>Notes and records of the Royal Society of London. 2020 Jul 22; 74(4): 625-51

Roland Heynkes 15.11.2025, CC BY-SA-4.0 DE

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Gliederung

NR BABU

AU Rijul Kochhar

TI The virus in the rivers: histories and antibiotic afterlives of the bacteriophage at the sangam in Allahabad

QU Notes and records of the Royal Society of London. 2020 Jul 22; 74(4): 625-51. doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2020.0019

AB 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.

SP englisch

VT Originaltext

ZF Der Zusammenfluss (Sangam) der beiden großen Flüsse Indiens, der Ganges und der Yamuna, befindet sich in der Stadt Allahabad. Rituellem Baden im Wasser dieser Flüsse wird eine heilende Wirkung gegen Infektionen (und eine Erlösung vom ewigen Wiedergeboren werden) zugeschrieben. Die "heiligen" und geografischen Eigenschaften der Flüsse haben mythische Bedeutungen im Hinduismus und anderen religiösen Traditionen. Und der britische Bakteriologe Ernest Hanbury Hankin konnte 1896, zwei Jahrzehnte vor der Entdeckung der Bakteriophagen (durch d'Herelle), experimentell nachweisen, dass das Wasser der Flüsse von Jamuna und Ganges tatsächlich Cholera-Bakterien abtötet. Dem Autor geht es aber mehr um die Verflechtung von Volksglaube, Religion und Wissenschaft.

LA babu.pdf