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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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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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• Sangeeta Rajbhandary (Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University),
• 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

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Abstract: In western eyes Nepal remained an enigmatic terra incognita until the end of the 18th Century when a Chinese invasion gave the Honorable East India Company (EIC) the opportunity to send a mediating diplomatic mission to Kathmandu in 1793. William Kirkpatrick led this seven-week expedition, accompanied by surgeon-naturalist Adam Freer. Although no botanical collections are known from this expedition, Edinburgh-trained Freer would have taken notes and these probably formed the basis of discussions on medicinal plants in Kirkpatrickís An Account of the Kingdom of Nepal (1811).

The signing of an Anglo-Gurkha trade treaty in 1801 provided a better opportunity for exploration and when Captain Knox took up the post of Resident in Kathmandu in 1802 he took with him Francis Buchanan, another surgeon-naturalist and Edinburgh alumnus. Buchanan (later Hamilton, and known botanically as Buchanan-Hamilton) made good use of his 14-month stay in Nepal, recording over 1100 species, collecting some 1500 herbarium specimens (mostly now at LINN-SMITH and BM), preparing over 100 coloured drawings (LINN) and sending over 100 batches of seed and living material back to William Roxburgh in Calcutta. In 1810 and 1813/14 Buchanan was stationed close to the Nepalese frontier and took the opportunity to send local collectors over the boarder to gather economically important plants. Buchanan acquired specimens of a further 100 Nepalese species this way, forming part of his Bengal Survey collections of more than 2000 specimens which Nathaniel Wallich distributed as part of the EIC Herbarium. Buchanan retained a duplicate set for himself that is now at E.

After the Anglo-Gurkha war in 1816, at Buchanan’s request, Wallich arranged for the new British Resident in Kathmandu, the Hon. Edward Gardner, to send back living plants and herbarium specimens to Wallich in Calcutta. Gardner and his team collected many plants between 1817-1820, and Wallich sent all the specimens to London (now at LINN-SMITH and BM). Wallich either sent seeds back to Britain (some to Buchanan and RBG Edinburgh) or tried to grow them in the Botanical Garden in Calcutta. Wallich himself visited Nepal in 1820-21, extending the exploration of the Nepalese flora beyond the Kathmandu Valley by employing pilgrims to collect plants up to the alpine zone around Gossainthan (Gossainkund). Wallich amassed more than 1700 herbarium specimens from Nepal and distributed them as part of the EIC Herbarium (K, K-W, BM, E, CAL, G-DC, etc.) in which 1834 plants are from Nepal.

In the following years many hundreds of new species were described from these early collections in publications such as Wallichís Tentamen florae Napalensis Illustratae (1824-26), Plantae Asiaticae Rariores (1830-32) and A Numerical List of dried specimens of Plants in the East India Company (1828-49). David Donís monumental work Prodromus Florae Nepalensis (1825) was based on the collections of Buchanan and Gardner (wrongly attributed to Wallich) and alone accounted for over 800 species. These early collections, particularly those in the Wallich distribution, are very important for the taxonomic study of Nepalese plants, but they are unavailable to botanists in Nepal. To facilitate use of these collections, high quality digital images of the specimens in the UK and scattered around world are urgently needed.

Biography: Sangeeta Rajbhandary and Krishna Shrestha are plant taxonomists and senior lectures in the Central Department of Botany, Tribhuvan University. They have a long interest in the historical collections of western botanists in Nepal, including extended study visits to the Natural History Museum, and Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh and Kew. Mark Watson is also a plant taxonomist, and since 1991 has been based at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. His expertise lies in Sino-Himalayan Floristics and he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Flora of Nepal project. In recent years he has developed an interest on the often misunderstood historic collections that relate to Nepal, in particular those of Francis Buchanan-Hamilton and Edward Gardner.
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