Eleventh International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

In the city of Allahabad—located at the confluence (“sangam”) of India’s largest rivers, Ganges and Yamuna—ritualistic dips in sacred riverwaters are revered for their believed curative power against infections as well as salvation from karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the sangam—and its Kumbh Mela pilgrimage—have mythic valences in Hinduism, yet the curative riverwaters also have a basis in microbial physiology: 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–or bacteriophages–by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters of the sangam in sacred Sanskrit 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. I explore how the phage comes to be spoken about amidst a plurality of practitioners, within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, and in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial-resistance (AMR). Allahabad, thereby, presents a “cosmotechnics” of infection, purity, and memory wherein faith, filth, and phage are inextricably intertwined. In doing so, this paper pursues the technical, yet protean, object of the bacteriophage through multiple slices of particular cosmologies that populate the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad.