‘I wanted to keep them like my babies’: A Wknd interview with orchid man AN Rao

He still talks about his time in Arunachal Pradesh with a sense of wonder; like someone who found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

PREMIUM

Nearly half a century ago, Abbareddy Nageswara Rao, then 23, travelled for four days, from Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh to Guwahati in Assam, in a succession of ever-smaller trains, then by rattling bus to Shillong, Meghalaya, and on from there to Arunachal Pradesh, to conduct a then-rare orchid enumeration.

He didn’t know the language, was unfamiliar with the food. But he’d heard that there were rare flowers in this state that no one had documented yet.

By the time Rao left Arunachal Pradesh 35 years later, he had discovered 35 new species of orchid. Many are endemic; two are named after him (Dendrobium nageswarayanum and Tropidia hegderaoii). The two he remembers hunting for the hardest are the Biermannia arunachalensis, a small endemic variety that grows on the moss-covered branchlets of small trees and flowers only in April; and the Cymbidium henbungense, also endemic, but which lives as a root stalk through most of the year, emerging from the ground only for 15 days, in September, to flower.

Rao, now 68, had dreamed of discovering new plant species since his days pursuing a Master’s degree in botany. “The discoverer of new plants gets mentioned in botanical history. This really excited me. I wanted to discover new species and name them the way I wanted to. I wanted to keep them like my babies,” he says.

He eventually collected so many “orchid babies” that, two weeks ago, he received the title of Padma Shri, one of India’s highest civilian awards, for his contribution in the face of considerable challenges. Those hurdles included malaria-causing mosquitoes (“my legs were always covered in bites; I don’t know how I did it,” he says, chuckling), large snakes, the insurgency and the fact that even landlines were rare. “It was very dangerous, and I often couldn’t call home for weeks,” he says.

Rao’s journey to Arunachal Pradesh began in the 1970s, when the young botanist secured a research fellowship with the Botanical Survey of India (BSI). J Joseph, then deputy director of the BSI’s eastern circle, pointed him to the flowers. Orchids are rarely studied, he said. If one wanted to make a mark, that would be a good place to begin.

Rao was accordingly tasked with an orchid survey of the eight states of north-east India, which are rich in this valuable medicinal and ornamental plant. It was an exercise that would take him four years. In his excursions, locals who still used these plants in medicine and sold the flowers would become a key source of tips on rare varieties.

Rao was hooked. “I wanted to study nearly everything in the field, from molecular structure to breeding patterns,” he says.

A year after he completed the survey, in 1982, while working on a thesis on the orchids of Arunachal Pradesh, Rao joined that state government’s department of environment and forests, as an assistant orichidologist. He would serve there for 30 years.

“In taxonomy the highest reward is discovery of a new species. It is a feeling I might never be able to describe in words. The whole idea of a sense of ownership of the species that I discovered is what kept me going,” he says.

But his mission wasn’t just to tag and discover. He also wanted to produce hybrid varieties. “If we use only wild orchid species, some could become extinct, especially since these flowers are so delicate and can only grow in very specific conditions. I wanted to produce hybrid orchids that we could use for our benefit without actually harming the species.”

Working with other researchers, Rao has helped create five hybrid varieties.

At 54, he retired from his government position and took on a new one as director of the Manipur-based Centre for Orchid Gene Conservation of Eastern Himalayan Region, an independent research body that operates under the union government’s department of science and technology.

In 2016, he retired from this too, and returned to Andhra Pradesh with his wife Sridevi Rao, a homemaker , now 56, and their son Sreenath Rao, 32. “I wanted to go home, and enjoy family time,” he says. Part of Arunachal Pradesh returned with him. The family estate in Eluru, West Godavari, is called Orchid Villa.