The botanical roots of Empire | London exhibition on Indian botanical art

The story of empire is the story of humans—that is how it is taught and generally understood. But what if it is, in fact, the story of plants? Poppies, pepper, nutmeg, cotton, tea—the British Empire was powered by plants. This botanical perspective is in fascinating focus at the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, currently.Flora Indica: Recovering Lost Histories of Indian Botanical Art is an exhibition of 52 works by Indian artists between 1790 and 1850. They represent a tiny proportion of the more than 7,000 in Kew Gardens’ unique archive commissioned by representatives of the East India Company. It has been put together by one of the world’s leading experts on Indian botanical art, Dr Henry Noltie, and Hyderabad-based scholar and curator Dr Sita Reddy. I talked to them about how they had arrived at this particular selection, and what a story they were trying to tell. BOTANIST, CURATOR, DETECTIVE: Dr Henry Noltie is a leading expert on Indian botanical art (Photo: Hardik Chhabra) “Easier to say what we left out,” says Reddy, “there was such an embarrassment of riches.” They decided to concentrate on North India, and largely to avoid well-known medicines and spices, selecting only works that held the richest and most layered stories: botanical, sociological and historical. And crucially, to bring these hitherto unknown artists out of anonymity and name them.The exhibition is arranged in four softly lit galleries, the first of which is simply called ‘The Artists’ Room’. There was scant information to go on, but with forensic detail and painstaking cross-referencing, Noltie has been able to identify no fewer than 21 largely unknown Indian artists. It is almost as if these shadowy figures—Lutchman Singh, Kareem Bux, Kasim Ali and Vishnuprasad, Bhagoban Chaterjee and Ramanath Banerjee and others—step into the light to stand by their work two centuries later. The exhibition also includes the work of one unnamed artist, in acknowledgement of the many who still remain unnamed and unknown..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}The next two rooms showcase the botanical gardens in Calcutta and Saharanpur, with the last room dedicated to Bihar, Awadh and Bengal and the paintings commissioned by Scottish surgeon Adam Freer (1793-1820) and the French soldier Claude Martin (1790s).Each painting deserves close attention. The ‘exquisite stylisation of the infloresence’ of vetiver (Chrysopogon zizanoides) had me gazing, in awe, for several minutes. The curators believe this work was made between 1826 and 1832 by an unknown artist; the Devanagari script notes it was drawn in Karnal and is known by the local name pamni.In the two glass display cases, you get a three-dimensional sense of the collection—plates from the original books, the painting of the plant alongside the dried, preserved original specimen. In one, there is an astonishing find—discovered by Henry Noltie—of a painting with a pop-up flap. The original painting of a pine (Pinus gerardiana), possibly by Vishnuprasad, did not have a cone, so the artist added one later, attaching it with two folded paper straps, aligning each pine needle with incredible precision. 'FLORA INDICA: Recovering Lost Stories From Kew’s Indian Drawings' by Henry Noltie | ROLI BOOKS | Rs. 2,495 | 224 pages It is difficult to get one’s head around the sheer scale of Noltie’s undertaking in delving into the archive to recover and reorder this vast collection. “When a collection came into Kew, the only interest in it was taxonomic.... All the paintings were dispersed.” Paintings which had two different species on one sheet—such as the Himalayan balsam—were cut up and filed separately. Thanks to Noltie’s combination of botanical knowledge, curatorial skill and dogged detective work, severed paintings have been made whole, collections reassembled and individual artists reunited with their works. “It’s a combination of detective work, botany, art history, archive work, translationsit all comes together,” he says. Reddy underlines the importance of this: “There’s nobody who would be able to do that with Indian botanical art. We call it ‘Henry’s method’.”Flora Indica is a superb exhibition, and one that they hope will travel to India. Working around the financial, logistical and conservation constraints, they intend to have the works printed in India as high quality gicle facsimiles. This, for them, is not simply an artistic ambition, but a moral and political one: an act of restorative justice, decolonialising botanical art history and going some way to finally giving these Indian artists—and their beloved plants—their due.FLORA INDICA is on display at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London, till April 12- EndsPublished By: Mansi Published On: Jan 16, 2026

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The botanical roots of Empire | London exhibition on Indian botanical art

An exhibition of colonial botanical art at London's Kew Gardens gives Indian artists their due

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