Between Jungle and Jangala–Vegetal Matters in an Aqueous World

Knowledge of plants in the Southwestern Ghats of India, prior to colonial interventions, was enmeshed in human practices and perceptions of the vegetal mediated through everyday encounters. Experience and sensorial aspects of human relatedness to plants was transmitted through mediums of oral stories, songs, and material making. Inhabitants of this monsoonal world roamed diverse terrains, walking through a matrix of sacred groves, grasslands, swamps, rocky outcrops, and cultivation lands that gave them an understanding of shifting seasons, other-than-human worlds. The rigorous colonial recordings and interpretations of vegetal life in the Ghats, using drawings and textual descriptions of local plant knowledge in this region, began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when colonial travellers and surgeons were fascinated with materia medica. The most well-known documentation, the seventeenth Century 12-volume Hortus Malabaricus, found its way to experimental gardens in Europe and influenced norms of classifying, documenting, and codifying indigenous understandings in the vocabulary of a then emergent science of Botany. This chapter articulates the nuances of transformations that occurred with the recordings of plant life as the ontic register shifted from the encountered multi-dimensional knowledge towards static text and images; and the possibility of renewed relational understandings framed by a situated ontology.