As he leads us through the Premchand Roychand Gallery on the first floor of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vaastu Sanghralaya (CSMVS), Fort, our eyes realise there’s a lot to take in.
For starters, at the entrance is an exhibit of 80 plants, which among others, includes the Indian home staple, tulsi. There’s also the aloe vera. Of Indian origin? we wonder. “Well, the thing about India is that it assimilates from other cultures and makes it its own. One doesn’t know which part of the world the aloe vera is native to, but it is a plant that survives all kind of conditions,” says Ratan Vaswani, curator of Tabiyat, the Mumbai-leg of a three city exhibition titled Medicine Corner, of which he is also the project coordinator.