Spanish-born clergyman and botanist Fr Hermenegild Santapau served as head of the Botanical Survey of India. Santapau was born at La Galera, Tarragona, and joined the Society of Jesus at Gandia, Valencia, aged 16. He proceeded to study classics and languages in Spain and London, going on to Rome to take his PhD in philosophy, which was granted in 1927. The following year he left Europe for India to complete his theological studies.
While in India, Santapau's interest in botany developed, and in the 1930s he returned to England, where he earned a bachelor's degree and PhD in botany at the Royal College of Science and Imperial College, London. He collected plants in the eastern Pyrenees in 1934 and in the Italian Alps in 1936, and worked in the herbarium at Kew from 1938.
After two years working in the herbarium at Kew, Santapau joined the teaching staff of St. Xavier's College, Bombay, in 1940, as Professor of Botany. While based in Bombay he made numerous collecting trips in the holidays between terms, and when working as a visiting lecturer. In 1946 he collected in Baluchistan and then in Kathiawar, for example, and between 1950 and 1955 in the Dangs Forest (Gujurat). Over the course of his career Santapau covered large areas of India, from the Western and Eastern Ghats, Goa and Andhra Pradesh to the northern regions of Assam, Darjeeling and the Eastern Himalayas, Dehra Dun and Mussoorie. He was particularly active during the year he spent as chief botanist on the Botanical Survey of India in 1954.
In 1961 Santapau was appointed director of the Indian Botanical Survey. He remained in this post until 1968 and during his term led a delegation of Indian botanists on a three-month tour of the USSR (1962) and to Edinburgh for the tenth International Botanical Congress (1964).
Among Santapau's publications were floras of the Western Ghats (three editions, 1953, 1960 and 1968), Purandhar (1958) and Saurashtra (1962), plus works on the Acanthaceae, Asclepidaceae, Periplocaceae and orchids of Bombay. He was a fellow of the National Institute of Sciences of India, the Linnean Society and the Indian Botanical Society, and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Bombay Natural History Society, among others. He was the recipient of several honours and awards in recognition of his botanical and educational work, including the Birbal Sahni Medal of the Indian Botanical Society.
Sources:
P.V. Bole, 1970, "Rev. Fr. Hermenegild Santapau, S.J.", Taxon, 19(4): 576-583
R.R. Stewart, 1982, "Missionaries and Clergymen as Botanists in India and Pakistan", Taxon, 31(1): 60.
