By Ritambhara
Itty Achuden’s plant knowledge supplied the core of the Hortus Malabaricus, one of the earliest printed studies of the plants of tropical Asia. Achuden was a hereditary Ezhava physician from the Kollatt family near Cherthala, on the coast south of Kochi. His family kept palm-leaf manuscripts on medicinal plants, and he added his own field knowledge to them.
The book carries the name of Hendrik van Rheede, the Dutch East India Company’s commander in Malabar. It appeared in Amsterdam in 12 Latin volumes between 1678 and 1693. It describes about 740 plants of the coast and hills that now lie in Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
A physician who chose the plants
Rheede supplied the authority, the artists and the printers, and Achuden supplied the knowledge. Historians, including Richard Grove, credit Achuden and fellow Ezhava plant experts with choosing which plants went into the book. They supplied the local names and described what each plant was used for. Three Konkani physicians, Ranga Bhat, Vinayaka Pandit and Appu Bhat, checked the material against their own tradition.
Achuden’s statement of authenticity is printed in Volume One in Malayalam, in the old Kolezhuthu script. The Konkani physicians added a second statement in Konkani. These two pages place Indian scripts at the front of a Latin scientific work of the period.
Malayalam names in modern botany
The Ezhava names grouped plants by family likeness, much as botanists group them today. Plants sharing a root name, such as the onapu group, were treated as relatives. The plates print each name in Roman, Malayalam and Arabic scripts, with Konkani names in Nagari, so a reader on the Malabar coast could match a drawing to a plant. Carl Linnaeus used the Hortus as his main source on South Asian plants. He built many of his Latin names on the Malayalam ones, so names first spoken in Malabar villages still sit inside the scientific record.
The botanist K S Manilal spent 35 years annotating and translating the Latin volumes into English. His edition, published by the University of Kerala, put the book back in the hands of Indian readers. Its plates and descriptions now give botanists a baseline for the plants of 17th-century Malabar.
The trade that followed
Achuden worked from inherited manuscripts and close knowledge of the plants around his village. The demand on those plants is now national and commercial. A 2017 study for the National Medicinal Plants Board, cited by the Press Information Bureau in 2022 and by the Lok Sabha in 2023, found about 1,178 medicinal plant species in trade in India. Of these, 242 are in high demand, at more than 100 tonnes a year each. Both government reports state that most of this supply is still gathered from the wild.
Achuden’s knowledge survives because a Dutch governor printed it and later botanists kept using it. The plants he described survive only where their forests do. His work asks readers now to record and protect the wild sources of their medicines with the same care he gave to naming them.
