A botany scholar, working with the Indian Museum, Kolkata, the author was fascinated by the variety of plants noticeable in the early Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jaina sculptures that are aesthetically displayed in the archaeology gallery of the museum. The Indian Museum, Kolkata: one of the world’s oldest museums, is in itself a grand eclectic institution of Indian culture and objets d'art – with various discipline-wise galleries – like art, archaeology, anthropology, botany, zoology, and geology.

Making a close study of the entire collection of sculptures, housed in the museum, Jayasri Lahiri comes to identify 37 species of plants. She here offers a scientific study of these plants – describing each species’ Latin nomenclature, with English, Sanskrit, and other synonyms; its family; its visible distinguishing marks for identification; geographical distribution; morphological features; flowering and fruiting time; chemical constituents; therapeutic value; and, among other aspects, how it was used in Ayurveda: the traditional Indian medicine.

Even if Jayasri’s research is primarily focused on the identification of plants seen in the museum sculptures, she ventures into an arduous task of contextualization the sculptures in a vast historical framework. She also corroborates the findings of her research with literary sources tracing plant profiles in some of ancient/medieval Sanskrit and Pali texts. And these besides, she also presents a synoptic account of early Indian tradition of herbal medicine – largely on the basis of classics like Caraka-samhita and Sushruta-samhita, and how this tradition continues even today. The study carries a generous supplement of illustrations.

Dr Jayasri Lahiri has been working in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.