Who were the unsung artists behind colonial India’s rich botanical paintings?

"These are palimpsests that combine art and science,” says taxonomist, curator and botanical historian Henry J. Noltie by way of explaining the paintings we are looking at. Created in the 18th and 19th centuries by Indian artists, these works were meant to record the abundance of flora and fauna that the subcontinent held, mostly at the behest of the officers at the East India Company (EIC) and, later, by British authorities after the EIC was dissolved. The taxonomic principle is so strongly at work that some of the paintings remain only partially coloured, just enough for a botanist to glean a fuller picture from the faint outlines.

We are meeting on a particularly bleak morning in Delhi at his publisher’s office to talk about Noltie’s latest work, Flora Indica, a handsomely produced catalogue accompanying a show at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London (on till 12 April). The book’s subtitle, Recovering Lost Stories From Kew’s Indian Drawings, signals the intentions behind this project—to appreciate the rich history of botanicals from the subcontinent while also making reparations to the artists who made these works and remain unsung to this day.

Noltie, who has spent his long career working at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, took up the daunting task of going through more than 7,500 botanical paintings that lie in the collection at Kew and selecting just a handful for the exhibition. Working with historian and independent researcher Sita Reddy, he organised the show, as well as the book, under three broad thematics: “The life of the paintings, the lives of the artists who made these, and the afterlife of the works and their makers,” as he says. The focus of this selection is on paintings from North India, from herbariums in Saharanpur and Calcutta (now Kolkata). The works from the south reveal other styles and stories. What emerges from this exercise is not just a slice of history but also a jigsaw puzzle that is fascinating and complex, cohering in parts but far from finished.

The scholarly interest in recovering the identities of a group of artists who worked in 18th and 19th century India and were, until recently, lumped together under the rubric “Company School” has gathered momentum in recent years. In 2019, historian William Dalrymple curated Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting For The East India Company at the Wallace Collection in London, which showcased a wide range of paintings by artists like Mazhar Ali Khan, Yellapah of Vellore, Shaikh Zain ud-Din, Bhawani Das and Manu Lall. Apart from the sheer diversity of their subjects—focusing on the flora, fauna, and peoples of India—the exhibition made the world aware of the different approaches adopted by the painters.

Noltie’s work takes this effort a step ahead by humanising some of the artists in ways that hadn’t quite been done before. In the course of his archival sleuthing, for instance, he found a touching letter from Vishnuprasad, a senior artist, writing to his former boss, Nathaniel Wallich, who “had just returned to his post of Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden after an absence in Europe of nearly five years,” to quote Noltie. Apart from it being a supplication to be reinstated to Calcutta from his current post in Saharanpur, Vishnuprasad’s letter, with its faulty English, gives him a personality that the “Company School” had long anonymized.

The blame for this erasure lies with the patrons who had originally commissioned the paintings. Only in rare instances, a colonial sahib would take the trouble to inscribe the name of the artist who had made a painting. More commonly, the works were known by the collections they were part of—such as the Fraser Album, which Dalrymple drew on, or the commissions by Scottish botanist and surgeon William Roxburgh (1751-1815). Even great scholars, like the late B.N. Goswamy didn’t think it worthwhile to exhume the names of the artists from the oblivion into which they had been thrust. More recently, scholars have started paying closer attention to the paper trail that accompanied the paintings, making discoveries about the provenance of the work as well as the hands behind them.

Noltie, for instance, was lucky to stumble on a set of stylistically intriguing paintings and trace them back to their makers, thanks to Adam Freer (1747-1811), who was rather scrupulous about attributing credit to the artists who worked under him. In other cases, labels stuck on the paintings claim these were the handiwork of British artists like Mary Govan, but such anomalies, Noltie explains, are due to later additions made by the successors of the families. Govan, however, was a trained artist herself and did add her own embellishments to some of the works made by Indian artists.

In spite of their less than respectful attitude to the painters, the British masters did not compensate them badly. Compared to the wages of the gardeners and other staff, the artists made a far better income. Some of the kinder patrons, like Hugh Falconer (1808-65) for instance, lobbied with the authorities to pay a pension to the widows of some of the deceased painters. Talent often triumphed over truants, as in the case of Lutchman Singh, who sowed his wild oats and got into trouble as a young man, but was bailed out by his masters for his exceptional gift (Noltie describes him as a “loveable rogue”). In the end, Singh had a long and prosperous career spanning several decades. Presumably, he was paid well enough to survive into old age at a time when life expectancy was far less than what it is today.

Like most colonial projects, the botanical mission, too, was an expression of the urge to control, tame and classify. Historian Eugenia W. Herbert’s 2013 study Flora’s Empire: British Gardens in India showed that the “garden imperialism” of the British was yet another means to fill the coffers of the Raj, be it through poppy farming or tea plantations. “The officials who commissioned these paintings were not ecologists,” Noltie clarifies, “though they were deeply interested in natural history.”

There are instances, however, such as in the painting of a fern, where it is evident that climatic and environmental changes have indeed impacted certain species over the centuries. Where once the tree used to grow to be several metres tall (as it is depicted in scale next to a Lepcha person), it no longer does so. Once these valuable paintings are digitised and made accessible to a wider community of scholars, maybe more such revelations will come to light.