In 2023, Bangalore-based sculptor Ranjini Shettar showcased five large-scale installations at the Barbican Centre in London, UK. Spread across the Barbican Conservatory, these installations — made out of wood, stainless steel, muslin, and lacquer — drew inspiration from the organic forms of plants. In doing so, Shettar took forward the Indian tradition of botanical art which has been developing across the region since time immemorial.

Indian Flower Paintings In The Mughal Period

Although Indian artists have been drawing inspiration from the rich floral biodiversity of the region since classical antiquity, it was during the Mughal Emperor Jahangir's reign in the 17th century that flower painting developed as a distinct sub-genre within the Indian art traditions. These paintings were made in the miniature tradition of the Mughal period, with beautifully illuminated borders. However, these paintings were decorative rather than scientific and were made for entertainment rather than to aid in identification. The most identifiable flower painting from this period is of a Tulip by master miniaturist Nadirul'asr Mansur Naqqash, which the artist painted during a visit he made to Kashmir with the Emperor Jahangir himself in the spring of 1620 or 1621.

During the same trip, Mansur produced over a hundred such paintings of flowers, but apart from a few other paintings of irises, narcissus, and other flowers from the north-western India that are somewhat botanically accurate, none of these hundred flowers and plants can be identified with absolute certainty.

Hortus Indicus Malabaricus — The First Comprehensive Treatise On Indian Plants

As Europeans colonised the Indian subcontinent in the 17th century, Indian artists — inspired by the European tradition of realism in art — began striving for botanical accuracy in their paintings.

The first great illustrated book on Indian plants was commissioned by the Dutch commander of Malabar, Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakestein (1636-1691), and was published in 12 volumes between 1678 and 1693. This magnificent book, Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, was the culmination of van Rheede's lifelong interest in botany, and included 740 copperplate engravings of Indian medicinal and edible, wild and cultivated plants, shrubs, and trees based on drawings made by Dutch artists in India.

As the first substantial book on Indian flora, the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus was a comprehensive project even by modern standards. The book drew from a vast repository of traditional ethno-medicinal information from palm leaf manuscripts by Itty Achudan, an Ayurveda practitioner based in Malabar, and three Brahmin priest physicians named Appu Bhat, Vinayaka Pandit, and Ranga Bhat. The texts provided by them were meticulously translated from the Indian languages by two priests, Fr Johannes Casearius and Fr Mather of St Joseph, and appeared in the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus with detailed botanical descriptions by botanists Jan Commelin, Paul Hermann, and Johannes Munnicks. The plant names were given in Latin, Sanskrit, Malayalam, and Konkani, with the Malayalam names also written in the Arabic script. In all, a team of nearly 100 people worked on the book, backed by both the ruling Raja of Cochin and the Zamorin of Calicut.

The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus was a truly seminal project that not only paved the path for other colonial botanical projects to follow, but also influenced the global discipline of botany. Many of van Rheede's Latin names for plants were taken up by the Swedish naturalist, taxonomist, and explorer Carl Linnaeus when he framed the standardised principles and rules to be followed in the classification and naming of plants in his book Species Plantarum in 1753. Some of these names, like Basella, for the ubiquitous Malabar spinach, and Magnolia champaca, or the Champak, are still in use today.

Kampani Kalam Or The Company School

As the Mughals diminished and the English edged out other European colonial powers at play in India, British patronage changed Indian art-making. Under British employ and influence, the miniature painters of the diminishing and diminished Mughal and Rajput royal courts, and the devotional painters of the Vijayanagara empire adopted a more hybrid Mughal-European style that came to be known as 'Kampani Kalam', or the 'Company School'. The hybrid Indo-European style marked an ostensible shift in both materials and aesthetics in Indian art. Artists had to switch from gouache to European watercolours, and learn to work on a larger scale, at least near life size, and in a more naturalistic style.

The earliest botanical paintings made in the Company style, dating from around 1772, was commissioned by Dr James Kerr, a Scottish surgeon stationed in Bengal, and made for wealthy English and European patrons. Bhawani Das, Sheikh Zain al-Din, Ram Das, Vishnupersaud, Gorachand, and Ramchand were some of the first documented Indian artists working in the Kampani Kalam or Company style.

Robert Wight, Rungiah, And Govindoo — The Most Prolific Botanist-Artist Trio In The Early Colonial Period

The most prolific botanist to study and document the flora of South India in the colonial period was Robert Wight (1796-1872). Between 1840 and 1853, Wight wrote and printed several books about the plants of the Nilgiris in South India, such as Spicilegium Neigherrense (1846) and Selection of Neilgherry Plants Drawn and Coloured from Nature (1851), which included 204 hand-coloured illustrations and descriptions of plants. His major work, Icones planatarum Indiae Orientalis was uncoloured and contained over 2,000 lithographs by Indian artists Rungiah and Govindoo.

The team of Wight, Rungiah, and Govindoo produced over 4,000 plant illustrations between themselves, among which 1,445 were published. Today, the original paintings produced by Rungiah and Govindoo are dispersed between various botanical libraries, notably the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; and the Natural History Museum, London.

Botanical Art In India: 19th Century To Now

Despite this long tradition of botanical painting in India, the art form dwindled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the absence of steady commissions from patrons like the Mughals, Deccan, Pahari, and Rajput royals, and the surgeons and botanists of the British East India company, many skilled artists — often trained in the traditional style highly detailed of miniature paintings — turned to the tourist markets in Rajasthan, Delhi, and Agra.

Fortunately, in recent years, a new generation of Indian artists have revived the tradition with their practice. While artists and illustrators like Bangalore-based Nirupa Rao have taken a more traditional, naturalistic approach in their work, sculptors like Ranjini Shettar and Sourabh Gupta have re-imagined what Indian botanical art could mean. Once again, there are some very talented Indian artists working in the field of botanical art, and it's safe to say that the future of Indian botanical art is in good hands.

Learn more about Ranjini Shettar's practice here.

Learn more about Sourabh Gupta's practice here.

Follow Nirupa Rao here.

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

Sourabh Gupta's Paper Botanicals Embody The Poetry, Magic, & Wonder Of Nature

An Indian Sculptor Is Creating A Botanical Paradise In London's Barbican Conservatory

How Botanical Artist Hemlata Pradhan Is Shaping A Sustainable Future