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Abstract
Bioprospecting refers to the scientific investigation of plants and folk medicines in the hope of developing new drugs. Its 1980s revival raised concerns about the intellectual property of indigenous people, requiring bioprospecting scientists to make legitimate benefit-sharing agreements with resource owners and communities. Despite the “ethical” look of such a movement, it has been criticized as a new form of “biocapitalism.” This is especially true in India, where the government has initiated databases of “valuable” traditional medicine, such as Ayurveda, and criticism has been directed at the way the complex composition of Ayurveda was disentangled and reorganized into elementary botanical units commensurate with the global pharmaceutical industry. This paper explores the politics embedded in the material-semiotic process of databasing Ayurveda and herbal plants. Focusing on a state government project in Uttarakhand, India, the study reveals how the project relies on colonial herbal relations while generating new and unexpected relations among particular medicinal plants (jadi buti), folk Ayurvedic healers (vaidyas), and local plant taxonomists. This study highlights the necessity of grasping the emergent biodiversity databasing initiatives in India as “experiments,” open-ended, uncertain, and indeterminate projects rather than part of a universal process of pharmaceuticalization.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive criticism. The earlier version of the paper was presented at the international symposium at Kyoto University, “Vital Experiments: Living (and Dying) with Pharmaceuticals after the Human.” I am indebted to Gergely Mohacsi, the organizer of the symposium, and the panelists and participants for their helpful suggestions and critical questions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Moe Nakazora is a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University. She has conducted long-term field research on indigenous knowledge, biodiversity-related science, and intellectual property rights in India. Her representative publications include Anthropology of Intellectual Property Rights: Biodiversity-related Science and Indigenous Knowledge in Contemporary India (2019, in Japanese, the 47th Shibusawa Award) and “Temporalities in Translation: The Making and Unmaking of Folk Ayurveda and Bio-cultural Diversity” (2018, Routledge). Her latest research interests revolve around the rights of nature litigations and the relation between “man-made law” and “the law of nature” (cf. “Making Law of/with Nonhumans: The Ganges River is a Legal Person”, 2020, NatureCulture).
Notes
1 The Indian government’s recent policy shifts regarding clinical trials involved an amendment to Schedule Y of India’s Drugs and Cosmetics Rules of 1945, to harmonize guidelines for the conduct of clinical trials with those mandated by the International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH), the purpose being “safe, efficient, and ethical processes for the testing, approval, and registration of drugs for market.”
2 The legal reform concerns the change in India’s patent laws to make them compliant with the mandates of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, which led to a ban on reverse engineering generic versions of medications by India’s local drug industry.
3 Sunder Rajan examines the landmark patent disputes around an anticancer drug, Gleevec, developed by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, to explore how intellectual property rights had to be balanced against considerations of “public health” in the new Indian patent legislation (Sunder Rajan Citation2017, chapter 3).
4 For instance, there is still ambiguity regarding how to identify the property holders of traditional knowledge, that is, whether states or communities hold rights for knowledge.
5 Gaudillière relies on Sunder Rajan and Stefan Helmreich for use of the term “biocapital.” In so doing, he defines it as a “bioeconomy characterized by its rhetoric of innovation, its porous boundaries between private and public activities, and its integration into the financial economy through the typical ‘biotech’ cortege of patents, start-ups, stock appreciation, cycles of promises, and investments” (Gaudillière Citation2014: 413).
6 “TKDL links the systematic documentation of traditional knowledge in the name of its protection against ‘biopiracy’ with appropriation strategies implemented through national patents, registration, and branding. The very same tension underlies the international uses of the TKDL as reference inventory” (Gaudillière Citation2014: 413).
7 Although it is generally true that the TKDL has disentangled and reorganized a complex system of Ayurveda to match the International Patent Classification (IPC) system, as Fredriksson (Citation2021) rightly pointed out, it was not a one-sided process; WIPO, since 2003, also revised the IPC system to incorporate categories of traditional knowledge based on standards established by the TKRC system. However, by creating new categories under the existing system, the project still aimed at accommodating Indian traditional medicine within the international patent system rather than making the new system for traditional medicine. I will return to this point in the conclusion, mainly comparing it with what has happened in Uttarakhand.
8 The CSIR is India’s largest publicly funded research agency, with more than 40 laboratories. Considering that, in 2000, the major share of investment in Indian pharmaceutical research was public, it is reasonable that the CSIR holds the most significant number of pharmaceutical patents.
9 Uttarakhand, in the northwestern Himalayas, became the 27th state of the Republic of India in 2000, when it separated from Uttar Pradesh. Numerous social scientists have linked the emergence of the environmental movements in Uttarakhand to the evolution of political consciousness and solidarity among local people. For instance, Linkenbach (Citation2005) claimed that the Chipko movement of the 1970s, a critical development in the environmental history of the region that aimed to stop certain exploitative practices, was largely responsible for a more general political awakening of local inhabitants, eventually leading to the successful struggle for a separate state within the Indian union. After the separation, because Uttarakhand has a range of altitudes (240–7,800m) and is thereby ecologically diverse and especially rich in medicinal plants, the state government took steps to develop a “Herbal State (jaḍi-būtī pra-deś).” This meant that economic and social development through the commercialization of medicinal plants became significant in Uttarakhand. The People’s Biodiversity Register, a databasing project conducted in each of India’s states targeting “uncodified traditional medicine,” is regarded as a part of this “Herbal State” policy in Uttarakhand.
10 As Madhavan and Gaudillière (Citation2020) reported in detail, in India too there are several cases of benefit-sharing agreements concerning appropriation of traditional knowledge in industrial Ayurveda.
11 I will return to this division in the next section.
12 Indeed, in contemporary Uttarakhand, those who are called vaidyas are essentially specialists in treatment using medicinal plants. As it is generally said that in Uttarakhand, people can become vaidyas only if they have interests in medicinal plants, regardless of their caste or jāti, the category of “Uttarakhand vaidyas” includes a variety of people ranging from hereditary vaidyas (jāti) to those who gained knowledge of medicinal plants through interaction with sādhū (wandering Hindu renunciates) (Nakazora Citation2015a). A local ethnobotanist, C. P. Kala, who has interviewed 60 vaidyas in Uttarakhand, also claims that “traditional vaidyas in Uttarakhand refers to those who gained knowledge of medicinal plants through hereditary traditions or from other knowledgeable vaidyas” (Kala Citation2005: 257). Furthermore, as I have written elsewhere, the recent herbal projects of state government and NGOs (including the biodiversity databasing project) play a role in making such ambiguous subjects visible, involving particular forms of inclusion and exclusion (Nakazora Citation2015a).
13 Following the conventions of cultural anthropology, we use pseudonyms for organizations such as research institutes and NGOs as well as scientists, NGO staff, and vaidyas, except those whose publications are cited in this article.
14 This legislation further certifies that the central government regulates bioprospecting by foreign residents; the state government is responsible for bioprospecting by Indians.
15 Dehradun is the capital of Uttarakhand, where an industrial park with a concentration of domestic pharmaceutical companies (“the Pharma City Selaqui”) is located.
16 In Uttarakhand, during the first phase of the project, there was not so much process, as the director then did not proceed with any actual activities. Therefore, the project's second phase was still a “pilot” phase in which the BMC was not yet established.
17 The study of infrastructure (Bowker Citation2000; Star Citation1999) shows how infrastructure is not a “neutral” technical device to support human activities but involves particular efforts at inclusion/exclusion in its making.
18 Moreover, the intense interest of the Indian government in new global “information” sciences, such as genomics and biodiversity sciences, has included an ethical and political drive to go beyond colonialism. As historian of science V. V. Krishna notes (Citation1997, 238), colonial science in India was a “planned activity from the metropolis,” where “the colonies were assigned the subordinate tasks of ‘data exploration’ and application of existing technical knowledge, while the theoretical synthesis took place in the metropolis.” For the Indian government, the contemporary global attention to data science thus provided a possibility for an identity switch, changing national science from a subordinate science during the colonial era to a new global science in which India has a leading role (Sunder Rajan Citation2006).
19 Itty Achudan not only provided secret texts inherited in his community but also picked up plants that were included in Hortus Malabaricus, and he classified them for Van Rheede. The fact that the genus Achudemia was named after him shows the significance of his “theoretical” contribution to Linnaeus’s classification system (Grove Citation1995).
20 This is illustrated by the English army officer Major General Thomas Hardwicke, who made the first attempt to collect plants from the region in 1796. He collected plants from Alaknanda valley (Burkill Citation1965; Simpson et al. Citation1996). His effort was followed by those of Felix Vincent Rapper and William Spencer Webb, who collected plants from another part of the Garhwal region, namely the Yamanotri area, in 1802–1803. Subsequently, J. F. Royle, then superintendent of Saharanpur Botanical Garden, collected plants from Dehradun and described them in his illustrations of the botany and other branches of the natural history of the Himalayan mountains and the flora of Kashmir in 1833–1840. The contributions of Richard Strachey and J. E. Winterbottom, who instituted the first-ever herbarium of plants found in this part of Himalaya, have been noteworthy. They published a catalogue of plants of the region in the Atkinson Gazetteer, which comprised about 2,000 species and is still considered one of the best plant collections from this part of the Himalayas.
21 As the legacy of these plant collections, descendants of some hereditary vaidyas have kept the “appreciation letter” they received for their cooperation with British botanists. For example, Hukam Singh Negi, the grandfather of my main informant in a village in Chamoli, Ragveer, received a letter from a prominent botanist at the University of London in 1941. In this letter, it was indicated that Hukam Singh Negi helped him with his collection work for a year and that he was not a “qualified” Vaidya, although he had excellent knowledge about Ayurveda and herbal plants. Ragveer recalls how his grandfather was familiar with botanical names for famous medicinal plants, such as hattha jadee (Dactylorhiza hatagirea), in the region.
22 Quoted from my field notes (14 August 2011).
23 Quoted from my field notes (4 October 2011).
24 The taxonomists at BRI always emphasize that, in most cases, the details of the specimens are vague and fragmentary, and that it requires “brainstorming” to trace the original location.
25 In June 2013, Uttarakhand faced a huge flood and landslide, the biggest disaster since 2004 in India.
26 The ethnographic cases used in this section overlap with my other work (Nakazora Citation2016); however, the analysis introduced in relation to pharmocracy is original.
27 Quoted from my field note (28 December 2011). Emphasis is mine.
28 Quoted from my field note (23 January 2012).
29 Quoted from my field note (23 January 2012).
30 Quoted from my field note (11 August 2011).
31 For instance, atis means “poisonous if you take too much,” based on local pharmacological knowledge, while hattha jadi indicates the morphological feature of the plant (“roots look like hands with fingers”) (Singh Citation2008: 370).
32 These books are published to reflect the recent popularity of Ayurveda as alternative medicine mainly among the middle class or outside India.
33 In this line of thought, Papadopoulous (Citation2018) notes that “decolonial” politics/social movements mediated by technoscience could also be understood as experiments that change the everyday material interconnectedness in the more-than-human world.