The Unloading of Goods: Voyage to Calicut Series, 1504
Portuguese National Library, Lisbon

A Workshop at the Asian Art Museum Education Studio
April 23, 2010, 2-4 PM

Abstract
In the Pre-modern Era, the search for a direct sea route to India to acquire the rare natural products of India-botanical medicines, spices, rare woods and gems - was the impetus behind the European voyages of discovery that profoundly changed the map and history of the modern world.  Many of these commodities, Indian botanical medicines and spices, were essential for European life during that period.  Along with commodities, Europeans in India acquired and codified centuries old botanical-medical knowledge of India, which influenced European science, literature and pictorial arts.  The lecture will highlight the influences of India on European science, art and literature during the period drawing on manuscripts, books and works of art from the 16-18th centuries. This little known page of history, when Shakespeare, Milton and others reached to the ‘Indies’ for inspiration and Linnaeus borrowed liberally from Indian materia medica, offers a fascinating picture of earlier East-West interactions.

Anna Spudich is a visiting scholar at the National Center for Biological Sciences/Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, Bangalore. She is studying the history of East-West interactions based on trade in the botanical-medical resources and knowledge of India in the pre-modern world. Currently she is also involved in a living history project with a scholar of Ayurvedic traditions, Indudharan Menon, recording and archiving extensive interviews with the last remaining scholar-physicians of the Ashtavaidya tradition of Kerala. She divides her time between her home in Palo Alto and the NCBS/TIFR.