Contemporary artists reclaim botanical art's colonial past

In the galleries of the Museum of Art & Photography in Bengaluru, centuries of botanical illustration unfold across Paper Gardens: Art, Botany and Empire. Here, the meticulous renderings of tropical flora, each vein of a leaf, each unfurling petal, tell a story far more complex than scientific documentation. These images emerge from the long shadow of empire, produced at a time when plants were treated not simply as living forms to be studied, but as resources to be catalogued, possessed, and folded into the machinery of colonial expansion. The exhibition traces how botanical art became an instrument of colonial power, mapping the natural wealth of colonised lands for distant imperial centres.

Yet within these same frames lies another, often obscured history: the hands of Indian artists who actually created many of these works. Unnamed, uncredited, their expertise in rendering local flora was essential to European botanical projects, even as their contributions were systematically erased. The Hortus Malabaricus, that monumental seventeenth-century compendium of Malabar's plants, relied heavily on local knowledge and artistry—a collaboration the colonial record preferred to forget.

The Colonial Gaze and Its Afterlives

Botanical illustration in India did not begin with European arrival, but colonialism transformed its purpose and politics. Under the East India Company and later the British Raj, plants became subjects of extraction and profit. Cinchona for quinine, tea for export, rubber for empire—each required precise documentation, and Indian artists were recruited to provide it. Their intimate knowledge of local species, their skill in rendering form and colour, made them indispensable. Yet their names rarely survived in the historical record.

Nirupa Rao, a Bengaluru-based scientific illustrator whose work appears in Paper Gardens, was recently asked to lead a walkthrough of the exhibition. The curators tasked her with offering insight into the displayed works from the perspective of a painter—since so little is known about the Indian artists behind colonial-era botanical art, she was asked to fill in the blanks.

This sense of loss—of watching a familiar landscape become unrecognisable—animates her work. Rao's illustrations are acts of noticing, of insisting that the plants around us matter. "Beyond the aims of ecological learning," she explains, "my work has a broader goal: to help people notice and fall in love with local, everyday species that don't necessarily have showy flowers or fruit like exotics brought in from across the world."

For Nidhi Mariam Jacob, a self-taught artist from Bengaluru known for her lush "Fantasy Garden" series, botanical art is inseparable from memory. Her paintings are populated by the flora of her childhood: orange champakam, jasmine, haliconia, wild lantana. "Nature has been my biggest healer since I was a child," she writes. "I spent a lot of my time alone, watching flowers and trees in my mother's and grandparents' gardens, or out in nature."

Jacob's gardens are not strictly representational. They unfold as dreamscapes that move through memory, sensation, and imagination, becoming quiet odes to the emotional and interior worlds from which they emerge. "Some nights, I dream of a garden or a specific flower or a version of it and I quickly wake up to sketch it out before it is erased from my memory." Her work is suffused with the presence of her late mother, a woman she once believed to be a "nature goddess" for her ability to coax life from cuttings. "With my paintings, mostly an ode to my mother and keeping her memory alive, I paint lots and lots of flowers."

Priti Vadakkath came to plants through a different passage—one shaped by parenthood, caregiving, and a physical relocation from city to mountain. "Gardening entered my life more intentionally after we moved from Bangalore to Kochi into an independent rental home with space for a garden," she reflects. "It became both a daily activity and a space of nurture and quiet reflection."

A shift occurred when, driven by concerns around food, environment, and sustainability, Priti moved to the mountains of Munnar in Idukki to begin a regenerative farm. "Working closely with the untamed land brought me into a more direct relationship with ecological systems. With my hands in the soil, I began to understand interdependence not just as an abstract idea, but as something lived and negotiated daily."

The Overlooked and the Resilient

A recurring theme across these practices is attention to what is overlooked. Rao champions "local, everyday species" rather than showy exotics. Priti’'s ongoing body of work, Shola Grasslands, focuses on grasses and so-called weeds—plants often dismissed but vital to ecological balance. "I was struck by their resilience—their ability to endure fires, many of them human-induced, and return, regenerate, and continue."

This marks a quiet but pointed inversion of colonial priorities. Where empire sought out the rare, the exotic, and the economically valuable, these artists direct their attention toward what is ordinary yet enduring: the plants, ecologies, and forms of life that persist quietly around us, sustaining worlds that often go unnoticed. In doing so, they propose an alternative ecological imagination—one that, as Priti puts it, "holds fragility and resilience together."