British Imperialism and its Legacies: Apluda communis collected by Robert Wight
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of plants collected from overseas locations. Apluda communis is a tall perennial member of the grass family (Poaceae) occurring across southern and south-eastern Asia. The specimen was collected in southern India by Robert Wight (1796–1872), probably in the first half of the 1800s. It was named in 1843 by George Arnott Walker Arnott (1799–1868) (later Professor of Botany at Glasgow University) and CG Nees von Esenbeck (1776–1858), a German botanist; the name is now considered a synonym for the accepted name Apluda mutica.
Robert Wight is considered to have made one of the most significant contributions to the study of Indian botany. Born in Scotland, he studied medicine in Edinburgh and then worked for the East India Company as an assistant ship’s surgeon. He arrived in Madras (now Chennai) in 1819, where his interest in botany blossomed. He surveyed the southern Indian peninsula, amassing a large herbarium collection. He also worked with local indigenous collectors in more remote areas.
Wight returned home on furlough in 1831, with nearly two tons of botanical material, and spent three years working through this vast collection, collaborating with his old university colleague George Arnott Walker Arnott. It is estimated that in total the East India Company distributed about a quarter of a million specimens to researchers and institutes in Europe and India. Wight’s collaboration with Walker Arnott helped to make his collection more widely available and also resulted in the joint publication of their Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indiae Orientalis(Peninsular Flora of India). This publication has been described as the ‘most valuable and able contribution to Indian botany which has ever appeared’.
Wight returned to India in 1834, continuing his work as a surgeon but maintaining an interest in botany, including more collecting, though his work now focused more on economic botany. He was involved for several years in the experimental introduction of American cotton and the associated mechanised cultivation, but the project ultimately was not a success. In 1838 he married Rosa Ford and settled in Ootacamund in southern India. He returned to England in 1853 but contributed little to Indian botany during his retirement.
Wight is also renowned for his work on botanical art, where he used lithographic techniques to produce lavishly illustrated but scientifically accurate drawings of plants that he and others collected. Such illustrations, in the days before photography, were an important resource for scientific research. He employed two skilled Indian artists in this endeavour, Rungiah and later Govindoo. Wight has been acknowledged for ensuring their names were printed on their works, a recognition seldom given to local Indian artists or botanists during colonial days. One expert has written that ‘Wight’s most lasting achievement was his role in aiding identification by means of the publication of illustrations based on the works of his Indian artists’.
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