The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  These early social reformers also argued in favour of providing education to Indians in English. This was a choice that went on to have a deep impact. Many think that English education was used by the British to create a class of Indians who would be loyal to them. Thomas Macaulay in 1835 argued, ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ his note is often used by people to support the view that English education was used only for the purpose of creating loyalty amongst Indians. But not all Britishers agreed with Macaulay. The fact was that many Indian reformers also favoured English—this is not so strange because these reformers knew that Indian civilization had been in decline for a long time. They correctly blamed this on lack of technological and intellectual innovation.

  The knowledge of English was regarded as a window to the world of ideas that came from Europe. Far from creating a class of loyal Indians, it was the English-educated middle class that would be at the forefront of India’s struggle for independence!

  The College of Fort William, which was set up for training British civil servants, was one of the important places for Anglo-Indian interaction. The college was meant for training civil servants but it brought about remarkable interaction between Indian and British scholars. This led to new scholarship as well as thinking. One of these scholars was Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, who taught there in the 1840s. He was an extraordinary man and his contributions include giving the Bengali language its modern form, the emancipation and education of women and the teaching of Sanskrit texts to low-caste Hindus. Indian civilization benefited a lot from this new way of thinking.

  The students of the College of Fort William were not always thinking about their studies. A student named Mr Chisholme was sued in 1802 and brought to court by Jagonnaut Singh, a lawyer. Here is what happened: a cat had been sitting in a shop near Chisholme’s residence. The student set his dog on the cat but it fled into the lawyer’s house and into the women’s quarters! Mr Chisholme and the dog followed the cat. When the lawyer objected, Chisholme punched him in his forehead! In the end Chisholme admitted his guilt and was reported for proper action.

  Meanwhile, Thomas Stamford Raffles, a talented young official, was sent by Governor-General Minto to Penang (now in Malaysia) to keep an eye on the Dutch in South East Asia. The British and the Dutch had long been bitter rivals in this region and the English East India Company wanted to make sure that the shipping routes between India and the Far East were secure. When Napoleon conquered Holland, the British occupied the Dutch possessions in the East Indies. Raffles played a leading role in these events. In the middle of organizing military operations and administrative systems in faraway islands, the extraordinary man found the time to observe the flora and fauna, record local customs and study ancient ruins.

  After Napoleon was defeated, the Dutch wanted their colonies back. There were heated negotiations between Calcutta and Batavia (the Dutch headquarters, now Jakarta). The Dutch would eventually get back most of their possessions as per the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, but not before Stamford Raffles had made sure that the British would continue to control the Straits of Malacca.

  The key to this strategy was the establishment of a new British outpost in Singapore. The island had been, in name, under the control of the Sultan of Johore but Raffles was able to secure it in exchange for the payment of an annual rent and British support against the Sultan’s local rival. Singapore was formally founded on 6 February 1819 with a great deal of pomp and the firing of cannon.

  Raffles is known today as the founder of Singapore but he had an extraordinary interest and curiosity about the natural and cultural history of South East Asia. He collected samples of plants and animals and even sent back a Sumatran tapir for the Governor General’s garden in Barrackpore! He wrote about the Indianized culture of Java and Bali and is said to have ‘rediscovered’ the great stupa of Borobodur during the British occupation of Java.

  Just before he returned to England, Raffles set up an institute in Singapore inspired by Calcutta’s Fort William college. It survives as the Raffles institution, an elite school, though its original location on Bras Basah Road today is occupied by the Raffles City Shopping Mall, just across from the famous Raffles Hotel. There are so many places in Singapore today that are named after Raffles that it can be quite confusing for a visitor!

  IT’S A TIGER! IT’S A MAP!

  As the British settled down firmly in India, they quickly discovered the need for good maps charting the country’s interior in order to help with the administration, revenue collection and military movements. Till the mid-seventeenth century, European map-makers had been focusing on the coastline but now, the interiors also had to be mapped.

  The tool used for doing this survey was the perambulator —a large wheel set up to allow the measurement of distance.

  East India Company troops would often take a perambulator along on marches and estimate the distance by adjusting for the twists and turns of the road. This was not exactly accurate but it gave them readings that were a lot better than earlier estimates. For example, a map of Sri Lanka and the Coromandel coast from these times carries the note: ‘The route from Tritchinapoly to Trinevelley ascertained by a march of English troops in 1775.’ This was quite common!

  The British decided to carry out a more scientific survey of Bengal after they had conquered it. In 1765, Robert Clive assigned James Rennel, a young naval officer, the task of making a general survey of Bengal. Rennell took a band of sepoys and travelled the countryside for seven years fixing latitudes, plotting productive lands and marking rivers and villages. It was hard and dangerous work. There were tigers everywhere and Rennell was only too aware of what they could do—he jotted down his fears in his notebook.

  A tiger did carry off a soldier on at least one occasion. On another, a leopard jumped out of a tree and mauled five sepoys before Rennell grabbed a bayonet and thrust it into the beast’s mouth! On yet another occasion, he was deeply wounded while fighting off bandits. At thiry-five, Rennell returned to England and produced the famous Bengal Atlas. He was hailed as the ‘Father of Indian Geography’.

  Though it was the best that had been done so far, Rennell had only covered a small part of the subcontinent. As British conquests expanded, the need for further surveys was felt. The task fell on William Lambton.

  Lambton had had a long but ordinary career in India till he was made the Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India. This happened by chance. In 1798, he was sailing from Calcutta to Madras on a ship. There was a young colonel on the same ship called Arthur Wellesley who would later go on to become the Duke of Wellington, the victor at Waterloo. But in 1798, he was better known as the younger brother of the Governor-General and he was on his way to fight against Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Wellesley was impressed with Lambton and took him along for the expedition. Tipu Sultan was defeated and killed at the siege of Srirangapatnam. Lambton played an important role in this battle.

  It was during this campaign that he came up with the idea of doing a survey of India using triangulation. This means, one takes three visible points as the corners of a triangle. The points should be visible from each position. If one knows the length of any of the sides and can measure the angles, the length of the other sides can be calculated using trigonometry. With the new measurements, another new triangle can be made and so on. This was tiring work but it provided very accurate measurements. Lambton followed this method to create an accurate map of India and also to use the measurements to establish the exact shape and curvature of the earth. This was not just out of scientific curiosity—it was of great importance to Britain, a naval and trading power. Lambton told Wellesley about his plan and Wellesley spoke to his brother, the Governor-General. And that’s how Lambton landed his job!

  The first thing that Lambton did was to order a modern theod
olite to help with the survey. A theodolite is like a telescope that can help make very accurate measurements of angles needed for triangulation. The equipment Lambton ordered weighed half a ton and had to be shipped from England. On the way it was captured by the French and taken to Mauritius! But when the French realized that it was a scientific instrument, they very politely repacked and sent it to Madras. At last, Lambton could start on his work.

  He began by establishing a baseline at sea level in 1802. He did this just south of Chennai’s famous Marina Beach. From a flagpole on the beach, he found out the horizontal distance to the grandstand of the Madras racecourse. Once this was done, he started the sequence of triangulation that would criss-cross India for the next sixty years! This process lasted not just for his lifetime but for also that of George Everest, who took the job after him. In 1802, the East India Company had thought this work would be done in five years. The fact that this project was allowed to continue despite the time and resources it took up shows how important and useful it was considered by the British.

  Carrying the heavy theodolite through jungles, mountains, farmlands and villages must have been very difficult. Often, there were bandits, local people who were hostile to the British, and kingdoms that had not made their peace with British rule. Often, there were long delays because dust and haze made it difficult for them to take readings. At each location, the theodolite had to be dragged up to a height in order to provide a reading. Tall buildings were used when there were no hills. In 1808, Lambton decided to use the massive eleventh-century Brihadishwara temple in Thanjavur. This Shiva temple had been built by the Cholas at the height of their powers. It’s a huge structure even by modern standards.

  Unfortunately, the ropes slipped and the theodolite was smashed! Though it was so huge, it was a delicate instrument. Anyone else would have given up but not Lambton. He ordered a new one from England at his own expense and then spent the next six weeks repairing the damaged equipment with great pains.

  Lambton worked on the survey till he died of tuberculosis in 1823. His forgotten grave was recently discovered by writer John Keay in the village of Hinganghat, fifty miles south of Nagpur. His theodolite is in better condition and is now housed in headquarters of the Survey of India in Dehradun. Less than half of the project had been completed when Lambton died. But fortunately, George Everest was equally committed. By the time Everest retired and returned to England in 1843, the Great Arc had been extended well into the Himalayas.

  Everest built a bungalow for himself at Hathipaon near Mussourie. The ruins of this bungalow still stand on a ridge with a magnificent view of snow-capped peaks on one side and the valley of Dehradun on the other. It is just a fifteen-minute drive from Mussourie town, followed by a ten-minute walk up the hill. Everest returned home a famous man and was knighted.

  Did you know?

  In 1849, the highest mountain in the world was discovered. It was more than 29,000 feet high! This mountain, Peak XV, was called Chomolungma or Mother Goddess of the World by the Tibetans. The Survey of India usually retained the local names for places wherever possible but not this time. The highest mountain in the world was renamed after George Everest. Yes, Peak XV is Mountain Everest.

  THE REVOLT OF 1857

  By the time Mount Everest was named, the British were in control of the whole subcontinent. What was not directly ruled by them was managed through one-sided treaties with the local princes. Nobody else had controlled such a large part of the subcontinent since the Mauryans.

  How did the British succeed in doing this when other Europeans had failed? It’s true that they had the technology but this wasn’t the only reason. It’s not as if the technological gap between the Europeans and the Indians was as large as in the Americas or Africa. And there were vastly larger numbers of Indians than Europeans. There were also European armies for hire and allies fighting on the Indian side at times. And yet, the British were able to beat off much larger armies and still maintain control with a small number of officials. How?

  What is surprising about the British conquest of India is that so few British were involved! The armies of the East India Company were mostly made up of Indian sepoys. In many cases, the British actually got support from the locals. For example, at the Battle of Plassey, Robert Clive was funded and encouraged by the merchants of Bengal. Some historians feel this shows, once again, that Indians did not think of themselves as a nation till the nineteenth century. But we’ve seen that this wasn’t true and that Indians have had a strong sense of being a civilization for many, many years. Why did they not oppose the British rule more strongly then?

  It’s possible that this happened because the collapse of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century had left the country in chaos. It had seemed that the Marathas would replace the Mughals, but they failed because of the loss at Panipat and internal fighting. The countryside was full of bandits and robbers. Some of them, like Begum Samroo, became so powerful and rich that they lived openly and in style in Delhi and were considered ‘respectable’ members of society.

  The East India Company was not kind or generous but it did create some order in the country. Also, unlike the Portuguese, the British did not try and interfere with the local culture and social norms. Even when they did, like in the case of abolishing sati, they did it with the support of Indian reformists. This is probably why they didn’t initially seem threatening to the Indians.

  After his great victory at Plassey, Robert Clive did not offer thanksgiving at a church. He did it at a Durga Puja organized by Nabakrishna Deb in Kolkata!

  But by the mid-nineteenth century, this open attitude changed. The British began to look at Indians as people who needed to be ‘civilized’. They felt Hinduism was a ‘superstition’ and that the locals needed to be converted to Christianity if they were to be ‘saved’. The Indians—both Hindus and Muslims—did not take well to this for obvious reasons.

  This anger finally led to the Revolt of 1857, exactly a hundred years after the Battle of Plassey. Within a few weeks, the bulk of the East India company’s Bengal Army was in open revolt and, in many cases, the British officers had all been killed. This revolt spread like wildfire across large parts of north and Central India. The revolt didn’t have a single leader or a single group of leaders who were issuing orders. There were different centres with a number of different leaders, usually people from the old Indian aristocracy who had had their powers taken away from them.

  Delhi was one such important centre of the uprising. By 1857, Shahjahanabad was no longer the glorious city it used to be. The eighty-two-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar was an emperor only in name. The royal family survived on a pension the British gave them and many of the junior branches of the family were living in extreme poverty. William Sleeman, an official who visited the Red Fort a few years before the revolt, says that 1200 members of the family lived in the palace on the small pension but they were too proud to work! Instead, they would try and use their family name to cheat and make money. Even the palace inside the Red Fort was in shambles. In 1824, Bishop herber described the palace gardens as ‘dirty, lonely and wretched; the bath and fountain dry; the inlaid pavement hid with lumber and gardener’s sweepings, and the walls stained with the dung of birds and bats’. Things would have been worse by the 1850s.

  Writers like William Dalrymple have tried to present the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar as a ‘court of great brilliance’ and as a place that led to cultural growth but this is not exactly true. The court did have some excellent poets like Ghalib and Zauq but Delhi in those days was not Calcutta, where new ideas and innovations were afloat. Ghalib’s poetry is beautiful but it’s a lament about the world collapsing around him, not a vision of the future.

  In May 1857, several hundred sepoys and cavalrymen rode into Delhi from Meerut and encouraged the local troops to join them. Together, they killed every British person they could find. Indians who had converted to Christianity were also killed. As more and more rebels arrived, the soldie
rs turned to the ageing emperor for leadership. Bahadur Shah was not sure what to do—if he listened to the soldiers, he was worried that the British would take revenge on him. But if he didn’t, there was a large and growing number of angry men he’d have to face. He decided to play along with the rebels but he remained uncertain about his moves throughout this episode.

  Meanwhile, a small British force arrived and set up a position of defence on the ancient Aravalli ridge overlooking the walled city. From here, they pounded Shahjahanabad with cannon. The British were few in number but the rebels were not well-organized and they could not capture the position from the British. A small group of Gurkha soldiers held off waves of rebel attacks near Burra Hindu Rao’s house on top of the ridge—the place is now a hospital. One of the princes, Mirza Mughal, did try to organize the rebels but his efforts went in vain because the emperor couldn’t make up his mind and members of his own family tried to pull him down. The British had a constant flow of information about what was happening inside the Red Fort throughout the siege!