Nirupa Rao
I grew up in Bangalore, southern India, in the 1990s—a city in the throes of rapid, chaotic urbanisation. With less and less room for climbing trees and playing street cricket, my generation increasingly spent our time indoors. I attempted to fill the lack with picture books and novels, whose characters filled their days romping through fields, forests and meadows. There was a subtle irony in all of this: most of these books were hand-me-downs from friends and relatives who lived abroad. The children of these stories inhabited worlds brimming with daffodils and blackberries, which came to shape my imagination far more than what surrounded me. I developed an intimacy with the landscapes of faraway places long before I could truly see my own.
It took some years for this disconnect to come into focus. My mother had relayed memories of her botanist uncle, Fr. Cecil Saldanha, who had led the first catalogue of Karnataka’s flora in the 1960s (Nicolson, Gandhi, 2002), and I began to lament how little I knew of his legacy. I looked back to the books of my childhood, wondering if I could enlist their sense of nostalgic whimsy to tell the story of my local environs.
But my attempts to celebrate quintessential Indian flora proved less than straightforward. What were the plants of my environs? In this census of Bangalore’s trees, thirteen of the top twenty-five most common species in the city are non-natives—from Africa, Australia, southeast Asia and beyond—brought to India primarily in the colonial period (OpenCity, 2024). When I asked people around me, most named species like Bougainvillea (from South America) or gulmohar (Delonix regia, from Madagascar) as their favourite local flowers. The story of my environs, in essence, reflected insidious imperial histories far more than indigenous ecologies. Further still, a simplistic native vs. non-native narrative is complicated by a shortfall of research on the relative impacts of these species on Indian city environments, as well as the urgency of protecting any remaining green cover in a rapidly urbanising country.
When I finally selected the plants that would feature in my children’s book on south Indian flora, I sought out a ‘purer’ representation of our ecology, going beyond the city into the ‘wild’, and, just as significantly, prioritising the weird and wonderful over the familiar. For example, a telling omission was the ubiquitous Lantana camara—an ornamental flower introduced in the 1800s from tropical America, which has invasively usurped over 40 per cent of southern jungles (Mongabay, 2020). Instead, I compiled a cabinet of uncommon curiosities, including everything from carnivorous sundews to insect-trapping Ceropegias, to rare relic patches of wild nutmeg swamps that indigenous customs preserve untouched as ‘sacred groves’. Particularly fascinated with these swamps, I later co-directed an animated short that highlights their unique significance, both social and ecological.
With both projects, I’m deeply aware of how much I sidestepped in order to represent an idealised ‘Indian’ environment. This conundrum is what drew me to the Plants on Paper workshop, which undertook to acknowledge and accept what has passed, while constructively moving beyond it. Our visit to the Hunterian Museum’s ‘Curating Discomfort’ provided an instructive case study: their decolonising effort includes, among other measures, rewriting exhibit labels to make room for unspoken imperial legacies (University of Glasgow, 2024).
While my work so far has introduced readers to native plants far beyond our fields of vision, what remains unwritten is the book that could help a child like me understand—and even reimagine—what’s outside her window. I think it’s time to tell that story, even if it requires dealing with complex colonial histories. The story of ‘Indian’ landscapes—urban or rural—might not be as simplistically romantic as I initially envisioned. But however difficult the conversation, what’s important for now is that we keep talking about our plants, thorns and all.
References
Nicolson D, Gandhi K. 2002. Cecil John Saldanha (1926-2002). Taxon. 51(August 2002): 585–587. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/tax.513002
OpenCity.in. Bengaluru Tree Census Data [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jun 12]. Available from: https://data.opencity.in/dataset/bengaluru-tree-census-data
Mongabay. Lantana invasion threatens 40 percent of India’s tiger habitat, reports study [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jun 12]. Available from: https://india.mongabay.com/2020/08/lantana-invasion-threatens-40-percent-of-indias-tiger-habitat-reports-study/
University of Glasgow. The Museum of Discomfort: How Glasgow’s Hunterian is Decolonising through its Collection [Internet]. [cited 2025 Jun 12]. Available from: https://www.gla.ac.uk/explore/glasgowsocialscienceshub/resources/all/headline_1086131_en.html