Who Owns Traditional Medical Knowledge? - Smithsonian Center ...

MAKING HERITAGE LEGIBLE 171
FIGURE 2. Engraving of Tenga (coconut palm) from Hortus Malabaricus vol. 1 (1678) by
Bastiaan Stoopendael after a drawing by Antoni Jacobsz. Includes multi-lingual inscriptions
in Latin, Malayalam, Arabic, and Sanskrit. Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.
mulation similar to one used by cultural internationalists since the Hague Convention.
The translation of the volumes thus needed to be widely publicized to
highlight the former glory of Kerala and traditional Ayurveda, but it also had to
build on the legacy of the Latin Hortus Malabaricus. 39 This, in other words, is not
strictly a claim of ownership but a routine revivalist strategy with a golden age
view of history—of recovering precolonial Edenic pasts—except that in this case
the tradition to be restored was not classical Brahminism but itself constructed
through colonial intervention. Indeed recent accounts go so far as to laud Manilal,
himself an Ezhava, as a second Van Rheede. 40
But beyond epistemology, the Hortus Malabaricus and its English translation
hold a new relevance in today’s world where natural drugs are gaining fresh recognition
but are plagued by biological patent laws and IPRs. Some patent experts
think that translating texts like Hortus Malabaricus into English works as a doubleedged
sword: It may actually help rather than hinder biopirates and “would hand
heritage to them on a platter” especially in the absence of universal acceptance of
the Convention Biological Diversity. 41 Their fear is that the translated Hortus Mal-