by John Keay
But, to Hodgson’s credit, he at least seems not to have confounded science and sport. As in all his other ‘amusements’ he was entirely self-taught, but he brought to the examination of every species a minute attention to detail and structure. This could only be satisfied by the dissection and analysis of dead specimens. But he was also a great field naturalist, fully conscious of the importance of observing behaviour and habitat, and an outstanding collector. His menagerie included some of the rarest Himalayan goats and pheasants, and he is the only man known to have tamed an Indian jackal. In 1833 he attempted to send some of his collection to the Zoological Society in London. The mortality rate amongst sea-borne zoo specimens in those days was appalling. An Indian gaur (or bison) sent by the Asiatic Society had just perished at sea, and a rhinoceros in the same cargo had first created havoc on deck and then, ‘a storm coming on, the captain thought it only prudent to throw him overboard’. Hodgson’s specimens fared no better.
One of the deer leapt overboard, the other knocked itself to death against the bars of its cage. The pheasants and pigeons lived until the vessel got into the colder latitudes, when they died, one after the other.
In all, his zoological studies resulted in 127 articles, most of them published in the Asiatic Society’s journals. His first, in 1826, was an account of ‘the Chiru, or Unicorn, of the Himalayas’ and his last, in 1858, the description of a new species of Himalayan mole. Long-legged thrushes, cat-toed plantigrades, Tibetan badgers, and the fifteen species of Nepalese woodpecker – all were grist to his insatiable researches. His drawings, now in the London Zoological Society, form the most complete folio of Himalayan fauna and his collection of specimens, now in the Natural History Museum, is said to number 10,500. He was the first to describe some thirty-nine new species of mammal and about 150 new birds.
The question of claiming and naming new species was a particularly sore point. Hodgson was a stickler for precise description and careful identification. He hesitated to proclaim any new discovery until he had studied at least two or three specimens. But some of his contemporaries were less scrupulous. ‘If any person who chances to lay hold upon a single shrivelled skin may forthwith announce a new animal,’ wrote Hodgson in 1836, ‘the real student of nature must be content to leave what is called discovery to the mere nomenclator; and the science must continue to groan under an increasing weight of fictitious species.’ Three years later he was even more bitter and, in announcing a new species of cuckoo, pointed the finger even at the zoological societies.
Amongst the numerous new birds forwarded by me to London some years back, when I was young enough to imagine that learned societies existed solely for the disinterested promotion of science, was a very singular form of cucuculus. Unceremoniously as many of my other novelties have been appropriated, this one, I believe, still remains undescribed, and I therefore beg to present a description and sketch of it.
Hodgson’s successor in the fields of zoology and ornithology was Edward Blyth, curator of the Asiatic Society’s Natural History Museum from 1841–63. If Hodgson was the Jones of ornithology, Blyth was its Prinsep. As a struggling pharmacist in the London borough of Tooting he had conceived a passion for studying and dissecting birds. When the pharmacy failed he sailed for Calcutta and the ill-paid, over-worked and underrated post of museum curator. And in this humble position he remained until, after twenty years, his health finally collapsed. He contributed some forty erudite papers to the Society’s journal and catalogued their entire collection. But more important was the stimulus he provided to every would-be naturalist in India. Like Prinsep he was an inveterate correspondent. To sportsmen and animal lovers alike he sent out a call for specimens; and soon, from the four corners of India, stuffed birds and skins, drawings and descriptions, came flooding in. Working round the clock, he acknowledged them, catalogued them, published them – and asked for more. He became a walking encyclopaedia, ridiculed by some but revered by those, including Charles Darwin, who shared his love for pure science.
The catalogue of the Society’s collection was incomplete when he was forced to retire. It was taken over by T. C. Jerdon, a doctor in the Madras army. In the 1860s Jerdon published the first standard handbooks to The Birds of India and The Mammals of India. Twenty years later a further series on The Fauna of India was commissioned by the government with the geologist W. T. Blanford, as editor. Jerdon recorded some 242 mammals but by Blanford’s time this tally had risen to over 4000. However, the decline in the numbers and distribution of the more distinctive species was already evident. Probably Indian zoology owed as much to the improvement in firearms as to the example of Hodgson or the encouragement of Blyth. As the matchlock gave way to the breech-loader and the breech-loader to the express rifle, sport and science grew in popularity prodigiously. Sadly, in India as elsewhere, no distinction was made between the two, and Jerdon, for instance, could devote much of his entry on sus indicus to a lyrical description of pig-sticking.
The accounts of men like Tod, Buchanan and Mackenzie who, in their different roles, marched and counter-marched across the subcontinent in the early years of the nineteenth century, show plainly that tigers were a terrible curse. Buchanan records whole villages and crops deserted because of their depredations. Alexander tells the same story of the area around Ajanta and as late as the 1860s Blanford notes that nearly a thousand people a year were killed by tigers in Bengal alone. Leopards, too, could be just as deadly; one is on record as killing 200 people in two years. And these, of course, were only the man-eaters – perhaps one in a hundred of the total; but all preyed on domestic cattle.
The government had instituted a system of rewards, which could be as much as fifty rupees for a tiger, to encourage native huntsmen; the sporting sahibs needed no encouragement. But by Jerdon’s time, the 1860s, this had apparently had little effect; ‘the tiger’s numbers appear to be only slightly diminished’. By the 1880s it was a different story. Blanford noted that ‘within the last twenty or thirty years the number of these destructive animals has been greatly reduced, and they have now become scarce, or have even in some cases disappeared entirely, in parts of the country where they were formerly common’. Blanford evidently did not consider this a matter for concern, rather for congratulation. Twenty years later Lord Curzon, like his predecessors, would religiously observe the rituals of the ceremonial tiger shoot. Although no man understood better than Curzon the need to conserve India’s monuments, it is doubtful whether any Anglo-Indian appreciated the need for conserving her wildlife.
The Indian lion, found by Tod in Rajasthan and reported by Heber as far north as the Punjab and by Cunningham as far east as Bharhut, was by Blanford’s day ‘verging on extinction’ and restricted to the Gir forest of Saurashtra where alone it still survives – just. The rhino, which was met by the emperor Babur on the Indus and still found in the Terai in Jerdon’s day was, by Blanford’s time, reduced to just 473 specimens, all in Assam. Even the killing of elephants was for a time subject to a government reward. The idea that the country’s fauna was as important a part of its national heritage as Sanskrit, or that it had inspired as many artistic masterpieces as the Buddha story, seems not to have occurred to either naturalists or orientalists.
A happier tale by far is that of the discovery of India’s flora. To a trading concern like the East India Company the natural productions of the country, and the extent to which they could be improved and augmented, were matters of vital concern. It was the spices of the Malabar coast that had attracted the first Europeans and it was opium, indigo, cotton, tea and jute which successively financed the British raj. Botanical studies thus had great practical and commercial value as well as the purely scientific, and they were funded accordingly. Sir William and Lady Jones might adopt botany as ‘the loveliest and most copious division in the science of nature’ but they also watched with approval the founding of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1786. A similar institution was already in existence in Madras and it was from there that in
1793 William Roxburgh came to Calcutta to take over as superintendent. Roxburgh, ‘the Indian Linnaeus’, ‘the father of Indian botany’, was, like Francis Buchanan, a Scot and originally a surgeon in the Company’s navy. This was of course no coincidence. The best medical schools were in Scotland and herbalism was still an important part of medicine; botany was in fact included in the medical curriculum. But whereas Buchanan became essentially a roving field-worker, collecting and surveying his way across Burma, Mysore, Nepal and Bihar, Roxburgh was a scientist and horticulturalist, studying, cataloguing, laying out his gardens, and experimenting with new varieties.
During twenty years he transformed the Calcutta garden into the most extensive and scientifically organized in Asia. Like the great banyan tree in its midst, which steadily put out more branches and roots till it covered an area a quarter of a mile in circumference, the gardens grew under Roxburgh’s care from a collection of 300 species to one of 3500. For the purposes of study he instituted a herbarium, and trained a number of Indian artists in the production of scientific plant drawings, a field in which the Indian’s supposed genius for portraying minute detail could be put to good use. By the time Roxburgh retired in 1814 some 2500 plates had been completed. There were also two books in manuscript, one a catalogue of the garden which included at least 500 species new to science, and the other an unfinished Flora lndica.
This last was eventually edited and published by William Carey, the orientalist, and Nathanial Wallich. After a brief period in which Francis Buchanan took charge of the Calcutta garden, Wallich became the new superintendent and held the post for thirty years. He had originally come to India as surgeon at the Danish settlement of Serampore just upriver from Calcutta. But in 1813, when the British at last found a pretext for ousting the Danes, Wallich was taken prisoner and then, in recognition of his botanical knowledge, rehabilitated. Though perhaps less erudite than Roxburgh, he proved an even greater traveller and collector than Buchanan, visiting Nepal, Singapore, Penang and Burma as well as all the more botanically interesting regions of India. His greatest contribution to science, though, was the distribution in Europe of his herbarium, numbering some 8000 different species, together with vast quantities of seeds and plants. Joseph Hooker declared this ‘the most valuable contribution of the kind ever made to science’. In one fell swoop Wallich made available to the botanists of Europe the flora of ‘the most varied botanical area on the face of the globe’.
There only remained the production of a standard work of reference on the subject. Roxburgh’s Flora lndica was far from comprehensive and was, anyway, incomplete. Several other works on the flora of particular areas had appeared and it was by using these, as well as drawing on their own collections from north India and the Himalayas, that Thomas Thomson, another Scottish medico-botanist, and Joseph Hooker set about a new Flora Indica in the 1850s. Volume One appeared in 1855, Thomson himself covering the cost. It was hoped that the government would see the value of the work and finance the remaining volumes. But, at this rate, the subject was expected to run to some 12,000 pages, or twenty further volumes. The government procrastinated, Thomson was called away to take charge of the Calcutta botanical garden, and the project lapsed. It was not, however, forgotten and in 1870 Hooker revived it on a reduced scale. With official backing and a new staff of collaborators he laboured away at Kew Gardens for a further twenty-seven years until the last of the seven volumes of Indian Flora was published.
Hooker, the greatest of all British botanists and the friend and colleague of Darwin, had made botanical forays in India, Nepal and Tibet; but he never served in India and never had reason to identify with the country. In Darjeeling he was privileged to win the affection of Brian Hodgson and even to stay in his house. Hodgson became ‘one of my dearest friends on earth’ and he named a celebrated rhododendron, as well as one of his children, after him. But it seems doubtful whether Hooker ever really understood the strange passion that fired such a man. The botanist was all youthful enthusiasm and curiosity. Hodgson, now surrounded by cats and shunning all society, seemed impossibly aloof and eccentric, lost amidst his books and his multifarious enquiries. In age there were seventeen years between the two men, but it could have been fifty. Hooker represented all that was modern in terms of science and scholarship, Hodgson recalled the older, wider traditions and the looser disciplines of Jones or Mackenzie.
Meanwhile, following the example of Madras and Calcutta, other botanical gardens had sprung up in different parts of India. At Saharanpur north-east of Delhi, John Forbes Royle, yet another Scottish medico-botanist, made an important collection of flora from Kashmir and the western Himalayas. The Saharanpur garden was located in what had originally been a Moghul garden, and though planned as much for research as for amenity value, it no doubt provided useful experience for the later rescue of more famous Moghul gardens. The lovely sunken parterres between the palaces of Dig in Rajasthan furnish an even better example than the Taj of how the formality of a Moghul garden could be complemented by the horticultural and botanical skills of the British.
Later in the nineteenth century Saharanpur became famous for its collection of fruit trees. Likewise, the Madras gardens concentrated on the growing of tobacco, pepper and cardamom. All the gardens were in fact as much government research stations as pleasure groves, and from them went out the steady stream of seeds and seedlings which gradually changed the pattern of Indian agriculture. In 1835 Hodgson announced from Kathmandu, ‘I am felling, and digging, and sowing potatoes and oats – yea, with my own proper hands.’ Both crops were recent introductions and it was said that, if the British disappeared from India overnight, the extent of their influence in the country could still be clearly measured by studying the distribution of the potato. Bishop Heber agreed, regarding it as ‘perhaps the most valuable present they [the people of Kumaon, in this case] are likely to receive from their new masters’. He was not so much denigrating the benefits of British rule as extolling the virtues of this new addition to the staple diet.
All this was, of course, before the arrival of more celebrated products. At Saharanpur, Royle was already advocating the introduction of a Peruvian tree known as chinchona. The name came from that of a Spanish contessa who had been cured of fever by taking a liquid extracted from its bark. In the 1880s Clements Markham revived Royle’s idea and, through the botanical gardens, chinchona was successfully established in India. As quinine, it did as much to reduce deaths from malaria as, later, did DDT.
Another crop with which Hodgson, amongst others, experimented was the tea bush. As early as 1778 Sir Joseph Banks, the great naturalist and promoter of exploration, had recommended tea to the East India Company as a crop that might profitably be introduced into India. He even suggested that, with the seeds or shrubs, some Chinese planters should also be imported. Banks urged Lord Macartney’s mission to China – the same that included Dr Dinwiddie and the surveying instruments ultimately acquired by Lambton – specifically to investigate this possibility. Seeds and plants were apparently forwarded to the Calcutta garden, and in 1819 Dr Wallich was able to supply both to an official anxious to experiment with the crop in Assam.
But the real breakthrough came with the discovery, both there and in Nepal, of an indigenous tea plant. In its wild state this was more a tree than a bush and, during the 1820s, Wallich was unable to confirm whether it was in fact tea or whether it was a camellia. The government, in danger of losing its monopoly of the China tea trade and faced with an insatiable demand from the British tea drinker, now moved fast. A committee was set up to investigate the subject, a mission was despatched to China to acquire more seeds and know-how, and Wallich was sent to investigate the Assam trees. He not only confirmed that they were tea but also discovered that they were much more widespread than was thought.
The result of the researches of the tea-deputation despatched to Assam under Dr Wallich, respecting the tea plant in that country, gives every reason to expect that tea will become in a short time a
prime article of export from India. The plant has been found in extensive natural plantations and the localities are such as to encourage the belief that it exists far more extensively than has been actually discovered, and to warrant the conclusion that Assam, and our northern frontier generally, will afford the most ample field for tea-cultivation of every variety.
Three years later, in 1839, the first Indian tea was offered for auction in London. By the end of the century it had completely ousted the China variety and India was the largest grower of tea in the world.
The report quoted above of Dr Wallich’s deputation to Assam was published in the Asiatic Society’s journal for 1836. A plump leather-bound volume of 840 pages, it covers a breadth of material that may be taken as typical for any year. The first article is from Charles Masson on his haul of coins from Begram in Afghanistan. Then comes a piece from Hodgson quoting Sanskrit texts in support of his reconstruction of Buddhist beliefs. Then follows a report on the great fossil finds being made in the Siwalik hills, including the bones of a creature the size of an elephant but more like a camel and with four horns (it was called the Sivatherium after the god Siva). Colonel Stacy reports his find of that Bacchus relief from Mathura and there is news of a new pillar inscription in the Gupta script. In this single volume Hodgson contributes twelve articles on new birds and mammals, and Prinsep nearly as many on translations of coins and stone inscriptions.
For the Society 1836 was not a good year. The Orientalists were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Macaulay in the previous year. Sanskrit studies were virtually proscribed and Prinsep, in his preface, felt constrained to offer some encouragement. There was still ‘a tide of popular favour, or at least a diminutive wave of it’, which reached ‘the secluded estuary of oriental research’. If Calcutta was distinctly hostile, London, Paris and Vienna still appreciated their studies. The work would go on. ‘We shall ever study to infuse into these pages a pleasing variety of original information on all subjects, of man’s performance or nature’s productions, within the wide range prescribed to us by our allegiance to the Asiatic Society.’ The spirit of Jones lived on.
