For quite a while, the question of which plant was actually bhui amla was a small torment. I first saw a picture of it in a book. Then one day Shahidul pointed one out to me. I assumed I would recognise it the next time, so I only looked from a distance and walked on. That turned out to be a mistake. I kept seeing it without being able to say for certain which one it was, and I mixed it up with tamarind seedlings, amloki, panisitki and plenty of other things.
Rasif is good with small plants, so one day I asked him to show it to me again. This time I crouched down and handled the plant properly. It is small, and at first I took it for a seedling of something bigger. Later I learnt that this is as big as it gets, a herb of only 50 to 70 centimetres.
Flowers hidden under the leaves
That day I noticed the one feature that still lets me recognise bhui amla at a glance. The flowers sit neatly along the underside of the leafy branchlets, leaves on either side and a row of flowers down the middle. That is where the genus name Phyllanthus comes from: it means leaf and flower, and plants whose flowers and fruits sit on the leafy shoots like this are grouped in this genus.
The scientific name of bhui amla is Phyllanthus niruri. The genus used to be placed in the family Euphorbiaceae; it has since been moved to a family of its own, Phyllanthaceae. One more thing worth saying: the common bhui amla weed in our part of South Asia is often Phyllanthus amarus, a species that was long confused with P. niruri. Another well-known member of the genus is amloki, the Indian gooseberry, Phyllanthus emblica.
My uncle’s amloki tree
Next to our house, in my uncle’s yard, there was an enormous amloki tree. When I was small and school let out, I threw countless stones at it on the way home to knock down the fruit, which hung in heavy clusters. We would eat the amloki and then drink water, and the water tasted wonderfully sweet. Perhaps our stone-throwing wore him down, because one day the tree was cut down.
Male flower or female flower
Anyway, we were talking about bhui amla. It is an annual, and though you can find it all year round, it is most common in the monsoon. It loves damp ground, and wherever it finds some it seeds itself in crowds. The flowers are a yellowish white. I have never seen it myself, but I am told there is a red-flowered form too. The fruits are tiny.
Now that I can pick it out from a distance, a new problem has turned up. This little plant carries separate male and female flowers on the same plant, and when I look at them I cannot tell which is which. I am going to need help again to settle that one.
A mine of compounds
Reading books and journals to learn more, I was honestly surprised. The more I read, the more there was. For such a small plant, the list of compounds is long enough to call it a mine. Flavonoids, alkaloids, tannins and lignans, with phyllanthin and hypophyllanthin the most discussed, alongside things like quercetin, gallic acid and beta-sitosterol. Stem, leaf and root each have their own list. I had hoped the root would be shorter, but it is not. A useful plant gets researched more, I suppose.
Bhui amla as a herb
Now to the point. Nobody works out what compounds a plant contains just for fun; the aim is to see what they do. Bhui amla has been used as a herb for a very long time in India, the Caribbean, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, China, South Africa and elsewhere. Its use is recorded in traditional Chinese medicine, in Indonesian jamu and in Indian Ayurveda.
As far as anyone knows, it first became known for the use of its root in liver complaints. In village medicine it has traditionally been used for kidney stones, fevers, coughs, sleeplessness, poor appetite and skin conditions, and a paste of the leaves or seeds is applied to itches and ringworm. Its folk use against kidney and gallbladder stones is where its other name, stonebreaker, comes from.
The laboratory has not ignored it either. Studies have reported that extracts of the plant inhibit the DNA polymerase of the hepatitis B virus and the reverse transcriptase of HIV. These are laboratory findings, not proof that the plant cures anything. Much of the research interest centres on phyllanthin and hypophyllanthin and what they do in the liver.
After hearing all this, if the idea of bhui amla face powder, cream, toothpaste or hair oil starts going round in your head, it is not such a bad idea. If everyone knew all its qualities, we would probably no longer find it growing just anywhere; we would not find it even if we went looking, and it might have ended up on our list of rare or vanished plants. It is precisely because so few people know about it that this very useful weed is still everywhere, and quite safe.
The traditional uses described here are for information only. Consult a doctor before using any plant to treat an illness.
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