Dear Reader,
I tend to judge a book by its cover, and the cover of The Signature of All Things—showing tiny, delicate flowers on a mossy patch—acted like a spell, pulling me towards it. My heart sank when I saw the author’s name—Elizabeth Gilbert of the schmaltzy Eat, Pray, Love fame—but I picked up the book nonetheless from the second-hand shop. I am glad I did.
The Signature of All Things (2013) is a historical novel about a fictional 19th-century botanist from Philadelphia called Alma Whittaker. It, or at least one third of it, is so deep that it made me feel ashamed of my prejudices against First World authors who self-heal in Bali.
Gilbert writes with sharpness and poignancy about Alma’s loneliness and intellectual hunger in a world where members of the second sex were expected to lead quiet domestic lives under the thumbs of men. Disappointed in this larger world, Alma turns her attention to the micro—to the unnoticed, unloved realm of mosses. “The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature,” Gilbert writes.
A heartbreak and her father’s death make Alma voyage out to faraway Tahiti to study its flora and fauna. There she throws herself heart and soul into botanical research, and arrives at hypotheses about evolutionary processes that echo Darwin’s. She reaches her conclusions before Darwin did but never publishes her findings for fear of being mocked as an amateur and a woman.
Alma is fictional but her intellectual dilemmas would be similar to those of real-life women in the fledgling sciences of botany, bryology, geology, or palaeontology in the 19th century. They were as brilliant as their male counterparts but were held back by their gender from achieving as much fame. For instance, English author Beatrix Potter, who is mostly remembered for her cutesy tales of rabbits and ducks, was also a naturalist, with a keen interest in mycology, or the study of fungi. She collected mushroom specimens, observed them under the microscope, and produced breathtakingly detailed drawings, which are used for reference even today.
Potter wrote a paper on the reproduction of mushrooms (“On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae”) which was duly rejected by London’s Linnaean Society, the centre of 19th century botany, which had no place for women. One of its high officials, William Turner Thiselton-Dyer, dismissed Potter’s ideas as “mares’ nests” and refused to even look at her drawings.
The botanist after whom the society is named, Carl Linnaeus, himself had rather sweeping ideas about the plant kingdom that, unfortunately, we cling to even today. Banu Subramaniam’s Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism draws attention to how Linnaeus’ plant classification system reinforced gender binaries and facilitated colonial botanical appropriation. Kalpish Ratna writes an enlightening review of the book here.
The pioneering Indian botanist Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) also faced gender and caste prejudices in India and abroad, but remained undeterred. If naming is a way of appropriating power (as evident in Linneaus’ classification of the plant system that was, and remains, Eurocentric), then the fact that a variety of magnolia is named after Ammal (“Magnolia kobus Janaki Ammal”) should be considered as a triumph of sorts for women. Read more about Ammal in this BBC report from 2022, the year that marked Ammal’s 125th birth anniversary.
In the BBC article, Ammal’s grand-niece, the writer Geeta Doctor, whom we meet frequently in the pages of Frontline, says of her great aunt: “She thrived on human possibility… She was passionate about everything, completely liberated, and always fixated on her work.”
I daresay this holds perfectly true of Doctor too, whom I happen to know as a dear “mail pal” (I hope she doesn’t “unfriend” me for declaring my admiration in public). Read her lively review of Tejinder S. Randhawa’s Vernacular Architecture of India in the latest issue of Frontline.
On this Dussehra day, as we celebrate the victory of goddess Durga, we wish all women—from the safai karmachari to the homemaker to the scientist toiling away in the lab—get the recognition and honours they deserve.
Happy Dussehra!
We will meet again soon.
Anusua Mukherjee
