Art was the primary medium to document the natural world, before photography and filmmaking. In a talk, Drawn to the Wild: A conversation on Animal illustrations in India, to be held as part of Celebrating Art and Natural History at National Gallery of Modern Art, independent researcher, Shyamal Lakshminarayanan with Tatiana Petrova, ornithologist and wildlife artist based in St Petersburg, will highlight the place of art in natural history, with an emphasis on the artistic and scientific rendering of birds both from India and outside.
Bengaluru-based Shyamal, formally trained in agricultural science, statistics and computing, has a deep interest in the narrative of natural history studies in India, including studies on the collaboration between Indian artists and British amateurs. He says documenting the natural world in terms of words or pictures is not something Indians have done well. “The people who wrote about India’s natural world were mostly travellers,” says Shyamal, “For example, the Mughals started recording the environment when they first came to India. They were fascinated by everything. Unfortunately the only preserved mediums in India are temple carvings and in them we don’t find much animal or plant illustrations. Usually they are instrumental, in terms of a vahana for a deity. It was only when Indians moved to other countries that you see documenting of the natural world. Hindu temples in South-East Asia have more botanical detail.”
Some British officers who came to India were avid documenters of the natural world, says Shyamal. “This was an entirely new land for them. They hired Indian artists to make illustrations of Indian animals and plants. So we have a lot of natural history illustrations from that era. There were amateur naturalists like Major General Hardwicke and Colonel Sykes. Colonel Hodgson worked with several Nepali artists. The most well known was Raj Man Singh Chitrakar. He did the most amazing art work ever, which I discovered only when I went to London. The work was never published. In the British Library and the Zoological society of London you will see the original plates of work done by Indian artists, in the 1800s.”
Shyamal acknowledges that there is a sudden interest in Nature in the city, but rues, “It is a very superficial interest with people taking their cameras, driving out in the weekend to some far off place, going to sanctuaries and taking photos to put on Facebook. But making a painting or a sketch of an animal or plant requires much more acute observation.”
Shyamal says art and science should meet. “As a scientist you shouldn’t stop at science and as an artist you shouldn’t stop at art. These distinctions weren’t there. Darwin wasn’t a scientist, he was supposed to become a priest. Gerhard Heilmann was a Danish artist and was considered one of the greatest ornithologists. Art aided a lot of early science
Shyamal has made immense contributions to Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation gave him a scholarship to go to London. “For Wikipedia, we want people to donate images for free. Unfortunately, there is only a small fraction of people who contribute to Wikipedia. Sometimes there are no pictures. So when that happens, I sometimes make an illustration and put it in the article. In India we don’t encourage sufficient self learning, with the internet that that is changing.”
As a researcher, Shyamal says he is purely curiosity driven. “For example, last week, I was curious about how eucalyptus came to India from Australia. As I started reading, I discovered the Acclimatisation Society, which was founded in 1859. They believed that flora and fauna should be moved around—animals from Africa should be placed in parks in London and trout in rivers in Ooty and eucalyptus in India. I improved the biography of the founder of the Acclimatisation in Wikipedia. When I was researching the founder I discovered that one of his classmates was Francis Day who was actually inspector general fisheries in India, and he is the one who introduced trout into the rivers in Ooty!”
Drawn to the Wild: A conversation on Animal illustrations in India will be held on June 7, from 3 pm to 4.30 pm, at NGMA, 49, Manikyavelu Mansion, Palace Road.
