Mapping India
Gargi Gupta reviews India: A Mapful Story that shows how the British increasingly became skilled at chronicling India in the maps between 1597 to 1940
Until well into the 16th-17th century, what the West knew about India was shaped by the writings of a 2nd century Greek polymath named Claudius Ptolemy. Seen today — maps based on Ptolemy's calculations began to be made in Europe from the 14th century onwards — they seem laughable.
For instance, the Ptolemic map, prepared by an Italian map-maker called Magini, which is one of the exhibits at the on-going show, 'India: A Mapful Story' at Ojas Art Gallery in Delhi is almost ludicrously wrong. The peninsula, the most distinctive geographical feature of India, is missing. A single, straggly line of hills is depicted in the north, and some are more scattered here and there across the island-like land mass which is identified as INDIA INTRA GANGEM (India within the Ganges, in Latin). The only detail that Ptolemy seemed to have got right was the placement of the two rivers — Ganges and Indus — flowing from the mountains in the north to the seas in the east and west, respectively.
The oldest is Ptolemy's map that dates back to 1597, and the most recent is of the 1940s, just before independence, both of which form part of the show. A visitor can almost see in them, as you travel down the centuries, the development of man's (especially the West's) ideas about the Earth, about geography, about ways to measure the Earth, to depict topography, and so on.
"For the West, India was a new territory. Maps were being made in Europe for a long time, and they had depicted every city, every region. Added to that was the desire for power. Which is why you see so many maps made by not just the English, but also the French, the Portuguese, the Dutch," says the gallerist, Anubhav Nath.
Unlike in the West, maps are not a well known collectible item in India, says Nath, but the scene is starting to hot up in recent years. Globally, there exists an active market with regular auctions and fairs, which collectors such as Nath frequent. "But I have also bought many of my maps from second-hand book shops," he says. Most of the 140 maps on exhibit are on sale, with prices ranging between Rs3,000 and Rs4.5 lakh, except for a few that Nath would like to keep for himself.
One of these is a very odd map, dating to 1687, made for the 50th anniversary of the building of the Delhi Red Fort. "This is like the Mughal suba map, maps which depicted all the provinces of the Mughal empire. But the artist has added two cartouches [decorative feature] and a depiction of Shahjahanabad below," glosses Nath. Except that Shahjahanabad looks very like a medieval European city with gabled-roof houses, very likely because the artist who made the image never came here and went by accounts of tourists and visitors. In a similar "loss in translation", says Nath, the artist has depicted the "boat bridge" on the Yamuna behind the fort, which used to be a series joined together as a single large boat that seems to straddle the river.
With old maps, it's not always what's depicted, or the information they embody, that make them valuable, but also their aesthetic qualities as art. The most expensive of the pieces at the Ojas Art Gallery is an 18th-century Austrian map of 'Hindostan', which is a reproduction of a landmark 1782 map, by a British map-maker called James Rennell. The map was remarkably detailed and used all the then-current knowledge about India gained from the trignometric, military and topological surveys. "But what's remarkable about this map is its cartouche, which shows Britannia [the goddess personifying Britain] receiving books from Brahmins. It's very detailed and one of the most beautiful cartouches you'll ever find," says Nath.
The bulk of the exhibition, however, consists of maps from the 18th and 19th centuries, the period when the European powers were jostling to establish colonies in India. The proliferation of maps from this period, which went from being sketchy, to detailed exercises showing cities, small towns, rivers, mountains, etc, indicates how important the colonisers felt getting to know India, and making maps of it, was.
The later maps are of interest for the way they bring to life the history we read about in textbooks — the 1909 map of Bengal, which shows the province soon after the British divided it in 1905, or pre-Partition India ranging from the Hindu Kush mountains in the west to the delta of the Padma on the east. It's 70 years this year since our map looked like that.