‘A desideratum more sublime’: imperialism's expansive vision and Lambton's Trigonometrical Survey of India

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The advent of advanced European survey techniques and practices in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries fashioned and formatted landscapes according to a new order of things giving rise to synthetic geo-political realities. In adopting a comparative approach to study the cartographically energized representational strategies deployed in both the British home ground and its overseas colony, conclusive connections can be drawn between a national imagination and the colonial project predominantly based on territorial subordination and the attainment of materiality through maps. Triangulation and trigonometric surveys, being based on a mathematical principle of connected triangles, helped reinforce the colonial expansive vision. Mukherjee's study of William Lambton's ‘Trigonometric Survey of India’ examines the systematic manner in which lived spaces were subordinated, overwritten and over-ridden by colonial cartography in peninsular India. Survey records, however, interestingly point to an existing discordance between the lived space of the inhabitants and its representation in the Euro-centric map-literate world. Ironically, mapping, embraced in the name of science, often fell under terrible suspicion from the local inhabitants, pointing to the absolute disconnect between the two world orders.