South Asia

(India, Pakistan, Bangladesh)

East India Company Rule from 1765, British Raj from 1857 - 1947

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Designed digitally with Procreate 2025-2026, Physical edition in the backlog
Species featured

Indian peafowl
Pavo cristatus

Pavo cristatus is native to the Indian subcontinent, where it has been woven into Hindu iconography, Mughal court culture, and regional ecological systems for millennia. Under British rule, the peacock became one of the most aggressively exoticised symbols of empire. Its feathers were collected, traded, and exported as luxury goods. Its image reproduced across British decorative arts as shorthand for an imagined, opulent Orient. This orientalising gaze, which flattened a living bird into colonial aesthetic currency, is precisely the logic this series subverts. The peacock remains present across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; its range does not acknowledge the Radcliffe Line, drawn in five weeks in 1947.

Cotton
Gossypium arboreum

Cotton was cultivated across India for thousands of years before the British East India Company arrived. Under the Raj, cotton production was systematically reorganised to serve British textile mills, most concentrated in Lancashire: Indian farmers were pushed off food crops and into cash crop cultivation at prices controlled by colonial administrators and merchants, not growers. The resulting disruption to local food systems contributed directly to the cycle of famine that killed tens of millions across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The cotton that passed through Indian hands, crossed the ocean, and arrived at British looms returned to India as finished cloth, taxed and priced to undercut local weavers. The plant that made Morris's industry possible is the same plant that unmade India's own.

Indigo
Indigofera tinctoria

Cultivated for centuries by Indian farmers as part of a self-determined agricultural economy before the British East India Company appropriated it as a compulsory extraction crop. Ryots were legally bound to dedicate a portion of their land to indigo cultivation at prices set by planters, regardless of profitability or food security, driving farmers into permanent debt and off subsistence crops. The resistance this provoked — the Indigo Revolt of 1859 — is one of the earliest organised forms of anti-colonial agricultural resistance in Indian history. The distinctive deep blue of Indigofera tinctoria — the same dye that coloured the cloth that built Britain’s textile industry, filled the shelves at Liberty London, adorned the beloved designs of William Morris — is the colour of the South Asia edition not despite its beauty, but precisely because of it.

Sandalwood
Santalum album

Valued in Ayurvedic medicine, Hindu ritual, and regional commerce, and significant enough that the Mysore kingdom under Tipu Sultan had placed it under royal monopoly before British annexation. Colonial forest policy did not introduce extraction so much as industrialise it: sandalwood was among the trees most systematically exploited under East India Company leases, exported alongside ebony and blackwood at a scale that had no pre-colonial precedent. The Imperial Forest Department, established in 1864, formalised what had been relentless unregulated felling of these slow-growing trees. Conservation arriving not to protect the forest, but to manage its depletion more efficiently.

Great Indian Bustard
Ardeotis nigriceps

Once widespread across the dry grasslands of the Indian subcontinent, Ardeotis nigriceps is now critically endangered, with fewer than 150 individuals remaining. Its decline is a direct consequence of agricultural land conversion, a process whose roots lie in the systematic restructuring of Indian land use under the Raj, when subsistence agriculture and communally managed grasslands were displaced in favour of cash crop monocultures serving British markets. Power line collisions now pose an additional existential threat in the same Rajasthan landscapes where colonial-era irrigation infrastructure first fragmented its habitat. The Great Indian Bustard is not a casualty of abstract modernity; it is a casualty of a specific sequence of decisions made by a colonial administration that treated Indian land as a resource to be optimised.

Lotus
Nelumbo nucifera

The lotus is among the most theologically and culturally weighted plants in the world: sacred in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, present in Sanskrit literature for over three thousand years, a symbol of purity, renewal, and the possibility of beauty arising from difficult conditions. Under the British Raj, it became something else: a decorative motif, lifted from its sacred context and reproduced across colonial-era export goods, textiles, and architecture as aesthetic evidence of India's ancient civilisation — the same civilisation the colonial project claimed to be civilising further. The lotus wetland habitats it depends on were meanwhile steadily drained and converted under the agricultural restructuring the Raj imposed. The flower colonial administrators admired in the abstract was disappearing in the specific.

Color Theme

Indigo

"Not a chest of indigo reached England without being stained with human blood" - E.W.L. Tower, magistrate