Professor KS Manilal: The man whose love for the flowers of Kerala will always remain eternal

Professor KS Manilal: The man whose love for the flowers of Kerala will always remain eternal

The great Romantic poet William Wordsworth may have wandered alone while finding the inspiration to pen his most famous poem.

But as an Orchids-mad research student, I was fortunate that I was in the company of my Guruji, the redoubtable and now late Professor KS Manilal, while making my forays into the Silent Valley in the early eighties. Fittingly, it was with him guiding me that we rediscovered the famed Malabar Daffodil Orchid (Ipsea malabarica) after 140 years.

It goes without saying that Professor Manilal, who passed away at the dawn of the new year aged 86, was truly one of India's greatest botanists.

Conferred the Padma Shri, his legacy includes his seminal translation of a 17th century Latin classic into English and subsequently Malayalam, besides mentoring multiple generations of students.

A dream comes true in Silent Valley

My association with my Guruji started when I joined him in 1981 as a research fellow in his Department of Science and Technology-sponsored project.

I was a freshly-minted MSc in Botany from University College and the project I joined aimed to study the flora of Silent Valley in Palakkad district.

At that time, Professor Manilal was busy organising the Botanical Congress for the Indian Botanical Society. We were given the task of taking care of the botanists from across India. This was a learning experience and an occasion to make friendships with several of them.

Field work for the Silent Valley project was conducted only the following year. Dr VV Sivarajan, a senior student of Professor Manilal then, took us to Silent Valley to teach us how to make collections. Silent Valley covered an area of 8,952 hectares of forests. For a person like me who wanted to study plants at close quarters, Silent Valley was indeed a dream come true.

Wherever I looked around, everything was new to me. During those magical nights by the river, illuminated by hundreds of thousands of stars above and warmed by the fire lit by our team — especially our guide Hamsa — I prepared extensive notes with sketches of the plants, particularly the orchids.

When I was back at the University of Calicut's Department of Botany, I made it a habit to redo the sketches for identification and publication. I remember that our project room was just opposite Guruji's room. In the evenings, I would go back to the room, have a fresh bath and a cup of tea and promptly return to continue my studies.

Guruji was watching what I was doing and on occasions, he would invite me to share a cup of tea. This schedule of activities continued for a couple of years when I started getting the dividends of my labour -- the discovery of new species, new records and rediscoveries.

It was then that the famous rediscovery I mentioned above of an orchid species originally collected in Malabar by Jerdon and studied and named by the German botanist Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach(1862) happened. Jerdon's specimens were finally deposited in the Herbarium of the Natural History Museum in Vienna (W) where we could study it in detail.

We were lucky to rediscover Ipsea malabarica (Malabar Daffodil Orchid) after 140 years because the Silent Valley had remained closed for many decades thanks to the proposed hydro-electric project. We were in a team to make a fresh study and report back to the Indian government on the floral wealth. Soon, the Malabar Daffodil Orchid became a centre of attraction and a star species for the conservation movement.

This was followed by the discovery of a series of new species of orchids like Robiquetia josephiana, Eria tiagii, Liparis indirae, etc. Also an important discovery was the Sri Lankan orchid Dendrobium panduratum in Silent Valley. The results of the Silent Valley project were later published as a book.

While I could instill an interest in orchids in my Guruji, it was he who influenced me in the study of botanical history and past botanists. You must remember that this was at a time when Google was yet to be born and the word internet meant only connectivity.

Our image searches in the days before Google

Talking of the internet reminds me of one incident when I was able to make him happy with a search of mine.

Once Professor Manilal was planning a trip to Bombay for a presentation on Garcia da Orta, a Portuguese physician in Goa. He badly wanted an image of Orta. I manage to get an image from Jim White of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation in Pennsylvania, USA. It was a transparency that I reproduced many times before handing the good Professor one copy for his presentation.

When he returned, he was cheerful because the audience in Bombay were seeing Garcia da Orta for the first time. I thanked White and we continued the exchange of images of botanists since then. I started learning about past botanists and their activities in this manner by gathering their images and adding them to my own growing collection.

There was another notable instance when an image had to be found. When Professor Manilal was working on Van Rheede's Hortus Malabaricus, a 17th century classic, there was no image of Rheede available. The Professor procured one image from Dehra Dun and the artist at Calicut University, Janardhanan, prepared a faithful copy.

In the company of Nicholson of the Smithsonian Institution, an interpretation of Van Rheede's plants was finally published. As the original book was in Latin, there were lots of grey areas that needed to be better understood and conveyed to a much wider audience.

His magnum opus

One of Professor Manilal's relatives advised him to learn Latin by himself. This was easier said than done, but due to Guruji's incessant urge to understand what transpired between Rheede and his co-author, the famous Indian botanist Itty Achuthan, embarked on his odyssey of learning.

It took decades to reach a level that enabled him to translate the book to English first and then to Malayalam, the language of Itty Achuthan, who passed on the traditional knowledge of his forefathers on the plants of Malabar to Van Rheede. This was his magnum opus and was printed by St. Joseph's Press, Thiruvananthapuram.

The health of my Guruji worsened after the completion of this great work.

Several honours like the Dr EK Janaki Ammal Award and Padma Shri were bestowed on him and he humbly accepted every appreciation with due respect and high regards. In between, he had a stroke, leaving half of his body paralysed. Still, he managed to reply to all the requests and comments with one hand.

When the end finally came, it was only fitting that everyone from the Prime Minister onwards hailed my great teacher. Sir, here's to you once again with love.

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