Charles Umpherston Aitchison Administrator, Diplomat Historian (1832-1896)

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The Victorian Age was replete with monumental historical projects like the History of the Parliament, Calendar of State Papers, Victoria History of the Counties of England and witnessed prodigious publication of Historical records. Stubbs and Maitland were keen investigators of Anglo Saxon political institutions, particularly in the two centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066 AD. In India too the British adopted a similar policy either to fends off challenges to their regime in the post Mutiny era when India was taken over by the Crown or as a intervention in preservation of Historical Documents and this project is associated with Charles Umpherston Aitchison. He was the Foreign Secretary of India, the first "President" of the Public Service Commission, the precurson of the UPSC and he was appointed to the Covenanted Civil Service soon after the Compettitive examinations were introduced and so was a pioneering competition wallah. Apart from these disctinctions, he was also the Lt. Governor of the Punjab and was closely associated with Sir John Lawrence.

C U Aitchisons

Charles Umperston Aitchison was born in Scotland in 1832 and was educated in the University of Edinburgh like the others we have studied in this series: William Roxburgh. He graduated with a Masters' degree in what was then quaintly described as Moral Philosophy and he was the only candidate selected from Scotland for appointment in the Covenenated Civil Srvice in India. His first appointment was inHissar in May 1857 but was providentially transferred to the Punjab and hence escaped the massacre that followed the Mutiny in May 1857, He was in Lahore when the Mutiny began. After the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, Aitchison was sent to Calcutta where he worked as an Under Secretary in the "Political Department".

The Mutiny was a turning point in Indian History in that it represented a significant movement towards national aspiration, although in an incohate fashion. For the English it was a moment of reckoning in that the violence that they had seen expereinced at the hands of their beloved "natives" was on a scale that shook the foundations of the political order that bound India to England or Great Britain as it styled itself then. And it is here that the work of C U Aitchison is reembered.

Historians have seen the rise of the East India Company to politcal and military power as a consequence of the decline of the Mughal Empire. The Treaty of Allahabad signed in 1765 merely ratified an pre existing reality. But in the "Narrative" part of his XIII volume Treaties, Sanads and Engagemets, a different and more sophisticated understanding of the process of territorial conquest of India is developed. We can call that process: Conquest by Treaty. Nearly 2500 individual documents are found over the XIII volumes that for some strange reason continued to be published under the editorship of C U Aitchison even after his death. The conflict between Paramountcy and So vereignty  lay at  the heart of this gigantic venture. Was the status of the East India Company in India until its takeover by the Crown in 1858 that of a Sovereign or the Paramount Power. The East India Company like any corporate body derived its charter to trade from the English Parliament but by the middle of the eighteenth century had transformed itself into a major political and military power largely on the strength of its huge land army and deft diplomacy. And the net result were Treaties which were signed by the Company with major political powers of the indigenous people like the Nizam, the State of Mysore, the states of Rajputana, the states of Central India etc. In most of these cases the Subsidiary Alliance from the time of Warren Hastings meant the accptance of a "Resident" and a detachment of Company forces which were o be maintined by the states in hih they were deployed.  Sannads were of a different order. They were documents issued by the Paramount Power in reply to or in response to an existing situation or dispute on the ground. The right of succession to the Gaddi was usually recognized through the grant of a sannad bearing the seal and signature of the Company. Engagments is a dubious category. Salt manufature, fishing and custom duties, forest grazing rights, native customs and practices were all governemed by the term Engagement. The English Administration both during the reign of the Company and the Viceroys communicated with "Native Chiefs" through the Political Department and it raises the question whether the Administartion then considered Natice chiefs to be "sovereign" entities. This question also has bearing on the later political history of India in that when the Transfer of Power took place in 1947 all the 616 entities that constituted the fabric of India became at one fell stroke "Independent"'.

C U Aitchison collected the documents which were widely dispersed in various territories and offices of the then regime and published them in order to demonstrate the legal validity of English authority to govern. The English Administration was particular that they nested and varying degrees of Sovereignty did not clash with the authority to governern India. And the Administration was based on consent in the strictly political sense in that it rested on the Treaty signed between the Native States and Princely States. The latter was a category that emerged only after the 1911 Durbar.

In the late nineteenth century, a major shift took place in the strategic thought that influenced the British policy in India. The security of India resided not only in the capability of defence on land but also the ability to intervene in the wide maritime worls stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Straits of Mlacca, a vision most eloquently articulated in Lord Curzon's celebated Address to the Royal Geographical Society, London and a vision whose wisdom in only now being understood after 70 years of neglect. Hence the Engagments with the Sultans of the decaying Ottoman Empire on the Gulf were brought into the imperial horizon: Muscat, Aden, Zanzibar and host og Arab sultans signed agreements including the Emir of Kuwait, a document they used to demonstrate their Independence when Saddam Hussein invaded the territory.

C U Aitchison was appointed President f the Public Service Commission in 1886 and he reccomended the establishment of the Imperial Civil Service, the nomenclature of which was changed to the IndianCivil Service. He also took interest in establishing educational insitutions in the Punab and the Aitchison College in Lahore is a good example. Upon his return to England he was created Knight Commander of the Star of India and he died in 1896.

Indian diplomats who have to answer challenges from a vaiety of different sources have to dpend heavily on Sir Aitchison's monumnetal work including the challege over Sir Creek.

George Floyd and the Death of American Democracy

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Police officer kneeling on his neck

USA is erupting in a race war that should show to the world the ugly face of American Liberlism. White liberalism has presented itself as a friend of the Blacks and has essentily hi jacked the Black Lives Matter Movement for serving its own decietful political agenda. This may sound strange, but the fact is that unlike the Ku Klaux Klan and the Southern Red Neck, who do not present themselves of friends of the Blacks, the white liberal is said to be  alet to discrimination, oppression and inequality, slogans that they deploy to deflect attention from any attempt at scrutinizing their record vis a vis the Blacks. In the Universities, the white liberals thunder to ther students about the "politics of race" "racial profiling" " white privilege" etc a rhetoric tht sometimes seduces the blacks to support the white liberal agenda: the Woke Agenda. And the same is replicated across the world. The support extended by these miserable white liberals to the agitations against a perfectly legal and democatic Citizenship Ammendment Act (CAA) passed by the Indian Parliament to extend the benefits of citizenship to the dispossessed minorities in the Islamic Republics in th neighbourhood of India also stems from the same perverted understanding of the moral centrality of the "white" race in negotiating the complex problems of the world today. A control over the acedemia and the Press has made woke liberalism thrive in the exalted ether of Post Colonialism. Now back to USA.

The American Police treats the Native Aerican and the Black Americans as the enemy or in woke lino, the "Other". Barack Hussein Obama made the situation worse for the African Americans by creating a huge industry of Prisons for Profits and by introducing madatory sentencing for non violent crimes such as drug dealing. A life imprisonment for being caught with 5 gms of drugs is unfair to say the least and that was the contribution of the dreamboy of the woke liberals, Obama. There are three basic problems within the African American community: lack of educational opportunities and skills, lack of positive role models and excessive state intusion in the lives of African American communities and the Police or th social welfare organs of the American state are the most egresious invaders of Back social and cultural space. Black mothers are routnely threatened to have their babies taken away for "neglect" and that too because she has to work to support the baby in the first place and most work spaces for low skilled jobs do not have creches or day care centres.

White liberals who are so eloquent about Inequality and are likely to have read a rave review of Thomas Pikketty have not said anything worthwhile on the Skilling of the African American youth. I remeber when I was a Ph D student at a well known American University I studied History and got my PhD in Medieval History way back in 1987) an African American gratudate student who went by the unfortunate name E Pluribus Unnum was repeatedly discouraged and humiliated until he exhausted his savings from doing a construction job in New York and then he faded away. The man responsible was one with an implacable liberal credentials. And I can say that when it comes to frothing at the mouth with liberal platitudes, there cannnot be anyone better than white liberals with their manifestos denouncing Inequality Racism Oppression and the like and they carry this toxic ideological cocktail into academic witngs in the name of post colonialism. All the while we must remember they are the poducts of white privilge and use that privilege to batten themselves at the expense of others,

There have been nearly 100 deaths this year alone of Black men who have been killed by policemen. Is their training at fault? We have no answer? Is the system of White Privilege so entrenched that the woke liberals cannot do anything maningful? I cannot udndertand how political leaders like Nancy Pelosi who has been so hyperactive against Donal Trump has done nothing for the under privileged in her own society. Even here after the killing of Geoge Floyd she was busy denouncing Trump who said quite categorigally tht rotest should not deenerate into Anarchy. Now the rioting that is taking place in New York, Washington, Richmond, Los Angles and scores of other cities is bringing a collapse of American society which is already been battered by COVID 19.

American Racism has two faces the ugly face of the KKK and the pretty face of the Woke Liberals and I feel I am safer with one whose malefesence I understand.

William Roxburgh and Indian Botany Plants Empire and Trade: Roxburgh and the Royal Botanical Garden Calcutta

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

PART III

Wiki Commons Roxburg Mansion Howrah

After the terrible diasater faced by William Roxburgh, he was called upon to the Superindendent of the newly established Botanical Garden at Calcutta. His great work on Indian flora, Flora Indica was undertaken here and was published by the Serampore Baptist Press under the stewartsip of William Carey.The influence of the Linnean System of Taxonomy and Nomenclature is embodied in this work' William Roxburgh took charge of the Botanical Garden in 1793 and in his first stint remained till 1797 wnen he returned to England to regain his health.In October 1799 he returned to Calcutta and remained in India till 1805 and left for his native Scotland in 1805 after spending a few months at St. Helena, the Company Island.In 1813 he left India for good to settle in Scotland. At the time of his depature he left his botanical collection and the Manuscripts of his Flora Indica with Carey anf they formed the basis of the two major publications of william Roxburgh: Hortus Bengalensis, a catalogue of plants in the botanical Garden and Flora Indica the outstanding classica work on Indian plants which till this day is regarded as the starting point of Indian Botany.

One of the first taks that he accomplished at Calcutta was the construction of hie Residence and Herbarium that also housed his Library, With the help of his extensive network of collaborators strewn all over the World, Roxburgh was able to bud up a good library of Botanical works, thereby replacing the one that he lost at Samalkotta.Roxburgh was particularly interested in commercial plants like Cotton and Indigo which would enable the East India Company increase its profits. Though he was not a founding member of the Asiatic Society of India which was created by Sir William Jones in 1784, Roxburgh publihed many of his researches in the Journal of the Asiatic Society and in Asiatik Researches. It has become fashinable for historians of Science writing under the pernecious shadow of Saidian, Foucouldian and Post Colonial theories to argue that such scientific enterprises as for instance the one presided over by Roxburgh or that of his contemporary Colin Makenzie were in reality elaborated trophies of power and Imperial Domination. The  argument being that Empire seeks to classify,rationalise, and ultimately appropriate the local knowledge in order ro subserve imperial ends. Joseph Banks and William Roxburgh are viewed as marionettes on a stage pre determined by economic and technological actors. Such an approach to History is both teleological and deterministic and denies the agency of human actors involved. The work undertaken by men uch as these must be seen in the light of their own acions and perceptions within an overarching framework provided by the East India Company.

When Robert Kyd left the botanical garden, there were only around 335 species of plants, trees and ferns in the Royal Botanical Garden. When Roxburgh retired after serving the Garden for nearly two decades the number had passed 3335 species. A  number of plants were introduced from China, South East Asia especially the Mlay Peninsula, West Indies, Canary Island, St Helena. Effort was made to introduce Mahogony and the Garden still has the trees planted by Roxbergh and as if by mircale survived the recent Cyclone Anpham. SriLanka, Bhutan, Andaman Islands were some of the other places from where plants were secured. The logic behind such exchanges was the pesrvation of seed and plant types so that a better understanding of nature could be obtined. Al this, of course, was predicated on the pious assumption that by careful study the Garden of Eden could be recreated here on Earth.

Of great interest was Sugar to the early pioneers. The politics of the East India Company collided head on with that of the entrenched Sugar lobby in the House of Commons who wee represntative of the West Indies Sugar interests who used African Slave labour to grow their commercial crop. The American War of Independence and the problems in the Aylantic in the early nineteenth century gave Indian sugar some respite and India started exporting Sugar by the last decade of the Nineteenth Century, Another issue that the Company faced was the drain of silver caused b the voracious demand fro Tea in England. The trade with China was financed by the export of Silver and until the Company hit upon Opium and forced it upon the Chinese from 1832 onwards, effort was made to grow Tea in India. Ut was Roxburgh who got 272 tea cuttings from Canton and tried to acclamatize Ta to Indian conditions.

The lasting contibution of William Roxburgh lay i his Plants of the Coromandel and Flora Indica. 
Another commercial crop in which Roxburgh showed great interest was Hemp which was used in packing and cordage. In the 310 acres that constituted the Botanical Garden, a part was dedicated exclusively to commercial crops and it may not be out of palce to point out that Rxburgh was the founder of Plant Research in India.

William Roxburgh died in 1815 but his name lives on.

William Roxburgh and Indian Botany Plants Empire and Trade From Samalkotta to Calcutta

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Part II

From Samalkotta to Calcutta

From Plants of the Coromandel

William Roxburgh was appointed as a Surgeon seconded to the Norther Circars and he set up a botanical garden at Samalkotta, at the estuary of the River Godavari, not far rom Coringa, the bio diversity hot spot and the French territory of Yanam. He reached Sanalkota in 1781 and established his ressidence near the Garden and collected a large number of plants which were eventually published in Plants of the coromandel several years later. It is quite likely that the Herbariusm of Robert Koneig was inherited by Roxburgh. Collecting plants all over th Norther Circars at a time when the East India Company had not fully esatblished itself must have been quite challenging. While he was at Samalkta, Roxburgh initiated the training of "natives" into the making of botanical drawings which drew heavily on the Deccan School of natural drawings and paintings which in turn were derived from Mughal examples. The Deccan Sultanates especially of Bijapur and Bidar had a rich background of naturalistic painting. 

The young Dr William Roxburgh was schooled in the methods and philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment and believed as did his patrons in the East India Company that along withTrade and other commercial activities the Company must help in the formulation of knowledge and explore the natural word for the exploitation of its resources by England. We mut remember that the British Empire at this time was being challenged across the Atlantic by the American War of Independence and that was soon overshadowed by the looming war with France. Finance Profit and Economic well being were the key elements in the Company's strategy. To that end Roxburgh devoed his energy identifying economically profitable palnts that culd be acclamatised successfully in Indian geographical conditions and also prepare them for transfer to other  scntres in the Joseph Banks' expanding network of botanical gardens: Cape of Good Hope, St. Helena and of course Kew Gardens. 

Plants of the Coromandel 

At Samalkotta, Roxburgh experimented with plants of economic value such as (1) Coffee (2) Cinnamon (3) Nutmeg (4) Arrotto (5) Sappan wood (Breadfruit ( 6) Mulberry and (7) Pepper vines. It is clear that the Company still had its Spice Monopoly in mind while framing its botanical institutions. The VOC controlled the Spice Islands and with the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, the East India Company took advantage of its large military presence in the Southern part of the Peninsula and captured Java. Once again another Scotsman, Col Colin Mackenzie who collected and collated histrical documents in South India, teamed up with Sir Stamford Raffles another Scot to collect documents and historical artifacts from the Island of Java. Some of these artifacts belonging to the SriVijya Kingdom can be seen in the Museum at Calcutta.

William Roxburgh was perhaps married at the time he lived in Samalkota though ater the death of his wife he ook up with an ndian woman in Calcutta and had a son with her who was educated in Edinburg but unfortunately died before reaching the age of 40. He too was a namesake of his father. The idallyic existence was shattered on the night of May 19th and 20th, 1787. What happended on that fateful night; By the time the night of horror was through, Roxburgh had lost his valuable Library, his drawings of botanical specimens, his Herbarium, his house his house and 10,000 pagodas of cloth.And herein lies a tale.

May is generally not cyclone season along the Coromandel Coast, November is the month when the historically devastating Cyclones of the Coromandl hve struck. Yey Roxburgh writes in his acount that he could feel "great convulsion" from the morning of May 17th. The wind he says blew hard from the North East and Roburgh was a keen metreologists as he kept a detailed record of Tides and Winds during his stay at Madras measuing high tide every day. In fact his first published essay in The Journal of the Royal Society was a record of Tides he maintained at Madras, now Chennai. Roxburgh did sate that the weather was unusual at this season. And he goes on to sate that "we did not apprehend that it would become more ferocious, but on the night of the 19th t night it increased to a hard Gale and on 20th in the morning it blew a perfect hurricne". Waves to the hright of narly 15 feet came crashing on the sleeping inhabitants of Coringa and Samalkota. Roxburgh and his wife escaped the storm by taking refuge in ahouse built on top of a hill and in the morning when they ventured  out saw death and devastation all around. He estimated that about 10,000 people had been killed in this freak perfect hurricane in an unsual time of the year.

Can the unusual storm and surge of the Sea which rose to the height of nearly 15 feet be expalined in terms of a tsunami caused by an erruption in the volcano in the Andaman chain, the one in Barren Island. There is a piece of evidnce in the historical record publised by Colebroke that recorded the erruption of the Barren Island volcano just a few days before the Sea surged towatd Samalkotta and Coringa. A sailor saw columns of smoke asending from the summit of the volcano from a distance of 7 leagues.

Thus the unusual fury of the May 19-20 Sea sure recorded by William Roxburgh may have been the effect of this Indian Ocean volcanic eruption'

To be continued in Part III

Sir Rollo Gillespie and the Battle of Nalapani: Why Nepla's Claim holds no water

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Today's Newpaper headline screams about the territorial assertions made by the Prime Minister of Nepal and India has rightly rejected his claim that it lacks historical merit, And what exactly is the historical merit India has so boldly claimed. We will address that issue and History offers us the only correct way of dealing with such controversies. Does Nepal have truth on its side or is the Prime Minister Grand Standing his new Patrons, the Chinese.

Much of Indian political landscape was shaped in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the Mughal Empires declined and new powers arose to fill the space evacuvated by the Fall of the Mughal Empire. Sir Jadunath Sarkar was spot on when he arued that the dyning Mughal Empire was more significant to India than the Empire at its peak. The new power of course was the Easi India Company whose "corporate violence and pillage" as Darlymple put is framed the political and military history of India fr nealy a century and to this we maust add the important role played by Maharaja Ranjt Singh and the short lived Sikh kingdom which essentially stopped the Tibetans and the Nepalese from occupyig parts of India east of the Sutlej and if Ladhak is an integral part of India it is due to the successful occupation of Lahsa by the forces of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The Nepal warlord Amar Singh Thapa tried to take the fort of Kangra but the Sikh forces drove him out

Political change was on the horizon in the Kingdom of Gorakh as well. Prithivi Narayan Shah tried unifying the kingdom of Nepal and set his eyes on the land beyon the Ghandaki river especially the region of Gharwal whose ruler suought the support of the East India Company; The expansion into Tibet was repulsed by the Chinese who in turn imposed the Treaty of Betrawati on Nepal by which Nepal agreed to pay tribute to China and lost its sovereignty to the Middle Kingdom. The Prime Minister of Nepal is following the same dangerous game today.

Sir Rollo Gillespie

There is a saying in Nepal: With the merchants come the musket with the Bible the Bayonet. This popular saying refers to the circumstances surrounding the Anglo Nepal War which arose out of territorial disputes and the demand for Down a soft wool a very valuable commodity. The notoriously tempramental river the Mahakali was officially recognized as the boundary and herein lay the oot of the conflict.

The historical considerations that the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India alludes to are the making of one man, Sir Rollo Gillepie.In South India he is reviled as the butcher of Vellore when in July 1806 he led a small contingent of arounf 100 native and European troops scaled the ramparts of the Vellore Fort within which a Mutiny had taken place in the morning of July 8 when the troops massacred around 300 or so Europeans in their beds. Gillespie had earler served with distinction in Jamaica and after the suppression of the Vellore Mutiny he was sent to Java where he succeeded in capturing Jakarta. Gellespie was brutal as he was brave and both in Java and in Vellore he left benind a trail of blood and gore.The first recorded use of the Anglo Saxon method of mass execution by tying soldiers to the cannon and blowing them to bits was introduced by Rollo Gillespie to be followed ears lated by General Neill during the Distrurbances of 1857.

In 1814 Rollo Gellespie commanded the East India Company troops at the Battle of Nalapani where the troops of the the Nepal Army were soundly defeated and that victory paved the way for the signing of the Treaty of Sugauli by which the entire Terrai and the gharwal region of Nepal was annexed in  1816. And so India is quite right in assering its rights over the region that Nepal now claims. As for Rollo Gillespie he died in the Battle of Nalapani in 1814 and his remains were transported to Meerut where he lies burried in the St John's Church.

Gillespie Memorial

In this neglected graveyard is the Grave of the warrior to whom India is indebted for acquiring by conquest the Terrai region of the present day state of Uttarakhand.

I wish Indian Historians will leave their obsession with the so called National Movement and move on to the study of issues like this which have a bearing on India its strategic and domestic interests.

William Roxburgh and Indian Botany Plants Empire and Trade

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

William Roxburgh

The Scottsh Enlightenment had a profound impact on India and historians have failed to study the impact of the intellectual movement that emerged as a consequence of the Act of Union, 1707. I have been studying a number of Scots who worked in India during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; Mark Wilks, Colin Mackenzie, and am now beginning a more detailed study of William Roxburgh. My work on Col Mark Wilks has been cited in the latest English Historical Review and have worked earlier on Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India. I now hope to write a longer work on the Scottish Nation in India and its contribution to the understanding of India, it History, Literature and the Natural World. Obviously an Intllectual History of the sort we propose sits uncomfortably with the modern notions of post colonial study which negates the very idea that the past is accessible to human knowledge and is open to truthful and rational investigation. With these words let me move on to the study of William Roxburgh.

Government House Madras, Chennai

Perhaps the most honoured botanist of his day and was second only to Sir Joseph Banks. William Roxburgh was educated at the University of Edinburgh which was the instirutional centre of the Scottish Enlightenment' Born in 1751 Roxburgh died in 1815 and came from a family that had close ties with Henry Dundas who was the Chairman of the Board of Control of the East India Company and an influential politician in Georgian England. roxburgh stdied under John Hope who initiated the young William into the world of botanical study. Botany was still in its infancy, though the Royal Gardens of Kensington and Kew had been established it was under Sir Joseph Banks that these botanical gardens became centers of an ever widening web of botanical exchange, ropagation of plants and collection of seeds for further reseach and study. Indeed the very establishment of the Botanical Garden at Kew was itself a Scottish foundation as it owed its origin to John Stuart, the Earl of Bute in the 1760s. With the intervention of hs patrons in the Company establihsment, William Roxburgh got a position as Assistant Surgeon in the Madras Headquarters of the East India Company. Arriving in Madras after rounding the Cape of Good Hope in May 1776. The job of the Assistant Surgeo seems to have been extremely light as roxburgh found the time to indulge his passion for collecting botanical specimens.

Botanical nvestigation was rather chaotic in the early eighteenth century, a situation that was destined to change due to the theoretical and empirical work of the great Swedish naturalist Charles Linnaeus. The plants were studied on the bais of their external charecteristics rather than the inherent sexual and reproductive functions which were performed in numerous ways by plants. Linneaus introduced the taxonomic method by which the charecteristic features of plants were studied according to its Taxonomic feature, generic features and thereby the species was identified. The morphology of plants and their parts were studied in a scientific manner and Herberia were manitained for ready reference.

In Madras now renamed Chennai, Roxburgh mt Dr Koenig a pupil of Dr Charles Linneaus. Koenig was associated with the Danish settlemnt of Tranquebar, a notorious slaving station on the coromandel coast run by the Dutch East India Company and of course Protestant missionaries like Ziegenbang did not find anything offensive ethically or morally in the odious trae of indegenous people as slaves. Both Roxburgh and Koenig went of Plant collection expeditions all over the Coromandel region collecting specimens. The East India Company was particularly interested i economically beneficial plants like Teak, Indigo and of course Spices. We do not know what happened to this early collection. When Koenig died he left his papes to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society. In 1781 Roxburgh was transferred to Samalkota, near the estuary of the River Godavari and the wild life reserve Forest of Coringa and it was here that a mounumental tragedy struck.

( to be continued in Part II)

From Hortus Malabaricus to Flora Indica: William Roxburgh and Botany

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Horti Malbarici

"A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible", is a well known Welsh proverb. The worlf of Plants and their place in the Natural World has seized the imagination of Poets, Philosophers and Scientists. And in the eighteenth century with the dawn of the Scottish Enlightenment, the search for botanical specimens and their exploitation for economic or medical purposes became a vital ingriedient of the global network of botanical gardens with Kew Garden at the top of the chain and spreading right round the world to places as far distant as St. Helena, Cape Town, Calcutta, Singapore and Penang. Sometimes called Company Gardens these botanical spaces collected stored and transmitted palnt specimens from across the lobe. Till tis day Kew Garden holds the world's largest seed bank and contains Plant Plasma from almost all known species. Eminent botanists like Sir Joseph Banks the Patron of the famous William Roxburgh ( 1751-1815) were associated with and worked for the Collections now located in Kew and Kensington Gardens. The exchange of seeds and botanical specimens rom the tropical world to the Americas is a story that needs to be revisited as the prticipation of "natives" in this process is largely ignored and white scientists are given almost a divine stature in existing literature.

The expnsion of the European world into parts of Asia and Africa was the first step that enabled the systematic transfer of Asian botanical knowledge acquired over centuries of reflection to networks of knowledge exchange that sprung up all along the maritime routes linking Asia to Europe. India was the first Asian Civilization ro be plundered of its traditional knowledge and once plundered rendered illlegitimate in the eyes of the newwly triumphant West. A good example is the creation and publication of the Hortus Malbaricus whose title page is illustrated.

The Dutch East India Company or the VOC was in Asia even before Queen Elizabeth I granted the Charter to Gentlemen Traders on the last day of December 1600. The VOC comanded the Cape of Good Hope and had a significant presence in Java with Batavia as the centre of an ever expanding web of exchange involving Plants, Slaves and Missionaries. The Spice Islands which produced the spices of the world which were in great demand like Nutmeg, Cinnamon,Pepper and Cloves. And to facilitate the cultivation of such spices and economically useful plants it was necessary to appropriate local knowledge and with Kochi falling into the hands of the Dutch the path was opened for systematic exploitation of indigenous knowledge. The Portuguese had already started the process in Goa but their addicion to religious propaganda and the Inquisition left them with little time to pursue more academic ends'

The Governor of the Dutch territory along the Mlabar with Cochin now Kochi as the capital was Hendrik van Rheede who conceived of the idea of assembling the entire botanical kingdom of the Western Ghats into a lage compendium which would enhance the Materia Medica available to the western world. The capture of local medicinal knowledge was vital as the soldiers from Europe were following seriously ill with tropical diseases for which the dark skinned native seemed to have the cure with herbs plant extracts and the like. Over a period of 30 yeas the Flora of the Western Ghats was collected illustrated and published in Netherlands. It may be added that Hortus Malabaricus which has been translated into English by Dr Manilal, a botanist and Historian from Kerala. The 12 volumes with rich illustrations was one of the most expensive publications of the time and only 6 complete copies of this great work are known to exist and none in India.

Th extract local knowledge and its  medical uses it was necessary to involve local bearers of knowledge: Ranga Bhatt, Vinayaka Bhatt and Appu Bhatt along with a vaidhya of the Ezhava Community Itty Achutan were the ones who collected the specimens and gave the names in malayalam language. Here again we find that the exchange of knowledge was facilitated by men who were willing to collaborate. From Malayalam the name were translated into Portuguese and then a Latin trnaslation was made. The myriad linguistic registers involved and the expense of makinf the Copper engravings of the Plants as illustrations and the publication of the huge volumes all show how valuable the local  knowledge was. If Intllectual Property is claimed over this knowlefge the entire Pharmacuetical Industry of Europe and  America will collapse.

The 12 volumes desribed in detail 742 plants and since the taxa of Charles Linneaus was still a century away, the classification was made using local principles. Unfortunately the herbarium records of this Project were lost and the plants in this splendid volume can be identified only up to the generic level. The morphology of plants was not understood when Hortus was completed. The creation of this spectacular work itself stimulated botanical collections in India and other parts of the world'

                                            (to be continued in Part II)