The Long Leaf: How a Colonial Herbarium Shipped Centella from Antananarivo to Mumbai

Centella asiatica arrived in Mumbai not by ship’s manifest, but by botanical specimen. In 1832 a British missionary in Madagascar sent a letter—now held in the archives of the Pharmaceutical Historian—describing how Malagasy healers used satrokantsiroka to close wounds and calm fevers. The plant’s Malagasy name still echoes in the Malagasy Dictionary and Encyclopedia: silabola, “silver fragment,” a metaphor for something so valuable it could stand in for coin. That same root, later classified as Centella asiatica, would travel east on paper, then return west as extract, oil, and active in the SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Ampoule 55ml.

The journey began in herbarium cabinets. Between 1880 and 1930, French and Malagasy botanists—among them the team behind Plant collectors in Madagascar and the Comoro Islands—pressed specimens from the central highlands, the eastern rainforest edges, and the rice-field dikes where women still gather the creeping vine at dawn. One fragile sheet, catalogued in the Digitizing Death project, shows the plant’s characteristic fan-shaped leaves and the looping label handwriting that once traveled from the field to the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. There, chemists isolated the glycoside now called asiaticoside and, in 1949, Malagasy scientist Professor Albert Rakoto Ratsimamanga—working with Laroche-Navarron Laboratories—turned that compound into Madecassol, the first standardized wound-healing drug derived from Centella. The chapter Development and Commercialization of Asiaticoside in Madagascar credits Thomas Rahandraha, a Malagasy chemical engineer, with building the chromatographic system that guaranteed every batch matched the original museum record.

By the 1950s, Madecassol tablets were prescribed across French colonial hospitals from Réunion to Pondichéry. When supply chains shifted after independence, the wild harvest continued in the same districts—Ambatolampy, Andramasina, Moramanga—where the herbarium sheets had been gathered. Botanists later confirmed that Madagascar hosts a distinct polyploid complex of Centella asiatica with higher triterpenoid content than Asian populations, a finding documented in Insight into the biology, genetics and evolution of the Centella asiatica polyploid complex in Madagascar. The study measured leaf biomass and triterpenoid yield, research that underpins today’s sustainable wild collection practiced by roughly 50,000 pickers, most of them women, as reported by People and Plants International.

The extract that now sits in Mumbai serums and creams is still tethered to those colonial vouchers. Every drop of SKIN1004 Madagascar Centella Light Cleansing Oil 200ml carries the memory of a pressed leaf folded between blotting paper, of a chemist in Tananarive calibrating a column, of a woman in the highlands kneeling before sunrise to harvest. The plant’s journey—from silabola to serum—is not a promise of brighter skin, but a record of movement: herbarium to pharmacy, forest to formulary, Antananarivo to Mumbai, carried on paper and in extract, still legible today.