The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  GUERRILLA ATTACK!

  By the time Bernier and Tavernier were criss-crossing India, Shah Jehan was no longer the emperor. Aurangzeb, his son, had grabbed the throne after imprisoning his father in Agra fort and ruthlessly killing all his siblings. The new emperor next attempted to expand the boundaries of the Mughal Empire.

  Aurangzeb’s big push was into the southern peninsula. He shifted to the Deccan in 1682 and would never see Delhi again. He lived in a constant state of campaigning for the next twenty-six years. Aurangzeb extended the empire but he also destroyed it. The never-ending wars were disastrous—for the Land and the exchequer. Bernier commented that though the Mughal emperor had revenues that exceeded the combined ones of the Shah of Persia and the Ottoman Sultan, he was not wealthy because all of it was eaten by the expenses.

  Aurangzeb was also a religious bigot, a man who could not tolerate people of other faiths. He destroyed Hindu temples and reimposed the hated jiziya tax on non-Muslims. When this tax was first announced, the Hindus of Delhi gathered in large numbers in front of the Red Fort to protest against it. The emperor set his elephants against them and many were trampled to death. There were many other atrocities that Aurangzeb committed in the name of religion.

  Because of all this, the relationship between the Hindus and the Mughals became sour. There were revolts in many places across the empire. One of the most successful of these was led by Shivaji, the Maratha rebel. The exploits of Shivaji and his men are so daring that it would have been hard to believe them if not for the people who wrote about those events in those times. Using the volcanic outcrops of the deccan Traps (which you read about earlier), the Marathas repeatedly outwitted the larger Mughal armies.

  The Marathas captured Sinhagadh by using a trained monitor lizard named Yeshwanti to scale the walls! The guerrillas tied a rope around the lizard, which climbed up a rock face that was so steep that it had been left without any guards. A boy then climbed up the rope and secured it for the rest. The fort of Sinhagad is just outside Pune. You will see cadets from the nearby military training school climbing up the hill with their heavy packs.

  Another group that broke out in open revolt were the Bundelas. Their leader, Raja Chhatrasaal, used the low hills of the Vindhya range to wage a campaign against the Mughals. It is said that raja chhatrasaal had a very beautiful dancer named Mastani in his court. When the Marathas rescued the Bundela chief from a tight spot, Chhatrasaal thanked the Maratha commander Baji Rao by ‘gifting’ Mastani to him. Baji Rao went on to become the Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Marathas. Mastani rode with him on many of his campaigns. On the highway between Orchha and Khajuraho, there is a small but beautiful palace built on a lake by Chhatrasaal for Mastani during her younger days. The surrounding hills are heavily fortified which goes to show how troubled those times were.

  But who first defeated the Mughals? It wasn’t the Marathas or the Bundelas. This defeat happened in the middle of the Brahmaputra in faraway Assam at the hands of the Ahom general Lachit Borphukan. The Ahoms came to India as refugees in the early thirteenth century. They were distantly related to the Thais from what is now the Burma-China border and were probably just a few thousand in number. Soon, they converted to Hinduism and established a kingdom that lasted from 1228 till 1826.

  In 1662, Aurangzeb’s governor in Bengal, Mir Jumla, attacked the Ahoms of Assam, but couldn’t fully defeat them because of heavy rains, the difficult terrain and the constant guerrilla attacks. This raid hurt the Ahoms but they survived and steadily got back their territory. In 1671, their commander Lachit Borphukan cleverly coaxed the Mughals into a naval battle on the Brahmaputra river where the smaller and more manoeuvrable Assamese boats inflicted a crushing defeat on the Mughals. Though seriously ill, Lachit Borphukan personally led the attack. This was the first major defeat the Mughals had faced in India and their empire began to crumble.

  Despite the defeats and rebellions the Mughal Empire survived many things—religious intolerance, leaky public finances, Maratha guerrillas, Bundela chieftains and the Assamese navy. The foundations built by Akbar and those after him were still strong but Aurangzeb committed the ultimate sin—he stayed on the throne too long. He was ninety by the time he died in 1707! Just as it happened with Ashoka and Feroze Shah Tughlaq, those who came after him were weak rulers. This led to a foreign invasion.

  In 1739, the Persian army of Nadir Shah occupied Shah Jehan’s Delhi and killed twenty thousand people. They left with much treasure, including the famous Peacock Throne. The power of the Mughals declined so much that the Marathas occupied large parts of central India even as governors of far-flung provinces like Bengal and Hyderabad became virtually independent. Eighteenth-century India had descended into chaos!

  A number of foreigners saw this as an opportunity. In the North West, the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani, and in the North East, the Burmese set their eyes on India. In the coastal regions, the rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese had been replaced by the rivalry between the French and the English. Armies for hire wandered around the countryside, feared by rulers and the common people. For a short while, it looked like the Marathas would replace the Mughals and establish order but their internal rivalries let them down. They were defeated by the Afghans in January 1761 in Panipat, Haryana. The scene was set for a war of maps.

  THE WAR OF MAPS

  The Marathas were the only Indians who had developed some map-making ability. Their maps were not as good as the European ones, but they knew their terrain. Meanwhile, the French and the British map-makers became the experts in this technology, replacing the Dutch.

  At first, it was the French who held the advantage. By the early eighteenth century, they had a well-established network on the Indian coast. Their most important outposts were in Pondicherry, just south of Madras (Chennai) and the ancient submerged port of Mahabalipuram. There were smaller outposts like Mahe on the Kerala coast, Yanam on the Andhra coast and Chandannagar on the Hooghly channel of the Ganga, just north of the English settlement at Calcutta. The French also controlled the strategically important island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  The maps of India that the French made were far better than those created by their rivals. The best of the French map-makers was D’Anville. He never visited India but seems to have collected the best available information from his Paris home. Unlike others before him, he focused on the facts and avoided the fantastical elements—Mandeville’s influence was finally wearing off!

  Thus, when d’anville wanted to correctly locate Satara, the Maratha capital, he asked the Portuguese ambassador to the French court for more information. The Portuguese were fighting the Marathas at that time. D’Anville was told that Satara was in the Ghats and that it was eight days’ journey from both Goa and from Bombay, at the apex of a triangle formed by these two lines and the coast. For most map-makers of that time, this would have been more than enough information. But D’Anville was not satisfied. He left Satara out because he felt he couldn’t locate it exactly.

  The British were not too far behind. There were many British map-makers in the first half of the eighteenth century—Herman Moll, John Thornton and Thomas Jefferys. Their records show that they also followed the developments in French maps. They made detailed local maps of specific ports and military places. One of the more interesting of these maps is an English map of Maratha admiral Kanoji Angre’s sea fort. From its fortified base at Vijaydurg, the Maratha navy troubled European shipping up and down the Konkan coast for several decades. Angre also defeated the abyssinian pirates, the Sidis, but was unable to remove them from their base at Murud-Janjira.

  The forts of Vijaydurg and Janjira lie south of Mumbai. The fort of Janjira is built on a small island but local fishermen are happy to take visitors out on a rowboat for a small sum. Vijaydurg is built on a peninsula but also offers spectacular views of the Arabian Sea. The eighteenth-century English map of Angre’s fort contains a lot of details about its defences. It also shows
what the Europeans thought of the Maratha admiral. They’ve marked a building as ‘Godowns where he keeps his Plunder’—as if he was just a pirate!

  Though the maps of India by now showed detailed depth measurements along the coast and even greater detail for the entrances of major ports, they had relatively little idea about the Himalayas! The Himayalas are one of the most prominent geographical features of the planet. Most maps do show some awareness of mountains to the north but the range is not really marked anywhere properly. There was a belief going back to the time of Alexander that the northern mountains were a continuation of the Caucasus.

  But Bernier visited Kashmir and he left a comprehensive account of the province which was used by the Mughal emperors as a summer retreat. He says there were two wooden bridges over the Jhelum at Srinagar and beautiful gardens along the riverbanks. Most of the houses were made of wood though some larger buildings, including the ruins of old Hindu temples, were made of stone. He talks of the pleasure boats the rich owned that floated in the Dal Lake and about the lovely parties they threw in the summer.

  Bernier says that the Mughals used their base in Kashmir to extend their influence into Little Tibet or Ladakh and Greater Tibet (Tibet itself). Bernier wasn’t too impressed with the stunningly beautiful place. He says, ‘No other useless place can be compared with it.’ But a visit to Ladakh will make you disagree with him for sure! Try spending a full-moon night on one of the lonely mountain passes. It’s impossible to describe the way the stars look at these heights and the way the moonlight reflects on the bare rocky mountainsides. The moon can be so bright that you can almost read a book by it!

  It looks like the Mughals made some inroads into Ladakh. The Ladakhis promised to pay an annual tribute to them, allow the building of a mosque in their capital and to issue coins in the name of Aurangzeb. The mosque in leh can still be visited. It’s at the head of the main bazaar and just below the old palace.

  However, because of the difficult terrain, the Mughals could not really make sure that the Tibetans submitted to their rule. Bernier says that nobody really believed the Tibetans would keep their word. He was very curious to know more about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Bernier tried to question Tibetan merchants about their country but learned very little. As we shall see, the British had to make great efforts to acquire reliable information about this Land in the nineteenth century. For now, the Europeans needed to know more about the geography of the subcontinent itself.

  So far, knowledge of India’s interiors was quite basic. They only knew of the major trade routes. But this changed with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 where the troops of the English East India Company, led by Robert Clive, defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. For the first time, a European power came to control a major province. Soon, the British acquired large territories and led campaigns to the deep interiors of the country. Accurate maps became more important than ever. Enter Colonel James Rennel.

  7

  Here Comes the Train

  The Portuguese first came to Bengal in 1530. They set up trading posts at Chittagong in the East and Satgaon in the west. Over time, the river near Satgaon silted up and the river port of Hooghly became the main trading hub. The port was on the Bhagirathi, a distributary of the Ganga—what we now call the Hooghly after the old port town.

  By the seventeenth century, other Europeans also joined the party. They set up trading posts along the river—the French at Chandannagar, the Danes at Srirampur and the Dutch at Chinsurah. The English East India Company first had its local headquarters at Hooghly. However, they seem to have had some problems with the local Mughal officials and were forced to sail down the river in 1686. When matters finally settled two years later, the English sent a squadron on ships from Madras (now Chennai) to re-establish their presence in Bengal. The squadron was headed by the company’s chief agent Job Charnock.

  CALCUTTA CALLING

  On 24 August 1690, Charnock landed at a village called Sutanuti on the East bank of the river. He had already visited the spot two years earlier and had liked it. So he decided to build the new English trading post here. It would grow into the city of Calcutta, now called Kolkata.

  There were three villages in this area—Sutanuti, Gobindapore and Kalikata. The last village gives the city its name. The merchant families of the Setts and Basaks already ran big businesses here. There was a fourth village nearby, called Chitpur, from where the road ran all the way to the ancient temple of Kalighat. Just off this road, in the middle of a jungle full of tigers, was a Shiva temple built by a hermit named Chowranghi. The temple is no longer there and the place is now occupied by the Asiatic Society on Park Street. But Chowringhee Road, which is one of the city’s most important roads, is named after the hermit. The road was renamed after Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1980s but most citizens of Kolkata still call it by its old name.

  Job Charnock probably chose this place because of its military advantages. The river ran along the west of the site while there were marshy salt lakes to the east. To the south there were dense jungles full of tigers, while to the north there was a creek that ran from the river to the salt lakes in which big boats could travel. You can still see many of these features. The creek no longer exists but the places surrounding it have names like Creek Row and Creek Lane. The Eastern marshlands where the city would expand in the 1970s is still commonly called Salt Lake although its official name is Bidhannagar. A few of the lakes still exist as the East Kolkata Wetlands and these give the city a unique natural sewage recycling system.

  The British who first arrived in this area settled down around a water tank called Lal Dighi, which had been excavated by a Bengali merchant Lal Mohan Sett. The name Lal Dighi means Red Pond and there’s a story that it gets its name from the colours used by the locals during the festival of Dol (or Holi). The water tank still exists and stands in the middle of the business district. Soon, the British built a number of big buildings around Lal Dighi, including a fort they named Fort William. The General Post Office now stands in the place where the original Fort William used to be and should not be confused with the later Fort William that we see today.

  Though trade flourished in this area, there were also many difficulties. The region was surrounded by swamps full of mosquitoes and many early European residents of Calcutta died due to disease. Alexander Hamilton, who lived in Charnock’s times, says that there were 1200 English of various ranks living there when he visited the city. Within six months, 460 of them died! This may have been a really bad year but it gives us a sense of what kind of problems the East India Company employees had to encounter. Less than three years after establishing the trading post at Calcutta, Job Charnock also died. His tomb is on the grounds of St John’s Church, just off Lal Dighi. His eldest daughter, Mary, passed away a few years later and was buried in the same tomb.

  Nevertheless Calcutta continued to grow. A map from 1757 shows that the British had built a fortified trench called the Maratha Ditch all around Calcutta to defend it from attacks by Indian rulers. The name of the ditch tells us that the British saw the Marathas as more of a threat than they did the Mughals after the death of Aurangzeb. Most of the area within the fortifications was still mostly rural but there is a small urban cluster around Lal Dighi and along the river.

  In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal Siraj-ud-Daulah briefly took control of Calcutta and renamed it Alinagar. But just a year later, Robert Clive defeated him at Plassey and the British came to control the province. Calcutta now became the headquarters of a rapidly expanding empire. Over the next century, it became the largest city in the subcontinent and one of the most important urban centres in the world. This is clear when you compare the 1757 map of Calcutta with the one published by Chapman and Hall in 1842. A few of the old features are still there. Lal Dighi is shown but is surrounded by large buildings including the Writers’ Building. This is not the Writers’ Building built in 1882 which functions today as the secretariat of the state of West Bengal. The original Writers’ B
uilding was also a big building and was used as rent-free accommodation for clerks and other junior employees of the East India company. The Maratha Ditch has been filled up but you can still see its outline in the 1842 map as the Upper Circular and Lower Circular roads—they continue to be very important roads even now though they have new names.

  If you’ve visited Kolkata and are familiar with the city, you will find the 1842 map to be very interesting. The form of the modern city is clearly visible. The Old Fort William has been replaced by the large star-shaped fort that is still used by the Indian army as its eastern headquarters. The British town planners left large open spaces around the new fort—this was so there would be a clear line of fire for the fort’s cannon. These are now the parks of the Maidan. The Victoria Memorial did not exist at this stage and in its place is the complex marked as the Grand Jail. The site of the Turf Club already has a racecourse. Well-known roads such as Park Street and Camac Street have taken shape and are clearly marked. Many of the street names have been changed since the 1970s—otherwise, you could probably find your way around most of Central Kolkata by using the 1842 map!

  The map also shows how, by the mid-nineteenth century, the fast growing city was spilling out of the limits, the old Maratha Ditch. We can see how the new suburbs of Sealdah, Ballygunge and Bhowanipur are just beginning to appear. They turned into fully urban settlements very slowly. Even in the early 1980s, some parts of Ballygunge still looked semi-rural and had big bungalows, fish ponds and weekly village markets. These open spaces are now full of multistorey residential towers but some reminders of the past are still present—the peculiar lanes, the odd hut standing in between modern buildings, the old village shrine in the middle of the road . . . By the middle of the nineteenth century, Calcutta also became a centre for intellectual and cultural activity. Indians from across the subcontinent came to the city to earn a living. There were large communities of Jews, Armenians, Greeks and even Chinese in the city. Though these communities have reduced in size in recent decades, they have left behind buildings and names of places that still remind us of them. This environment with so many cultures living together set the stage for the next phase of evolution of India’s civilization. Over the next century, Calcutta attracted social reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda and Vidyasagar who pushed through remarkable changes that have shaped modern India.