Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India, by Nilanjana Mukherjee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India by Nilanjana Mukherjee Ushashi Dasgupta (bio) Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India, by Nilanjana Mukherjee; pp. xiii + 300. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021, $136.00, $39.16 ebook, £120.00, £31.44 ebook. At the turn of the nineteenth century, William Lambton embarked upon a trigonometrical survey of India’s southern peninsula. As Nilanjana Mukherjee explains, this highly technical method of mapping required “ready access to vantage points, such as mountain or hill tops, or temples and fort steeples” (85). The project was met with bemusement in the colonial administration. “If any traveller wished to proceed to Seringapatam,” the Finance Committee of Madras declared, “[they] need only say to head palankeen bearer, and . . . he would find his way to that place without having recourse to Col. Lambton’s map” (83). On the ground, resistance was evident. Poligars reacted with anger when an officer arrived to set up a triangulation station at Narnicul Droog in 1803. In Mysore, Joshua De Penning cut down a sacred peepul tree “in order to clear and create the view.” Lambton himself “failed to realise why his survey faced such obstacles and blamed it partly on British administrative inefficiency and failure to communicate with the natives” (87). “Even in the bigotted country of Tanjore,” he wrote, “I ascended no less than 12 Coverams [gopuram], and without those lofty buildings I never could have got through the country” (88). Taken together, Mukherjee’s examples raise questions about different kinds of geographical knowledge—that of the map-maker, standing on high, versus [End Page 713] the palankeen-bearer, carrying the weight of the colonizer’s body. They also establish connections among cartography, power, and violence. For Mukherjee, “the specular method of the survey completely overwrote as well as overrode the lived space which already existed in the experiential reality of the natives” (85). This captures Mukherjee’s argument in miniature. Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason: Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India identifies the ways in which “the British made themselves the intellectual masters of the Indian landscape”; cartographic projects were about the desire for, and assertion of, control (13). For Mukherjee, increasingly organized attempts to subject Britain, especially “the Celtic and Gaelic fringes,” to the “gaze” had direct consequences in the empire (118): British surveyors, artists, and travel writers were determined to pin India down in much the same way. Thus, India—as concept, discernible territory, imperial possession— became crystallized. Each section of the book begins with a chapter on trends in Britain before moving into Indian case studies in the second chapter. The first section introduces British geodetic, hydrographic, and cartographic initiatives, such as the Ordnance Survey. The India chapter considers Lambton and James Rennell, whose Bengal Atlas (1781) and Map of Hindoostan (1782) saw “the figure of the cartographer [become] an imperial role model and a vanguard” (73). The second section argues that artists had a “distinctive way of ‘seeing’ Indian landscape, and thereby of possessing it and shaping it” (127). It explores aesthetic responses to nature and architecture in Britain, the depiction of exotic locales in stage scenery, and the popularity of panoramas representing India. It then shifts its focus to Company art, which places the “native subject within an imperial aesthetic frame”: the picturesque (147). Though the chapter discusses painters’ views of Kolkata, its central figures are George Chinnery and Charles D’Oyly, whose eyes were drawn to Dhaka. D’Oyly’s Sketches of the New Road (1830) “celebrate[s] . . . colonial circulation and public work” (166). The final section asks “how literature (especially of travel) is used . . . to control, order or limn a place” (189). The India chapter examines William Hodges’s Travels in India (1790), James Baillie Fraser’s Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Sources of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges (1820), Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (1828) by Reginald Heber, the Bishop of Calcutta, and botanical studies by Joseph Dalton Hooker...