FREDERICK NORONHA
Shyamal Lakshminarayanan forwarded an email, with a brief message contained only in its subject-line. It read: “Please try to attend if you can — Henry is an old friend.” The event mentioned a book release at Sensible Earth, Salvador Do Mundo (Saloi, in Bardez) last Wednesday.
Shyamal being an old friend, one was tempted. But seasonal crowds and the Porvorim elevated road work make travelling unpleasant this time of the year. So, on finding a copy of H.J. Noltie’s Flora Indica: Recovering lost stories from Kew’s Indian drawings at Broadway Book Centre, the next best thing was to go through this hardbound, elaborately-printed, coffee-table book of botanical art.
Just published by Roli Books, this book is filled with Indian botanical illustrations. These works come from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, on the south bank of the River Thames. Set up in the early 18th century as a royal pleasure garden developed by the Princes of Wales, it later became a scientific botanic garden in the mid-19th century.
Botanic gardens were many things rolled into one. They served diverse purposes — scientific labs studying unfamiliar plants; economic instruments (think: spices, tea, rubber, cinchona, sugar); administrative tools (to manage land, agriculture, and imperial resources).
Today, Kew is considered to be a world-leading centre for plant science and conservation. It has historic landscapes and iconic glasshouses with vast living collections. Search online and you find out about its herbaria, libraries, and archives that document global plant life. Besides Kew, some of the global botanic gardens include Paris, Berlin, New York, Missouri (St Louis), Singapore, and Edinburgh. Portugal had less impressive ones at Ajuda (Lisbon) and Coimbra.
Against this background, Henry Noltie’s ‘Flora Indica’ has been just published, in large size and hardback. With its 224 pages, and elegantly bound, the book is priced at Rs. 2,495 in India, and more abroad (ISBN 9789349474765).
From its impressive cover typography and design, to the paper and binding it uses, plus the text and images, the book spells class. In it, artists’ impressions from the Kew collection of Indian botanical art “is brought together here for the first time, with some of the remarkable stories they can tell”.
Noltie (see more about him on his Wikipedia page) studies the work of 20 Indian artists. We are told this was “previously fractured, uncatalogued and largely inaccessible collection of over 7,000 Indian illustrations in Kew’s archives”.
Noltie worked for three decades in Edinburgh—as a taxonomist, curator and historian of its Indian collections. This reflects the kind of specialisation that the Western world has, towards various fields of knowledge, which we tend to lack, maybe for understandable reasons (but which cannot continue to be an excuse however).
Besides a foreword by William Dalrymple (“an art historical triumph, a complete re-imagining of the world of the artist”), the book has five main chapters. Three focus on the botanic gardens of Calcutta, Saharanpur and Bengal-Bihar-Awadh. The first chapter is on the artists themselves. Finally, the fifth looks at the history of the Kew Collection. Acknowledges, further readings, an index, etc make up the other pages.
Not to be missed are some historic maps (Hindustan with Berar, Bhotan, Tibet and Burmah) and etchings (The East India House, London, 1813… admission ticket to the East India Museum, circa 1840s).
The timeline (p.17) gives a sense of what was happening in the rest of the world, even as artists were undertaking their botanical paintings. For instance, the Calcutta Botanic Garden was founded in 1787, and while other gardens were being set up, there were also wars (Anglo-Gorkha War, Anglo-Burmese, Anglo-Sikh, and the like).
Noltie’s introduction explains how the book came about, and its purpose. Artists, we are told, were those “whose work represents a fusion of traditional Indian draughtsmanship and composition with the naturalism and scientific detail required by their European commissioners”.
As becomes clear, this is a book focussed more on the work from the east and north of India. This is not surprising, given the way in which British (and early East India Company) influence spread in these regions.
But distant Goa also has a stake in this topic. Not just directly in Goa, but through what today constitutes Kerala as well.
It was in Goa, long before the British, that Garcia da Orta (who has a garden named after him in Panaji till date) created a text that made ripples in Europe. It was “extensively appropriated” (read pirated) in Europe. Then, the later Dutch initiative at documenting plant-based knowledge in Kerala had the involvement of Saraswat Konkani-speakers (Ranga Bhat, Vinayak Pandit, and Appu Bhat), who are believed to have a connection with Goa.
Nolte’s ‘Flora Indica’, Garcia da Orta’s ‘Colóquios dos Simples’, and ‘Hortus Malabaricus’ reflect European engagement with Indian plants; but each does so in different ways. Orta’s 16th-century Portuguese work is conversational and pragmatic; the Jewish-origin scholar mixes local knowledge, observation and medicinal uses, with indigenous informants playing active epistemic roles (making, shaping and validating knowledge).
‘Hortus Malabaricus’, produced under Dutch sponsorship in the late 17th century in today’s Kerala, is encyclopedic and Latinised. It systematically catalogues the Malabar Coast’s flora while preserving vernacular names and uses contributed by local scholars. Nolte’s Anglo-British ‘Flora Indica’ (based on images from the early 19th century) prioritises Linnaean taxonomy, morphology and formal classification. It subsumes Indian plants into a global scientific framework, with indigenous knowledge often secondary.
There are other differences too. The Portuguese work is centred on trade and medicine. The Dutch try to create a comprehensive natural history study that bridges local and Euro systems. For the British, the focus is institutionalised science serving empire and governance. From dialogue (Orta), the trend shifts to recorded collaboration (Hortus) to catalogued reference (Flora Indica).
One suspects that even a historian might find interesting clues of how the Empire worked in those times through these pages.
To begin where we started: Shyamal’s suggestion. Like some other Wikipedians I know, Shyamal is deep into a range of subjects. Once, we got talking, he had, at his fingertips, so much information on Allan Octavian Hume, the Scottish-origin civil servant and ornithologist in colonial India who later became a founding figure of the Indian National Congress. It dawned that he had created the Wikipedia page on Hume, about the most insightful information one can today get on this man.
Shyamal mentioned that Noltie is a botanist specialising in the grasses. He commented later: “I think he became interested in the Indian artists that the British botanists employed when he came across their amazing plates in the herbarium collections. He felt he had to make their beauty known more widely. He wrote several major biographies —Robert Wight and Hugh Cleghorn, on the early botanical gardens of India, etc. He was a visitor to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary at Wayanad and I came to first know of him through that connection.”
This is an interesting and substantial work that will appeal to readers interested in botany, plant studies, colonial history, or to anyone with a wider curiosity about these subjects, even if its ambitious size and scope make it somewhat pricey.
