1 - Garden of Scripts: Arabic-Malayalam in the Hortus Malabaricus

The use of different scripts in the twelve volumes of the Hortus Malabaricus, a pioneering effort in early modern European botanical exploration in Asia, has not yet been studied comparatively. The text predominantly employs the Latin script for its descriptions and narrative, but the accompanying images feature captions written in Arabic, Devnagari, and Malayalam scripts. The Arabic script is often misinterpreted as Arabic language, but it is, in fact, Malayalam written in the Arabic script. Kerala has a long tradition of transcribing the local language in various scripts and the captions seem to be a part of this tradition. The earliest works in the Arabic-Malayalam literary tradition are known to date from the early seventeenth century onwards, and the Hortus Malabaricus provides evidence of it being printed for the first time. Upon closer examination, an even more intriguing aspect emerges: the script used is not just Malayalam written in the Arabic script; it is a fusion of Arabic, Latin, and Malayalam. It appears to be the work of a non-native speaker of both Malayalam and Arabic (quite possibly Matteo di San Giuseppe, an Italian priest who resided in Iraq and India for several years). With attention to these nuances, this paper reconstructs the potential directions and methods that the makers of the Hortus Malabaricus employed to incorporate these scripts into its volumes. Their initiatives reflect the larger early modern attempts to address the cosmopolitan audience of the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond by creating a garden of scripts.