This project is a result of a grant from India Foundation for the Arts and has been fully underwritten with support from the Bajaj Group.

Although this site bears my name as author-curator, it could not have been made without the support of the following: First and foremost, the India Foundation for the Arts, whose award of an Arts Research Documentation grant gave me the impetus, encouragement, and funds to pursue this project. Thanks to all of the wonderful IFA staff, but in particular to Tanveer Ajsi, Arundhathi Ghosh, and to Suman Gopinath for suggesting new avenues within which to extend this work. I am grateful to the Bajaj Group for underwriting the project. 

Fellowships and grants from other institutions also allowed me to consult primary archives in Washington DC, Leiden, and London. Thanks to support from the Smithsonian Institution (Baird fellowship, 2015), the Library of Congress (Parsons award, 2015), the University of Leiden (Indian Medicine symposium, 2016), and the Wellcome Trust (Research Bursary, 2016), which gave me incredible opportunities to look at, touch, study and be inspired by archival botanical art and medico-botanical texts from India.  

My greatest intellectual debt in this field has been to Henry Noltie, whose impeccable work at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh has provided a gold standard for research, books and exhibitions on botanical art and Company collections. Henry's generous colleagueship has also made this scholar-curator path easy to follow. Thanks also to Vinita Damodaran at the University of Sussex, Richard Grove, who first introduced me to the Hortus Malabaricus more than 20 years ago, and Mark Nesbitt at Kew Gardens for generously sharing knowledge and resources. I was lucky in that the three botanical texts and gardens featured here have had extraordinary historians who laid the foundation and did all the scholarly heavy lifting - for the Malabar, J.Heniger (Hortus Malabaricus), for Calcutta and Madras, H.Noltie (Wight's Icones, Dapuri Drawings, Cleghorn's Collections) and James J Whyte (Plants of the Coast of Coromandel), and for the Nilgiris, K.M.Matthew (Ootacamund Flowers, Flora of the South Indian Hills). Their work allowed me to come along years later, build on their research, and connect a few dots. 

I gratefully acknowledge the Indian archives and archivists – in Calcutta, the Botanical Library and Archives of the Botanical Survey of India; and the Indian Museum’s BSI gallery (then presided over by Dr. Venu Gopal); in Kochi, staff and librarian at the Thripunithra Palace Library and heritage center; in Ootacamund, staff at the Library of the Government Botanic Garden and especially Dr. Ramsunder who generously shared with me his images of the unpublished Ootacamund Flowers. Source credits for all reproductions of printed materials are included. 

This work is the first seed of a larger project on botanical art archives that I am slowly nurturing and putting into place. And for that, I have many other people to thank. At an important juncture, I met Suresh Jayaram, who showed me his work on Lalbagh and Krumbiegel, convincing me that gardens were the right context to study botanical archives. So also Suman Gopinath, who through our mutual love for archives and art, suggested venues in Kochi and Singapore for curated exhibitions on botanical arts, past and present. Ditto with Sarat Chandra at the Deccan Heritage Foundation, whose restoration at the Hyderabad British Residency made room for my proposal to include archival work on the Begum's garden. Another set of facilitators and guardian angels in London - Ratan Vaswani, Ross Macfarlane - have been extremely supportive about my ideas for a multi-media exhibition on Hortus Malabaricus during Kochi Biennale 2018. Meanwhile, ongoing conversations with wonderful botanical artists (among them Meena Subramaniam and Hemlata Pradhan) and contemporary artists of Indian archives (Renee Ridgway, Rajkamal Kahlon, Simryn Gill, Iswar Srikumar, Anushka Meenakshi and others) have helped keep my vision focused and my spirits up. To them, and to all those I hope will join in creating a network of artists, activists and scholars who work on botanical art, provisionally titled BotanicUs, my grateful salaams. For such a network too was among the proposed goals of this forward-thinking IFA documentation grant - how to collectively protect our botanical art past in order to safeguard our futures.  

Last but not least, my web designer Rebecca Girigalla helped in organizing, animating and bringing this work to life. The site also benefitted from the extensive help of Iswar Srikumar and Anushka Meenakshi, who parachuted in during a few very busy weeks in their own lives, offered their creative filmmaking and editorial eyes, and generally fixed all glitches. The planet (and of course Ars Botanica) is richer for such people.