Botanical Survey of India’s collection of rare paintings, dyes, fabrics and type specimens to go public

Decade-long exercise by the BSI is a valuable and fascinating online record of India’s plant diversity.

In the 1840s, when British botanist William Griffith came across the rare holoparasitic flowering plant Sapria himalayana in Arunachal Pradesh, there were not enough ways to document it. A botanical portrait of the root parasite plant with bright red flowers and sulphur yellow dots was made as early as in 1842 hundreds of miles away, near Kolkata, by a painter named Lutchman Singh. Botanical painting was crucial to discovery of numerous other such plants, including the Eulophia nuda, an orchid painted by G.C. Dass in May 1862 at the same historic location, the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden. Thousands of such botanical paintings, unique and almost two centuries old, are rare and valuable not only because of the artistic talent of their Indian painters but also because they highlight the country’s plant diversity. The Central National Herbarium of the Botanical Survey of India (BSI) has the biggest ever collection of 3,280 large botanical paintings by about 20 painters, whose names appear on the paintings but not much else is known of them.