India Discovered (36 page)

Authors: John Keay

Tags: #History, #Historiography, #Asia, #General

There only remained the production of a standard work of reference on
the subject. Roxburgh’s
Flora lndica
was far from comprehensive and was, anyway, incomplete. Several other works on the flora of particular areas had appeared and it was by using these, as well as drawing on their own collections from north India and the Himalayas, that Thomas Thomson, another Scottish medico-botanist, and Joseph Hooker set about a new
Flora Indica
in the 1850s. Volume One appeared
in 1855, Thomson himself covering the cost. It was hoped that the government would see the value of the work and finance the remaining volumes. But, at this rate, the subject was expected to run to some 12,000 pages, or twenty further volumes. The government procrastinated, Thomson was called away to take charge of the Calcutta botanical garden, and the project lapsed. It was not, however, forgotten
and in 1870 Hooker revived it on a reduced scale. With official backing and a new staff of collaborators he laboured away at Kew Gardens for a further twenty-seven years until the last of the seven volumes of
Indian Flora
was published.

Hooker, the greatest of all British botanists and the friend and colleague of Darwin, had made botanical forays in India, Nepal and Tibet; but he never served
in India and never had reason to identify with the country. In Darjeeling he was privileged to win the affection of Brian Hodgson and even to stay in his house. Hodgson became ‘one of my dearest friends on earth’ and he named a celebrated rhododendron, as well as one of his children, after him. But it seems doubtful whether Hooker ever really understood the strange passion that fired such a man.
The botanist was all youthful enthusiasm and curiosity. Hodgson, now surrounded by cats and shunning all society, seemed impossibly aloof and eccentric, lost amidst his books and his multifarious enquiries. In age there were seventeen years between the two men, but it could have been fifty. Hooker represented all that was modern in terms of science and scholarship, Hodgson recalled the older, wider
traditions and the looser disciplines of Jones or Mackenzie.

Meanwhile, following the example of Madras and Calcutta, other botanical gardens had sprung up in different parts of India. At Saharanpur north-east of Delhi, John Forbes Royle, yet another Scottish medico-botanist, made an important collection of flora from Kashmir and the western Himalayas. The Saharanpur garden was located in what
had originally been a Moghul garden, and though planned as much for research as for amenity value, it no doubt provided useful experience for the later rescue of more famous Moghul gardens. The lovely sunken parterres between the palaces of Dig in Rajasthan furnish an even better example than the Taj of how the formality of a Moghul garden could be complemented by the horticultural and botanical
skills of the British.

Later in the nineteenth century Saharanpur became famous for its collection of fruit trees. Likewise, the Madras gardens concentrated on the growing of tobacco, pepper and cardamom. All the gardens were in fact as much government research stations as pleasure groves, and from them went out the steady stream of seeds and seedlings which gradually changed the pattern of Indian
agriculture. In 1835 Hodgson announced from Kathmandu, ‘I am felling, and digging, and sowing potatoes and oats – yea, with my own proper hands.’ Both crops were recent introductions and it was said that, if the British disappeared from India overnight, the extent of their influence in the country could still be clearly measured by studying the distribution of the potato. Bishop Heber agreed,
regarding it as ‘perhaps the most valuable present they [the people of Kumaon, in this case] are likely to receive from their new masters’. He was not so much denigrating the benefits of British rule as extolling the virtues of this new addition to the staple diet.

All this was, of course, before the arrival of more celebrated products. At Saharanpur, Royle was already advocating the introduction
of a Peruvian tree known as chinchona. The name came from that of a Spanish contessa who had been cured of fever by taking a liquid extracted from its bark. In the 1880s Clements Markham revived Royle’s idea and, through the botanical gardens, chinchona was successfully established in India. As quinine, it did as much to reduce deaths from malaria as, later, did DDT.

Another crop with which Hodgson,
amongst others, experimented was the tea bush. As early as 1778 Sir Joseph Banks, the great naturalist and promoter of exploration, had recommended tea to the East India Company as a crop that might profitably be introduced into India. He even suggested that, with the seeds or shrubs, some Chinese planters should also be imported. Banks urged Lord Macartney’s mission to China – the same that
included Dr Dinwiddie and the surveying instruments ultimately acquired by Lambton – specifically to investigate this possibility. Seeds and plants were apparently forwarded to the Calcutta garden, and in 1819 Dr Wallich was able to supply both to an official anxious to experiment with the crop in Assam.

But the real breakthrough came with the discovery, both there and in Nepal, of an indigenous
tea plant. In its wild state this was more a tree than a bush and, during the 1820s, Wallich was unable to confirm whether it was in fact tea or whether it was a camellia. The government, in danger of losing its monopoly of the China tea trade and faced with an insatiable demand from the British tea drinker, now moved fast. A committee was set up to investigate the subject, a mission was despatched
to China to acquire more seeds and know-how, and Wallich was sent to investigate the Assam trees. He not only confirmed that they were tea but also discovered that they were much more widespread than was thought.

The result of the researches of the tea-deputation despatched to Assam under Dr Wallich, respecting the tea plant in that country, gives every reason to expect that tea will become in a short time a prime article of export from India. The plant has been found in extensive natural plantations and the localities are such as to encourage the belief that it exists far more extensively than has been actually discovered, and to warrant the conclusion that Assam, and our northern frontier generally, will afford the most ample field for tea-cultivation of every variety.

Three
years later, in 1839, the first Indian tea was offered for auction in London. By the end of the century it had completely ousted the China variety and India was the largest grower of tea in the world.

The report quoted above of Dr Wallich’s deputation to Assam was published in the Asiatic Society’s journal for 1836. A plump leather-bound volume of 840 pages, it covers a breadth of material that
may be taken as typical for any year. The first article is from Charles Masson on his haul of coins from Begram in Afghanistan. Then comes a piece from Hodgson quoting Sanskrit texts in support of his reconstruction of Buddhist beliefs. Then follows a report on the great fossil finds being made in the Siwalik hills, including the bones of a creature the size of an elephant but more like a camel
and with four horns (it was called the Sivatherium after the god Siva). Colonel Stacy reports his find of that Bacchus relief from Mathura and there is news of a new pillar inscription in the Gupta script. In this single volume Hodgson contributes twelve articles on new birds and mammals, and Prinsep nearly as many on translations of coins and stone inscriptions.

For the Society 1836 was not
a good year. The Orientalists were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Macaulay in the previous year. Sanskrit studies were virtually proscribed and Prinsep, in his preface, felt constrained to offer some encouragement. There was still ‘a tide of popular favour, or at least a diminutive wave of it’, which reached ‘the secluded estuary of oriental research’. If Calcutta was distinctly
hostile, London, Paris and Vienna still appreciated their studies. The work would go on. ‘We shall ever study to infuse into these pages a pleasing variety of original information on all subjects, of man’s performance or nature’s productions, within the wide range prescribed to us by our allegiance to the Asiatic Society.’ The spirit of Jones lived on.

Author’s Note To Third Edition

When I was writing this book, the ‘orientalist’ scholarship with which it is concerned came in for a savaging at the hands of Professor Edward Said (see his book
Orientalism,
published in 1978). Reviewing Western portrayals of, and investigations into, the Islamic Middle East, Said discerned an ignorant and disparaging commentary prompted by acquisitive and self-serving
motives. This pejorative aspect of ‘orientalism’ has since been enforced by his numerous disciples and critics.
India Discovered
is, however, quite innocent of it. Most of the text was written before Said’s great work appeared, and I doubt whether I would have written it differently had it been otherwise.

India is not like the Middle East and its colonial exposure was of a different order. For
every act of vandalism there were several of conservation, and for every paragraph of orientalist disparagement there was a page of wide-eyed wonder. Both are frankly represented in the text which follows. On balance, though, I believe that to the scholars of the Raj, India’s heritage came to represent not some antithetical ‘other’ to be denigrated and marginalized but a spectacular survival with
which they were anxious and proud to be associated, a jewel, indeed, in the crown. Of course such studies gratified the imperialist mind-set. No scholarship is entirely disinterested, be it orientalist or a critique of the same.

Just as the intellectual climate has changed, so has my own perspective. Since this book was written I have learned much more about Indian history. The jaunty assertion
in the Introduction that India’s early history is devoid of the personalities and anecdotes which make the past palatable cannot go unchallenged. As the author of a recent work replete with just such detail
(India: A History),
I stand severely self-corrected. There are other generalizations which, were I writing this book today, I would avoid, although they scarcely detract from what is essentially
an account of eighteenth-nineteenth century enquiry. And there are instances, particularly in respect of Harappan studies (Chapter 12), where the pace of current research means that anything in print is already out of date.

The book originally appeared under the same title but in a large format with many colour illustrations. This smaller format makes for more manageable reading and the new illustrations
convey a greater sense of period. They were collected by Joy Law, to whom I am most grateful.

Argyll, January 2001

Sources and Bibliography

In a book of this nature it seemed inappropriate to burden the text with references and notes. The sources quoted at length are, in any case, generally self evident from the context. Likewise, the publications listed below no more represent an exhaustive bibliography of the subject than they do the extent of my own reading. They are simply those which have been found most
relevant. In particular I should like to single out the journals of the various Asiatic Societies – especially those of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta). They are the fields whence this story has been garnered. (Except where otherwise stated the place of publication is London).

PRIMARY SOURCES