Sujeet George

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA will develop a series of creative outcomes that include an exhibition, a multi-modal book and a symposium, drawing from the Herbarium collection available at the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP). The exhibition will visually incorporate multiple elements that go into the making of a herbarium, including the analogue and digital tools of cataloguing, the different forms of storage practices, the people involved in this endeavor over time, and the specimens themselves. The project is a collaboration with the IFP, a Franco-Indian research institution set up in 1955. By facilitating and undertaking research across the various disciplines of the natural and human sciences, IFP’s archival collections have grown to include a variety of materials like photographs, manuscripts, maps, herbarium specimens and pollen grains that have played an indispensable role in guiding and enriching research. Sujeet George is the Project Coordinator for this project.

Sujeet George is based in New Delhi and is currently enrolled as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, Zurich. He has a doctoral degree in History on Antecedents of the Green Revolution: Agricultural Science in British India, c. 1870–1950 from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. Sujeet is a historian of modern South Asia, focussing on science and its colonial legacies, natural history, and digital humanities. He is currently working on The Herbarium as Historical Memory, as part of his post-doctoral fellowship. Given his interest, long engagement with the field and research acumen Sujeet is best suited to be the Project Coordinator for this Foundation Project of IFA.

For this Foundation Project, Sujeet rests his inquiry in the Herbarium collection at IFP. The project attempts to delve into the larger emerging discipline of plant humanities through its examination of the collections of the Herbarium and address two broad questions. Firstly, the project will attempt to understand what extent the development of this Herbarium at the IFP aligned and/or superseded the wider initiative of developing a domain of native scientific knowledge in postcolonial India; and secondly, to locate the herbarium as a dynamic storehouse of knowledge production and historical memory, by examining the ways in which the data assembled at the herbarium is utilised by present-day botanists for research as well as pedagogic and public history purposes. While the exhibition is the primary outcome of the project, to aid the exhibits, a few short length videos will be created on the Herbarium. In addition a video interview with a plant biologist and a video with voiceover offering a glimpse into the process of digitisation of a specimen to introduce and demystify the unique site of Herbarium as an archive will also be done. These videos will be woven into the multi-modal book on the Herbarium, which will specifically look at the forms of archiving, the shifts in storing practices, the transition from analogue to digital record keeping and the contemporary relevance of herbaria. As a conclusion, a symposium will be organised to initiate conversations across disciplines on the status of scientific collections and its legacy in the contemporary. The fundamental focus of the project is to understand the relationship between the creation of spaces of/for scientific practice, and the larger social processes engaged in nation-making in postcolonial India.

Sujeet has divided the one year term of the project into a phase of research work at IFP, preparation and production of the videos, planning for the exhibition, putting together the multi-modal book and organising the symposium. The exhibition has been planned towards the end of the project term and he will collaborate with a curator or exhibition designer to work towards the same.

The outcomes of the project will be a physical exhibition tentatively titled Landscapes/Labscapes, a multimodal book as an extension of the exhibition chronicling the story of the herbarium, and the symposium. The Project Coordinator hopes to take the exhibition to other educational institutions or invite students from such institutions to IFP during the course of the exhibition. The Project Coordinator’s deliverables to IFA along with the final reports will be the images from the exhibition, the multi-modal book, and recordings of the proceedings from the symposium. 

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This Foundation Project is implemented by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), under the Archives and Museums programme, in collaboration with Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP). It is made possible with support from Tata Trusts, with the corpus interest of an earlier seed grant.