
Thanks to a generous donation from one of the Library’s earliest benefactors, Bishop John Warner (1581-1666), Magdalen is lucky enough to own a seminal seventeenth-century work on the rich plant life of India’s Malabar Coast. Hortus Indicus Malabaricus – or Hortus Malabaricus, as it is more commonly known – is a twelve-volume encyclopaedia of over 740 plant species native to the beautiful shores of modern-day Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. It has enormous value for botanists studying the region. However, it is also a prized linguistic artefact among speakers of Malayalam – one of the Malabar Coast’s major languages – for its rare examples of a virtually lost script.
How Hortus Malabaricus Was Made
Hortus Malabaricus was very much a team effort. It involved over a hundred people, some of whom were native to the region, while others were colonial settlers. At the heart of the project was Hendrik van Reede tot Drakstein (1636-1691), the newly appointed Commander of Cochin (Malabar’s capital) under the Dutch East India Company. Known among colonisers for his collaborative attitude and genuine respect for local culture, Van Reede built excellent working relationships with the region’s existing royal families. Sadly, some of his contemporaries criticised his “soft” approach, and after six years in post he returned to the Netherlands.
Early in his tenure as Commander, Van Reede was alarmed to discover that many local plants were being exported all the way to Europe to create medicines for his fellow Dutch colonisers. He wanted to save on the considerable cost and loss of time by giving his colleagues the knowledge to make the medicines themselves in Malabar. A set of books with detailed botanical descriptions and illustrations seemed a helpful solution. Initially, he employed Pietro Foglia, an Italian priest, to gather plant samples and make drawings, but the scope of the project soon became so large that one assistant was not enough.
Local Vaidya (pre-Ayurvedic physician-healer) Itty Achudan (born 1640) joined Van Reede as an expert advisor on the plants’ medicinal properties. Coming from the low-born Ezhava caste, Achudan would have acquired most of his knowledge through the oral tradition. He was assisted by three Brahmin scholars: Appu Bhatt, Ranga Bhatt and Vinayaka Pandit. Beyond this core team were tens of academics, healers, engravers, monks, and dignitaries, who contributed their knowledge mostly without credit in the final publication. Dutch East India Company interpreters Emanual Carneiro and Christiaan Herman de Donep played a vital role in translating Achudan’s findings from Malayalam, via Portuguese and Dutch, into the Latin required for Van Reede’s final text.
When Van Reede and the team had gathered a sufficient number of drawings and descriptions, they began sending their work to Johannes Van Someren and Johannes Van Dyck, publishers in the Netherlands. Van Someren and Van Dyck released a first volume of Hortus Malabaricus in 1678, but Van Reede was disappointed to discover that it had been edited and annotated without his knowledge. After Van Reede’s return to his home country, a second volume was published under his close supervision, and an editor of his choice (Johannes Munnicks) was appointed for Volume Three.
In 1691, tragedy struck. Van Reede was on his way back to Malabar for a few months’ visit when his ship was wrecked off the coast of Bombay. Van Reede did not survive the disaster. His friend Jan Commelin (1629-1692), director of the Amsterdam botanic garden, who had been contributing Latin commentary to Hortus Malabaricus, agreed to supervise the publication of the nine-volumes-worth of information that remained. He appointed editors, negotiated with new publishers after the deaths of Van Someren and Van Dyck, and safeguarded most of the original drawings, which are now kept at London’s Natural History Museum.

The Botanical Legacy
Hortus Malabaricus remains a landmark text for Western botanists interested in Southern India. Nothing like it had been attempted before Van Reede’s time, and the comprehensiveness of its regional coverage is largely unsurpassed. Perhaps its main scientific legacy is its contribution to the classification system of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), the founder of modern Western plant and animal taxonomy. Linnaeus chose Hortus Malabaricus as his principal reference book for South Asian flora, basing many of his new Latin names for the plants on their Malayalam names. He even named a genus of flowering plant Rheedia, in tribute to Van Reede.
Bearing in mind that Van Reede’s aim had been to educate colonial communities, Hortus Malabaricus unfortunately took much longer to reach the people who were originally closest to the plants. Latin was unknown to the vast majority of Malabarians and Malayalam was mainly an oral language, with literacy a privilege reserved only for the highest castes. It was not until twentieth-century Malabarian botanist K. S. Manilal (1938-) decided to make an English translation that the work became widely accessible to local readers. Manilal’s formidable task took him thirty-five years – even longer than the thirty needed to create the original Latin volumes.
With English having become a lingua franca in the multicultural region, Manilal’s translation generated a lot of interest upon its publication in 2008. Members of the Ezhava caste (to which Itty Achudan belonged) ran an awareness-raising campaign, thanks to which the Malabar Botanical Garden now boasts a “Hortus Valley”, with 432 species from the books on display.

The Linguistic Legacy
In the seventeenth century, Malabar was already a linguistically diverse area, with Sanskrit, Malayalam, Tamil, Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch all in widespread use. Though Van Reede’s focus was on botanical education, his work has also come to be a valuable record for historians of language, thanks to his decision to provide plant names and certificates of authenticity in multiple languages and scripts.
The plant names are given in Latin, Arabic, and two Malayalam dialects: one written in classical Malayalam script, the other in an ancient script called Nāgarī. The Nāgarī script is widely preserved elsewhere (especially in Prakrit and Sanskrit holy texts), but to find any surviving example of the classical Malayalam script is extremely unusual. This is because, until the eighteenth century, Malayalam texts were written on palm leaves instead of paper, in curvy, fluid letters specifically designed so as not to break the leaf. Sadly, in the hot and humid climate of the Malabar Coast, most leaves eventually rotted away.
Readers should bear in mind that the Dutch engravers employed by Van Reede did make occasional errors when transcribing the Malayalam script from palm leaf to paper. They used mirrors to help them copy the shapes, resulting in some accidentally reversed letters. Another important caveat is that the local botanists approached by Itty Achudan and his assistants would have dictated the names of the plants orally. In Malayalam there is a strong distinction between spoken language (vaamozhi) and written language (varamozhi), so the plant names in Hortus Malabaricus should be read as transliterations of spoken Malayalam rather than true examples of written Malayalam.
The certificates of authenticity provided by Itty Achudan and Emmanuel Carneiro, at the beginning of Volume One, offer specimens of written Malayalam. Two different sub-varieties of the classical script are showcased. Achudan chose to write in Koleluttu, a variant originating around the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, whereas Carneiro wrote in the eighth-century Arya-eluttu script traditionally used by Brahminic scholars. Though not lengthy, the certificates contain enough detail to give a sense of seventeenth-century varamozhi, and they acknowledge the key role played by non-colonial experts in producing this educational text.
A third certificate of authenticity, written by Achudan’s assistants, Appu Bhatt, Ranga Bhatt, and Vinayaka Pandit, introduces another language to the mix: Konkani. This was the three assistants’ native language, traditionally written in Nāgarī script. Unlike Malayalam, which comes from the Dravidian language family, Konkani is an Indo-European language, distantly related to Latin, Dutch and Portuguese as well as a number of Middle Eastern languages. Sadly, its appearance in Hortus Malabaricus is limited to this one passage, but the certificate is a small example of another Indian language that had suffered considerable challenges to preservation. In the case of Konkani, these challenges were man-made rather than environmental; all Konkani literature pre-dating 1526 was deliberately destroyed in the Goa Inquisition (a violent campaign by Portuguese colonisers to force local people to become Catholics). Use of the language was officially banned in 1684. Van Reede would have encountered Konkani only in its suppressed state, so his decision to feature it at the start of Hortus Malabaricus is perhaps indicative of his compassion towards the people he had been sent to rule.

Magdalen’s twelve-volume set of Hortus Malabaricus is not the only one in Oxford, but it is one of only a tiny handful of copies both here and nationally. It remains a precious resource, unsurpassed in its descriptive scope and triumphant in its unusual preservation of two threatened languages. The fact that Magdalen’s seventeenth-century librarians chose to spend some of Bishop Warner’s donation on the full set, and then some of the College’s own funds on an index created by Jan Commelin’s nephew Caspar, suggests that the potential of Hortus Malabaricus was recognised early by the College. Over three hundred years later, it can still be consulted in the Old Library by anyone who wishes to make an appointment.
Written by Jessica Woodward, Special Collections Librarian
With thanks to John Thuppayath
Further Reading
Fournier, M. (1987). ‘Enterprise in botany: Van Reede and his Hortus Malabaricus—Part I’, in Archives of Natural History, 14(2), 123-158. DOI: 10.3366/anh.1987.14.2.123.
Fournier, M. (1987). ‘Enterprise in botany: Van Reede and his Hortus Malabaricus—Part II’, in Archives of Natural History, 14(3), 297-338. DOI: 10.3366/anh.1987.14.3.297.
Govindankutty, A. (1983). ‘Some observations on seventeenth-century Malayalam’, in Indo-Iranian Journal, 25(4), 241-273. DOI: 10.1163/000000083790081464.
Saradesāya, Manohararāya (2000). A History of Konkani Literature: from 1500 to 1992. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Singh, A. (2015). ‘Botanical Knowledge in Early Modern Malabar and the Netherlands: A Review of Van Reede’s Hortus Malabaricus’, in Transformations of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion, 44, 187-208. DOI: 10.1515/9783110366174-008.
Subramaniam, B. and Chatterjee, S. (2024). ‘Translations in Green: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Vegetal Turn’, in Configurations, 32(1), 1-23. DOI: 10.1353/con.2024.a917006.