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Event Date: 6 December 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London SW7 5BD

Wallich and Indian Natural History:
Collection Dispersal and the Cultivation of Knowledge

This international, interdisciplinary conference will be held on the 6th and 7th December, 2011 at the Natural History Museum, London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew on the general theme of South Asian natural history collections, with a special emphasis on those of the Danish botanist Nathaniel Wallich (1786–1854). Wallich is a major figure in the history and development of botany in the nineteenth century. As Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden between 1817 and 1846, he undertook botanical expeditions, described new plant species, collected thousands of plant specimens amassing a large herbarium, and commissioned local artists to draw beautiful botanical watercolours. His work has therefore been extremely influential in South Asian natural history research.

Major South Asian natural history collections from the 18th and 19th century are now dispersed across institutions in South Asia, Europe and beyond. This conference will explore the challenges associated with studying and exploiting such collections and the interesting opportunities they provide for interdisciplinary research. It forms an integral part of the World Collections Programme-funded project “Wallich and Indian Natural History”, the first inter-institutional endeavour of its kind between the Natural History Museum, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Library. In particular, this project is creating an exciting new website (coming soon) which supports a virtual collection of the plant drawings, specimens and correspondence of Nathaniel Wallich.

In celebration of this project, a group of distinguished international speakers has been brought together to present papers covering a wide range of different disciplines. They will speak on the first day of the conference at the Natural History Museum. Day two, held at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, will provide a unique opportunity to see a wide range of Wallich and related materials (including original drawings and herbarium collections) behind the scenes at Kew. We welcome everyone interested in natural history, art history, botany, South Asian studies, social history, history of the British Empire, museum studies and digital humanities to join us for what we anticipate will be a very stimulating conference.

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Programme

Welcome by Professor Philip Rainbow (Keeper of Zoology, NHM) .

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Opening Remarks (Julie Harvey, CAHR Centre)

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Panel 1 - Nathaniel Wallich: His Expeditions and Collections

(Chair: Dr B. Venugopal, Director, National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi)

David Arnold (Department of History, University of Warwick)
Nathaniel Wallich and the Natural History of India
[AUDIO HERE]

Bodhisattva Kar (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, and the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam)
Frontier, Collected: Nathaniel Wallich in the North-Eastern Frontier of British India
[AUDIO HERE]

Sangeeta Rajbhandary (Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University), and
Krishna K. Shrestha (Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University), Mark F. Watson (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh)
Wallich and the First Explorations of the Nepalese Flora
[AUDIO HERE]

Panel 1 Discussion

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Panel 2 – Dispersal and Movement within the British Empire

(Chair: Professor Felix Driver, Professor of Human Geography, Royal Holloway College, University of London)

Sandip Hazareesingh (Department of History, The Open University)
Plants, Power and Productivity: The East India Company and Cotton Imperialism in Early Nineteenth-Century Western India
[AUDIO HERE]

Caroline Cornish (Department of Geography, Royal Holloway College, University of London)
Circulating India: Kew, Colonial Forestry and Circuits of Display
[AUDIO HERE]

Kapil Raj (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Title TBC
[AUDIO HERE]

Panel 2 Discussion

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Panel 3. The Wallich Project
(Chair: Dr Vinita Damodaran, Senior Lecturer in South Asian History, University of Sussex)

Henry Noltie (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh)
Scottish Surgeons and Indian Botany: Dispersed Collections of Drawings and Specimens, a Case Study from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
[AUDIO HERE]

Antonia Moon (British Library) and Charlie Jarvis (Natural History Museum)
Wallich’s Papers at the British Library and Beyond
[AUDIO HERE]

Timothy Utteridge (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew), Clare Drinkell (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) and Ranee Prakash (Natural History Museum) The Wallich Plant Illustrations in London: Identification and Dissemination
[AUDIO HERE]
Panel 3 Discussion

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Closing Remarks (Julie Harvey, CAHR Centre) .

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conference images:

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Event Date: 6 December 2011
Flett Lecture Theatre
Natural History Museum
London SW7 5BD

Wallich and Indian Natural History:
Collection Dispersal and the Cultivation of Knowledge

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Henry Noltie (Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh)
Scottish Surgeons and Indian Botany: Dispersed Collections of Drawings and Specimens, a Case Study from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh

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Abstract: In the library of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is a gigantic filing system known as the ëIllustrationsí or Cuttings Collection. This contained about 250, 000 herbarium sheets bearing visual representations of plants, ranging from newspaper cuttings to original drawings. Used as a taxonomic tool (to supplement herbarium specimens) the arrangement was purely taxonomic, with all related historical information on artists, patrons, original collections and provenance lost. Familiar with the collection from his Indian taxonomic studies, the author, in 1998, started to extract and reorganise a vast corpus of more or less entirely unknown drawings by Indian artists, as it was only by reconstituting the original collections that their history and significance could be reconstructed ñ in some ways analogous to making a natural classification to replace an artificial one based on the single ëcharacterí of the name of the plant depicted. The largest part of the Indian material emerged once to have formed a diverse collection assembled by the pioneering Indian forest conservator H.F.C. Cleghorn (1820-1895) containing literally thousands of original drawings made from life, and tracings from botanical works, documenting his travels and researches, some used for teaching purposes at the Madras Medical College, and some relating to the Madras Exhibitions of the 1850s. But far more emerged: notably a collection of drawings made for Alexander Gibson (1800-1867), another pioneering forest conservator, relating both to his forest travels in Western India and the garden of the Bombay Presidency that he superintended at Dapuri. Of pre-eminent taxonomic importance were the drawings made by two Telugu artists, Rugiah and Govindoo, for the Madras surgeon Robert Wight (1796-1872). Major monographs on the Gibson and Wight collections have resulted. In this talk I will discuss how this research was undertaken, in order to rediscover the histories of these collections, and to re-establish links between the drawings with drawings in other collections, with related documentary sources, and with herbarium specimens, in Scotland, England (especially Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library) and India, together with field excursions to the sites where the work (in many ways a joint Indian-British enterprise) was originally created. The talk will also discuss the importance of the copying of drawings and the transmission of visual knowledge ñ in particular the role of Nathaniel Wallich in the creation of two sets of copies made from the pre-eminent Roxburgh Icones at Calcutta Botanic Garden. This will illuminate both positive and negative aspects of Wallichís enigmatic character.

Biography: Henry Noltie has been based at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh since 1986. With degrees both in botany and museum studies, his work has included taxonomy (specialising on monocots of the Sino-Himalayan region) and curating exhibitions relating to the RBGEs historical collections. For the last decade his work has revolved around the history of Indian botany, especially on the drawings made for Scottish East India Company surgeons by Indian artists.

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