A Brief History of
the Colonial Map in India—
or, the Map as Architecture of Mind
Matt Reeck
1.
Not just a map, but the authority of a map.
The silliness of all the bad maps at the beginning of academic books.
Gulliver’s maps. Gilligan’s maps.
Where does the authority of a map come from? Why am I obsessed with maps? Why, if there has been one sort of collection I have always wanted to have, has it been a collection of maps? Who does a map move? What does a map move? A population scientist? A dreamer? A general? Does a map move land? What does a place feel like without a map? What is unmappable ground? Merely the remote? No, there is no more remote in the world. The sacred? Is it sacrilege to map sacred ground?
When we reflect upon maps, the statements we can make seem too self-evident to risk making. Maps and mobility are connected, synergistically. Maps are a dynamic part of a process of settlement and commerce. The advent of good maps is the advent of control over the land, and the end—or beginning?—of our romance with wilderness.
Maps are said to use scientific measures of distance, rather than the unscientific, like landmarks, or time as a physical embodiment—“two days’ steady walk.” Maps mean to make standard, to standardize the physical; they mean to place places outside of time. For instance, Lucknow will always be 556.2 kilometers from Delhi, along a certain road. Though, of course, Delhi is growing toward Lucknow, and Lucknow toward Patna.
Legend.
As a moral is to a story, so a legend is to a map.
Legend.
As the map grows, the legend spreads.
2.
Map as architecture. Architecture of mind.
The map builds the mind, the constitution of matter, a material unfolding. The map marks the levels, the stories, of power. Ground, then up.
Ground down. The native skill, a figment of the imagination, a pigment coloring the lens. When I asked him why they didn’t have maps, he said, “Only people who aren’t from here need maps.”
Strangers. Maps estrange the land. Taking away history. Taking away the spirit. But taking them where?
Terrain. Country. Overseas.
To tax the land, there must be owners. Titles. Tithes to those who come with the power of maps to fix, to fixate, upon the written mark.
First come, first served? First written, first served.
Legend.
Each time a new man came, the map grew by one inch. By the time the army came, the map, they said, proved the land was theirs to keep.
3.
The founding (grounding) of the geographical & human-geographical sciences.
Trace the locations on a map:
1784. Asiatic Society of Bengal.
1822. Société Asiatique de Paris.
1824. Asiatic Society in London.
1830. Royal Geographic Society.
1831. Royal Geographic Society of Bombay.
1839. Société ethnologique de Paris.
Legend.
A Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal includes extensive vocabularies and forty lithographs based largely upon the photographs of Sir Benjamin Simpson, one of the best-known colonial photographers whose accolades include a gold medal for his collection of eighty photographs entitled Racial Types of Northern India at the Great London Exhibition of 1862. In the preface, Edward Tuite Dalton acknowledges that ethnology is the by-product of an abandoned plan for a “great” Ethnological Congress in Calcutta meant “to bring together […] typical examples of the races of the Old World, to be made the subject of scientific study when so collected.”
Legend.
To be a world, you must first have people in it.
Legend.
To study their craniums, a natural science?
Legend.
They wrote the misspelled names of the natives upon the map, all that was left, a smudge on the back of the mind.
Legend.
In their imaginations, there was a map of the world with them at the center of it.
4.
Connection between war and maps. Route and military surveys. Ethos of heroism.
Ground equals law. Map equals might. A map of the sea? A map of outer space? A map of the mind? All would look different. Why, when we think of maps, do we think of maps of land?
Heroes and compatriots in the scientific community, colleagues of self-congratulations.
E. O. Wheeler, surveyor general of India, writes from Dehradun, June 1945, in the preface to R. H. Phillimore’s Historical Records of the Survey of India, “The research work has been immense; the records have come from a multitude of places; many have been rescued from oblivion; they have been studied, sorted, and compiled into an admirable history that is at once instructive and entertaining.”
These men thought that they were heroes of science.
Phillimore: “A large part of this volume is taken up by biographical notes, in spite of a warning given to me that the work is always more important than the man.”
No, he says, the man is important. The man is a hero.
Legend.
Each time I traveled the road, it looked different to my eyes—buildings replacing buildings, faces replacing faces—though it was the same road on the map. I experienced a sensation, like the sensation of speaking a foreign language for the first time, of my mind being adjusted to a new pole.
Legend.
Meant to reveal the land, set to a mean, it acquired the thumbprint of the industry of mapmakers. All hail the map-maker, the builder of the arc of our mind’s eye!
5.
Density equals knowledge. Density is power and control. Making visible. The thrill of the power to make visible, a godlike power. Phillimore: “It is interesting to note the natural triumph of every surveyor able to correct by actual survey the map of some earlier worker who never had the opportunities!”
Collegiality. But competition.
Foucault’s natural history: “Natural history is nothing but naming the visible.”
Naming the visible. The map’s value increases as its density of information increases. Is there a limit to the world rendered visible? Does the world forced into verisimilitude retreat into pronouns—that one, this one, there, here, there?
Legend.
The coordinates of the visible, the scope of what can be known.
Legend.
Arranged as such.
Legend.
The map limits horizon. A frustration of the imaginable.
6.
Imperial Europe allowed any European country access to lands in which other European countries had established mercantile and military inroads.
Inroads. Roads going in. Into the middle country, the heartland, the hinterland. Hinterland. Far inside. The heart of the beast.
For “business purposes.”
“Thanks to the French!” the British imperialist cartographers say. Thanks to d’Anville, Du Perron, thanks to Claude Martin working with Rennell.
The Anglo-French imperial formation?
“One part of my idea of an imperial formation is that it is dialogical or dialectical. The agents in it, the imperial leaders and the interrelated scholars, not only compete with one another, they also shape each other. Each appropriates features from the other.” (Ron Inden)
Legend.
One thing you can say about imperialism, one map, two maps, three maps, four. Five maps, six maps, seven maps, ore.
Legend.
I awoke from my nap. I awoke from my map. There I saw ahead of me the country as though for the first time. Déjà vu. No, “vu.” Eyes shorn of blinders. A synapse fires, each detail allotted its place in my mind.
7.
Mercantile and military competition.
Harbors to be kept secret: “The Directors were anxious to keep these surveys of their harbours secret” (Phillimore).
Safe harbor. Safe haven. Harbor a secret. Harbor a criminal.
The ships in the Opium Wars set off from harbors.
Legend.
The map was laid across the table, stones set on its corners to hold it against the breeze. Here, here, and here, he said, pointing to names, dots on a map. But what did it mean to his audience, when the air in their lungs then was a different air than anything they would experience there?
8.
Seas and rivers.
Changeling | nature | surveys | dreg | constructing | rule.
“Rennell’s surveys of the Bengal rivers will always be of interest for the study of changes of details along their courses” (Phillimore).
Rivers as part of natural history, rivers as part of spiritual inheritance.
Rivers dredged are narrow lakes.
What would a mythological map of rivers look like? Why don’t maps represent the mythological or spiritual dimensions of land and rivers?
Rivers, in the wild, aren’t steady things. They’re seasonal. Their courses change. They’re hard to navigate. Being hard to navigate, they’re not good means of commerce.
To make rivers the conduits for a commercial society, there has to be management. They have to be dredged, diked, bridged, deadened.
Chart a river’s course. Sound its depths. Dredge a river. Open it to commerce. Run a railroad along its side. Build a bridge.
Walking by the river, a map in hand. Trash accumulates on riverbanks.
Legend.
Did you see her in Devi disappear into the river grass at the film’s end? Did you see the wedding party arrive on the barge in The World of Apu? Did you see the way that a river and a railroad speak of different lines, lineages, and architectures of mind? The river’s inconsistency meting one type of humanity, the railroad’s consistency fit for the factory?
9.
How cartography is a first process in the secondary mapping of humanity: ethnography, city planning, and social science. The key word emerges—population.
Two quotes:
The era of geographical and topographical surveying also ushered in numerous other surveys on the botany, geology, forests, and other natural resources as well as on the antiquities and archaeology. Though population was not the object of concern in these surveys, it has been noted that right from the early surveys of Colin Mackenzie, population and its characteristics figured in the statistical surveys to some extent. By the mid-nineteenth century, population became an explicit object of concern, and this moment of surveying and mapping was extended to the population as well. From surveying and mapping territories, the epistemological concerns and administrative requirements shifted to mapping populations. (U. Kalpagam)
Lastly, population is the point around which is organized what in the sixteenth-century texts came to be called the patience of the sovereign, in the sense that the population is the object that the government must take into account in all its observations and savoir, in order to be able to govern effectively in a rational and conscious manner. The constitution of a savoir of government is absolutely inseparable from that of a knowledge of all the processes related to population in its larger sense: that is to say, what we now call the economy. (Foucault, “Governmentality,” 1968)
Legend.
People transformed into population.
Legend.
It took months before they updated the maps, and that in a busy city. We kept looking for what we knew existed, but the maps denied us the satisfaction of seeing our world represented to us in the authority of a map. Then the advertisements started appearing for a place in our town, a neighborhood with a name that none of us knew. Shifting ground with bulldozers and backhoes, were the city planners and developers renaming or not naming, as whim might move them? We started to think that if they could change the map so easily, when would reality follow? Or had it already? Leaving us with an image in our minds of a place we used to know.
10.
To talk about maps, the way that maps “talk” to us, represent us and our designs on the world, the way we can’t see the world without first seeing a map. We, modern humans, we, the populations of nations, inscribed in an architecture, populated through maps.
As a child grows to inhabit the body, the adult inhabits the map.
Legend.
He set the legend, he modeled the scale to reasonable proportions. Blank space balances the mind, a sensation of beauty. The semblance of order. One white lie, then another.
11.
Not just a map, but the authority of a map.
Where does the authority of a map come from? Why am I obsessed with maps? Why, if there has been one sort of collection I have always wanted to have, has it been a collection of maps? Who does a map move? What does a map move? A population scientist? A dreamer? A general? Does a map move land? What does a place feel like without a map? What is unmappable ground?
Legend.
Texture, architecture. What relief then? The map’s ambiguous sheen—like the moon, reflecting what you choose to see.
Legend.
The pull of uphill, the old man looking at the full moon, bemoaning, “When will we get there?” The night spent at the temple, wrapped in a mattress alone in a back room, the pain in the knees going down, the way that perspective shifts with each footfall. On the map, Girnar.
Legend.
The feelings that place instills in breath, lapse, breath, lapse, being.
Legend.
Texture, architecture. Whose rough estimate, the map organizes the mind.