ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beyond 'Botany': Plant Knowledges across South Asia

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

New and critical scholarship on the history of plants and the practices of botany has called attention to the foundational erasures, silences, and re-writings upon which natural history and western botany were instituted under imperialism (Subramaniam 2024; Gutierrez 2025). This fundamental critique of the classificatory projects of the early natural sciences has aided historians of South Asia, and of empire, to engage with the question of epistemic pluralism and develop analyses of unconventional archives. While we accept erasure as an historical artefact of colonial epistemology, as historians studying the complex relationships between language, empire, and plant knowledge in South Asia, our interests in multilingual archives have led us to excavate and understand epistemes of the plant sciences that have been hitherto unexamined. As such, our scholarship builds on and complements work in Global South studies that focuses on questions of translation and the co-production of knowledge traditions and the multilingual intermediaries who work across them. We foreground the varied intellectual labours of local knowledge-producers who were not directly subject to European botanizing endeavors, or remained at a distance from them, circulating among particular communities and audiences in separate yet related ways. Here we take seriously ordinary names of plants in family traditions, oral traditions, therapeutic and culinary uses, sensory and imaginative roles, and metaphors of plant life that emerge from South Asia’s abundant regional languages. On occasion, we also find trajectories of plant knowledge that are related and yet branch away from the region's classical Persianate and Sanskritic discourses. As such, we explore models of plant history and multispecies relations across Asia that are generative of social, intellectual, and cultural history and yet exceed the epistemic framework entailed in 'botany' as a disciplinary practice.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Annelise Walker, Pennsylvania State University

Individual Presentations

• Earthly Rural: Colonial State-Making and ‘Opacity’ of Nature-Culture Worlds in the Rainiest Place on Earth - Aparajita Majumdar, Brown University

• Under the Mulberry Tree: The Kabul Cocoon and Vernacular Ecologies in Afghanistan, 1860–1960 - Marjan Wardaki

Session Organizer

• Marjan Wardaki