Video | Seeds of Culture – How spices sowed the seeds of globalisation

As part of its 57th anniversary, Visvesvaraya Industrial & Technological Museum in Bengaluru has organised a travelling exhibition in collaboration with National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS-TIFR).

The exhibition provides an overview of the influence of Indian traditional knowledge in botany and medicine in the global context.

India is considered the heartland of spices. Since the first millennium AD, India was connected by land and sea to Arabia, East Africa and South East Asia to facilitate the trade in spices.

The exhibition draws attention to the acquisition of knowledge of Indian spices by Europeans. The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus was compiled by Hendrik van Rheede of the Dutch colony in Kochi with information provided by traditional medical scholars in the Malabar region before the book was published in Amsterdam during the second half of the 17th century.

At the exhibition, you can play traditional games using seeds, get a fabric dyed using indigo, flip through a digital version of Hortus Indicus Malabaricus, visit the Spice Garden to take a look at plants of ginger, turmeric, pepper and cardamom, which originated in India.

The exhibition is on the third floor of VITM, which is a unit of the National Council of Science Museums (NCSM), an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The main activity of NCSM is to popularise science, promote scientific scientific temper and develop an innovative approach among young adults through out-of-school activities. NCSM operates 26 museums and centres in India.