Drawing Roads, Building Empire: Space and Circulation in Charles D’Oyly's Indian Landscapes

Abstract

Studies of colonial travel and mobility reveal how spaces are constructed through practices which select and link sites together, drawing fresh itineraries and re-organising places. A series of lithographic sketches published in 1830 as Sketches of the New Road in a Journey from Calcutta to Gyah, drawn by Charles D’Oyly (1781–1845) on his journey from Calcutta to Gaya, captures the tacit colonial imbrication of notions of travel, circulation, landscape and spatial production. An officer posted in various capacities at various places in eastern India in the early part of the nineteenth century, D’Oyly was a prolific amateur painter who sketched and painted different landscapes across the region. His Sketches holds a special significance as his pictures capture and freeze glimpses of a newly-constructed colonial road stretching across the countryside. D’Oyly's plates were intended to celebrate the new colonial circuit as a form of public works, drawing attention away from the urban epicentre of colonial Calcutta. I read this construction as a kind of spatial practice whereby a fresh idea of space emerges through these new operations, supplanting that of pre-colonial India.