Scrolls & Leaves: World History Podcast

In the treacherous Great Basses Reef in Sri Lanka, renowned author Arthur C. Clarke finds a submerged treasure ship with a hoard of silver coins

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In a windswept mountain pass, more than a hundred years ago, a towering Afghan man hacks a Scottish trader to death. Then the killer disappears. A British officer is determined to track him down and rides along the old Silk Route into western China. No sign of the killer but he does encounter a book of Ayurveda unearthed in the nearby desert. The Sanskrit lettering details the power of Healing Plants.<br />
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Throughout history, plants have yielded a range of medical remedies. Neem leaves so bitter they wash the worms out of stomachs in Indus Valley cities four thousand years ago. Complex Ayurveda concoctions of spices and herbs to ward off disease. Or the pills and injections of modern pharmaceuticals, a quarter of which derive from plants. <br />
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But plants are more than medicine. They have driven exploration, empires and colonization. Europe’s insatiable demand for spices and botanical remedies creates pipelines of plunder and trade across the world. As the bedrock of the pharmaceutical industry, the transformation of plants has sometimes overthrown millennia of indigenous medical wisdom. <br />
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“Healing Plants” traces the journey of plants as medicine and commodities from ancient times to the present. As you reach for that tablet in your medicine cabinet, perhaps there are echoes of its healing properties in a makeshift book found in the desert along the Silk Road.

When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, it found that African slaves would much rather not work on its colonial plantations -- even for a salary. It had to find a new source of labourers and hired workers from India, Java, China and elsewhere. India, especially, was a major source of indentured labour as it was a British colony.<br />
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In this episode, we recount the tale of Mangre Lal, a man in his 20's from Bahraich, who goes to Fiji. We hear his story through his grandson Brij Lal, a world-renowned Indo-Fijian historian. After two-three generations, Indo-Fijians found themselves in the ruling party in Fiji in the '80s. But ethnic divisions have resulted in multiple coups as native Islanders have struggled to assert their dominance. Indo-Fijian Australian comedian Umit Bali recounts what it was like to live in Fiji in the '90s.<br />
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Lal, who has been a vocal critic of the government, was exiled from Fiji. But he refuses to recant his criticism, even if it means he can never again visit the land of his birth.

The world’s borders are clamping down for un-vaccinated people, most of whom are poor and/or from the Global South. This echoes events following a 19th century pandemic of cholera which killed millions of people worldwide. The colonial power improved water and sanitation in their European and American cities, but left their colonies undeveloped. They instead set up surveillance and border control to keep disease within those faraway borders. The race-based policies can be traced to present day.

The ‘Curse of the Kohinoor’ is this: Any man who wears the diamond will suffer a terrible fate. But is this true? Or was this simply a story that conveniently allowed the British Empire to justify the colonial appropriation of the diamond? <br />
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Maharaja Ranjit Singh was the last Indian owner of the Kohinoor diamond. He was a fair and secular king -- one of the greatest rulers of all time. When he dies in 1839, his 9-year-old son Duleep Singh takes over the throne. The British East India Company is watching like a vulture, and conquers the Empire through treachery. It plunders the immense wealth of the kingdom, unravels the socioeconomic fabric of the state, separates the 9-year-old King from his mother-- and present him and the Kohinoor as trophies to Queen Victoria. This is the 'cursed' history of the Kohinoor that is conveniently forgotten by the British today. So is the diamond cursed? Listen to find out!

The Jewels of the Maharajas symbolized power and a connection with the divine. Anyone who wanted to be a greater ruler would want them as a symbol of sovereignty. In 18th century Persia, there was a great King who wanted to rule all of Asia. This is the story of Nader Shah and his quest for the legendary Koh-i-Noor diamond and other jewels of the Mughals. Please use headphones to hear immersive sound.<br />

For more than a decade, archaeologists have been searching for the lost port of Muziris on the southwest coast of India. Incredible finds point to maritime trade and links with many ancient cultures, including the Roman Empire: amphorae, semi-precious stones and beads, intaglios, and pottery from throughout the Indian Ocean world. Join us on a visit to a sleepy village in Kerala to learn more about these artifacts and whether this site really is the lost port of Muziris.

Not many people know of histories from the majority world, where 80% of all people live. We will tell you some of these stories in Season 1, Trade Winds. Each episode tells a story set on the Indian Ocean as global civilizations connect with South Asia. Hear about the episodes coming up this season.

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British scientist Sir Ronald Ross tries to stops a deadly cholera outbreak in 1895 Bangalore. He applies learnings from the new field of epidemiology

Can the great divide between Ayurveda and modern science ever be bridged? We talk to biologist Annamma Spudich who's studied traditional medicine.

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Cartoonist Arghya Manna is one of the few people who portray the history of Indian science using comics. We talk to him about creating art during Covid-19, and the Great Bengal Famine.

From the mountains of Central Asia comes a musical form that borrows extensively from Nature. In this episode, we talk to Tuvan vocalist and composer, Saylyk Ommun, about Tuvan throat singing and its links with the natural world and modern genres like rock.

Friederike Voigt , the curator of South Asia at the National Museum of Scotland, has been on a decade-long quest to investigate and restore the histories to objects in the museum that speak of colonization. In this episode, we discuss the objects and history of Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last King of the Sikh Empire -- and how he's represented in two paintings by artists who come from drastically different backgrounds.

From the deep mines of South America, tons of silver travel to Mughal India to fill the coffers of Emperors with precious coins

South Asian immigrants in the U.S. adopted a predominantly Black and Puerto Rican form of music in the late 1990s to express their identity. It moved with these immigrants across the world. Today, Desi Hip Hop is a global phenomenon. <br />

On July 1, 1800, the appearance of a pair of severed breasts on Don Cayetano’s windowsill leads to a twisting journey into the history of crime and policing in Guatemala City.

At the turn of the 20th century, the British took Indian indentured labourers to sugar plantations in Fiji. There, Indian women would sing “bidesia” -- laments for a lost homeland. In this Chatroom, acclaimed Fijian poet-philosopher Sudesh Mishra speaks of bidesia, and also about Fijian indigenous knowledge systems that place humans as part of the planetary assemblage.

The "epic clash" of traditional medicine vs. Western medicine is really anything but when it comes to treatment. In reality, medical systems have always influenced each other to change and evolve. In this episode, we look at the influence of technology on Ayurveda. It’s a little window into the transformation of India’s indigenous medical system, beginning in the 1860s.

We are increasingly sharing space with predators and wild animals, with deadly consequences... for the animals, that is... not so much the humans.. or, at least that was the case until the pandemic.. Covid is the result of a breaching of ecological boundaries. In this episode, we learn how to co-exist with our fellow animals from Nayanika Mathur

When your village, city or the world are affected by disease, medical treatment is just one intervention. Another is rituals and spiritual practices. Every culture has them. In India, a rich tradition of Disease Goddesses assigned a female deity to each illness. From Hariti and Shitala for smallpox to Ola bibi and Ola devi for cholera -- and Corona devi for our current pandemic -- the goddess was believed both to cause the disease and to protect those who prayed to her. Sometimes the rituals went beyond prayers and pujas to a practice called scapegoating -- symbolically capturing the disease in an object, animal or person and removing them to another location. David Arnold, professor emeritus at the University of Warwick in the U.K., has been studying the history of disease and medicine in South Asia for many years, and explains the phenomenon of the Disease Goddess.

We follow British scientist Ronald Ross as he tries to stop a cholera outbreak. At first he's stumped. The disease shows up in one place and then jumps to the other end of town. And how to get his hands on a microscope when there's only one in all of South India? Like a good detective, Ross puts the clues together -- quite literally -- into a handmade map and it helps him solve the mystery.

Atreya, the renowned teacher of Ayurveda, is walking with his pupils on the banks of the river Ganga in Kampilya. Ominous signs of an epidemic shadow the grandeur of the ancient kingdom. Atreya explains to his students how an epidemic arises from degraded environmental conditions. And he points to their cause: the unrighteous actions of a specific group of citizens. Sanskrit scholar Dominik Wujastyk of the University of Alberta in Canada, narrates this compelling tale from one of the oldest Ayurvedic texts. It’s a story of surprising resonance with our current global situation. <br />
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Time Markers (mins:sec)<br />
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0:34 Two major encyclopedias of Ayurveda<br />
1:23 Learning Sanskrit from eminent pandit in Pune<br />
2:30 Reciting first part of story in Sanskrit<br />
3:41 How Ayurveda views the human body<br />
4:30 The Charaka samhita<br />
4:55 Atreya’s story<br />
6:58 How Ayurveda explains an epidemic<br />
7:20 Descriptions of corrupted environmental conditions<br />
8:26 Atreya’s story continues<br />
8:50 What causes environmental corruption<br />
9:44 Greed and the environment<br />
10:24 Ancient texts are based on observation<br />
10:53 A golden opportunity

Disaster brings change. We discuss surveillance and public health during Covid-19. These days, it’s not only governments capturing raw data about us; rather, a public health vacuum left by governments over decades is being filled by tech companies, which have stepped up surveillance, says Martin French, a sociologist and surveillance expert at the University of Concordia in Montreal.

Can the great divide between traditional and allopathic medicines ever be bridged? We talk with Annamma Spudich, a cell and molecular biologist who has also studied Indian medical systems for years. This blend informs her unique perspectives, from the efficacy of black pepper at the molecular level to a folk practitioner whose prescription includes a medicinal plant collected by a naked man.

Why do so many colonial cities in the developing world not have piped water? Many parts of old cities in India still employ bhistis, or water carriers, to take water to people who don’t have pipes -- though they are a fading breed, and being replaced by water tankers. We speak to historian Pratik Chakrabarti of the University of Manchester.<br />

Folk healing is the most ancient form of medicine. It sprung from common kitchen ingredients — when humans realized that spices, herbs, and foods not only provide nutrition but could help us overcome illness.<br />
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India’s medical system depends on the roughly 2 million folk healers to provide medical care in villages far from hospitals and health centers. They use more than 6,500 medicinal plants.<br />
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G. Hariramamurthi, a folk medicine expert, has traveled throughout India over the past three decades, visiting more than 12,000 villages. He helps folk healers document their medical practices and treatments, most recently for prevention of Covid-19. In this episode, Hari addresses a question posed to many folk healers: do folk remedies really work?

We visit Bombay Presidency at the turn of the 20th century. The port city was a major economic hub, so, when rats onboard ships from Hong Kong carried bubonic plague into Bombay in August 1896, the British Raj reacted vehemently to tamp it down. There were a multitude of experiences of the plague and disease control, often delineated by class and caste. Maybe you've noticed this with Covid19, too? We discuss some of these themes with Tarangini Sriraman, a historian at Azim Premji University in Bangalore.

Historically, border control arose out of a combination of infectious disease and the global color line. But this frame of understanding a disease outbreak doesn’t apply so well to Covid19, where older narratives have flipped — so far.<br />
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To understand border control and Covid19, we have to move away from globalization, and look at what’s happening locally. The novel coronavirus is about what’s going on inside domestic borders.

Visit Muziris, a port on the Malabar coast, described by ancient poets and captured in a trade document called the Muziris Papyrus. Then, hear the co-hosts describe Season 1.