Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (23 page)

Raffles is remembered mostly as the
founder of Singapore, but his writings show an extraordinary curiosity about the
natural and cultural history of South East Asia. He avidly collected samples of
plants and animals and even sent back a Sumatran tapir for the Governor
General’s garden in
Barrackpore. He wrote extensively
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. I wonder if he ever saw the panel carved with the windblown
ship—a memory of an earlier age of mercantile trade. 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, although its original location on Bras Basah Road is today occupied
by the Raffles City Shopping Mall, just across from the famous Raffles Hotel. As
anyone visiting Singapore will have noticed, the liberal use of the
founder’s name can be quite confusing.

As the British became more entrenched
in India, they quickly discovered the need for good maps of the country’s
interior to help with administration, revenue collection and military movements.
Till the mid-seventeenth century, European mapping had been concentrated on the
coastline but now the interiors had to be systematically charted too. The key survey
tool was the perambulator—essentially a large wheel set up to allow the
measurement of distance. East India Company troops would often take a perambulator
along on marches and an estimate of distance would be worked out by adjusting for
the twists and turns of the road. While this was hardly accurate, it provided
readings that were a vast improvement on earlier estimates. For instance, a map of
Sri Lanka and the Coromandel coast from this era carries the note, ‘The
route
from Tritchinapoly to Trinevelly ascertained by a march of
English troops in 1755’. This was quite typical.

With the conquest of Bengal, the British
decided to carry out a more scientific survey of their new possessions. In 1765,
Robert Clive assigned James Rennell, a young naval officer, the task of making a
general survey of Bengal. Rennell took a detachment of sepoys and criss-crossed the
countryside for seven years fixing latitudes, plotting productive lands and marking
rivers and villages. It was hard and dangerous work. While surveying the Gangetic
delta (the Sunderbans), Rennell wrote in his notebook ‘We have no other
Obstacles to carry on our Business properly than the extensive thickets with which
the country abounds, and the constant dread of Tygers, whose vicinity to us their
Tracks, which we are constantly trampling over, do fully demonstrate’.
⁴

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. In an act of extraordinary bravery, Rennell grabbed a bayonet and thrust it
into the beast’s mouth. On yet another occasion, Rennell sustained deep
sabre wounds while fighting off bandits. At thirty-five, Rennell returned to England
and produced the famous
Bengal Atlas
. He was hailed as ‘the
Father of Indian Geography’.

Although it was the best that has been
done thus far, Rennell’s work had covered only a small part of the
subcontinent. As British conquests expanded, the need for further surveys was felt.
The task fell to acerbic genius William Lambton, who had had a long but unremarkable
career in India till he was made the Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical
Survey of India. He got the job quite by
chance. In 1798, he
happened to be sailing from Calcutta to Madras on the same ship as a young colonel
called Arthur Wellesley. He would go on to become famous as the Duke of Wellington
and the victor at Waterloo, but in 1798 he was better known as the younger brother
of the Governor General and was on his way to fight against Tipu Sultan of Mysore.
He seems to have been impressed with Lambton and took him along for the expedition.
Tipu Sultan was defeated and killed at the siege of Srirangapatnam. Lambton played
his part with distinction. By consulting the stars he was able to avert a major
disaster during a manoeuvre when British troops were unknowingly marching north into
enemy lines rather than south to a defensible position.
⁵

It was during the campaign that Lambton
came up with the idea of doing a survey of India using triangulation. Basically,
this requires three mutually visible points as corners of a triangle. If one knows
the length of any of the sides and can measure the angles, the length of the other
sides can be established by trigonometry. The newly determined sides can then each
be used to establish a new triangle and so on. It is tedious work but provides very
accurate measurements. Lambton had another motive beyond just creating an accurate
map of India. Using this methodology, he wanted to also use the measurements to
establish the exact shape and curvature of the earth. This was not just scientific
curiosity; it was of vital importance to a naval and commercial power like Britain.
Lambton told Arthur Wellesley his plan, who in turn spoke to his brother the
Governor General. Lambton got the job.

The first thing that Lambton did was to
order a state-of-the-art theodolite to help with the survey. A theodolite is
basically
a telescope that has been specially adapted to allow
the very accurate measurement 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. However, when the French realized
that it was a scientific instrument, they gallantly repacked and sent it to Madras.
At last, Lambton could start on his work.

Lambton 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 ascertained the horizontal distance to the
grandstand of Madras racecourse. Once he had established this base-line, Lambton set
in motion a sequence of triangulation that would crisscross India for the next sixty
years, consuming not just his life but that of his successor George Everest. In
1802, the East India Company had expected the work to have finished in five years!
It is a testimony to the prestige and usefulness of this project that it was not
stopped for six decades, despite the time and resources it would ultimately
consume.

Trudging through jungles, mountains,
farmlands and villages with a heavy theodolite in tow must have been very difficult
work. Often there were bandits, hostile local populations, and suspicious kingdoms
that were still not reconciled to British rule. Many a time there were long delays
because dust and haze obscured visibility. At each location, the theodolite had to
be dragged up to a height in order to provide a reading. Tall buildings were used
where there were no hills. In 1808, Lambton decided to use the massive
eleventh-century Brihadishwara temple in Thanjavur. The temple dedicated to Lord
Shiva had been built by the Cholas at the height of their
power
and is a huge structure even by modern standards. Unfortunately, the ropes slipped
and the theodolite was smashed. For all its size, it was a delicate and minutely
calibrated instrument. A lesser man would have given up. However, Lambton ordered a
new one from England at his own expense but then spent the next six weeks
painstakingly repairing the damaged equipment.

Lambton worked on the survey till he
died of tuberculosis, in the field, in 1823. His crumbling grave was recently
rediscovered by the writer John Keay in the village of Hinganghat, fifty miles south
of Nagpur. His theodolite is in better condition and is now housed in the Survey of
India headquarters in Dehradun. Less than half of the project had been completed
when Lambton died. Fortunately, he was succeeded by the equally dedicated George
Everest. By the time Everest retired and returned to England in 1843, the Great Arc
had been extended well into the Himalayas. He built a bungalow for himself at
Hathipaon, near the hill-station of Mussourie. Its ruins still stand on a ridge
commanding magnificent views of snow-capped peaks on one side and the valley of
Dehradun on the other. It is merely a fifteen-minute drive from Mussourie town,
followed by a ten minute walk up the hill. Just the shell of the house remains,
although the roof was largely intact when I visited it in February 2011 and the
fireplaces were clearly visible in the larger rooms. Everything else had been
stripped bare. Yet, as one looked out of the broken window frames at the Indian land
mass extending south into the far distance, one could feel the soul of the eccentric
but determined Welshman hanging in the air.

Everest returned home to recognition and
a knighthood, but it is unclear whether he had ever seen Peak XV. In 1849,
surveyors in the eastern Himalayas took theodolite measurements
of Peak XV from six different angles. By averaging the measurements, the Bengali
computer Radhanath Sikdar calculated that the peak was 29,000 feet high. He rushed
into the office of Everest’s successor, Andrew Waugh, and is said to have
blurted out, ‘Sir, I have discovered the highest mountain in the
world’. The problem was that the learned scholars of that time would have
dismissed the idea of a mountain that was over 25,000 feet. They would be especially
suspicious of a rounded-out figure like 29,000. Therefore, the surveyors arbitrarily
added two feet to the calculation and for decades geography textbooks would carry
the number 29,002 feet!
⁶
Later measurements show the exact height at 29,029 feet or 8848 metres above
sea level.

Now came the issue of naming Peak XV.
The Tibetans already called it Chomolungma (Mother Goddess of the World). Unusually
for the colonial period, the Survey of India tended to retain the local names where
possible but in this case the temptation proved too great. It was named after George
Everest. Like many people today, I used to wonder why the British would name the
highest mountain in the world after the Surveyor General of India rather than after
royalty or even a Viceroy. However, having read about the sheer scale of the Great
Trigonometrical Survey of India, I can see that it was not so odd after all.

By the time Mount Everest was being
named, the British were very much in control of the whole subcontinent. What was
not directly ruled by the British was managed through one-sided
treaties with the remaining local princes. Not since the Mauryas had such a large
part of the subcontinent been controlled by a single power. How did the British
succeed where earlier European powers had failed? Technological advantage was
important, but cannot have been the deciding factor. Unlike in the Americas, Africa
or Australia, the technological gap between the Europeans and the locals was not so
large as to be able to neutralize a very large numerical superiority. In many
instances, there were European mercenaries and allies fighting on the Indian side.
Yet, the British were repeatedly able to beat off much larger armies and then
maintain control with a tiny number of officials. Why?

What is most striking about the British
conquest of India is that so few British were involved. The armies of the East India
Company were largely made up of Indian sepoys. Moreover, in many cases, the British
received encouragement and support from the locals. For instance, at the Battle of
Plassey, Robert Clive was funded and encouraged by the merchants of Bengal. Some
historians tend to see this as proof that Indians did not have any sense of
nationhood till the nineteenth century. However, as we have seen, Indians have had a
very strong sense of being a civilization for millennia. Why did the Indians not
oppose British rule more aggressively?

In my view, the real reason for this was
that the collapse of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century had left the
country in chaos. The Marathas, after showing some initial promise, had dissolved
into their internal bickerings. The countryside was plagued with mercenaries and
bandits of
every description. Some of these privateer warlords,
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 far from benign but, in comparison, did offer some semblance of order. There is
an important additional factor. Unlike the Portuguese, the early British rulers
conspicuously kept away from interfering with local culture and social norms. Even
in the few instances where they did intervene, as in the abolition of the despicable
custom of sati, it was done with the strong support of reformist Indians. This is
why they would not have appeared as a civilizational threat to the contemporary
Indian. It is not usually remembered that after his great victory at Plassey, Robert
Clive did not offer thanksgiving at a church but at a Durga Puja organized by
Nabakrishna Deb in Kolkata. One cannot picture Pedro Alvarez Cabral doing this.

Unfortunately, by the mid-nineteenth
century, this open attitude had changed and we see growing cultural and racial
arrogance. There is a distinct emphasis on ‘civilizing’, often
meaning Christianizing, the natives. This was no secret but openly discussed. James
Mill, author of
The History of British India
(1820), described Hinduism as
‘the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and
degraded any portion of mankind’.
⁷
Evangelical missionaries began using British political control to aggressively
seek converts. Not surprisingly, Indians—both Hindu and
Muslim—looked on all this with suspicion.

The resultant resentment eventually
erupted into a full-fledged revolt in 1857, exactly a hundred years after the Battle
of Plassey. British readers will know this as the Sepoy Mutiny.
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. The
phenomenon spread like wildfire across large parts of North and Central India. Note
that the revolt did not have a centralized leadership but occurred in a number of
different centres and had a number of different leaders, usually dispossessed
members of the old Indian aristocracy. Delhi was one of the important centres of the
uprising.