A devil’s wine envelopes the distance. It spreads like contagion. 

Carried from the Caribbean to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in London for studies, the mile-a-minute found its way to the botanical garden in Calcutta. We heard of the vine a second time when it was used as ground cover for tea, rubber, and teak plantations.

And then a third time, with the onset of the Second World War, when it was used to camouflage and secure airfields from Japanese bombers.

The Devil’s Tail or mile-a-minute is one of many from an inventory of plants that were carried into post-colonial India to adorn and soften modernist, concrete architecture. These include the Lantana Camara, Siam weed, and Mexican Petunia.

It is hard to miss the underlying tension produced by the processes of conversion and cultivation tied to landscapes, the senses, and the typification of everyday life into a Christian-Imperial order. Evangelization, horticulture-agriculture, and natural history became overlapping technologies through which the empire attempted to transform “unruly” territories into landscapes of Christian-Imperial civility and productivity. It was apprehended through a disciplining of relationships between humans, animals, plants, climates, and the sacred.

The colonial promise of “salvation” and/or “emancipation” was inseparable from the exercise of “civilizing”. It understood both people and place as requiring cultivation. While (Christian) conversion tended to belief systems, language, education, and social conduct, cultivation nodded to increased productivity or an extraction of land.

Throughout Sahil’s works we see references to this imperial-missionary impulse. Breadfruit, carambola, cashew, guava, and other colonial “materials” become irreducibly local while continuing to bear the memory of their oceanic journeys. They enter vernacular languages and ritual practices, settle into seasonal rhythms, and become ingredient and taste. They inhabit “contingent lives”^[1] within and beyond imperial infrastructures, where organisms challenge and sometimes exceed the systems designed to govern them.

In inaccuracies, lies a resistance to the colonial desire for transparent knowledge. The nuns drew from memory and narration rather than observation, so the breadfruit, ananas, and starfruit (amongst others) become uncertain, hybrid, or imaginative forms.

Inaccuracy also produces an opacity, in their inability to settle into singular meanings or fixed origins. Breadfruit becomes a botanical specimen, a religious offering, an ecological migrant, and a culinary substitute. Rather than settling history, these images accumulate a multiplicity that cannot be fully reconciled.

To reference Françoise Vergès, colonial botany is one of the material infrastructures through which the empire organised the world. Plants never travelled alone but in the company of enslaved and indentured labour, missionary networks, commercial capital, medical knowledge, and military expansion and extraction-regimes that transformed landscapes. Gardens, plantations, and pharmacies redistributed life across continents.

Sahil’s images contest the imperial images. Here, identity is produced not through purity or a claim to nativity but through ongoing, unceasing encounters.

Nestled amidst biblical imagery is a little patch of fruiting ananas. Not far under circling birds stands a thick, deep-lobed breadfruit tree. In another landscape, the carambola, aka star fruit, lay strewn under a tree. Images of the pandan, tapioca, cashew, chilli, nutmeg, and guava become ubiquitous across tropical contexts. While these murals were intended to educate, they also became an intimate record of its creator’s imagination of the world.

While it was not unusual to see Mediterranean or European plants including motifs such as grapevines, lilies, and olive branches copied from European sacerdotal images, Naik looks for fruits and flora that travelled to the colonies of South Asia aboard ships and as food for slaves.