Big-Enough Histories of Science: Three Stories from Early Modern South Asia

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta travelled across the Indian Ocean. During his time in South Asia, he resolved a confusion about the identity of the medicinal plants known as folium indum and malabathrum. This presentation uses this confusion as a starting point to investigate the information infrastructures that an outsider such as Orta entered as he moved through South Asia. Alongside Orta, Persian physicians, Sanskrit-educated lexicographers, and literate animal handlers investigated the natural world though engagements with the written word. Drawing on three stories from my current book project, the presentation explores methods of information management that were used in early modern South Asia and how they related to the management of medicines, elephants, and a wide array of literate individuals.