The confluence (sangam) of India's two major rivers, the Ganges and the Yamuna, is located in the city of Allahabad. Ritualistic dips in these river waters are revered for their believed curative power against infections, and salvation from the karmic cycles of birth and rebirth. The sacred and geographic propensities of the rivers have mythic valences in Hinduism and other religious traditions. Yet the connection of these river waters with curativeness also has a base in historical microbiology: near here, the British bacteriologist Ernest Hanbury Hankin, in 1896, first described the ‘bactericidal action of the waters of the Jamuna and Ganges rivers on Cholera microbes’, predating the discovery of bacterial viruses (now known as bacteriophages) by at least two decades. Pursuing the record of these purificatory waters in sacred writings and folklore, and later elaboration in the work of Hankin, this paper traces an epistemology of time that connects the mythic to the post-Hankin modern scientific, asking how imaginations of the waters’ antibacterial properties are articulated through idioms of faith, filth and the phage. The paper explores how the bacteriophage virus comes to be spoken about within secular and sacred epistemes of infection and riverine pollution, among contemporary historians, biologists and doctors, and in the city's museums. At the same time, it traces the phage in histories arcing from the ancient religious literature, to colonial disease control efforts, to today, where bacteriophages are being conceived as a potential response to the crisis of planetary antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Allahabad presents a ‘cosmotechnics’ where faith, filth and phage are inextricably intertwined, generating complex triangulations between natural ecologies, cultural practices and scientific imaginations. Cosmotechnics therefore opens up novel avenues to reimagine the phage as a protean object, one that occupies partial and multiple spaces in the historico-mytho-scientific arena of Allahabad today.

汇合处 ( sangam）印度的两大河流恒河和亚穆纳河位于阿拉哈巴德市。这些河水中的仪式性浸泡因其相信对感染的治疗能力以及从出生和重生的业力循环中得到拯救而受到尊敬。河流的神圣和地理特征在印度教和其他宗教传统中具有神话价值。然而，这些河水与疗效的联系也有历史微生物学的基础：在这附近，英国细菌学家欧内斯特·汉伯里·汉金 (Ernest Hanbury Hankin) 在 1896 年首次描述了“贾木纳河和恒河的水域对霍乱微生物的杀菌作用”，比细菌病毒（现在称为噬菌体）的发现早至少二十年。在神圣的著作和民间传说中追求这些净化水的记录，以及后来在 Hankin 的工作中的阐述，本文追溯了将神话与后汉金现代科学联系起来的时间认识论，询问如何通过信仰、污秽和噬菌体的习语表达对水的抗菌特性的想象。这篇论文探讨了噬菌体病毒如何在现代历史学家、生物学家和医生以及该市的博物馆中如何在感染和河流污染的世俗和神圣认识论中被谈论。与此同时，它追溯了噬菌体的历史，从古代宗教文献到殖民疾病控制努力，再到今天，噬菌体被认为是对全球抗微生物药物耐药性 (AMR) 危机的潜在反应。阿拉哈巴德提出了一种“宇宙技术”，其中信仰，污物和噬菌体密不可分，在自然生态、文化实践和科学想象之间产生了复杂的三角关系。因此，宇宙技术开辟了新的途径，将噬菌体重新想象为一个多变的物体，它在今天阿拉哈巴德的历史-神话-科学领域占据了部分和多个空间。