Frederick Noronha
In the past week, the death was reported of Kattungal Subramaniam Manilal. This name of an obviously South Indian botany scholar, professor and taxonomist (as a scientist who studies and classifies organisms is called) might not ring a bell to most. But his story intersects with a centuries old one of Goa, and definitely deserves more
attention here.
Manilal, who died at 86 on New Year’s Day, spent some three-and-half decades of his life working to research, translate and annotate the Latin book on the botany of coastal southern India, ‘Hortus Malabaricus’.
His work made so many aware about this book, which contains a great deal of botanical information on the Malabar (a region close to Goa). For centuries, the book had been in the blind-spot of Indian, and even English-speaking scholars, because it was almost entirely written
in Latin.
Today, if you want information on ‘Hortus Malabaricus’ (The Garden of the Malabar), or about Manilal himself, there’s so much of it available online. There are summaries, comments, translations, explanations, references and more. But it took the work and vision of one man for the work to reach so far….
The book contains the most fascinating images, and information from another era. It reminds us how important such information can be, and how understanding our world can make a difference to our lives. It also underlines how different the approach of the Europeans, and some other cultures, was in the Medieval World, towards our planet. Not for nothing they went on to rule the world, and reap the benefits (or the problems) for
doing so.
The book is available on online book-sharing sites. Quite a few of these exist, such as archive.org, publicdomainreview.org and others. These have been set up with the intention of legally sharing copyright-expired books, and one needs to appreciate the kind hearts behind such projects.
The book, in its many volumes, is supposedly authored by Hendrik van Rheede (1636-1691). His full name was Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein, and he was a military man and colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company.
Given the resources at his command, and the importance of the subject, this governor of the Dutch Malabar at Kochi is said to have employed 25 people to work on ‘his’ book, ‘Hotrus Malabaricus’. It describes 740 plants of
the region.
Online, one can find many colourful details of Van Rheed’s life and times. Or, of the 12 -volume work he got written. We’re told by the Wikipedia, for instance: “Since 1660, the Dutch East India Company had encouraged publication of scientific work and the documentation of the useful plants by Van Rheede would help in the fight against
local diseases.”
The text was in Latin, while the names of the plants was in four languages — Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic and Malayalam. Some mention Konkani too here. It refers to plants of the Malabar region — in those times referring to the stretch along the Western Ghats from Goa to Kanyakumari.
Interesting enough, the work was based on the palm leaf manuscripts by a famous herbal medicine practitioner called Itty Achuden. Achuden was a ‘vaidan’ (healer) in the Ezhava tradition and caste, which makes some say that Kerala had its medical tradition preceding Ayurveda.
Interesting, he was supported by three Konkani-speaking physicians, who would have traced their roots to Goa — Appu Bhat, Ranga Bhatt and Vinayaka Pandit. The work was edited by many others.
Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, the text got much more noticed only after it was translated into English. You can browse through digital copies of the book online.
While Goa has sometimes focussed on the role of the Konkani-speaking contributors to the book, the overall worth of it, and Manilal’s work, has been all but overlooked.
As we’re reminded online: “Hortus Malabaricus (meaning ‘Garden of Malabar’) is a comprehensive treatise that deals with the properties of the flora of the Western Ghats region principally covering the areas now in the Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka and the union territory [sic] of Goa.”
Just imagine the scale of the work: it was compiled over a period of nearly 30 years and published in Amsterdam between 1678–1693. Hendrik van Rheede, who was the governor of Dutch Malabar at the time, conceived it. He gets the credit for the work. After being translated into English and Malayalam recently, it was published by the University of Kerala.
Each of the 12 volumes is almost of 200 pages. There are 794 copper plate engravings, now all copyright-expired and some depicted alongside. Some comment: “It is believed to be the earliest comprehensive printed work on the flora of Asia and the tropics.”
Even earlier though, the Goa-and-Bombay-based Garcia da Orta did an ambitious, though differing work, on the medicinal plants of this region, which one cannot overlook.
T. Whitehouse in his 1859-published ‘Historical Notices of Cochin on the Malabar Coast’, has commented: “All the country around was diligently searched by the natives best acquainted with the habitats of plants; and fresh specimens were brought to Cochin where the Carmelite Mathaeus sketched them, with such striking accuracy, that there was no difficulty in identifying each particular species when you see his drawings.
“Names of each species is written in Malayalam as well as Konkani (Then known as Brahmananchi Bhas). A description of each plant was written in Malayalam and thence translated into Portuguese, by a resident at Cochin, named Emmanuel Carneiro.
“The Secretary to Government, Herman Van Douep, further translated it into Latin, that the learned in all the countries of Europe might have access to it. The whole seems then to have passed under the supervision of another learned individual named Casearius, who was probably a Dutch chaplain and a personal friend of Van Rheede. A book of its size, on which such care was expended, must have consumed a fortune before its publication, and confers honour, both on those who compiled it and the place where it was compiled.”
One can only marvel at the work put in those times — of course for the benefit of those doing it — and also, in our times, of people like professor Manilal, who translated it and reminded all about its work once more. Go download your copy.
