We never know the value of things till we’ve lost them, we’re often told. Perhaps this is what drives interest to the rich natural heritage India had, specially in current times of our dwindling green cover. Do we know what kind of trees or garden plants existed in India in the 1800s? As much as there is the ambivalence to our Colonial past -- that undeniably exploited us -- but also recorded and preserved the time in their observations, arts and books. Hugh Francis Clarke Cleghorn was one such an Indian forest conservator who founded the Forest Department of the Madras Presidency.
He came to India as a surgeon with the East India Company. During his stay, he observed plants around him and had Indian artists make about 3000 botanical drawings to complement herbarium specimens he collected; many new species of plant have been described from his collections. In 1856 he was appointed Conservator of Forests in the Madras Presidency.
Cut to the present and you have Henry J. Noltie, with degrees both in botany and museum studies, who has been based at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh since 1986. For the last decade he was worked on the history of Indian botany, especially on the drawings made for Scottish East India Company surgeons by Indian artists. Noltie has studied Cleghorn’s life since 1998 and has published two volumes on his life and collections this year. He is in Bengaluru for a talk, and MetroPlus chatted with him. Excerpts:
Noltie’s interest in Cleghorn: I work with the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh where there’s a huge collection of Cleghorn’s -- he was in India between 1841 and 1868. He was an East India Company surgeon, but in those days surgeons were the only ones who had scientific training (medicine students were required to study plants and their relationship to drugs). When they got to India they were excited about the incredible wildlife -- from insects, birds, mammals, and plants. Cleghorn’s particular interest was plants, so he collected specimens -- lots of dried herbarium specimens. We’ve got thousands of them, we don’t know how many thousands! Because our herbarium covers the whole world -- we have over three million specimens. I estimate between five and 10 thousand are from South India.
How herbarium specimens are so well preserved even now: If you dry a plant specimen and keep it dry and away from insects, it will last for hundreds of years. In Britain we are lucky that the climate is very cool, and much drier, and herbarium specimens keep well in such climates. Now it’s possible to take high quality digital images of them and make them available online to people all over the world.
Cleghorn’s commissioned botanical drawings: We’ve also got over 3,000 botanical drawings Cleghorn commissioned while he was in India, by various Indian artists. These artists were unbelievably skilled. They wouldn’t traditionally be doing this kind of painting. When Cleghorn first came to India he met Robert Wight (director of the Botanic Garden, Madras) and he would have told him about how to train artists who would have been painting Hindu religious epics and gods. But if they were shown Western botanical drawings, they could adapt. And these were unbelievably beautiful drawings -- I mean no Western artist could have drawn a pineapple in that way -- ( he shows a drawing titled “Ananas” )- - there’s something about the stylisation that tells it was an Indian artist.
Arriving in Shimoga: Cleghorn started off in Madras in 1842. Then he was posted to Mysore. The British headquarters of the Mysore State was in Bangalore so he came here too, in 1845, and was later appointed to Shimoga. Mysore was divided into four districts during the time of Sir Mark Cubbon (British Commissioner of Mysore). Cleghorn travelled with the army to various places around Bangalore. He was in Shimoga for almost three years -- he loved being there. Unfortunately he doesn’t record the name of his artist there. There are almost 500 botanical drawings from this time in Shimoga (each with date and place). I plotted these out on a map (that shows places like Agumbe, Sagar etc). In 2007, I came for a month to Shimoga; before that I was in Mysore and met a botany professor who translated the Kannada names of the plants written in tiny writing on these drawings.
The speciality of these drawings: The stylisation , the way the drawings are arranged on page is particularly Indian. If a Western artist had done it, he would have taken a small section of the plant, planted it in the middle and left a lot of white space around. The Indian artists hated empty space, and filled page in the most inventive way. In Madras, where Cleghorn was in the 1850s (as professor of medicine at the medical college), he used an artist called Govindoo to draw plants in the Agricultural Society of Madras. (He points to the cover of the book and inside -- of the African Tulip that had been introduced to India just then, and now in abundance in Bengaluru.) He was interested in garden plants particularly. It was a time when the British were moving plants all over the world from one colony to the other - some because they were beautiful, some because they had economic use, like tea. The tradition of botanical drawings is dead in India, more or less. There are very few people doing it. If young artists could see this sort of work, I’d like to think it might inspire them to take it up. These are artistically beautiful compositions, and they can also be scientifically revealing. They show minute parts of plant, parts magnified.
The kind of colours used: I would like to get chemical analysis done on these drawings. We know that some botanists brought their own paints from England. But Robert Wight would make his artists mix their own paint, so we know they were using local dyes and minerals. Cleghorn doesn’t make any comment on them. The paper used, though, is European. Being a follower of Wight I would assume Cleghorn also got his artists to make their own vegetable dye and mineral based paints.
Cleghorn’s interest: When he became the first conservator of forests in Madras in 1856, Cleghorn wasn’t interested only in forest trees -- that was the primary interest for the East India Company -- which was building railways and needed railways sleepers. Cleghorn liked non-forest products -- plants that produced dyes, resins, and he was concerned that they should be preserved and locals allowed to use them, even if they had to pay a tax on them. It was the Colonial period, and India was getting exploited -- you can’t get around that. He was part of the Colonial project, but according to contemporary sources, he was concerned with the well being of the locals.
Company drawings v/s private collections: The reason I’m making this stuff available in books is that it’s of immense interest to the world. None of the images have been digitised yet, but there are plans to do it. Often these drawings were paid for of out of Cleghorn’s own pocket, and not commissioned by the Company. There were other sets of drawings commissioned by the Company and some of them are there in the Calcutta Botanical Gardens. These drawings, though, were from Cleghorn’s private collection and he was free to take them back with him. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that these are of immense interest to India.
Consultant to Lal Bagh gardens: In 1856 he was commissioned by Sir Mark Cubbon to come to Lal Bagh (it wasn’t called Lal Bagh then). Lal Bagh was Tipu’s garden then at Srirangapatna. The garden here -- it was two gardens joined together -- one was started by Hyder Ali and the second by Tipu Sultan, his son. They were formal and traditional Islamic gardens. But that garden had been used by the British at various periods, specially in the 1840s -- when there was an agri-horticultural society in Bangalore. Later it was mostly used to grow sugarcane because the soil was rich. Mark Cubbon was interested in having a horticultural garden again. So they got Cleghorn to come and give his advise, and he brought his gardener from the society in Madras - Andrew Jeffrey. They instantly knew this would make a good garden once again. So they sent to Kew to have a gardener sent. That’s how William New, the first gardener of the revamped Lal Bagh arrived in Bangalore.
To know more, attend Noltie’s talk “Cleghorn: Indian Forester, Scottish Laird” organised by the National Gallery of Modern Art, with National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi. It’s being held today, on October 8, at 4 p.m at the NGMA. Entry to the event is free to all, with seating on first come first serve basis.
