The Silverfish

As a biology major interested in the history of science and medicine, the P K Sukumaran collection piqued my interest. For one, he hailed from Thalassery in Kerala, north of my hometown, and his research on understanding sickle cell anemia was something that we often came across in newspaper reports and biology textbooks.

But my introduction to Sukumaran’s scientific process happened in 2024, while I was working at the Archives at NCBS, processing a collection that was closely related to the hematologist, while his own papers were being processed by another colleague.

However, I soon found myself involved due to my background in biology. Within his papers were various photographic materials, including 35mm slides on blood-borne familial diseases, that the archivist needed help contextualising.

As someone who had recently been introduced to the process of archiving, I had come to identify the various decisions that went into the process: appraising the material, archiving them, creating descriptive summaries, all towards the final output of a collection. Throughout the process, there are inevitably items on the margins that would end up in the archival collection. This judgement is usually made keeping in mind the history the archive is interested in. What’s interesting, however, is the way the ambit of the archive can also expand depending on the archivists who shape the archive.

The archivist who had processed the P K Sukumaran material came across a 1974 prospective plan from the Indian government to include abortion in the maternal and child health programme. There were no strong ties between Sukumaran’s research and sexual and reproductive health. So why was it in his collection? Upon closer inspection, it was a medical newsletter published by Sandoz, a popular Swiss pharmaceutical company. On the second page was a photograph of Sukumaran along with other eminent researchers. And below that, a long article on a panel discussion about genetics and medicine held at The First Annual Conference of the Indian Society of Human Genetics, in which he was a participant. The archivist had attached a note to this page – ‘to be scanned’. This made sense since the article was related to Sukumaran’s work and research and the archivist would prioritise it over other articles. The published catalogue reflects this decision. The archival entry ‘Medical Times, Vol.4, No. 3, March 1974 — Newsletter clipping, 1974’ in the P K Sukumaran Collection only shows you page 6 of the newsletter. That may leave some wondering, what’s on the other pages?

Preservation, though a noble mission, is urgent and time-consuming. And when there are thousands of papers that need to be scanned, the archivist needs to prioritise. In the process of digitising a newsletter for preservation, an archivist may decide to scan certain pages of archival relevance and not scan others. Alternatively, an archivist might also hesitate to physically preserve only certain pages of a newsletter and discard the rest, because it is likely that when something is removed from its original state, the context is lost.

These doubts are what led me to go back to this newsletter after it was archived. I found the physical folder of the newsletter at the deep end of the storage room at the archives, where all the pages were visible (including the ‘to be scanned’ note). There were weekly/monthly quizzes for doctors, more medical news, and of course, many advertisements for pharmaceuticals.

I have always been interested in understanding medical practice around reproductive health in the Indian context. And so, the article on page 1 caught my eye – a detailed multi-part report on a conference on endocrinology, which included the then-current advancements in hormonal birth control methods. This serendipitous discovery provided an exciting insight into how researchers looked at and talked about reproductive health and the topics of contraception at that time. Such items, which lay ‘out of focus’ of the primary objective of the initial appraisal, provide a range of information that could attain relevance to the person who wishes to look at it.

Just as this report seemed to be on the margins of the collection, something else that caught my attention was an infographic that circulated on X, formerly known as Twitter. When I first found it during the summer after I concluded my internship, it provoked a discussion within my friend circle about how hormonal birth control is still at the margins of medical research. Public discussion on the risk of blood clots following the COVID-19 vaccine led to the emergence of a chart comparing their prevalence post-vaccination with other medical interventions or other conditions – aiming to prevent fear-mongering against the vaccine and its efficacy.

Something that struck a chord with me was how the probability of blood clots from birth control pills were presented. In particular, it was being compared and placed alongside similar data pertaining to smoking. Such a comparison showed not only indifference to the high numbers of affected people, but also the way a public health crisis was treated as a mere footnote. As someone interested in understanding how gender stereotypes and inequalities creep into biology and bio-medical research and practice, this was ample evidence as to how the healthcare sector marginalises the needs of women and/or female bodies. For instance, how drug doses are traditionally adjusted for an average male body, how pain levels reported by women are mostly underestimated, and, in this case, how the pills were still approved despite a seemingly alarming side effect. It seemed like another attempt in normalising the pharmaceutical side effects borne by women and gender minorities, something that went into the margins once again.

Just as in this present scenario, a close reading of the reports in the P K Sukumaran Papers pointed me to the pattern of how research on birth control exclusively targeted female bodies, with a focus on the methods that aim to alter the event of ovulation. The side effects of the emerging techniques were discussed in the workshop, but one can easily identify the gaps or the lack of research that would have gone into those, particularly compared to what was innovated after the events of the newsletter where Sukumaran was featured.

At the archives, I spent most of my internship cataloguing the collection of a cytogeneticist, Krishnaja A P. She was part of several landmark research projects at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), such as a cytogenetic monitoring programme on human newborns carried out from 1983-1987 to find out the incidence of constitutional chromosome anomalies, as well as the international collaboration, the Human MicroNucleus Project (HUMN).

She was also a trained telegraphist. And Sukumaran’s niece (she was the one who donated Sukumaran’s papers as well, along with her archival material). As I threaded these connections, across collections, relations, disciplines, decisions, ideas, events, and processes; archiving became a deeply personal venture for me. And my interest in finding histories of science, especially the ones that remain at the margins, increased. While Sukumaran’s collection showed me a glimpse of the intersections of medical research and social justice, Krishnaja’s material gave me insights to what shapes research interests, collaborations as well as the administrative workings of scientific research that goes on in a premier institute like BARC. At present, it serves as my motivation to understand the histories of women in science, pertaining to their relationships with these institutions. Understanding archival processing and examining collections as also a process of serendipitous observations had made my engagement with the archives all the more intriguing.