The Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Sussex
Department Name: Sch of History, Art History & Philosophy
Abstract
Building on the earlier network grant on the Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean which included holding institutions such as libraries and museums and academics this proposal aims to develop public engagement and reach new audiences and user communities by staging 2 exhibitions and other related events linked by the theme of science and empire and Indian botanical heritage.
1.The first will be a major exhibition on the life and work of the botanist J.D.Hooker and India in the year of his bi-centenary, 2017, at the Indian Museum in Kolkata, India. This exhibition highlights the impact of the network by building on a collaboration between Kew, the BSI, the Indian Museum and CWEH at the University of Sussex. Hooker was the director of Kew (1865-1885) at a time when botany, and the network of botanical gardens, centered on Kew, played a major role in the project of British imperialism. He traveled extensively in India and was the main author of the Flora of British India (1872-97), the only flora of India yet published. The exhibition itself will be based on facsimiles of the exhibition previously developed at Kew, adapted and augmented with collections from the BSI, and other Indian institutions, which hold materials relating to Hooker.
2. The second exhibition entitled, 'Science and Empire' curated by the BL will produce a facsimile 'pop-up' exhibition, which will be hosted at the NMNH in Delhi. Modelled on the Library's successful touring exhibition, this exhibition will comprise nine attractively-designed panels of facsimile materials drawn from the Library's historic collections of India Office Records, private papers, books and manuscripts in Indian languages, and visual materials. The panels will cover the following themes: forestry; health and disease; irrigation; botany; geology; built environment. Displaying facsimiles of personal diaries and correspondence, government documents, maps, plans, pamphlets, photographs, paintings and drawings, the panels will create a picture of the impact of empire upon the natural and built environment of India over the period 1700 to 1950. The Library's holdings in this area are complemented by collections in India.The British Council will be invited to arrange the practicalities as they have facilitated an earlier exhibition by the BL and has already expressed support for this kind of flexible exhibition. It is expected that the exhibition will tour in Cochin and Mysore.
3. The opening of the Kolkata exhibition will be marked by a public conference with contributions from international speakers working in related disciplines. Both the exhibition and the conference will highlight the importance of India, Indian institutions and people in the development of scientific botany and its centrality to the project of colonialism, while increasing knowledge of, and engagement with India's botanical heritage among Indian academics, school students and the general public.
4.There will be the involvement of two local schools in a pilot project to engage school children by making them aware of the natural history collecting practices of the British Empire, the co-construction of of botanical knowledge by local communities in India and interesting them in the conservation of endangered flora of South Asia.
The timing of the event, in Hooker's bi-centennial year will allow the exhibition and conference to both benefit from and contribute to, the significant publicity which will accompany this anniversary in the U.K. This project capitalizes on the work done under the auspices of the previously funded Network for Collaborative Research on the Botanical and Meteorological History of the Indian Ocean, 1600-1900, with the primary aims of disseminating research beyond the academy reversing both the accumulation of the materials of scientific research and narratives of knowledge production from Britain to the global south.
1.The first will be a major exhibition on the life and work of the botanist J.D.Hooker and India in the year of his bi-centenary, 2017, at the Indian Museum in Kolkata, India. This exhibition highlights the impact of the network by building on a collaboration between Kew, the BSI, the Indian Museum and CWEH at the University of Sussex. Hooker was the director of Kew (1865-1885) at a time when botany, and the network of botanical gardens, centered on Kew, played a major role in the project of British imperialism. He traveled extensively in India and was the main author of the Flora of British India (1872-97), the only flora of India yet published. The exhibition itself will be based on facsimiles of the exhibition previously developed at Kew, adapted and augmented with collections from the BSI, and other Indian institutions, which hold materials relating to Hooker.
2. The second exhibition entitled, 'Science and Empire' curated by the BL will produce a facsimile 'pop-up' exhibition, which will be hosted at the NMNH in Delhi. Modelled on the Library's successful touring exhibition, this exhibition will comprise nine attractively-designed panels of facsimile materials drawn from the Library's historic collections of India Office Records, private papers, books and manuscripts in Indian languages, and visual materials. The panels will cover the following themes: forestry; health and disease; irrigation; botany; geology; built environment. Displaying facsimiles of personal diaries and correspondence, government documents, maps, plans, pamphlets, photographs, paintings and drawings, the panels will create a picture of the impact of empire upon the natural and built environment of India over the period 1700 to 1950. The Library's holdings in this area are complemented by collections in India.The British Council will be invited to arrange the practicalities as they have facilitated an earlier exhibition by the BL and has already expressed support for this kind of flexible exhibition. It is expected that the exhibition will tour in Cochin and Mysore.
3. The opening of the Kolkata exhibition will be marked by a public conference with contributions from international speakers working in related disciplines. Both the exhibition and the conference will highlight the importance of India, Indian institutions and people in the development of scientific botany and its centrality to the project of colonialism, while increasing knowledge of, and engagement with India's botanical heritage among Indian academics, school students and the general public.
4.There will be the involvement of two local schools in a pilot project to engage school children by making them aware of the natural history collecting practices of the British Empire, the co-construction of of botanical knowledge by local communities in India and interesting them in the conservation of endangered flora of South Asia.
The timing of the event, in Hooker's bi-centennial year will allow the exhibition and conference to both benefit from and contribute to, the significant publicity which will accompany this anniversary in the U.K. This project capitalizes on the work done under the auspices of the previously funded Network for Collaborative Research on the Botanical and Meteorological History of the Indian Ocean, 1600-1900, with the primary aims of disseminating research beyond the academy reversing both the accumulation of the materials of scientific research and narratives of knowledge production from Britain to the global south.
Planned Impact
The staging of the Hooker and India exhibition in Kolkata will deepen and expand the exhibition's original impact in the U.K.by presenting it to an entirely new public and academic audience in India, while the production of teaching materials will extend this impact in schools and universities. The extension to audiences within India is seen as of particular value as much of Hooker's most important work and most prolific collecting was done here. The exhibition therefore represents a repatriation of knowledge, helping to highlight the centrality to scholarship of India and Indian collections and also reconnecting disparate archival materials to regenerate debate. The search for related materials at Indian institutions to be undertaken as part of the project will extend knowledge of both Hooker and Indian collections while consultation with universities, and the school project will help build connections and collaborative working relationships between Kew, Sussex, the BSI, the Indian Museum, Indian universities, schools and other institutions. The exhibition will also generate new audiences and users for the Kew/Sussex database of Hooker's Indian correspondence. While the Indian Museum would benefit directly from increased visitor numbers, the international reputations of the Indian Museum, Kew and Sussex would be mutually enhanced by the collaboration. The increased visibility of both Hooker and of Botany would be of strategic value to the partners since it would improve the viability of the collaborative project between CWEH, BSI and Kew. The partners are planning for a future collaborative project to digitise the whole of Hooker's Indian Herbarium, only a sample of which is currently digitised.
The 'pop up' exhibition planned with the BL at the NMNH, Delhi will highlight the BL's natural history holdings, bringing hidden collections to light and drawing public and scholarly attention to similar collections conserved in India broadening understanding of India's rich natural history heritage and issues related to their interpretation and preservation.
The school project will bring an understanding of Indian environmental and natural history to a secondary school level audience. The educational materials and essay's produced by the children will be shared on the project website.
The opening public conference will facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas, building on those developed during the funded phase of the original network and in particular the conferences held at Sussex and Delhi in 2012, 2013 and 2014 while presenting the opportunity to engage new international audiences including policy makers.
The work would also bring into the public domain ideas and issues emerging from substantial and broad ranging under-pinning research generated by the original network both in U.K. and India. This includes the Palgrave book series on global environmental history, the collaboration with the British Library on indigenous sources in the Sundarbans, the British Library's Wellcome Trust funded project on medical topographies, ongoing work with the UK Met Office, the forthcoming publication of a volume on Commonwealth forest history with the Forest Research Institute in Dehra Dun and the proposed digitisation projects at the Forest Research Institute, Indian Museum and the Botanical Survey of India - where the digitisation of 33 volumes of Nathaniel Wallich's files and specimens - are under way. Direct Conversations and meetings will create impact among professionals and policy makers. Such networks and relationships, will in turn help facilitate the proposed next phase of Indian Ocean environmental studies at CWEH: the development of a digital architecture within which an exhaustive archive of sources for the environmental history of the Indian Ocean is brought together and rendered fully searchable and freely accessible from anywhere in the world, revolutionising the study of environmental history.
The 'pop up' exhibition planned with the BL at the NMNH, Delhi will highlight the BL's natural history holdings, bringing hidden collections to light and drawing public and scholarly attention to similar collections conserved in India broadening understanding of India's rich natural history heritage and issues related to their interpretation and preservation.
The school project will bring an understanding of Indian environmental and natural history to a secondary school level audience. The educational materials and essay's produced by the children will be shared on the project website.
The opening public conference will facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas, building on those developed during the funded phase of the original network and in particular the conferences held at Sussex and Delhi in 2012, 2013 and 2014 while presenting the opportunity to engage new international audiences including policy makers.
The work would also bring into the public domain ideas and issues emerging from substantial and broad ranging under-pinning research generated by the original network both in U.K. and India. This includes the Palgrave book series on global environmental history, the collaboration with the British Library on indigenous sources in the Sundarbans, the British Library's Wellcome Trust funded project on medical topographies, ongoing work with the UK Met Office, the forthcoming publication of a volume on Commonwealth forest history with the Forest Research Institute in Dehra Dun and the proposed digitisation projects at the Forest Research Institute, Indian Museum and the Botanical Survey of India - where the digitisation of 33 volumes of Nathaniel Wallich's files and specimens - are under way. Direct Conversations and meetings will create impact among professionals and policy makers. Such networks and relationships, will in turn help facilitate the proposed next phase of Indian Ocean environmental studies at CWEH: the development of a digital architecture within which an exhaustive archive of sources for the environmental history of the Indian Ocean is brought together and rendered fully searchable and freely accessible from anywhere in the world, revolutionising the study of environmental history.
Organisations
- University of Sussex (Lead Research Organisation)
- Natural History Museum (Collaboration)
- Institute of Development Studies (Collaboration)
- ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS, KEW (Collaboration)
- The Botanical Survey of India (Collaboration)
- McGill University (Collaboration)
- The British Library (Collaboration)
- Meteorological Office UK (Collaboration)
- John Innes Centre (Collaboration)
- National Museum of Natural History New Delhi (Collaboration)
- UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH (Collaboration)
- Botanical Survey of India (Project Partner)
- National Museum of Natural History (Project Partner)
- Royal Botanic Gardens (Project Partner)
- British Library (Project Partner)
Publications
Aisher A
(2016)
Introduction: Human-nature Interactions through a Multispecies Lens
in Conservation and Society
Alex Elliott
(2017)
Climate change and the Humanities
Allan R
(2016)
Toward integrated historical climate research: the example of Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth
in WIREs Climate Change
Damodaran V
(2016)
Violence in the Countryside: Agrarian Unrest and Communal Rioting in Bihar, 1946
in Studies in History
Damodaran V
(2017)
Janaki Ammal, C. D. Darlington and J. B. S. Haldane: scientific encounters at the end of empire.
in Journal of genetics
Damodaran V
(2016)
Gender, Forests and Famine in 19th-Century Chotanagpur, India
in Indian Journal of Gender Studies
Damodaran V
(2016)
Famine in Bengal: A Comparison of the 1770 Famine in Bengal and the 1897 Famine in Chotanagpur
in The Medieval History Journal
Damodaran V
(2018)
The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History
Damodaran V
(2022)
Special issue: Multiple worlds of the Adivasi. An introduction
in Modern Asian Studies
| Title | Joseph Hooker botanical trail blazer and the environmental heritage of India museum display with a woman scientist, the life and times of the woman botanist E.K. Janaki Ammal. |
| Description | The Hooker exhibition which was originally curated by Kew for their own exhibition. It traveled to India as part of the follow on grant for impact and engagement to the Botanical Survey of India gallery of the Indian Museum in September, 2016. BSI added a lot of new exhibits of local relevance. We further curated another exhibition on the renowned Indian woman botanist, E.K. Janaki Ammal, the first director of the Botanical Survey of India. The exhibition received a lot of press coverage in the national and regional press. In 2017 the exhibition moved to Delhi to more audiences |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Impact | This exhibition now is part of an ongoing school project which involves two Bengali medium vernacular schools in Kolkata on the environmental heritage of India. The students of the participating schools were very enthusiastic about the project which involves a trip both to the Botanical Survey of India gallery and the Kolkata Botanic garden. We have photographs and feedback forms that demonstrate their deep enjoyment of the outputs of the project and the efforts of the scientists in explaining the garden and the curator in explaining the museum exhibit. Around 240 school children participated in the project. With further funding we hope to be able to take this school project on the environmental heritage of India to further metropolitan schools in order to educate urban secondary school children about the value of natural history heritage. |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean/schoolproject |
| Title | Mangrove school project |
| Description | This innovative school project facilitated by Sussex University that documents the narratives of children in a marginal environment has got off to a great start. The Sundarbans, the world's largest contiguous mangrove forest, bordering the Bay of Bengal is situated in the Ganges delta and is an environment subject to frequent cyclones and rising sea levels. |Most recently, a cyclone of dramatic proportions, Amphan affected the region in May 2020. The home of the saltwater tiger, the region has 54 islands with an enormous biodiversity that were gradually intensively settled in the nineteenth century under the British. For the island-hopping communities, mainly lower caste, tribal and Muslim living here, the struggle for existence not only in terms of recovery and resilience in the face of natural disasters, but also their daily difficulties have had an effect particularly on children and youth magnifying their anxieties about their future. This unique School Project documents the voices of school children of this region with the objective of understanding and learning from their 'uncertain' worlds. The project has collected uncrafted narratives-oral, visual, photographic and written from 50 school children aged between 12-15 years in an initial pilot project from the Raidighi Shriphaltala Chandra Kanta High School in the Diamond Harbour subdivision of South 24 Parganas |
| Type Of Art | Artwork |
| Year Produced | 2021 |
| Impact | As Webb and Kirby note, 'What is striking to us is how through their art and written narratives the young people (we think it's important to refer to them as 'artists' to accord them the dignity and respect that their work warrants) have captured both their deeply embodied and emotional experiences of uncertainty, but equally a nuanced engagement with the complexity of how such uncertainty is lived with: • Bodies weighed down by being uprooted, and the familial bonds (Bappaditya Mondal; Molli Naiya) and welfare services (Molli Naiya) that make such transitions possible. • Nature that is at once menacing (the face in the clouds in Bappaditya Mondal's image captures this) and offers hope through mother nature (Nafisa Molla; Koyel Das). • Foregrounding of a relational animal/human connection in which humans have destroyed animal habitats and still the future of both are bound up together (Nafisa Molla; Deb Kumar Singh)'. These are images result in what Webb and Kirby have called 'uncertain' pedagogies1 that invite audiences (whoever they might be e.g. policy makers, scientists, planners) to respond in two overarching ways to the images/text, that demand them to situate themselves in relation to the art and the artists, and what is being conveyed. 1. What is this to me? What does it mean to me? How do I read this beyond climate change as a scientific fact? What am I learning from this 'artist' that I didn't know before, and that it wouldn't be possible to know if not presented visually? 2. What am I to this? Where am I in this story? What does this demand of me as human being? Consumer? Professional? Citizen? These images will be part of a wider exhibition that we plan as a joint event in the Sundarbans, in Kolkata and Sussex |
| URL | https://www.sussex.ac.uk/webteam/gateway/file.php?name=mangrove-school-project-press-release-short-(... |
| Title | Science, Humanism and the making of Modern India |
| Description | An exhibition both physical and digital with 64 images complemented by two more exhibitions one on colonial anthropology and the second on the mangrove school project. The exhbition launch was attended by over 150 people in Kolkata and was a resounding success. |
| Type Of Art | Artistic/Creative Exhibition |
| Year Produced | 2023 |
| Impact | Helping to highlight collections of the Botanical Survey of India to open these up to a wider public.To encourage the visit of school children from provincial and marginal schools in the Sundarbans and to engage them in dialogue with the scientists to explore problems so uncertainty and climate change |
| URL | https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/59585 |
| Description | My earlier innovative, interdisciplinary AHRC network project (AH/J008559/1)on Indian Natural History collections in Botany and Meteorology has achieved outstanding engagement with a range of non-academic partners in the U.K. and India. It has already demonstrated impact of reach and significance in its ability to highlight new sources to understand environmental and climate change and to reach wider audiences through museum displays and online digital resources. Initial funding from the Sussex Research Opportunities Fund and the AHRC has led to collaborative work between the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) at Sussex with a range of non-academic institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, (Kew) the British Library (BL), the U.K. Met Office, the World Meteorological Organisation and Indian institutions such as the Botanical Survey of India (BSI), the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun (FRI) the Indian Museum and the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). It has resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding between the University of Sussex, the British Library and the U.K. Met Office, whereby these institutions agreed to share historical weather and climate data. The network currently has 105 members and has held three successful meetings in the U.K. and in India. We also host a descriptive account of the collections relating to natural history of the Indian Ocean World on the CWEH website http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean. This current award takes some of these aims and objectives further. Aims and Objectives Some of the key network members build on knowledge exchange and pathways to impact already undertaken in the funded phase of the original network and have identified a well-defined need for the fruits of their collaboration to be taken to new audiences in India by highlighting the value of historic natural history collections held in the U.K. and India for preserving India's botanical heritage. This is being done through two museum displays, a public conference, a workshop and a school project. ? Museum display (adapted by Kew from an earlier exhibition) on Hooker, India and the botanical heritage of India in the BSI gallery of the Indian Museum in Kolkata ? Museum display organised by the BL on Science and Empire in NMNH in Mysore ? an opening public conference in Kolkata with academic and non-academic audiences ? A pilot project to engage two Kolkata schools in understanding the links between Botany, Empire and the historic environment. The exhibitions represent for the first time a repatriation of botanical knowledge, highlighting the importance of India and Indian botanical collections held both in Britain and India and connects disparate materials through a search of related materials at Indian Institutions. We also plan to deliver impact by changing the culture of holding institutions such as the BSI with regard to the conservation of their natural history holdings and underlining their importance to the wider Kolkata and Delhi public and increasing visitor numbers to the BSI gallery and the NMNH. All these objectives were successfully accomplished and the school project in particular was a great success. The public conferences accompanying the conference was jam packed. Visitor numbers to the BSI gallery were steady through the year. The exhibition also toured to Delhi India's capital city increasing audience numbers. One of the key findings of the project was that knowledge, exchange, capacity building and environmental education are critical for our common future. All these boxes were ticked by this project. The AHRC school project has been extended to the Indian Sundarbans, via new funding from a Sussex/IDS project called the Mangrove school project. The project is due to start in March 2020. This year the project was affected by Covid but nevertheless was extended to some more vulnerable children in fragile bioregions of the Sundarbans. Some exquisite art work has resulted. |
| Exploitation Route | The exhibition which has been loaned permanently by us to the BSI is currently the focus of several activities, increasing the number of visitors and involving schools. It is hoped that will improve the public engagement with the natural history collections held in Indian institutions and improve the interface between scientists and the public in these institutions. It is hoped further that the exhibition will tour. Significantly one of the key impacts of the exhibition was highlighting the life of the first director of the Botanical Survey of India, E.K. Janaki Ammal. This co-curated exhibition got a lot of press coverge. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Kolkata-celebrates-botany-legend-Janaki-Ammal/article16073012.ece. The AHRC school project is due to be carried forward by the current CWEH/IDS Mangrove school project in the Indian Sundarbans. The school project is now being successfully extended to this region this year despite Covid |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Education,Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Description | Project History and Collaboration The Indian Natural History collections are a product of the documentation project of colonial empires: British, French, Dutch and Portuguese. Through our AHRC network on the botanical and meteorological history of the Indian ocean 1500-1900, CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records on environmental and climate change, strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collections and providing a roadmap for digitising these sources for improved accessibility. In terms of the botanical record, CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to identify important collections such as the Nathaniel Wallich collection, www.nmnh.nic.in/nhmwinh.pdf, to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the BSI, Kolkata and the FRI, Dehradun. As a result of our participation in the Endangered Archives project, 33 volumes of Nathaniel Wallich's manuscript files have been rescued at the BSI. Our collaboration with Kew over the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in a useful online digital resource which has successfully reached new audiences. www.kew.org/josephhooker. The Indian Letters project with CWEH was part of the Joseph Hooker exhibition at Kew in 2011 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/josephhooker. The PI was also a participant in a Natural History Museum video documentary as an expert on Indian collections in an NHM exhibition which ran from 2013-2014 http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/art-nature-imaging/collections/india-collection/history-and-context/index.html. The result of these efforts was to highlight the importance of these collections in holding institutions such as the BL, the NHM and Kew which host the biggest collections from India and the Indian Ocean World. The value of these, both in preserving the natural heritage of these countries and in knowledge creation and knowledge repatriation, cannot be underestimated. https://in.news.yahoo.com/indian-flora-records-london-digitally-repatriated-062408802.html.With regard to the climate record, CWEH and PI were part of the negotiations of the World Meteorological Organisation in Maputo in April, 2014 on the climate heritage of the Indian Ocean and worked on the final document. CWEH and its AHRC network are listed in the INDARE (Indian Ocean Data rescue) implementation plan that was signed by several member countries of the Indian Ocean rim at a senior government level on preserving the climate heritage of the Indian Ocean http://www.gfcs-climate.org/node/1. As part of building a climate archive for the region, we are currently in receipt of further funding from McGill University for a project that aims to map the historic climate archive for the Indian Ocean World and to model particular climate events over the last 500 years. The current proposal has emerged in this context and as a result of careful planning meetings held by project partners at Sussex, BL, Kew and the BSI about taking our collaboration forward in the period 2012 to 2016. Current Activities Along with Kew and the BL, we have taken two exhibitions to India as part of the larger engagement process with new audiences and to further highlight the importance of natural history collections relating to India held in the U.K. and India. Building on the pathways of impact of the original funded phase of the network including engagement by project team with academics, curators and policy makers in India the current proposal enhances this by engaging with school educators. It uses study days as a model for engaging students in debate and the public conference to bring people together to debate. As a result of the activities of the network, the holding institutions mentioned above have benefited from an understanding of their collections, firstly in terms of which of their collections are of interest to scholars of environmental and climate change and secondly in terms of being aware of one another's holdings and how these may complement each other. We have had four meetings, two in Sussex, one at the BL and one in Delhi to facilitate this. This has led to an important awareness by the FRI, Dehradun, the Indian Museum, and the BSI of the importance of their manuscript collections and the larger possibilities of holding institutions in Britain such as the BL, Kew and NHM for negotiating with holding institutions in India about complementing their collections. The BSI and the Indian Museum are also putting together a conservation programme to preserve their valuable and extensive collections of natural history and showcase them in displays at the Indian Museum. Our proposal is in line with the recent British Council initiative in India encouraging museums and gallery partnerships between India and the U.K. https://www.britishcouncil.in/sites/default/files/re-imagine_museums_india-uk.pdf Exhibition 1: Hooker/ India and the Botanical Heritage of India CWEH and Kew have significant expertise in this area having previously worked together on the digitisation of Hooker's India correspondence, which is now freely available via the Kew website in fully searchable form and has gained wide public and academic usage. Hooker's collections and work are of major importance to Indian botanical heritage, as well as to the environmental and colonial history of the region. These collections also provide a unique insight into changes in climate and biodiversity and are therefore of extreme importance to contemporary debates over anthropogenic climate change, species loss and habitat destruction. His most prolific collecting was done in India. The Hooker centenary exhibition at Kew in 2011 highlighted some of these themes including that of science and empire. By taking the Kew/Hooker exhibition to Kolkata we have enhanced the impact of the original exhibition by taking it to an Indian audience generating further network and exchange opportunities. By involving the wider Kolkata public in an opening conference, the project has extended the interest in Indian Natural History to new audiences. The participation through a pilot project involving two local schools and by producing teaching materials related to environmental history has had tremendous impact. We also hope to generate new users for the Kew online transcription of Hooker's correspondence at the public, academic and school level. The exhibition is based on facsimiles of what is held in Kew. Part of this project was an inventory of the Hooker letters in the BSI archives by the Indian based Research Assistant Dr Dey which is included as part of the exhibition. The exhibition whilst similar to the exhibition that was in Kew in 2011 has added several new displays curated by the BSI and the Sussex team. It is held at the BSI gallery of the Indian Museum an area of 5000 sq. feet. There has been a long period of detailed discussions with the stakeholders in developing this proposal, including Christopher Mills, former Head of Library, Art and Archives at Kew, James Broughton, Head of International Engagement the NHM, Dr Paramjit Singh, Director of the BSI and Dr Venugopal outgoing head of the Indian Museum and currently Director of the NMNH. There is a shared commitment to and expectation of this project as a means of changing the way that Indian communities experience and value their botanical history. We have generated media interest in the exhibition and have encouraged local groups for example to visit the exhibition and document their experiences. Exhibition 2: Science and Empire The British Library facsimile 'pop-up' exhibition, 'Science and Empire' was hosted at the Regional Museum of Natural History's gallery in Mysore. Modelled on the Library's successful touring exhibition 'Beyond the Frame: Indian British connections' (2012), the exhibition comprised nine attractively-designed panels of facsimile materials drawn from the Library's historic collections the India Office Records, private papers, books and manuscripts in Indian languages, and visual materials. The panels covered the following themes: forestry; health and disease; irrigation; botany; geology and built environment. Displaying facsimiles of personal diaries and correspondence, government documents, maps, plans, pamphlets, photographs, paintings and drawings, the panels will create a picture of the impact of empire upon the natural and built environment of India over the period of 1700 to 1950 helped depict India's natural heritage. The Library's holdings in this area were complemented by collections in India and the Regional Museum was invited to display original materials from their collections. The Council facilitated the touring of 'Beyond the Frame' and has already expressed its support for this kind of flexible exhibition, as an effective way of bringing the historical collections of the UK and India to a wider audience. We had extensive media coverage for the inaugural ceremony in Kolkata and Mysore and a series of public lecture by Antonia Moon (BL) and Gina Fullerlove (Kew), Henry Noltie (Edinburgh Botanic garden) Robert Prys Jones (NHM) to enhance public engagement. We also have a twitter and facebook site where the lectures can be downloaded. Participation of Kolkata schools The participation of two schools Kolkata as part of the wider engagement exercise with young people. These schools have been chosen because they are government schools with the vernacular, Bengali as the medium of instruction. The students were selected from the first two years of secondary school and will be aged 12-14 when they have less exam pressure. The school days so fare involve taking students out to the Kolkata Botanic Garden for 2 field trips one which will include a visit to the Hooker and the Botanical Heritage of India exhibition and the second to the Kolkata botanic Garden, with a view to exploring the role of both English and native plant collectors, local plant names and India's rich botanical heritage. The impact has been demonstrated by essays written by the students on the environmental history including the built environment of their local area and are being be supplied with reading materials prepared by the local Research Assistant, Dr Anindita Kundu who has prepared handouts for students. They are being supported by reading materials that will contain images and sketches from Hooker's herbarium as well as Bengali chronicles that contain descriptions of the local environment, Ayurvedic medicines and other important narratives on local cultural practices including from the puthi collection. These local chronicles are kept in local museums and contains oral historical material on nature and environment in Bengal. Dr Saha also translates the material into the vernacular. She currently administers the local study days that include the 20 school days for 240 students, in groups of 24 and will lead the group twice a week. The aim of the study day is to make students aware of the botanical heritage of India as found in the colonial archive and in the local knowledge held in community repositories in West Bengal. As far as learning resources for the participating students and their guides in Kolkata are concerned the educational materials will focus upon addressing the following key questions: 1. Why is botanical knowledge important for our future generation? 2. How does it help us understand our environment? 3. How can we can conserve our environment? The questions have been framed to suit the goals of the school days and our aim of achieving a wider engagement with the project concerns including an understanding of natural history collecting, the role of botanical knowledge both colonial and indigenous, the importance of India's botanical heritage and its conservation in terms of India's endangered flora and fauna. Another aim of the school days will be to co-produce education materials through an invitation to school children to depict their surrounding environment or a plant in the botanic garden. By studying the local knowledge kept in chronicles (Bengali puthis) the school children will add to their understanding of the contribution of indigenous knowledge in conservation practices in South Asia today. After evaluation of the project the team will share its story and educational materials including essays and drawings by school children and digitised pages of the exhibitions key content on the project database on the original CWEH website. Timetable of activities The project is currently underway and is keeping to the original timetable. 15th September, 2016- 1st October, 2016- Beginning of the project. Pro-active start of project with meeting of project participants in Sussex. Preparations for the two exhibitions would have already begun on receipt of announcement of funding by 1st August including email correspondence and phone calls and will be completed in September. These include generating the captions and text, photography, printing and packing, air freight of facsimiles, and transport. Curation of the whole. 1st, October, Kolkata 2016- 1st October, Kolkata 2017- Hooker and Indian botanical heritage exhibition at the BSI gallery of the India Museum (open to the public). October 7th, Delhi 2016- October 7th Delhi, 2017- 'Science and Empire' exhibition at the Indian Museum of Natural History, Mysore to be open to the public with a public lecture. The exhibition will circulate in the next year in venues in India including Cochin and Delhi. October 1st, 2016- October 1st, 2017- Two study days per month for 10 months excluding the school summer vacation with 24 students, one to visit the museum and the second a botanical field trip and study day at the Kolkata Botanic Garden Opening Conference - 1st and 2nd October, 2016- The opening conference by experts will engage the wider Kolkata public in debates on science, empire and natural heritage will be held at the Indian Museum. The conference participants include many members of the original network Antonia Moon, (B.L),Penny Brook, (B.L.) Paramjit Singh, (BSI) Paul Basu (SOAS) Henry Noltie, (Edinburgh Botanic Garden) , Deepak Kumar (JNU) Debjyoti Das, (Oxford) Ranjan Chakrabarti, (Vidyasagar University) Arun Bandhopadyaya, (Jadavpur) Rohan Dsouza (Kyoto), Virginia Mills (Kew) Asmita Kabra (Ambedkar, Delhi), Robert Prys-Jones, (NHM) Bipasa Raha (Vidyasagar). Project Management and Coordination There has been a long period of detailed discussions with the stakeholders in developing this proposal, including Christopher Mills, former Head of Library, Art and Archives at Kew, current acting Director of Collections, Fiona Ainsworth, Collections Manager, Library, Art and Archives, Kew Dr Paramjit Singh, Director of the BSI and Dr Venugopal outgoing Head of the Indian Museum and currently Director of the NMNH, Antonia Moon and Penny Brook at the BL. We have also consulted James Broughton, Head of International Engagement, NHM and member of our network. The project is being overseen by the PI, Dr Vinita Damodaran. She will be aided by a Coordinating Committee that will include 5 members of the original network, Professor Alan Lester at Sussex, Prof Deepak Kumar at JNU, two curators, Dr Antonia Moon and Dr Penny Brook at the BL and Prof Paul Basu (SOAS) museum specialist. Vinita Damodaran the PI will coordinate all the activities with help from a part time administrative facilitator at Sussex and a Research Assistant in India, Anindita Kundu. Kundu who is a trained conservator and researcher with PhD in conservation from Kolkata University will organise the study days for the schools and collect the evidence for impact. Dr Debjyoti Das and Dr Paul Basu will be the consultants on the project. Their expertise in endangered archives and local museums will be invaluable in terms of curation and will help ensure targeted impact. The British Council will help with the practicalities in India. The Coordinating Committee will meet thrice during the duration of the project Outcomes, Impact and Evidence The staging of the Hooker and India exhibition in Kolkata will deepen and expand the exhibition's original impact in the U.K.by presenting it to an entirely new public and academic audience in India, while the production of teaching materials will extend this impact in schools and universities. The extension to audiences within India is seen as of particular value as much of Hooker's most important work and most prolific collecting was done here. The exhibition therefore represents a repatriation of knowledge, helping to highlight the centrality to scholarship of India and Indian collections and also reconnecting disparate materials to regenerate debate. The search for related materials at Indian institutions to be undertaken as part of the project will extend knowledge of both Hooker and Indian collections while consultation with universities, and the school project will help build connections and collaborative working relationships between Kew, Sussex, The BSI, the Indian Museum, Indian universities, schools and other institutions. The exhibition will also generate new audiences and users for the Kew/Sussex database of Hooker's Indian correspondence. While the Indian Museum would benefit directly from increased visitor numbers, the international reputations of the Indian Museum, Kew and Sussex would be mutually enhanced by the collaboration. The increased visibility of both Hooker and of Botany would be of strategic value to the partners since it would improve the viability of the collaborative project between CWEH, BSI and Kew. The partners are planning for a collaborative project to digitise the whole of Hooker's Indian Herbarium, only a sample of which is currently digitised. The 'pop up' exhibition planned with the BL at the NMNH, Mysore will highlight the BL's natural history holdings, bringing hidden collections to light and drawing public and scholarly attention to similar collections conserved in India broadening understanding of India's rich natural history heritage and issues related to their interpretation and preservation. Both these exhibitions will enhance the collaboration between Indian and British institutions and will highlight the British Council initiative in India on facilitating Museums and Galleries: UK - India opportunities and partnerships. The school project will bring an understanding of Indian environmental and natural history to a secondary school level audience. The opening public conference will facilitate networking and the exchange of ideas, building on those developed during the funded phase of the original network and in particular the conferences held at Sussex and Delhi in 2012, 2013 and 2014 while presenting the opportunity to engage new international audiences including policy makers. The work would also bring into the public domain ideas and issues emerging from substantial and broad ranging under-pinning research generated by the original network both in U.K. and India. This includes the Palgrave book series on global environmental history, the collaboration with the British Library on indigenous sources in the Sundarbans, the British Library's Welcome Trust funded project on medical topographies, ongoing work with the UK Met Office, the forthcoming publication of a volume on Commonwealth forest history with the Forest Research Institute in Dehra Dun. Direct Conversations and meetings will create impact among professionals and policy makers. Such networks and relationships, will in turn help facilitate the proposed next phase of Indian Ocean environmental studies at CWEH: the development of a digital architecture within which an exhaustive archive of sources for the environmental history of the Indian Ocean is brought together and rendered fully searchable and freely accessible from anywhere in the world, revolutionising the study of environmental history. Documenting this project and measuring its impact is part of the production of knowledge central to the vision of the proposal. The objectives of this current project will be specific, measurable and time bound. It will target specific groups, such as school children. The project team will be cohesive and clear about project aims and goals and how to measure impact and collect evidence. In order to determine how the experience of seeing either the exhibition or otherwise engaging with this project's activities change people's perceptions various tools and methods will be employed. 1. Visitor numbers will be collected. 2. Visitor's experience, surveys and interviews will be done to provide evidence that minds have changed and new understandings reached by individuals. 3. With regard to Schools we will measure change in 240 students by making them complete a questionnaire before they go on their visits and then afterwards. 4. There will be interviews with teachers in the two schools feeding back their experience of change. 5. With regard to universities in Kolkata and Delhi evidence of links with university academics teaching Environmental history will be demonstrated. 6. Overall evidence about the way in which these events/activities have altered public understanding of India's resources, histories and policies. The interviews will be (a) Face to face (b) Telephonic (c) self-completion on paper or electronically. Other ways of measuring impact include; 1. A visitor's book as a way of capturing the thoughts of visitors and getting feedback. 2. Record keeping or self-observation by PI and Dr Kundu. This is a useful resource on how we can do things better in future. 3. Media Impact in terms of sales and readership figures of any publication. 4. Other general information on visitor numbers to the museums, visitor breakdown with regard to children and family visits will be provided. It is planned that the long term legacies of the project in terms of changes to behaviour will be mapped a year after the end of the project through oral and written interviews with students, academics and members of the general public and U.K. partners (BL and Kew) and Indian partners (BSI and NMNH). http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean The exhibitions were particularly successfully in attracting a large audience. They were accompanied by a public conference, the visit of the secretary of the Ministry Ajay Jha. The school project was also very successful. 240 school children were taken to then exhibition and the botanic garden where they were taught about India's environmental heritage. Visitor numbers, interviews with students, teachers, audiences and policy makers have all been collected as part of our impact case study. The exhibition also toured Delhi. The co-curated exhibition on E.K. Janaki Ammal gained enormous press coverge. http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/Kolkata-celebrates-botany-legend-Janaki-Ammal/article16073012.ece. The AHRC school project is also being taken forward as the Mangrove school project with additional funding from IDS. The school project has been very successful this year in the Sundarbans. 2019-ongoing his innovative school project facilitated by the University of Sussex that documents the narratives of children in a marginal environment has got off to a great start. The Sundarbans, the world's largest contiguous mangrove forest, bordering the Bay of Bengal is situated in the Ganges delta and is an environment subject to frequent cyclones and rising sea levels. |Most recently, a cyclone of dramatic proportions, Amphan affected the region in May 2020. The home of the saltwater tiger, the region has 54 islands with an enormous biodiversity that were gradually intensively settled in the nineteenth century under the British. For the island-hopping communities, mainly lower caste, tribal and Muslim living here, the struggle for existence not only in terms of recovery and resilience in the face of natural disasters, but also their daily difficulties have had an effect particularly on children and youth magnifying their anxieties about their future. This unique School Project documents the voices of school children of this region with the objective of understanding and learning from their 'uncertain' worlds. The project has collected uncrafted narratives-oral, visual, photographic and written from 50 school children aged between 12-15 years in an initial pilot project from the Raidighi Shriphaltala Chandra Kanta High School in the Diamond Harbour subdivision of South 24 Parganas. T |
| First Year Of Impact | 2016 |
| Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Education,Environment,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal,Policy & public services |
| Description | Conservation of Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic Garden as an interpretation centre |
| Geographic Reach | Asia |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| URL | https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170809/jsp/calcutta/story_166277.jsp |
| Description | Influencing policy of Botanical Survey of India and the National Museum of Natural History on their collections |
| Geographic Reach | Asia |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Impact | The exhibition in Kolkata on Hooker and the environmental heritage of India was opened by Sri Ajay Narayan Jha, the Secretary of Ministry of Climate change, environment and forests. He was given a tour of the exhibitions by Gina Fullerlove (Kew) and Vinita Damodaran (Sussex). . Ajay Narayan said that he planned four courses of action in response to the exhibition and to a recent meeting with the ZSI. The four courses of action were: 1) building more formalised collaborations between UK, Indian and American governmental ministries dealing with environment; 2) continuing work on digitisation and engaging in discussions about how to speed up this process; 3) involving institutions like NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training), to bring the knowledge to the common people, particularly school children; 4) talking to various institutions about touring the exhibition. This impact at a high level. We hope to meet with him further to push these policy imperatives. We also have an ongoing school project with impact on the education of vernacular school children who are appreciating going to the Kolkata Botanic garden and learning about environmental sustainability. More recently the exhibition toured Delhi. We also have had the initiative to digitally repatriate Indian plants from the Natural History Museum to India as part of the exercise to create a new Flora for British India. |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Description | Living Deltas Hub |
| Geographic Reach | Asia |
| Policy Influence Type | Participation in a guidance/advisory committee |
| Impact | My role in the project is to ensure that they have a strategy for determining and reflecting on the work we undertake and the outcomes and impact we generate across the whole of the team and in our study areas. This strategy enables us to evidence how we are progressing towards benefitting the social, physical and economic environment. This work involves whole-project stocktakes by the whole team to ensure that the right tools are employed by the project and that organisational culture and norms are respected. |
| URL | https://livingdeltas.org/ |
| Description | Our engagement with the Botanical survey of India has been enhanced. We engaged closely with the director of the botanical gallery in the Indian Museum, Dr Manas Bhaumick and Dr Anandita Saha in JUne 2022 and arranged a tour of visits to Kew garden, the Natural History Museum and the John Innes centre. In his reprt Dr Bhaumick and Dr saha spoke about how these visits has transformed their mode of thinking about public facing exhibitions and displays. This was an important capacity building exercise building on long standing networks. As part of a capacity building exercise we invited him to Susses, along with the curator of our exhibition Dr Saha priminlary to our exhibition |
| Geographic Reach | Asia |
| Policy Influence Type | Contribution to new or improved professional practice |
| Impact | Science collections in India normally are not open to the public. Our long interaction with the Botanical Survey of India has opened up their collections to a wider public and developed new links with institutions of scientific expertise in Britain such as Kew, the John Innes Centre, the British Library, The Royal Pavilion gardens in Brighton and the Natural History Museum. By encouraging and hosting visits between the two organizations, scientific practice in both India and Britain are enhanced leading to a decolonisation of the natural history collections of empire |
| URL | https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/59585 |
| Description | Participation as critical friend in decolonising natural history collections in Royal Botanic Garden, Kew |
| Geographic Reach | Multiple continents/international |
| Policy Influence Type | Membership of a guideline committee |
| Impact | Sharing botanical and environmental data for the shared benefit of India and the U.K. through digitisation , displays and school projects |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Description | SSHRC Canadian Social Science Research Council |
| Amount | $200,000 (CAD) |
| Organisation | Government of Canada |
| Department | SSHRC - Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | Canada |
| Start | 09/2019 |
| End | 08/2022 |
| Description | Science and the Colonies; Hidden networks of Botanical science, Ecology and Eugenics at the end of Empire |
| Amount | £99,987 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | AH/W009161/1 |
| Organisation | Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 01/2022 |
| End | 04/2023 |
| Description | Sussex Research fund |
| Amount | £42,000 (GBP) |
| Organisation | University of Sussex |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 04/2018 |
| End | 04/2020 |
| Title | Archival surveys on natural history collections and endangered archives in the Indian Ocean World |
| Description | The project has resulted in detailed archival surveys of archives in the Indian Ocean region which will be benificial to future research on climate and environmental change. This is an ongoing project aided by further funding from the Canadian Research Council and the Norwegian Research Council. We are currently conducting an inventory of local archives in Kutch and Sundarbans with a view to understanding their records on natural history. |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2012 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | This is important research as it has led to the uncovering of several endangered archives whose rescue is of enormous signifcance to a range of scholars from the sciences to humanities and social sciences in India, Malaysia and Bangladesh. This ongoing work by scholars linked to our network. |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Title | Improvement to public display collections of the Botanical Survey of India gallery |
| Description | By preserving collections and raising awareness of the exiting natural history collections of the British empire held in Indian and British institutions and engaging with these with the wider public through museum exhibitions, visits by school children and conferences |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2014 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The preservation of the Wallich collection in the BSI archives has resulted in renewed number of researchers visiting the Calcutta Botanic Garden in search of the archives. A hand list of the useful papers in the archives was prepared by the post-doctoral researcher which will be put on line on the CWEH website |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh |
| Title | Improving the research environment for researchers on Indian plant collections of the British Empire |
| Description | This project continues to engage in Digitisation, Display and school demonstrations to achieve a range of objectives of changing research infrastructure for the benefit of scientists and researchers particularly in the global south and engagement with youth and school children for new emancipatory futures |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2020 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | I have been invited to decolonise collections at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew as part of a wider decolonising project |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Title | Knowledge exchange and capacity building |
| Description | Through the activities of the network we have attempted to improve research infrastructure particularly in terms of developing a franework for the digital repatriation of Indian plants speciments held in U.K. institutions |
| Type Of Material | Improvements to research infrastructure |
| Year Produced | 2018 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The Natural History Museum's successful funding to secure 3 Indian scientists to visit the Museum and to help with digital repatriation of Indian plant specimens will have a significant impact on improving India's research infrastructure. |
| URL | http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2017/november/thousands-of-indian-plants-to-be-digitised-for-the-... |
| Title | A website containing a description of resources in key locations |
| Description | The network allowed for a scoping of the archives and collections relating to botany and meteorology in various locations in the Indian Ocean world. It also helped to develop through the technical committee meetings an interpretative framework for the records through a discussion of capture, presentation and metadata of the sources that will help to enhance the data through commentaries. The scoping of the archives relating to natural history of the IOW world is now available on line through the Centre for World Environmental History's website. We also contributed to the Kew, Hooker and India database.We are currently updating this database with a new inventory of the archives of the BSI |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2012 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | The collection and transcription of one database on Hooker's India letters has been digitised as part of the joint Sussex University/Kew project on his India correspondence and is available to the wider public on the Kew Website. The BL had a Botany in British India day. The BSI in Kolkata is inventorising and protecting its collections on Hooker. |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Title | a data base of seventeenth and eighteenth century disasters including famines, floods and droughts and a climate database |
| Description | The research funding that followed from the network from the University of Mcgill resulted in us setting up this database on the seveneteenth century crisis in South Asia followed by another database on the impact of ElNino in the eighteenth century |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Year Produced | 2016 |
| Provided To Others? | Yes |
| Impact | We collected data on climate and the environment in the Longue Durée from archives and are interested in making this information understandable to the public in terms of understanding the climate and how we engage with it in the Indian Ocean World. The potential to bring together our data within the MCRI database, the integration of the database to GIS, and the tools in development for ICRA are all exciting. To aid visualisation we hoped to create models concerning the periods surrounding two major volcanic eruptions, reconstructing wind directions and shipping routes with the help of Philip Brohan (Met Office) that shows the composite of all ships routes for the 2 years before and after the volcanic eruptions which will be displayed through a movie loop that shows each new route as it progresses but keeps past routes on the image with new routes changing colour after the volcanic eruptions and having two separate movies for the two volcanic eruptions. This visualization has been completed by two graduate students on the project Melissa Lazenby and Netsanet Alamirew. |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/human-environment-interaction |
| Description | Appraising risk, past and present: interrogating historical data to enhance understanding of environmental crises in the Indian ocean world Funder: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Grant number: N/A |
| Organisation | McGill University |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We work closely with McGill on this collecting data on Indian ocean world climate and human interaction at specific points in time. We also ran a very successful summer school in May 2021.The Appraising Risk Partnership's 1st Summer School Workshop was conducted on the 26th and 27th May via Zoom. It was organised by the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) at the University of Sussex, as part of the Appraising Risk Partnership funded by the Canadian Social Science Research Council and with collaboration from the McGill University, the British Library, the University of Hull and the Met Office. 44 participants, mainly early career researchers, registered for the sessions from India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Germany, U.K, Australia and Canada. Attendance for each day was good, with approximately 45 attendees on each day (including the 7 speakers/organisers). The theme of day 1, chaired by Vinita Damodaran was "Environmental Archives". The first half comprised 3x 20-minute presentations from Antonia Moon (British Library), Rob Allan (Met Office) and Greg Bankoff (University of Hull/University of Sussex), entitled respectively, "Some sources for meteorology in the India Office Records and related collections", "ACRE's experiences with Indian Ocean World archives and their uses" and "Climate and the Environmental Historian". The second half comprised a 40-minute workshop that drew on some of the themes from the presentations, run by Vinita Damodaran and Mike Rayner. The participants had been given 9 primary source extracts, relating to 3 case studies, in advance of the session, as well as secondary source material for optional further reading. The case studies related to (1) the 1864 Calcutta Cyclone, (2) the 1877-1878 El Niño and Madras famine, and (3) the 1944-1945 Pacific Typhoon. In break-out rooms of 4-5 participants they were instructed to discuss one of the case studies and answer questions about the sources. A padlet was provided as a platform to exchange ideas/ask questions, and each group was asked to share their conclusions with the larger group at the end. The theme of day 2, chaired by Mick Frogley, was "Climate of the Indian Ocean World: practical application". The first half comprised a demonstration by Melissa Lazenby of the KNMI Climate Explorer software (https://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi), exploring data from the Calcutta Cyclone case study. In the second half, participants were divided into breakout rooms of 5-6 participants, and were given exercises to complete using KNMI based on either case study 2 or case study 3. Following this, https://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/ |
| Collaborator Contribution | Collaborators who work together on conferences, publications on India and the Indian Ocean World include Margaret E.R. Kalacska - McGill University Co-PI Isaac N. Luginaah - McGill University Co-PI Angela Schottenhammer - KU leuven Co-PI Jon Unruh - McGill University Co-PI Julia Verne - Guttenberg University Co-PI James F. Warren - Murdoch university Co-PI |
| Impact | Summer school Publications Further grant applications Conferences |
| Start Year | 2017 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | Institute of Development Studies |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | Meteorological Office UK |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | National Museum of Natural History New Delhi |
| Country | India |
| Sector | Private |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | Natural History Museum |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | The Botanical Survey of India |
| Country | India |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Botanical and Meteorological history of the Indian Ocean 1500-1900 |
| Organisation | The British Library |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Public |
| PI Contribution | The AHRC networking grant made to the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) with Damodaran as PI helped facilitate initial networking meetings which have culminated in the recent signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between The University of Sussex, The British Library and The UK Met Office. The 3 have agreed to share historical weather and climate data to enhance understanding of environmental change in the Indian Ocean area during the colonial period. It is a hugely important period as European empires, the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese, brought about an unprecedented transformation of the landscapes and environments on the periphery of the Indian Ocean. The resulting ecological reshaping was closely documented and can be found in various types of colonial and indigenous documents but the issue is finding where relevant historical sources are held. In terms of the botanical record the transcription of an important record of Indian natural history in conjunction with Kew, the Indian letters of Joseph Hooker has resulted in the collaborative Hooker's India letters project, where we are listed as project partners. www.kew.org/josephhooker. We are now preparing to take the collaboration further by taking two exhibitions to India, the first one to Delhi and the second to Kolkata highlighting the role of natural history collections of the empire to a wider audience of school students, the general public and academics. The exhibition with the follow on funding for impact and engagment were extermely successful in addressing the questions of public engagement in Kolkata and Mysore. It was particularly successful in terms of involving secondary school children in the bid to understand and conserve the natural history heritage of India. In this year, the exhibition travelled to Delhi. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in further funding for that institition to bid successfully from the Rutherford Fund to bring 3 scientists from the Botanical Survey of India one of our key collaborators to the NHM for the work of digital repatriation of Indian botanical specimens. This got wide publicity in the Indian and U.K. press. We have now added a new partner to this network which is the Asia Scotland Trust and we are preparing to restore Roxburgh house in the Kolkata Botanic garden as part of this exercise.As part of further development of our international network we have managed to secure further funding with IDS to take a school project to the Sundarbans |
| Collaborator Contribution | CWEH is responsible for identifying relevant historical records , strengthening academic and non-academic networks, providing online hosting for descriptive accounts of the collection and ultimately providing a roadmap for digitising the sources for improved accessibility.The CWEH has already played a key advisory role in helping holding institutions such as Kew, the Natural History Museum and the British Library to establish interconnections between their various collections and those of institutions in South Asia such as the National Library in Kolkata and the Kolkata Botanic Garden. The colonial records include numerous papers and archives compiled by both private individuals and by colonial bureaucracies, naturalists, travellers, missionaries and scientific services. For example, the British Library holds a large collection of transcribed songs from across India that lament the environmental changes caused by the introduction of new crops by the British from the late 19th century. Physical sources include the specimens of plants, animals and geological materials that remain in herbaria and museum collections. Our collaboration with these institutions had helped to take an earlier curated exhibition by Kew to India on Joseph Hooker. This was inaugurated by us in Kolkata and Mysore in 2016 with two very successful exhibitions at the Botanical Survey of India and the Regional Museum of Natural History both institutions are our collaborators. We also had a school project to involve secondary school children to further their understanding of the natural history heritage of India. More recently our collaboration with the Natural History Museum has resulted in BSI and the NHM taking their collaboration further as a result of our network to digitally repatriate over a 100,000 Indian botanical specimens to India. The Asia Scotland trust is actively engaging with us to restore Roxburgh house as a new centre for environmental history and climate change. |
| Impact | The Hooker India letters is also an outcome of this network. http://www.kew.org/science-conservation/collections/joseph-hooker/partners. The Kew/ BSI/NMNH Natural History heritage of India exhibition is an outcome of this collaboration. More recently the collaboration has extended to Mcgill University, Canada and the Norwegian Institute of Social Sciences, Noragric who are collaborating with us on two projects on Human Environment interactions in the Indian Ocean World, 1500 onwards http://indianoceanworldcentre.com/Team_7and Climate change, uncertainity and social transformation (with Institute of Development Studies, (IDS) and Noragric). The digital repatriation of the Indian plants at the Natural History Museum is part of this collaboration exercise and the visit of three Indian scientists to aid with this repatriation exercise had recently been successfully funded.by the Rutherford trust. It is exteremly important for India/U.K. collaboration. |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Gwillim project |
| Organisation | McGill University |
| Country | Canada |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | Worked on the environment and climate of south India in the period of the sisters. My contribution was to the environmental history dimension of the project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | McGill University was given a large grant ot digitise and work on the collection of the sisters. This was a major initiative and one that we learnt a great deal from |
| Impact | Blogs Conferences Publication Reports |
| Start Year | 2019 |
| Description | Hidden histories of science |
| Organisation | John Innes Centre |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We highlighted the collections held in the JOhn Innes Centre mainly photographs and archives and brought it to a public audience through an exhibition in Kolkata |
| Collaborator Contribution | The John Innes centre and the Librarian were very helpful and contributed their expertise to the exhibition in the form of identifying key material and photographic images. We had 64 images for our exhibition |
| Impact | A public-facing exhibition on Science and the making of Modern India in Kolkata that was inaugurated on the 7th of January and is still running at the botanical survey of India gallery of the Indian Museum |
| Start Year | 2022 |
| Description | Kew garden critical friend decolonising natural history collections of empire |
| Organisation | Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | Kew, Sussex have worked closely together to digitise the natural history collections of empire. As a result of these engagements we have recently succeeded in getting digitised the 700 volumes of the Miscellaneous Reports with Routledge. We have also managed to digitally repatriate over 100,000 herbarium specimens from the Natural History Museum to the Botanical survey of India. These engagements built on the the earlier engagement with Kew when we took the Hooker exhibition to Kolkata |
| Collaborator Contribution | Kew supplied the exhibition that came to India. They have also liased with us closely over the nature of their collections and have invited me as a critical friend to decolonise their collections |
| Impact | https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/projects/miscellaneous-reports https://www.kew.org/science/our-science/projects/joseph-hooker-correspondence-project |
| Start Year | 2012 |
| Description | Restoring Roxburgh house as a climate change centre in the Kolkata Botanic Garden |
| Organisation | University of Edinburgh |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| PI Contribution | We are working with the Asia Scotland trust to preserve Roxburgh house as a climate change centre in the Kolkata botanic garden. The fund raising for this project has moved to the next stage where the MOU with the Trust and the Kolkata Botanic Garden has been finalised. 25,000 pounds has already been raised as initial funding for for this project. |
| Collaborator Contribution | The Asia Scotland Trust is very active in trying to fund raise for this project and recently we have made some strong links with the FCO in this matter |
| Impact | The outcomes currently include a detailed architectural plan for the restoration and a funding agenda. |
| Start Year | 2016 |
| Description | A formal working group on the conservation of Roxburgh House at BSI in Kolkata |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Policymakers/politicians |
| Results and Impact | We have created a dialogue by setting up an expert group about the importance to protect Roxburgh House as a heritage and historical site for Indian Botanical heritage. The proposal currently is being decided by the Indian ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | https://www.telegraphindia.com/1170809/jsp/calcutta/story_166277.jsp |
| Description | Digital Repatriation of Indian plants |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The network helped to promote links between Indian institutions and British Institutions. As a result of the activities of the network the Botanical Survey of India and the Natural History Museum have collaborated to digitally repatriate 100,000 Indian plant specimens. This has been made possible through the visits of the director of the BSI, Dr Paramjit Singh who is an active network member to network meetings in Sussex and London. See http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2017/november/thousands-of-indian-plants-to-be-digitised-for-the-first-time.html |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2018 |
| URL | http://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/indian-flora-records-in-london-to-be-digitally-re... |
| Description | Kew BSI exhibition tours Delhi |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | The Kew/BSI exhibition after its year long display in Kolkata was taken to Delhi in October 2017 here it had a successful showing over 10 days to a wide audience. It was inaugrated by the Director of the BSI and the Secretary Ministry of Environment. The specialist talk was given by one of our members of the steering committee of the network, Prof Deepak Kumar from JNU. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |
| URL | http://www.millenniumpost.in/features/exploring-the-botanical-heritage-of-india-267873 |
| Description | Mangrove school project |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | This innovative school project facilitated by Sussex University that documents the narratives of children in a marginal environment has got off to a great start. The Sundarbans, the world's largest contiguous mangrove forest, bordering the Bay of Bengal is situated in the Ganges delta and is an environment subject to frequent cyclones and rising sea levels. |Most recently, a cyclone of dramatic proportions, Amphan affected the region in May 2020. The home of the saltwater tiger, the region has 54 islands with an enormous biodiversity that were gradually intensively settled in the nineteenth century under the British. For the island-hopping communities, mainly lower caste, tribal and Muslim living here, the struggle for existence not only in terms of recovery and resilience in the face of natural disasters, but also their daily difficulties have had an effect particularly on children and youth magnifying their anxieties about their future. This unique School Project documents the voices of school children of this region with the objective of understanding and learning from their 'uncertain' worlds. The project has collected uncrafted narratives-oral, visual, photographic and written from 50 school children aged between 12-15 years in an initial pilot project from the Raidighi Shriphaltala Chandra Kanta High School in the Diamond Harbour subdivision of South 24 Parganas. The aims of the project are; 1. To listen to the voices of youth and children experiencing uncertainty and climate change in the Sundarbans towards reimagining their future. 2. To bring children's voices in conversation with expert voices to co-produce and reshape knowledge and to reframe debates on marginality, uncertainty and climate change. The target group for the project were Middle school children whose age ranges between 12 to 16 years and the methodologies adopted for accumulating these were to facilitate uncrafted narratives |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2020,2021 |
| URL | https://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/newsandevents/mangrove |
| Description | Museum exhibition and school visit |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 1st October The exhibition in Kolkata was opened by Sri Ajay Narayan Jha, the Secretary of MOEFCC. He was given a tour of the exhibitions by Gina Fullerlove and Vinita Damodaran. This was followed by the lighting of the lamp, the welcome song and words of introduction by Paramjit Singh (director of the BSI), Gina Fullerlove, Vinita Damodaran and Ajay Narayan Jha. Finally, a number of books were released by academics involved in the collaboration. During the tea break, the participants of spoke with Ajay Narayan Jha about various issues. Deepak Kumar stressed the need for digitising the collections of the ZSI (Zoological Survey of India) and the BSI. He spoke about the need to expand the school curriculum to increase the focus on environment and natural history. Ajay Narayan said that he planned four courses of action in response to the exhibition and to a recent meeting with the ZSI. The four courses of action were: 1) building more formalised collaborations between UK, Indian and American governmental ministries dealing with environment; 2) continuing work on digitisation and engaging in discussions about how to speed up this process; 3) involving institutions like NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training), to bring the knowledge to the common people, particularly school children; 4) talking to various institutions about touring the exhibition. All these have since happened the Hooker exhibition has not only attracted a lot of public attention but also two schools have been involved increasing the interest in environmental history and the current environmental global crisis. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016 |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh |
| Description | Museum exhibition and school visit |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Public/other audiences |
| Results and Impact | 1st October The Kew Hooker exhibition in the BSI gallery Kolkata was opened by Sri Ajay Narayan Jha, the Secretary of the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests. He was given a tour of the exhibitions by Gina Fullerlove from Kew and Vinita Damodaran (Sussex). This was followed by the lighting of the lamp, the welcome song and words of introduction by Paramjit Singh (director of the Botanical Survey of India, BSI), Gina Fullerlove, Vinita Damodaran and Ajay Narayan Jha. Finally, a number of books were released by academics involved in the collaboration. The audience for the inaugural conference, included the media, the Kolkat public, post graduate students, BSI scientists and Zoological Survey of India, scientist, School teachers who were involved in the school project that was to follow. During the tea break, the participants of spoke with Ajay Narayan Jha about various issues. Deepak Kumar (JNU) stressed the need for digitising the collections of the ZSI (Zoological Survey of India) and the BSI. He spoke about the need to expand the school curriculum to increase the focus on environment and natural history. Ajay Narayan said that he planned four courses of action in response to the exhibition and to a recent meeting with the ZSI. The four courses of action were: 1) building more formalised collaborations between UK, Indian and American governmental ministries dealing with environment; 2) continuing work on digitisation and engaging in discussions about how to speed up this process; 3) involving institutions like NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training), to bring the knowledge to the common people, particularly school children; 4) talking to various institutions about touring the exhibition. It is now currently reaching wide audiences via the museum exhibit and school students in two vernacular schools in Kolkata. The second exhibition put together by the British Library (BL) in Mysore. The exhibition was opened by Shri A.C. Lakshmana, the former secretary to the Government of Karnataka in the department of Forest, Ecology and Environment. Antonia Moon gave him a tour of the British Library part of the exhibition. Following this, the conference was introduced by Dr. Venugopal, Director of the NMNH, Antonia Moon, Vinita Damodaran, A.C. Lakshmana, Dr. Manjula and G.N. Indresha.The first session was on the theme of "Indian Natural History Collections". This was opened by Antonia Moon, who spoke about "Resources for South Asian Environmental History at the British Library". She was followed by B.R. Ramesh, who spoke on "The Forestry and Conservation Research of the French Institute in Pondicherry". Finally Subash Chandran discussed "Sunset over the Sacred Groves: Endangered Museums of Indian Cultural and Ecological Heritage". The second and final session of the day was on "Empire, Natural History and Forestry", and was opened by Henry Noltie on "Hugh Cleghorn: Indian Forester, Scottish Laird". This was followed by Robert Prys-Jones on "Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912): The 'Pope' of South Asian Ornithology". Finally, Gina Fullerlove spoke on "Joseph Hooker, Kew and the Plants of India". This meeting and exhibition was preceded by Nadaswaram music and was also attended by an audience of 100 people followed by high tea. The exhibition is currently planning a tour of other places in the country. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016,2017 |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/research/indianocean |
| Description | Public facing exhibition |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | The public-facing exhibition in Kolkata and the two-day-long workshop was attended by 160 people who were very happy with the outcomes. It generated huge interest and debate in science and human values among a range of people. School children from the marginal area of the Sundarbans delta attended the workshop and also presented their work on climate change and uncertainty through a range of art work including paintings |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/59585 |
| Description | School project, Indian Natural History collections |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Schools |
| Results and Impact | 250 school children have been engaging with the Botanic Garden in Kolkata on the natural history collections there and visiting the museum exhibition that has been on permanent display there. Since then we have extended the project with some further funding to another 250 students in the fragile bio-region of the Sundarbans |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021 |
| URL | http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cweh/ |
| Description | conference and curriculum change in a provincial university |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | Regional |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | The conference in Kolkan and the environment and tribal was highly praised by the tribal students who were able to interact with one of the members of our network a tribal activist Gladson DungDung. This was followed by a curriculum meeting with the teachers who were keen to add environmental history to the curriculum. The meeting was follwed by email exchanges through the year which helped the university to build up their environmental history teaching |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2017 |