Anna Spudich

Annamma Spudich was happy writing grants as an experimental biologist at Stanford University till she had this unexpected brush with history. A sepia-tinted book 'The Greate Herball' written by John Gerard in 1597, which she picked up from the shelves of a library, got her interested in the whys and hows of Indian botanical history. And eventually impacted the very course of her scientific pursuits.

"I was very, very intrigued," Annamma, Anna to friends, says. Many others were infected with her intrigue last week at Bangalore's National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). Visitors were raving about an exhibition that beautifully blended history, science and art and had almost everything that European books of the 16th and 17th century had to say about Indian botany.

Intriguingly again, it was called 'Such Treasure and Rich Merchandize' – the last bit inspired by the wealth of natural products that traveled from India to Europe along the spice route.

Anna Spudich

It's a standing invitation to all who get excited about little known nuggets from chapters of history. A fascinating glimpse into east-west interaction during the pre-colonial era, the aesthetically crafted exhibition is replete with botanical illustrations, prints and maps from books published between 1543 and 1693.

One look at the catalogue and you know why Anna, who has had varied interests, plunged into all this head on. You have the oldest Indian Birch bark manuscripts on 51 leaves talking of the medicinal formulations from 4th century as also the glorious 12-volume 'Hortus Indicus Malabaricus' published in Amsterdam from 1678 to 1693 and entirely devoted to useful and medicinal South Indian plants.

And then you have the 1563 'Colloquies on the simples, Drugs and Materia Medica of India' by Garcia da Orta alongside the 'Tractado de las Drogas y Medicinas de las Indias Orientalis’, a 1578 compilation by Spanish physician and naturalist Christobal Acosta, also the Portugese Viceroy’s physician.

All this is woven together in the visually appealing exhibition with excerpts from the likes of Shakespeare, Portugese poet Camoens and Milton and a breathtaking image by the renaissance master Raphael of the Indian elephant Hanno.

Anna Spudich

"The earliest book is from the times when the Portugese came to Goa. Acosta gathered all the knowledge that he could from local hakims and vaidyas and reported Indian treatments for tropical diseases unfamiliar to European physicians in his book," says Anna, whose enthusiasm has seen her do a lot of things — getting immersed in the depths of cell biology to study the role of the cytoskeleton in signal transduction, help her scientist husband in the laboratory, drop everything for a while to raise her daughters, and take flying lessons to be 'even more on the edge'. She is a scholar in residence at NCBS now.

The books and maps in the exhibition are accurate reproductions of their original ones. The images and texts are from rare libraries and collections in India, Europe and America. Of special mention is the Hortus Indicus Malabaricus that interestingly acknowledges Malabar traditional physician Itty Achudem and three other ayurveda practitioners as the sources in one volume. Several Malayalam plant names have also crept into the botanical nomenclature in the book.

Anna Spudich

Anna is justifiably planning to take the exhibition to other parts of the country. She is in talks with the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and hopes she can display this rare collection in as many cities as possible.