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Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

DAVID ARNOLD
DAVID ARNOLD*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

The career of the Danish-born botanist Nathaniel Wallich, superintendent of the Calcutta Botanic Garden from 1815 to 1846, illustrates the complex nature of botanical science under the East India Company and shows how the plant life of South Asia was used as a capital resource both in the service of the Company's economic interests and for Wallich's own professional advancement and international reputation. Rather than seeing him as a pioneer of modern forest conservation or an innovative botanist, Wallich's attachment to the ideology of ‘improvement’ and the Company's material needs better explain his longevity as superintendent of the Calcutta garden. Although aspects of Wallich's career and botanical works show the importance of circulation between Europe and India, more significant was the hierarchy of knowledge in which indigenous plant lore and illustrative skill were subordinated to Western science and in which colonial science frequently lagged behind that of the metropolis.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , September 2008 , pp. 899 - 928
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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15 It is, though, indicative of the multi-skilling expected of Company servants that in 1827 Wallich had to cut short his botanical mission to Burma to conduct a post-mortem in a legal case in Calcutta: N. Wallich to C. Lushington, Secretary, Bengal Public, 25 June 1827, Board's Collections (BC) F/4/1068: 29180, IOR.

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33 D. Arnold, Tropics, 61–70. However, even in the late 1820s, Wallich thought of himself as suffering from ‘old age’: N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 7 May 1829, DC 52, RBG.

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46 N. Wallich, 13 August 1832, ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company’, 193–5.

47 N. Wallich 14 August 1832, Ibid., 205–6.

48 N. Wallich to Secretary, Agricultural and Horticultural Society, 9 September 1823. Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, Part I, 1829, 75.

49 N. Wallich, 14 August 1832, ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Commitee on the Affairs of the East India Company’, 200.

50 D. Arnold, ‘Agriculture’, 514–8.

51 N. Wallich, ‘Brief Notice’, 138–9.

52 N. Wallich to Secretary, General, 1 October 1836, BC F/4/1761: 72126.

53 N. Wallich to C. Lushington, 7 February 1822, BC F/4/712: 14960.

54 Lord Auckland, 19 July 1839, BC F/4/1794: 73768.

55 For the fate of these plantations, see BC F/4/2648: 172113.

56 N. Wallich to Secretary, General, 25 May 1820, BC F/4/655: 18040.

57 See the reports of the Plantation Committee, especially 26 June 1823, BPC, 17 July 1823, nos. 33–39.

58 Seventh Report of the Plantation Committee, 6 January 1824, BPC, nos. 25–28, 22 January 1824; N. Wallich to Secretary, General, 20 November 1827, BPC, no. 57, 14 February 1828.

59 In his 1827 report on the Salween teak forests N. Wallich observed that the Company must act or else ‘private enterprise will very soon render fruitless all its endeavours to perpetuate the supplies for the public service, and one of the principal and most certain sources of Revenue will thus be irrevocably lost’: cited in H. Falconer, ‘Report on the Teak Forests of the Tenasserim Provinces’, Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government, vol. IX, Calcutta, Government of Bengal, 1852, 6.

60 Ibid.

61 N. Wallich, 13 August 1832, ‘Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Commitee on the Affairs of the East India Company’, 195–200.

62 As in his early correspondence with W. Hooker: N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 2 September 1818, 13 October 1818 and 8 October 1819, DC 52.

63 N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 2 September 1818, DC 52; N. Wallich to Secretary, Public, 8 April 1820, BC F/4/655:18040.

64 For Burma's ‘botanical and horticultural riches’, see N. Wallich to C. Lushington, 5 September 1827, BC F/4/1068: 29180.

65 ‘List of Plants’, appended to N. Wallich's report to the Government of Bengal, 21 December 1840, BC F/4/1949: 84700.

66 Quoted in Kumar, ‘Evolution’, 53.

67 N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 1 January 1828, DC 43.

68 N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 27 June 1832, DC 53.

69 R. de Candolle and A. Radcliffe-Smith, ‘Nathaniel Wallich and the Herbarium of the Honourable East India Company’, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 83, 1981, 325–48.

70 Wallich identified several new species of orchids, and though not directly involved in their commercial collection and sale, his nephew, Charles Cantor, was: see ‘A List of Terrestrial and Epiphytical Orchideae found in Assam and the Neighbouring Hills’, May 1850, in N. Wallich to G. Bentham, 20 August 1850, Bentham Correspondence.

71 On the links between botany, visual culture and commerce, see Hochstrasser, J. B., ‘The Conquest of Spice and the Dutch Colonial Imaginary: Seen and Unseen in the Visual Culture of Trade’, in Schieberger, L. and Swan, C. (eds), Colonial Botany, 169–86. Wallich's Tentamen Florae Napalensis Illustratae (Serampore, Asiatic Lithograph Press, 1826)Google Scholar was one of the first lithographic works produced in India.

72 N. Wallich, ‘Proposals for Publishing by Subscription . . . Plantae Asiaticae Rariores’, December 1828 (British Library).

73 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, xiii.

74 For the composition of earlier texts, see K. Raj, ‘Surgeons, Fakirs, Merchants, and Craftspeople: Making L'Empereur's Jardin in Early Modern South Asia’, in L. Schiebinger and C. Swan (eds), Colonial Botany, 252–69; Grove, R., ‘Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature’, Modern Asian Studies, 30: 1, 1996, 121–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Noltie, H., ‘Robert Wight and the Illustration of Indian Botany’, The Linnean, special issue, no. 6, 2006, 22–3Google Scholar. In 1827, seeking a pay increase from Rs 35 to Rs 60 a month for Vishnuprasad (a Brahmin who had previously worked on Buchanan's Bengal survey before joining the Calcutta garden), Wallich remarked that his current wage was ‘entirely inadequate for his skill, which . . . is not equalled among the Natives of this country and rarely exceeded by any botanical draftsmen in Europe’: N. Wallich to C. Lushington, 5 September 1827, BC F/4/1068: 29180. But such high praise was not for European consumption. In presenting the Plantae to a Western audience, Wallich blamed ‘any imperfections’ in the plates on their being drawn by Indian artists: N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, x.

76 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, 9–12, 35–7, 40–1.

77 For the growing distinction between Western, text-based botanical science and indigenous, oral plant knowledge, see L. Schiebinger and C. Swan, ‘Introduction’, 10.

78 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, 38, 44; vol. 2, 78; N. Wallich, Tentamen, 1, 39.

79 In his Preface (Plantae, vol. 1, ix) Wallich identified 28 botanists who had assisted him with the identification of plants; other names—including non-botanists—appear in the text: e.g., vol. 1, 28–9, 57, 72.

80 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, 2–3.

81 Even drawings of the Amherstia were greatly prized: N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 3 January 1828, DC 43.

82 D. Arnold, Tropics, 166–72.

83 A substantial considerable literature now exists on scientific travel: in particular, see Camerini's, J. R. articles: ‘Remains of the Day: Early Victorians in the Field’, in Lightman, B. (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, Chicago, IL, 1997, 354–77Google Scholar, and ‘Wallace in the Field’, in Kuklick, H. and Kohler, R. E. (eds), ‘Science in the Field’, Osiris, 11, 1996, 44–65Google Scholar.

84 Including Bharat Singh, ‘an intelligent and respectable Brahmin’, who had previously assisted Buchanan in Nepal and the Sunderbans. ‘It is to the rare knowledge of this man that both Dr Buchanan and myself owe the discovery of a large proportion of valuable trees and plants’: N. Wallich to Secretary Public, 25 September 1817, BC F/4/621: 15534. But Bharat Singh and the many other ‘Brahmins’ who served Wallich received scant mention in his European writings.

85 N. Wallich to Secretary, Public, 8 April 1820; Public Letter from Bengal, 31 July 1820, BC F/4/655: 18040.

86 N. Wallich to Secretary, Public, 4 July 1821, in ibid.

87 N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 14 June 1820, DC 43.

88 N. Wallich to Secretary, Public, 12 May 1826, BC F/4/955: 27123 (2).

89 Hyde, H. Montgomery, ‘Dr George Govan and the Saharanpur Botanical Gardens’, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society, 49: 1, 1962, 47–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90 R. H. Grove (Green Imperialism, 359, 375) suggests that Wallich was unaware of Humboldt's desiccation arguments and so failed to make a more scientific case for forest conservation in India. He may have ignored desiccationism, but was hardly unaware of Humboldt.

91 Royle, J. Forbes, Illustrations of the Botany and Other Branches of the Natural History of the Himalayan Mountains and of the Flora of Cashmere, London, W. H. Allen, 1839CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the Royle–Wallich correspondence, see BC F/4/955: 27123 (3).

92 Cf. Thomson, T., ‘Notes on the Herbarium of the Calcutta Botanical Garden’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 25: 5, 1856, 414Google Scholar.

93 N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 1 January 1828, DC 43. References to Humboldt are sparse in the Plantae: the only plant named in his honour (Humboldtia brunonis) was one so designated by Wallich's ‘revered preceptor’, Martin Vahl, and shared with the ‘equally illustrious’ Robert Brown: N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 3, 18.

94 See the guarded references to N. Wallich in the ‘Introductory Essay’ to J. D. Hooker and T. Thomson, Flora Indica, London, W. Pamplin, 1855. Note, too, the almost complete absence of Wallich from Darwin's massive correspondence. The marine biology of his son, George Wallich, was of much greater interest: see Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (eds), The Correspondence of Chares Darwin, vol. VIII, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1993, 526, 528–30Google Scholar.

95 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 3, v, 11.

96 J. M'Clelland, ‘Memorandum Regarding the Differences Between Dr Wallich and the Late W. Griffith’, June 1848, RBG Library.

97 W. Griffith, ‘Report on the Tea Plant of Upper Assam’, BC F/4/1709: 69024.

98 For Wallich's animosity to Auckland, see N. Wallich to W. Hooker, 8 February 1853, DC 55.

99 For Griffith's legacy, see J. M'Clelland, ‘Report on the Hon'ble Company's Botanic Garden at Calcutta’, 7 November 1846, BC F/4/2219: 110061; ‘Extracts from the Private Letters of Dr J. D. Hooker’, Hooker's Journal of Botany, vol. 1, 1849, 4–5.

100 N. Wallich to G. Bentham, 28 August 1848, Bentham Correspondence.

101 Among the first works of South Asian botany to employ the Natural System were D. Don, Prodromus Florae Nepalensis (1825) and R. Wight and G. A. Walker Arnott, Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indiae Orientalis (1834). One advantage of the Natural System was that it enabled botanists in India to anticipate that plants belonging to a family already well-known in Europe might possess the same properties in South Asia (for example, as medicinal drugs): Royle, J. F., An Essay on the Antiquity of Hindoo Medicine, London, W. H. Allen, 1837, 5–6Google Scholar; O'Shaughnessy, W. B., The Bengal Pharmacopoeia and General Conspectus of Medicinal Plants Arranged According to the Natural and Therapeutic Systems, Calcutta, Bishop's College Press, 1844, vGoogle Scholar.

102 ‘Wallich Catalogue: Arranged in Natural Orders by J. F. Royle’, December 1829, RBG Library. However, the evidence on Wallich's familiarity with the Natural System is confusing. The plants he brought back from Nepal in 1822 were said to have been arranged according to the Natural System (presumably but not necessarily by Wallich himself), except those of ‘doubtful affinity’: N. Wallich to C. Lushington, 21 January 1822, BC F/4/712: 19459.

103 W. Griffith's journal, 17 February 1836, cited in M'Clelland, ‘Memorandum’.

104 Wallich's 1840 list of plants (BC F/4/1949: 84700) distributed from Calcutta used the Natural System throughout, suggesting that by then Wallich had fully learned its use.

105 J. M'Clelland, ‘Report’, BC F/4/2219: 110061.

106 N. Wallich to Under Secretary, Public, 25 August 1845, BC F/4/2188: 106999.

107 [William] Madden, ‘The Turaee and Outer Mountains of Kumaoon’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 17:1, 1848, 418.

108 J. Hooker claimed that Griffith (whom he never met), Wallich, M'Clelland were ‘the three most ill-tempered fellows in all India & most sure to quarrel, that could anywhere be found’. He also believed that Wallich had made himself ‘thoroughly odious’ in India as a result of this dispute: J. Hooker to W. Hooker, 10 March 1849, 11 April 1849, Hooker's Indian Letters, RBG.

109 N. Wallich, Plantae, vol. 1, x.