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

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Abstract:
This paper introduces the 110 files of India Office Records now digitised for the Wallich project. Ranging from reports and travel accounts to letters and financial statements, these records are a major source of information on Wallich’s career: a direct result of the insistence by the East India Company’s directors that every action of its servants in India be fully reported back to London. We shall explain the administrative context of the documents, draw attention to some of the themes contained within them, and suggest possibilities for new research that their digitisation opens up. We shall briefly compare this collection to Wallich’s surviving papers in Calcutta, and indicate further sources where relevant material might be found.

Biography:
Antonia Moon is Lead Curator, India Office Records (post-1858) at the British Library. She has a particular interest in the archives of colonial science and has led the Library’s contribution to the Wallich project.

Charlie Jarvis is a botanist working at the Natural History Museum in London. He has published extensively on the botanical binomial names published by Carl Linnaeus and the herbarium collections, books and manuscripts that contributed to Linnaeus’ understanding of these numerous species. The biological collections of Hans Sloane are a current research interest. He is also scientific co-ordinator of the Museum’s Centre for Arts and Humanities Research.

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

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Abstract: The Museum of Economic Botany at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was the idea of the first director, William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865), and opened in 1847; a second museum was added ten years later. With audiences including the merchant, the manufacturer, the physician, the chemist, the druggist, the dyer, the carpenter and cabinet-maker, and artisans of every description,[1] the object was to instruct British industry on the wealth of plant resources available throughout the Empire. Woods formed a major component of the museum collections from inception and by 1863 a third museum, dedicated to colonial timbers, was opened in the former Orangery.

Whilst the museums no longer exist, the collections survive as the Economic Botany Collection and provide a rich resource for analysing the movement of collections from South Asia, during and prior to the existence of the Kew museums. Approximately 20,000 specimens of Indian woods are held which were transferred to Kew from EIC officers, the former India Museum, Indian botanic gardens, and numerous other institutions in the sub-continent. Many of the best-known names in imperial botany are represented in them, including Nathaniel Wallich, William Roxburgh, Joseph Hooker, Thomas Anderson, and Hugh Cleghorn.

In this paper, Kewís Indian woods are considered in two contexts: firstly, the rise of Indian forestry; and secondly, the collection and circulation of Indian arts, manufactures, and natural history specimens in both colony and metropole, what Saloni Mathur refers to as cosmopolitan circuits of exhibition and display.[2] I then trace the circuits taken by selected groups of objects, identifying the human actors who collaborated in their mobilisation, considering their sites of display, and thus gaining a greater understanding of how the Kew museums contributed to the circulation of India.

What emerges is a decentralised view of the forms in which knowledge of India ( objects, texts, images, people ) circulated within India, between India and other colonies and sovereign states, and within the imperial metropole, in the nineteenth century. This approach inevitably calls into play the role played by indigenous Indians in the production and circulation of scientific knowledge of the subcontinent, and results in a re-inscription of indigenous agency into the narrative of circulating India.

Biography: Caroline Cornish is a third year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a holder of a Thomas Holloway Research Scholarship. Her research project ( Collecting and Curating Science in an Age of Empire ) is focussed on the Kew Museums of Botany from 1847-1939 and is conducted in collaboration with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In October she will undertake a research trip to India to examine historic sites of collecting and displaying economic botany in the sub-continent. She has previously worked in museums and collections at national and regional level.

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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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• Timothy Utteridge (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
• Clare Drinkell (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
• Ranee Prakash (Natural History Museum)

The Wallich Plant Illustrations in London: Identification and Dissemination

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Abstract:

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Natural History Museum, London have extensive holdings of historic plant specimens and associated collections such as illustrations. Recently, both institutes identified several hundred Wallich unpublished illustrations in their collections that had never been properly named. This talk will discuss the project, particularly from a botanical science view and discuss the naming and origins of the illustrations (mostly from Wallich’s trip in Nepal and others from the Calcutta gardens), and show some images of herbarium material that match the illustrations that have been scanned, databased and now be made online. In addition the use of the illustrations in publications will be briefly discussed.

Biography:

Dr. Timothy Utteridge. SE Asia Regional Team, Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Tim is the Acting Head of the South-East Asia team at Kew with interests in several families in the region, especially the Icacinaceae and tropical Primulaceae. Tim was Kew’s Wallich illustration project key staff member who identified the illustrations and attempted to match them to extant herbarium material. Tim has recently taken over the role of the curator of the East India Company Herbarium at Kew (often referred to as the Wallich collection).

Clare Drinkell. SE Asia Regional Team, Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Clare is an assistant botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew with an interest in the tropical Primulaceae and Ebenaceae of South-East Asia. Clare was Kew’s Wallich illustration project key staff member who databased and digitized those specimens associated with the illustrations.

Ranee Prakash. Curator-Flowering Plants, Department of Botany, The Natural History Museum.

Ranee is a curator at the Natural History Museum with a strong interest in the plants of the Indian subcontinent. Before moving to the Natural History Museum, Ranee was a member of the team at Kew that initiated and conducted a major digitization programme of the world’s most important herbarium specimens – the type specimens. Ranee was the Natural History Museum’s Wallich illustration project key staff member who identified and digitized those specimens associated with the illustrations.
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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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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

Abstract: This paper wishes to explore the tensions between the logic of scientific collection, the art of making a frontier and the culture of recording experiences through a critical reconsideration of Nathaniel Wallichís famous travels across the north-eastern frontier of British India in the early eighteen thirties. At one level, this is an effort to complicate the easy collapse of science into colonialism, exploration into extraction, and experience into textual surface. At another, this paper also raises the question of limits and travels. How the commercial mandate of the Tea Committee circumscribed Wallichís botanical investigations, how the imperative of state making was in turn constrained by the conflicting findings of Wallich and his colleagues in the Scientific Deputation, and how the physical experience of travelling in the frontier unsettled the limits of the textual archive that grew out of it: these are some of the questions that this paper addresses. I would like to particularly focus on Wallichís pursuits of tea and rubber, the two commodities which eventually became the main exports from British Assam. In taking an issue with the standard approach to histories of colonial collections that routinely underplays the constitutive experience of travel in the production of scientific archives, my paper tries to raise a set of wider questions about the ethics and politics ofapproaching the archive that Wallich has left us. My sources consist of government documents, Tea Committee papers, Wallichís journals and scientific essays.

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