Gardens and Texts
In their comprehensive guide to the British Library's India Office collections on science, Richard Axelby and Savithri Preetha Nair list the East India Company-era botanical gardens that were active in India.[1] Ars Botanica will feature two of these colonial gardens - the Calcutta Botanical Garden, founded in 1789, which inherited works from the Coromandel coast (and Samalkot Company station); and the Ootacamund Botanic Garden, the oldest British Company garden in the South. To this it will add a third: Kochi's (now untraceable) 17th century 'odatha' – the lost garden of Dutch Malabar where Van Rheede and the Dutch East India Company's Hortus Malabaricus project allegedly gathered plant collections and prepared botanical drawings to be printed in Amsterdam.
Each of these gardens was associated with a pioneering botanical text, illustrated by local artists using singular art styles in different media. While the Hortus Malabaricus shows us how copperplate engravings (drawn in Kochi, printed in Amsterdam) changed the course of global botany and taxonomy, the Coromandel/Calcutta region shows that the art produced by native artists in Company gardens could be widely disseminated through the use of lithographs. A century later, the Nilgiris and the Ootacamund garden gives us watercolors (Ootacamund Flowers) made not by anonymous military or native artists but amateur European women artists, whose work later became the basis for the published flora of the region, Flora of the South Indian Palni Hills. Together, these mini art-archives point to three uniquely different visual representations of tropical plants, and multiple ways of refiguring Kampani kalam.[1]
Botanical engravings and invisible artists.
In 1678, an extraordinary Dutch botanical text – with extraordinary botanical art – began to take shape on India’s Malabar coast: Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, Continents Regni Malabarici apud Indos celeberrimi omnis generis Plantas rariores, 1678-1681. Or Hortus Malabaricus for short. Latin for the Garden of Malabar.
Botanical prints and unnamed artists.
Between the early 18th century and and the late 19th century, the scientific illustration of Indian flora - by native artists - went through something of an efflorescence. East India Company naturalist William Roxburgh, considered the father of Indian botany, was at the center of these early efforts. His Roxburgh Icones, some 3000 paintings made by native artists during his time at the Samalkot Company gardens in the Northern Circars, remain in Calcutta (with duplicates in Kew Gardens), of which 300 were published in the lavishly illustrated Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, considered the very first flora of British India.
Botanical watercolors and amateur artists.
By the late 19th century, botanical illustration in India was a thriving genre, influenced by new demands of tropical botany, imperial garden collections at the royal gardens of Kew and Edinburgh, and not least, what had come to be known as the ‘golden age of botanical illustration’ in the West.