Indian Botanical Art in the 21st Century

We’re so used to thinking of plants as immobile, passive beings, aren’t we? But I began to see that it is this very rootedness that makes them fascinating— leading them to adapt to threats and opportunities in ingenious ways that boggle the imagination. Like these beautiful bejeweled, alien-like sundews (Fig. 3). They grow in soils with poor nutrient levels, so they supplement their diets by luring, capturing, and ingesting insects using mucilaginous glands on their leaf surfaces. Small insects are attracted by the sweet secretions of these glands, but once they come in contact, they are ensnared in the sticky substance and then it’s game over.

The experience of creating the book Hidden Kingdom was both exhilarating and enlightening. For starters, I realised that despite my supposed botanical inheritance, I actually knew very little about plants, and even less about the Western Ghats. I had studied botany in school, of course, but our syllabus was bereft of local context. Yes, we had learned about carnivorous plants, but the example we were given was the Venus flytrap, an incredible plant native to North America. Unfortunately there was no mention of those beautiful sundews, which grow on the outskirts of Bangalore where I lived. How much more relevant and meaningful might high school botany have been if it reflected my own surroundings? 

I’m sometimes asked how, as a botanical artist, I’m able to express my own individual creativity. There is a presumption behind this that botanical art, as a vehicle of science, is a neutral medium—carrier only of scientific information. But the more I learned of my newfound profession, the more I realised this was far from the truth. In fact, in India botanical art is conventionally known as “Company Art” or “Company kalam”—a reference to its association with the Dutch or British East India Companies that once colonised the Indian subcontinent. 

During the modern colonial period, as European travel and conquest of various parts of the globe increased, so too did the fascination with entirely new, seemingly exotic flora. Naturalists, botanists and artists often accompanied explorers on their journeys. The HMS Endeavour, for instance, set sail from England in 1768—ostensibly, a “research vessel” which we now know was also tasked with a secret mission: to locate and claim the so-called “unknown land of the South”—Australia—for the British crown.2 Along with the naturalist Joseph Banks, the ship also carried artist Sydney Parkinson. He lived and worked aboard the ship, studying specimens and drawing day and night, battling off swarms of flies which ate his paints as he worked. He eventually died of dysentery before they managed to return to England. Such was the value attached to natural history illustration—it was a technology used to systematically catalogue the natural world in the service of both science and empire—a history with which botanical art is inextricably linked. 

In India, most of these botanical art collections were commissioned by Company officials for European audiences keen to catalogue the flora of their colonial possessions, and so even today the work itself is treated as being foreign—despite the fact that its subjects, Indian flora, hail from India, as did most of the artists, who usually went unnamed (Fig. 4). And yet, if we look closely at this work, it’s clear that this art form wasn’t just a foreign import: local artists brought with them the techniques of Rajput and Mughal miniatures, the styles of Tanjavur moochies and gudigars, combining them with a more European treatment of perspective, volume, and recession.3,4 Every one of these images contains not only the botanical fact of a plant, but a complex well of history and meaning.

Early on in my career, I was lucky enough to meet two ecologists, Divya Mudappa and TR Shankar Raman, who live and work in the Valparai region of the Western Ghats—an area dominated by tea estates established by the British in the 19th century. In the process, vast forests were cleared to create plantations. They are now run by Indian corporations who leave those parts of their land that are unsuitable for cultivation ostensibly wild, but in practice are often dominated by tree species that were brought to India from South America or the Caribbean in the colonial period to beautify the landscape. Unfortunately, these species don’t serve the needs of local fauna. So Divya and Shankar Raman work towards encouraging landowners to grow native species on uncultivated land in an effort to create corridors of true forest connecting plantations.5,6,7

They were looking to visually document these trees in some way, but the photographers they approached came up empty-handed. These species grow up to 43 meters tall, making them impossible to capture in a single camera frame. Besides, the surrounding foliage is too dense to clearly isolate a single specimen. So together, we decided to give good old painting a shot. 

In truth, even while standing before them it was tough to see the entire tree. Instead, I’d study its buttress up close, then climb up a hill to see its crown rising above the canopy. With Divya and Shankar Raman’s help, we’d imagine the intervening bits, stitching it all together into one drawing. Over two years, we documented thirty of the region’s most iconic trees, along with their fruit, flowers, seeds, and leaves. For those who don’t know the jungles as well as these naturalists, these drawings are probably the only way they’ll see these trees in their entirety (Figs. 5 and 6). 

Through this process, I began to see these jungles differently. The landscape I had been visiting nearly every year since I was born—a region I thought I knew so well—morphed from an undifferentiated sea of green into individual species with individual characters. This had been a seminal moment in my own career—a moment of awakening, when my eyes were opened to what had been hidden all around me in plain sight.