Science in History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ix, 241 pp. (Illustrations.) US$39.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-107-12697-8.
In a moment of academic exhaustion, I sought respite in Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs, pilfered from my grandfather’s bookshelf in his home in Chennai. Christie’s oeuvre remains immensely popular across India, and Five Little Pigs is among my favourites. The plot revolves around a man who is poisoned, with his wife framed for the crime. Sixteen years later, their now-adult daughter entreats the famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to reconstruct the crime and discover the identity of the true murderer.
As I followed the bread crumbs left by Christie, I received an email asking me to review David Arnold’s latest entry on the history of science and medicine in India, which, serendipitously, happened to be a history of poisoning in modern India. Arnold tells us that he was inspired in part by his reading of Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, but he might as well have been reading Agatha Christie. In her book on Christie’s poisons, Kathryn Harkup notes that Christie made frequent use of datura, a plant used not only as poison but also as an aphrodisiac (A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Tales of datura’s use in India, and of the figure of the Oriental poisoner more generally, inspired Christie and many other writers, including Dumas. If this colonial-era figure of the Oriental poisoner also inspired Arnold’s work, it is the shadow of the Bhopal Chemical Disaster of 1984, perpetrated by Union Carbide and sustained by the Indian government, that haunts it. As Arnold puts it, his book represents “a historical lineage for that catastrophe” (vii).
In this sense, Arnold’s book is no simple whodunit. To understand what happened in Bhopal, it is not enough to examine the history of the American chemical industry or Indian regulatory standards. According to Arnold, we must also look to the longer history of toxicity in everyday life. At the level of historiography, this might in fact be Arnold’s most critical intervention. In search of what he calls a “toxic principle” or “continuum” (11), Arnold casts a wide net, including not only concerns around adulteration, contamination, putrefaction, and intoxication, but also pollution. Writing of India, it becomes impossible to ignore the question of pollution as it related to ritual and caste-based anxieties about the mingling of people and substances. As both anthropologists and historians have pointed out for decades, pollution is always both moral and material.
This is an insight that Arnold develops throughout his book. Examples include his discussion of the unregulated sale of poisons in the bazaar alongside ordinary comestibles (chapter 2), where the risky business of matter out of place could lead to the inadvertent mixing of arsenic and salt (chapter 6). Or in the colonial poison scares that featured road-side bandits (thugis) drugging hapless travellers (chapter 3), lending credence to the colonial anointment of certain castes and tribes as innately criminal through the lens of an increasingly ethnological (and racialized) medical jurisprudence (chapter 4). Perhaps the most melodramatic example is Arnold’s recounting of the Agra double murder of 1911–1912, in which a pair of lovers transgressed the bounds of marriage and racial difference, poisoned their spouses, and faced the punishment of a colonial state committed to maintaining white superiority (chapter 5).
The stories Arnold narrates are powerfully riven along lines of race, religion, caste, class, and gender. Poison can be a weapon of the weak (31), or at least the weaker: for example, in the princely states, where Indian nobility deployed poison in battles over succession, or sought to remove an interloping colonial agent from their courts. In the course of more ordinary lives, poison could also be a means for a wife to resist her much older husband, but it might just as well be an aphrodisiac, a cure for his waning libido (31–32). The fact that arsenic was thought to spark desire and cause death exemplifies Arnold’s point about the paradoxical property of poisons as life-taking but also life-giving. Thus, the need for a colonial ethno-criminology with elaborate criminal types: to determine not only whodunit, but what they did, and whether it was intentional.
The final chapter of Arnold’s book stands as the most proximate history to Bhopal, by turning to the evolving toxicity of Indian cities. Here too, poison has two faces, as a means of killing rats and stopping plague, and later, in the use of DDT to curtail malaria (to date, India remains the largest consumer of DDT in the world). Arnold suggests that it was in fact India’s thirst for pesticides that encouraged the establishment of the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal (204), completing the arc of his toxic history. Arnold demonstrates how theories of miasma gave way to concerns about urban nuisance, which in turn led to the more “sanitary” notions of pollution that concerned the contamination of the environment by human and animal waste as well as industrial by-products (182). Yet, such a sanitary and sanitized conception of pollution was itself repeatedly contaminated by ritual and caste-based notions of pollution, such that the waters of the Ganga were considered ritually pure despite their pathogenic chemical and bacterial content (186).
In reading Arnold’s Toxic Histories, you might begin to see poison—not simply as metaphor, but as material substance—everywhere you turn, as the shadow side of nearly everything. On one hand, you might say: if poison is everywhere, we may as well throw up our arms in resignation and accept our fate. But I think what Arnold points to is a way beyond the polarity of purity and pollution through a careful consideration of the ways in which poisons have been integral to life in India (and elsewhere). In other words, the territory of poison has its bright side as well as its darker regions. We will never rid ourselves of poison (nor should we want to), but what Arnold forces us to reconsider is our collective relationship to poison, its uneven and certainly unjust distributions in both its therapeutic and malevolent forms.
Bharat Jayram Venkat
University of California, Los Angeles, USA