prove it?
GV: Well, there’s a contact-tracing app…
MR: the one that you download on your phone to see whether you’ve been in contact with anyone who has the virus?
GV: Yep
MR: And if you haven’t been around anyone, the app status is “green”. You are safe..
GV: Right. And if it’s red, then you’re infected. Stay home.
MR: Or else…?
GV: Or else, the authorities may come and make you stay home… so… the guard asks this guy to prove that he is not infected, else he can’t buy medicine.
GV: The guard is adamant. He’s drawn this little border, and the guy can’t cross it without the proper…. papers, shall we say? So the guy leaves without getting his medicine.
///
MR: My turn. Here’s a story — from Wuhan, where it all started. This one was published in the California Sunday magazine by journalist Shawn Yuan.
GV: OK
MR: China has been assigning codes to people — green for free movement, yellow means a 7 day quarantine, and red means stay home for 14 days. And it is mandatory for everyone to have these codes.
MR: On March 22, a 35-year old man named Wu leaves the hospital after recovering from covid19.. He goes back home. And then, he mostly just stays there. Doesn’t go out…
GV: Why not? Is his code red?
MR: No… it’s green.. It’s because of how he feels he is being treated by his neighbors. They avoid his family… when his wife enters the elevator, everyone else huddles into a corner…it’s like they’re in a permanent isolation bubble…
///
GV: It feels like we are policing ourselves and our neighbors these days… Our governments are certainly tracking us. States keep closing borders and opening… and closing them again. We stay at home waiting for permission to leave…
MR: Our lives feel a bit… dystopian. And the question is — how did we get here, to this moment? Why these responses?
GV: Well… there’s one simple answer, and a complicated one.
MR: ha ok – simple one first…
GV: well, it’s partly because in 2005, most nations in the world agreed to count, track, trace and control each and every one of us during an international health emergency…
MR: Like COVID19?
GV: right…
///
MR: And what’s the complicated answer?
GV: well… to really understand how these nations get to a point where they agree to such drastic action, we go back in time to another pandemic by talking to some historians…
Pratik Chakrabarti ACT1: I’m actually on my laptop. So I’m just dragging my laptop closer to me. Is that better?
GV: That’s Pratik Chakrabarti. yeah, the audio isn’t much better – but there was a lockdown, and he didn’t have a mic…
Chakrabarti ACT2: I work at the Center for history of science, technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester, UK.
GV: He says 200 years ago, a pandemic broke out in India — it was the first real one after the plague, or the Black Death of the 14th century. And this outbreak redefined everything – our notions of quarantine…
Chakrabarti ACT3: …of trade, commerce, disease [[that we draw from go back to this moment of the global pandemic that started in 1817 and became a global pandemic by 1832.]] [[Cholera]] You can almost read as a case study of modern pandemics, you know, it’s a useful mirror to understand all subsequent modern pandemics by
MR: What is this disease?
GV: Cholera.
GV: Everything goes back to 1817, when cholera broke out in Bengal.
**
Welcome to Scrolls and Leaves, a podcast featuring stories from the Global South.
GV: I’m Gayathri Vaidyanathan
MR: And I’m Mary Rose Abraham
This is Episode 1 – Pandemics and Borders. There will be 4 chapters, let’s get started…
**
MR: Chapter 1 – Disease knows no borders
There are many kinds of borders, not just what you think of immediately…. Even the masks we all wear is a border … trying to keep the germs out
Alison Bashford ACT1: “…a border can be anything from, the broad, the really critical, as we know now border of the skin, the border of the human body.”
MR: That’s historian Alison Bashford, at the University of New South Wales in Sydney…
Bashford ACT1: “And what crosses that border as a microbe, or what crosses that border, as a needle that injects a vaccine, say.”
MR: And as we look wider … The threshold of our front door…
GV: …borders around a town
MR: …even the crossover of a virus from forests to human settlements…
Bashford ACT2: “And then more in the 19th, and especially the 20th century, and borders, disease borders often became co-terminous with national borders and that’s when you get in disease times, a kind of a link between keeping disease out and keeping out people.”
///
MR: More than 200 years ago…disease took time to spread … it had to sail over oceans, clamber through jungles… trek across deserts….It traveled at the speed of caravans. Stopped for tea at remote outposts. And often, the weather would change, or the local scenery would go from valley to mountain, and it’d die out there — all alone. It usually took ages – decades, even centuries – to get around the world. So, things are plodding along until…
GV: The 19th century. Steamships replace sailboats and cut travel time significantly. Much of the Global South falls to the Europeans. The British go from being traders to rulers of the Indian subcontinent.
David Arnold ACT1: India was particularly important, particularly with the coming of colonialism from the very end of the 15th century onwards…
GV: That’s David Arnold, an expert on the history of medicine of South Asia and professor emeritus at Warwick University. He spoke to us from his country home in England.
Arnold ACT1: [[what colonialism does is to introduce a whole new range of factors to that existing epidemiological situation. It introduces much more maritime trade.]] It introduces a new population of Europeans who had their own diseases or their own disease susceptibility. It enhances links with Eastern and Southern Africa. It increases contact with Southeast Asia through to China.
MR: These were great conditions for a pandemic. Let’s go back to 1817, to a town in Bengal…This is mostly non-fiction, based on historical records, from our storyteller, Sumit Kumar…
**
It’s been raining since January. The heat has been churning up the swamps, and the vapour hangs heavy. Robert Tytler a British surgeon in Jessore has been expecting an outbreak.
Still, he is unprepared for 19th August
— a native doctor, or vaidya, knocks on his door. Something’s wrong in the bazaar, the vaidya says.
The bazaar is the Indian part of town. It’s 2-miles long, next to the Bhairab River. Across the river is a swamp. It’s so congested — people are selling food from their doorways and Tytler scrunches up his nose in disgust. The huts are narrow as can be…dark and damp inside.
The vaidya takes Tytler to a hut. A man is lying on a mat on the ground. He is middle-aged. His friends are pouring water into his mouth. Tytler gets closer and sees his face is pale, his forehead beaded with sweat. His eyelids are half closed, and Tytler pulls them up and sees lifeless eyes. His body feels frigid. His pulse is weak.
He was fine yesterday, the vaidya says. Then, during the night, he collapsed in pain. He had diarrhea, vomiting — he kept begging for water.
Tytler is shaken. This seems like cholera.
The next day, the man dies. Within 2 days, another 17 people die in the Bazaar.
That year in Calcutta, funeral pyres burn continuously at the ghats leading from Chitpore Road to the Hooghly River. When there’s no more fuel for cremation, bodies are thrown into the river. And in time, there are so many floating corpses that they entangle with the shipping cables. The stench is unbearable, and the magistrates pay Muslim men to clear the bodies.
**
MR: Cholera is unpredictable. Sometimes it claims an entire village, and spares the next one. It disappears, and reappears months later… The only sure thing is that death, when it comes, is swift and painful.
GV: From Jessore, it marches on with British troops.
It marches across the subcontinent. To Jaffna in 1818. It hops on the frigate Topaz and sails to Mauritius. Onward to Madagascar. Sumatra. Penang. Singapore.
MR: Russia in 1823. Persia and Turkey in 1828. Across the Baltic Sea into England and Ireland in 1831. The Americas in 1833.
GV: Six waves of cholera shake the world by the end of the 19th century. Tens of millions of people die globally, at least 10 million in India alone.
**
GV: Chapter 2 – Us and Them
GV: in the 1830s and 40s, people think that cholera is transmitted by clouds of toxic air — called miasmas — spewed by India’s very soils. Europeans name the disease Asiatic cholera or Indian cholera.
And that is a problem.
///
MR: Why? I mean, didn’t we just say cholera came from Jessore in Bengal?
GV: No, what we said was – the first record of the 1817 outbreak is from Jessore. Cholera is much older than that, there are historical mentions of localized outbreaks from around the world. But in 1817, the disease went global…
Projit Mukerji ACT1: I often joke with my students that it’s, I feel kinship with cholera, because it’s the most successful South Asian immigrant [[so I feel that it’s a pathbreaker]].
GV: That’s Projit Mukherji, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He doesn’t like it when people say cholera came from South Asia.
Mukherji ACT2: there’s a lot of problem with that narrative…
GV: People say cholera is from Bengal because there are old Hindu Goddesses dedicated to cholera, or… they point to mentions in ancient…
Mukherji ACT3: Ayurvedic texts
MR: Sounds like rather flimsy evidence…
GV: Exactly. Projit says the cholera Gods are new and created by people desperate for a divine cure. And the Ayurveda texts — they only mention symptoms – diarrhea, fatigue, dehydration…
MR:…Those can fit many diseases!
Mukherji ACT4: historians of medicine call this retro diagnosis when you take a contemporary cluster of symptoms and try to back project it and find other references where it crops up, and you ignore everything else.
Mukherji ACT5: What is more important is to think of why and this is I think, what you were hinting at, of why is there even this pressure to try and find a point zero and to call it Asiatic cholera, say it came from there.
Mukherji: And there’s a whole politics to that happening. And that was very much to do with a lot of 19th century racism. And in fact, like, if you look at the racism, it’s not always to do with South Asia. If you look at cholera globally and cholera, in many ways is the quintessential global disease because it starts off at a period when global travel and contact has been intensified and speeded up so it spreads very quickly it appears global, but in every place you see it and across the world, it often gets associated with other communities…
GV: Think about the connotations of cholera even today– no, the connotations of most infectious diseases. They seem to belong to the poor world – to Kolkata or Lagos.
**
MR: It’s 1849. London is reeling from the third cholera pandemic. A doctor named John Snow tracks down cholera patients – and with some detective work, he connects their disease to a water pump on Broad Street. The water is contaminated by sewage. It’s the first hint that just maybe, cholera is caused by more than clouds of toxic air.
GV: It’s after this point that the state’s role in healthcare changes. Projit says that before this, doctors were saying – give poor people more food, help them live well in clean housing so they can fight off contagions. Improve their socioeconomic conditions.
Mukherji ACT6: But that all gets sidelined because once you have this waterborne vector theory, public health becomes about, you know, policing, contact and about building certain kinds of infrastructure and guarding access to it [[rather than this more expansive idea of health, which is that health cannot just be about ridding your body of a germ, it has to be about your capacity to exist as a human being with dignity and in some kind of, with some kind of bodily integrity…]]
MR: That’s drastic…
///
GV: … here’s an example of how health becomes about borders. Indians are poor under colonial rule. Many are in cities that have no water, no sanitation. Their quarters are crowded and filthy. The lowest castes or classes have it the worst.
The European colonizers fear they will catch disease from the Indians. So they draw a border around themselves. They set up “white towns”
MR: white towns? Seriously?
GV: yes! And the Indian quarters were called black towns. I asked Tarangini Sriraman, a historian from Azim Premji University in Bangalore…about it…
Tarangini Sriraman ACT1: “It was important to ensure that there was not too much of coming and going off of Indians into the white town… except of course, to ensure that there’s enough of menial services that are made available. So so that’s the white town for you.
GV: It sounds like a gated community…
Sriraman: <laughs> It does. It definitely does.
///
MR: As policymakers in the West realize that cleanliness and sanitation are key to stopping cholera — they install piped water in London, Paris, New York. But in India…
Pratik Chakrabarti ACT4: …there’s a divergent history of what the British did to protect Indian cities, to improve sanitary conditions in the Indian cities.
MR: That’s Pratik Chakrabarti, we met him earlier…
GV: So what’d they do?!
MR: He says they build a dual system of sanitation in the colonies! In Calcutta, which was the capital of British India… they install one water supply where river water is filtered and passed to White Town. And a second water supply, which is unfiltered water, goes to the Black Town. And that dual system exists to this day in Kolkata!
GV: So does it work to stop cholera? this dual system…
MR: Sort of.. wherever sanitation and filtered water are installed, cholera rates decline …. elsewhere, not really..
GV: how do they justify their actions?
MR: In many ways — but the one that bugs me most — they imply that cholera belongs in India, to Indians, to the poor — in a way that it doesn’t in Europeans.
**
MR: Chapter 3 — Where there’s a border, there’s police
The thing that really cements the link between public health, borders and policing…is science
MR: Beginning in 1851, Europeans host these massive conferences on sanitation. Both scientists and diplomats attend these. And the tone is unabashedly racist … many times, they compare themselves to the Roman Empire and Christian crusaders — out to civilize and clean up the East. Ten of these conferences are held by the end of the century, and eight focus on cholera—
GV: Eight?!
MR: yeah. let me tell you about the 3rd one…
///
MR: It’s 1865, ok? and Europe is reeling from the 4th cholera pandemic. This one began in the Ganges delta, caught a ride on Hajj pilgrims traveling from India to Mecca. And from there to Egypt, and Europe. People are dying by the hundreds of thousands.
France calls for the Third International Sanitary Conference.
It’s held in Constantinople, the jewel of the Ottoman Empire, the threshold between the East and the West. On February 13, 1866, representatives from 18 mostly European nations get together. And the French delegate, Dr Fauvel, he, metaphorically speaking, he points his finger East. That’s where the disease is coming from.
MR: The conference goes on for 7 months and 13 days! 44 sessions.
GV: That sounds like a conference from hell…
MR: One committee discusses the Indian problem.
GV: Pray tell, what’s the Indian problem?
MR: The Italian delegate says it best — “We have to stop that cursed traveller who lives in India, everyone knows it, from taking his trips; at least we have to stop its progress as closely as possible to its departure point.”
GV: He’s talking about the Hajj pilgrims, right?
MR: Yes
MR: Here’s Projit…
Mukherji ACT7: …So pilgrimages become like, so the Kumbh Mela at Hardwar or the Hajj to Mecca become a major site where the state really starts intervening in unprecedented ways to, to control mobility. And so, there are all kinds of ways in which we actually see in India, what the world is going to see later in the 19th century throughout the 1800s, that is, of this gradual kind of development of new powers of state intervention which have which put this, the interest of stopping infection above and beyond any kind of respect for civil liberties.
MR: Here’s Sumit, our storyteller. This time, he is in Haridwar in 1867, with a story culled from research done by historian, Katherine Prior.
**
It’s 1867 — one year after the third sanitation conference. HD Robertson, a British official, is preparing for the Kumbh Mela in Hardwar. The spot is on the Ganges, where it exits the Himalayan foothills. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims are expected in April. They will bathe in the river to rid themselves of bad karma.
Robertson meticulously plans the sanitation. He charges a tax on the pilgrims and traders to pay for upgrades. He doesn’t want a cholera outbreak on his watch. His men dig trench latrines near the main camp that everyone must use. It stinks. There is little privacy. And they patrol the jungles and the riverbank to drive out anyone trying to relieve themselves there.
Some women do not go to the toilet for 2 or 3 days.
Despite the measures, 19 people die of cholera. And as the pilgrims head back home, they leave a trail of disease. The Brits are frantic, they stop pilgrims at rail stations and bridges to examine them for symptoms. The pilgrims are made to bypass larger towns; some have to walk miles in the heat, through heavy sand, without food or water. Some die from the journey.
Officers also quarantine some pilgrims for 2 to 5 days before they can enter their hometowns. If a person dies from cholera, they quickly burn his body and possessions. Despite all this, a quarter of a million Indians are infected within months — about half of die… Around 125,000 people die.
It’s the first outbreak of this size at Hardwar. The pilgrims blame the interference of the Brits. They are not wrong.
An inquiry finds that – Robertson’s men buried the excrement from the trench latrines in the porous riverbank right next to the Ganges. The ground must have been impregnated with sewage. It must have contaminated the Ganges, where people were bathing.
**
GV: that’s one account of the use of policing for public health reasons. Borders are defined and enforced between pilgrims and the others, towns and outside towns.. between the clean and unclean. Pilgrims became objects of surveillance.
///
MR: Fast Forward to 1883. A German scientist named Robert Koch [kok] shows once and for all that cholera is caused by a bacterium and transmitted by dirty water.
MR: But rather than fixing sanitation in their colonies — Europeans insist that the solution to cholera is to keep Indians away. Or put another way — rather than improving public health, they choose to police. And they require the quarantine of all Hajj pilgrims to Mecca. We’ve been poring over historical research on pilgrimages. And based on work by historian Saurabh Mishra, here’s a story of what a Muslim pilgrim setting off for the Hajj in 1885 can expect to go through…
**
I’ve been saving for Mecca for years. My journey began near Hyderabad and I traveled by rail and bullock carts to the big city – …Bombay.
I went straight to a Haj broker. These men are swindlers, but I was careful… I bought a ticket. There was a departure date, but these ships don’t leave until they are full. I stayed at a friend’s chawl near Thakurdwar and every day, I went to the port to check on the ship.
Before departure, I went to the medical camp, where some men inspected me for disease. They doused my bag in steam and gave me papers. I also got a pilgrim passport.
On departure day, the port was madness. Policemen were hitting people with their batons. The pilgrims swelled on broad, not looking back.
We were all dreaming of Mecca. The crowd carried me, up to the ship, down a hatchway. I found a small space inside the ship.
The steamship set off for Kamaran [KHA-ma-RAAn] Island, a barren land in the Red Sea – hell on Earth. A quarantine station. I hear the Ottomans run it. I was exhausted from my month-long journey, from the stench of people and excrement, the lack of food. I was shoved into a dinghy and rowed to the island. Attendants scrubbed me, and steamed my luggage. They pushed me into a hut where I have to stay with 60 other pilgrims for 10 days. The heat is suffocating. I have 11 square feet to myself. I have to pay for this confinement, for the over-priced food . I’m here. I’m afraid. If cholera occurs in this group, we will be trapped in Kamaran for weeks. The disease will run through this crowd.
I may even miss Mecca.
**
GV: Kamaran has a terrible reputation. One Indian who does this pilgrimage wrote this poem–
Mid Jeddah and Aden way
The quarantine at Kamarn lay.
The Hajis of the Indian land
Are first tried on this sand;
If one can save his life here,
In going to Haj he has no fear.
Who does not die in 10 days,
Good luck he has in all his ways.
O! for the sake of quarantine,
Thy (god’s) prisoners all of us have been.
**
Mukherji ACT8: all the stuff that we think are like what modern states do is actually developed in places like India because these are like the laboratories of modernity. And so because in Europe there are other concerns about things like civil liberties, which they don’t care about in the colonies, they can push people around no end.
GV: Projit says the place where these restrictions most clearly play out today is in our airports. The surveillance tools of the 19th century – the pilgrim passports, the bills of health, live on in our passports, visas…
MR: many countries today require proof that you have certain vaccinations such as yellow fever before you can enter…
GV: …and there’ll be a customs officer at the border poring over documents..
MR: …with the goal of enforcing who’s coming in and who’s going out. Noting down who crosses the border.
GV: These measures are familiar to anyone from the developing world who’s waited in airports to enter Europe or America… I mean, here’s a great example. When Alison Bashford hosted a conference in Sydney, she found that people from developing nations kept dropping out. As if to prove a point, it was a conference on medicine and borders…
Bashford ACT4: I can remember first of all, it was someone from Afghanistan, then it was someone from Pakistan. And then it was someone from Chile, if I remember correctly. And then there started to be a global South pattern of people who were pulling out of my global conference called medicine at the border. And I thought, what what what is going on here? [[Is this something as mundane as funding, in which case I can try and fix that]]
GV: It turned out that people from some parts of the world had to jump through many biosecurity hurdles – they had to prove they were not diseased… the guy from Afghanistan had to prove he didn’t have tuberculosis, for example… And getting all that paperwork was a hassle …
Bashford ACT5: the demographic of my conference ironically in the g, in the south — Sydney — ended up being almost All Europeans and North Americans.
**
MR: Chapter 4 – Assassination
The draconian measures begin with cholera, but it’s another disease — plague — that makes the Brits go all out… That’s when the state breaches the ultimate border — of our bodies.
GV: In 1896, bubonic plague enters Bombay, carried by rats that hitch a ride on ships from Hong Kong. The city is already devastated — cholera is always there and so is famine. People are malnourished and weak, prone to disease. The colonizers are terrified of the plague. They pass the Epidemic Diseases Act in India in 1897. Historian David Arnold calls it a ruthless law..
Arnold ACT2: It gave the government the power to intervene in almost every aspect of the populations life. And particularly, they’re targeting here, the Indian population, the Indian population living in the slums and tenements of Bombay, of Calcutta and other big cities.
GV: Soldiers throw people out of their homes. They burn down buildings. The authorities issue plague passports, which are pieces of paper permitting the bearers to leave their home for essential work. Rumors are going around that the doctors are carving out the hearts of plague victims and sending them to Queen Victoria. People pack up and leave the cities in droves…
MR: Walter Charles Rand is the special plague officer in Poona, and he seems like a despot, quite frankly … he sends soldiers into people’s homes. Tarangini Sriraman says this is unprecedented…
Sriraman ACT2: imagine these white men, these men in uniform, the soldiers just going into these houses And uninvited, they have no invitation to go Come here, but they they just enter these houses…
MR: and the soldiers, all men, approach women and ask them to disrobe so they can examine their armpits, their groins for plague, which causes these swollen bumps
GV: That is an assault.
MRA: Here’s a non-fiction story from those turbulent times…
***
It’s 1897. The Chapekar [CHA-fey-kar] brothers are angry. Soldiers are entering temples, disrespecting women, breaking idols and burning holy books. Walter Charles Rand is responsible for all this.
Damodhar Chapekar is the eldest. He procures a revolver – it’s faulty, only one barrel out of 5 works, but it’ll do. He also gets a pistol. And the brothers watch Rand. They decide to strike on June 22nd – it’s the day of Queen Victoria’s diamond Jubilee at the Government House in Puna. There will be a state banquet and reception, followed by bonfires and fireworks.
That evening, the tree-lined avenue leading to the Government House is packed. Police are everywhere. It’s a dark night. Damodhar waits outside the gates, watching the carriages leaving the banquet in the light of the lamps. At 11 pm, he spots Rand’s carriage and coachman.
He runs behind it, toward his brother Balakrishna, who is waiting near a yellow bungalow. Damodhar shouts at Balakrishna to tell him it’s on! Damodhar pulls open the window at the back of the carriage, puts the revolver close to Rand’s back and fires. Balakrishna fires at a second carriage that is following Rand.
**
GV: So what happens to them?
MR: Rand and the other officer die. The Chapekar brothers are hanged.
GV: And that plague law?
MR: You mean the Epidemic Diseases Act? It’s still with us … the Indian government enacted it for the coronavirus pandemic.
GV: here’s something even more troubling.. those International Sanitary Conferences from the 19th century — They are with us too! They led to something called the International Health Regulations, created by the World Health Organization in 1969. These are legally binding rules that dictate how the 196 member nations should act when there’s a global health emergency.
MR: Wait…isn’t that the thing you mentioned when we started talking about pandemics and borders, the ‘simple’ answer?
GV: That’s right.
MR: Wow… these are still in place?
GV: Yes. And in fact, in 2005, the World Health Organization rewrote the regulations, to make surveillance an even more central part of public health, says Martin French..he’s a sociologist and surveillance expert at Concordia University in Montreal
Martin French ACT1: [[one of the arguments tha t has been made is that]] many states especially in so called low resource areas, would, you know, be better served by investing in more fundamental components of public health than they would by spending money on trying to create surveillance systems.
GV: He says this focus on surveillance can be seen…
French ACT2: as a way to contain I suppose, contain infectious disease in poor areas, giving wealthy states the capacity to quickly act to protect themselves by closing borders and so on. I think this critique , we can trace this critique, and we can trace in some sense the containment logics of the international health regulations and of the global public health system to multiple origin points, but one of these origin points would certainly be European colonialism.
///
MR: So, the events of the 19th century are still with us in so many ways…they are the building blocks of our response to COVID19, to Ebola before this, to Zika, SARS….
GV: our actions have been so drastic. Lockdowns, surveillance…
French ACT3: We’re already sort of seeing the normalization of a lot of kinds of surveillance that, you know, prior to COVID-19 would have been unthinkable.
GV: even people who generally care about privacy are begging the state to step in and track everyone. The police may not be barging into our homes, but we have apps for that now!
MR: As for cholera, the main character of this story — it’s still around. It cropped up in May in Yemen. Mozambique, Zimbabwe in 2018, Niger, Iraq, Pakistan, in Haiti…
GV: …in pockets with unclean water, where people are poor, where there is strife and little governance — a grim reminder that we have failed in our collective responsibility of ensuring public health for all.
GV: Thanks for listening. I’m Gayathri Vaidyanathan
MR: I’m Mary Rose Abraham…
MR: Our sound maestro is…
Nikhil Nagaraj: Nikhil Nagaraj.
MR: The storyteller is… Sumit Kumar.
MR: You were listening to Scrolls and Leaves, in collaboration with the Archives at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.
GV: Our thanks to David Arnold, Alison Bashford, Pratik Chakrabarti, Martin French …
MRA: … Sanjeev Jain, Projit Mukherji, and Tarangini Sriraman.
GV: Thank you to our episode sponsors – IndiaBioscience and DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance.
MRA: Visit scrollsandleaves.com for episode notes, extended interviews with our experts, and to discuss. We’re listening. And of course, please subscribe on your favored podcast platform and spread the word! Our next episode is on Traditional Remedies.
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