Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great

Britain and India, 1760-1850

Author(s): Kapil Raj
Source: Osiris, Vol. 15, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise (2000), pp.
119-134
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/301944
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 Colonial Encounters and the Forging
of New Knowledge and National
Identities: Great Britain and India,
1760-1850

Kapil Raj*

ABSTRACT

In opposition both to the dominant vision of colonial science as an hegemonic

European enterprise whose universalization can be conceived of in purely diffu-
sionist terms, and to the more recent perception of it as a simple reordering of
indigenous knowledge within the European canon, this essay seeks to show the
complex reciprocity involved in the making of science within the colonial context.
Based on the example of India during the first century of British colonial conquest,
it examines the specificities of intercultural encounter in the subcontinent, the for-
malized institutions that were engendered, and the kinds of knowledge practices
that emerged in the case of the geographical survey of India. The essay suggests
that the knowledge created in this context is not just local in character, but partici-
pates wholly in the emergence of universal science, as well as of other institutions
of modernity.

INTRODUCTION

OVER THE LAST DECADE, PROMINENT IMPERIAL HISTORIANS

have called into question the concept of simple diffusion of the
values of modernity from Britain to its colonies-values such as democracy, justice,
and the welfare state. They have argued that modernity and its institutions are not a
simple emanation from a well-defined center, but are the result of adaptations and
accommodations of British institutions confronted with the social, political, and eco-
nomic organization of the countries Britain came to dominate, including Ireland,
Scotland, and India. They thus imply that Britain, its modern institutions, and its
empire were co-constituted.'
However, modern knowledge and its making did not figure among the domains
these authors studied. This lacuna has now been partially filled by Christopher Bayly

* Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS UMR 2139), Cite des
Sciences et de l'Industrie, 30, avenue Corentin Cariou, 75930 Paris Cedex 19, France.
I I refer here to historians like David Washbrook, Burton Stein, David Cannadine, and, most nota-
bly, Christopher Bayly. See his Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830
(London: Longman, 1989).

? 2001 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0369-7827/99/1401-0004$02.0

Osiris, 2001, 15:00-00 119

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 120 KAPIL RAJ

with his recent Empire and Information.2 In a move away from the coproductivist
perspective of his earlier works, Bayly here surveys the complex indigenous infor-
mation-gathering networks of precolonial India-ranging from gossipmongers in
the bazaars, marriage makers, and midwives to astronomers, physicians, and philos-
ophers-and the historical contingencies that led to their partial, though informal,
inclusion in the surveillance systems set up by the British following their rise to
power in the latter half of the eighteenth century. "The colonial information order,"
Bayly states, "was erected on the foundations of its Indian precursors ... reclassified
and built into hierarchies which reflected the world view of the Britons."3 However,
riven by mutual suspicion, distortion, and violence between the British officials and
their indigenous informants, the new colonial state's intelligence systems were frag-
ile. The whole enterprise resulted in a monumental failure when the British were
caught almost completely unawares by the popular rebellions and mutinies of 1857,
which almost cost them their South Asian empire.
Bayly, however, does not deal with the workings of other, more successful and
resilient institutions devoted to knowledge making and dissemination on which the
colonial information order equally depended. Indeed, the late eighteenth century
saw the rise, both in Britain and in its colonies, of a number of field sciences that
at once fed on and reinforced the colonial order, such as geographical surveying,
agriculture, botany, forestry, and anthropology.4
To be sure, Bayly does discuss debates about science and the status of scientific
knowledge among learned Indians and British in the nineteenth century, but this is
a second-order discussion, one step removed from the making of new knowledge.5
Moreover, Bayly's approach is inadequate for studying the development of these
sciences during this period. For a start, Britons themselves were in the process of
forging a national identity: to speak of a single British world view at the time, into
which indigenous knowledge was incorporated, is anachronistic.6 In addition, the
field sciences developed in a much tighter, more formal, and stratified institutional
context than the informal networks of intelligence-gathering at the heart of Bayly's
new work. Indeed, the successful functioning of these institutions presupposed the
imposition of a certain authority by the state, a degree of control that was beyond the
means (and ambitions) of individuals and their informal networks.7 And, although
colonial institutions grew out of preexisting administrations of indigenous regimes
and inherited much of their workforces, they were transformed by the new situation
through mechanisms of accommodation and negotiation, producing novel forms of
knowledge that were not simply linear offshoots of past practices and traditions.
Study of colonial institutions thus calls for an approach that, by bringing negotiation

- Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communica-
tion in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997).
I3bid., p. 179.
Simon J. Schaffer, "Field Trials, the State of Nature and British Colonial Predicament," pap
presented at the "Science and Empire" seminar, Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences e
Techniques, Cite des Sciences et de l'Industrie, La Villette, Paris, 11 June 1999.
5Bayly, Empire and Information (cit. n. 2), chaps. 7 and 8.
1) See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale U
Press, 1992). See also Roy Porter and Mikulks Teich, eds., The Scientific Revolution in Nat
Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981).
7See Svante Lindqvist, "Labs in the Woods: The Quantification of Technology During the Swedish
Enlightenment," in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century. eds. Tore Frangsmyr, John L.
Heilbron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), pp. 291-315.

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 121

and coproduction back to center stage, a

edge making and circulation during this period-an approach closer to Bayly's ear-
lier works as well as to recent work in the history and sociology of science.
From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the Indian subcontinent
played an important and active role in this coemergence inasmuch as it became a
space for multiple cultural encounters in the context of empire: encounters between
different groups from the British Isles, and between them and different sectors of
the subcontinent's own population. Corresponding to these two different types of
encounters, the first part of this essay, situated mainly in Calcutta, presents the spec-
ificities of scientific practices and the circumstances that led to their institutional-
ization. The second focuses on one institution-the Survey of India-to show its
hybrid nature and the coproduction of geographical knowledge that emerged.8 I
shall conclude by addressing questions related to the nature and scope of the knowl-
edge produced in the co-construction of modernity across the globalized space of
empire.

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY, CALCUTTA, AND THE COLLEGE

Direct contact between England and India dates from the establishment of the En-
glish East India Company in 1600. Coming to participate in the lucrative spice and
luxury commodity trade, the English initially represented no more than a few hun-
dred civilians and a couple thousand troops. Even at the apogee of empire in the
twentieth century, the British presence in India never exceeded a few tens of thou-
sands of civilians, a number at all times too small not to rely heavily upon autochtho-
nous intermediaries for most administrative and technical tasks.9 In fact, from their
arrival in the subcontinent, a collaboration was established between the British and
segments of the region's population: banians (bankers) and munshis (interpreter-
secretaries), and skilled workmen like weavers, jewelers, carpenters, shipbuilders,
and sailors. In the face of inter-European rivalries in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century, especially vis-a-vis the French, this collaboration extended to the
establishment of an army that included indigenous troops, artificers, and gunsmiths.
The conquest of Bengal in 1757 put the British firmly on the road to territorial
and political power. However, consciousness of this new role was slow in coming
for, in the years that followed, East India Company officials devoted their attention
to unbridled personal profiteering through looting and extorting exhorbitant taxes
from the local peasantry. But after ten million lives had been lost in the space of three
years-victims of a famine that was a direct consequence of the ruthless policies of
the company's servants-parliament in Britain pressured the company to establish
more orderly and permanent forms of exploitation and government.
So it was that Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal from 1772 to 1785,
received orders from London to take over the whole civil administration of the

8 I have chosen this institution partly to provide a counterpoint to Matthew Henry Edney, Mapping
an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago and London: Univ
of Chicago Press, 1997), the argument of which is largely founded on Bayly's central thesis in Empir
and Information (cit. n. 2).
9 One estimate, made for the Madras presidency during the first half of the nineteenth century, put
the proportion of Britons to South Asians directly serving the company's civil administration at 1 to
180. See Robert E. Frykenberg, Guntur District 1788-1848: A History of Local Influence and Central
Authority in South India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 7.

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 122 KAPIL RAJ

province. As the emerging state of Great Britain held that civil justice, public order,
transport, and communications depended upon taxation, Hastings took the orders to
mean the entire management of the province's revenues. IO The collaboration between
Britons and South Asians thus broadened to include tax collection and running a
civil government. And although the British set up a variety of new intermediary
relationships, their interlocutors remained in large part the indigenous "under civil
servants"-land-revenue officials, minor judges, and police officials inherited from
the Mughal and other princely administrations.
To Hastings's mind, successful administration required drawing up a kind of
Domesday Book of the company's territories. "Every accumulation of knowledge,"
he wrote, "and especially such as is obtained by social communication with people
over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to
the state.... "'11 In addition to taxation and law, this knowledge was to include natu-
ral history and antiquities, local customs, diet and general living conditions-in
short, all that would, by the end of the century, go under the name of "statistics."
Giving the highest priority to a knowledge of languages, Hastings devised handsome
monetary incentives for those officials willing to study Indian languages and culture.
This policy constituted the first step in the transformation of the European study of
exotic peoples from an individual avocation to a massive and institutionalized activ-
ity, reflecting how vital a concern it was for the emerging rulers of the subcontinent.
However, not all of the East India Company's agents had the wherewithal to take
up Hastings's offer. The vast majority of recruits to the company arrived in India
between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. 2 The only prerequisite for recruitment
was knowledge of "the rule of three and merchants accounts."'3 Few of the English
had been to university. Engrossed in fortune making in this "fine country for a
gentleman to improve a small fortune in," most had little curiosity about the subcon-
tinent's inhabitants nor, indeed, the culture to acquire learning.14
Of the minority of Englishmen who did have a penchant for intellectual pursuits,
most were, in the fashion of the "great school" and Oxonian, High-Church elite to
which they generally belonged, obsessed with classical thought and scripture. In-
deed, their education was dominated by the study of Greek and Latin, and by the
"grand tour" of Italy and Greece. '5 Their attitudes towards politics and government,

"' See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783 (London:
Unwin Hyman, 1989), and Georg Robert Gleig, ed., Memoirs of the Life of Right Honourable Warren
Hastings, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1841), vol. 1, p. 214.
" Warren Hastings to Nathaniel Smith, chairman of the East India Company, 4 Oct. 1784, reprinted
in Charles Wilkins, trans., Bhagavad Gita (London, 1785), preface, p. 13.
12 India Office Records, Court Minutes 1784-85: B/100, p. 216, British Library, London (hereafter
cited as India Office Records).
'- Writers' petitions and educational testimonials for recruitment into the East India Company
quoted in Anthony Farrington, The Records of the East India College Haileybury & Other Institutions
(London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1976), p. 4.
'4 James Rennell to the Rev. Gilbert Burrington, 7 Nov. 1763, India Office Records, MSS Eur/
D1073.
'5For a description of the daily life of the British in India during this period, see Perciva
The Nabobs (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963). For eighteenth-century classical education
ain, see Robert Maxwell Ogilvie, Latin and Greek: A History of the Influence of the Classics on
English Life from 1600 to 1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 46 ff. See also John
Harold Plumb, Men and Places (London: Cresset Press, 1963), and John Lawson and Harold Silver,
A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973).

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 123

conduct, manners, and style testify to

surprisingly, in their eyes, Sanskrit was to Indian vernaculars what Greek and Latin
were to contemporary European languages. Like their virtuoso contemporaries in
Europe who invested in recovering the works of ancient Greece and Rome, they
concentrated, in their exploration of Indian learning, on ancient Sanskrit literary,
philosophical, and scientific works. Naturally, they sought as informants and privi-
leged interlocutors their Indian counterparts-those of the Brahminical upper castes
who had mastered Sanskrit, and maulavis (Muslim law-officers) and munshis adept
in Arabic and Persian-a reliance that reinforced their classical inclinations. Their
understanding of the contemporary society that they were supposed to govern was
shaped by a scrutiny of classical texts and of texts specially commissioned to be
written, in Sanskrit, by their Brahminical collaborators.
The Vivadabhangarnava (Treatise on putting an end to litigation) by Jagannatha
Tarkapanchanana, a venerable professor of law and legal expert to the Calcutta Su-
preme Court, is a typical example of the new type of collaboration. A hybrid text
constructed jointly by the British jurist Sir William Jones and Jagannatha's team of
court-pundits (native legal assistants), it went well beyond the scope of preexisting
Hindu law manuals.16 Because of its comprehensiveness and the immense authority
Jagannatha commanded among his colleagues, pupils, and the Bengali public, this
work was widely used by Indian court assistants and British judges alike. It was also
to serve as a model for a spate of supplementary compositions by pundits in the
employ of British-administered courts. These works, in turn, formed a corpus pre-
scribed in the syllabus of the Sanskrit College in Banaras, established in 1794 to
breed a new generation of pundits "to assist the European judges in the due, regular,
and uniform administration of [the] genuine letter and spirit [of Hindu law] to the
body of the people."'97
If the classicists were mainly trained in the English public schools and at Oxford
and Cambridge, men of science, law, and medicine were mostly trained either in the
dissenting academies or in the Scottish and Dutch universities.'8 Indeed, in Scot-
land's more egalitarian Presbyterian tradition, many more men went to university
than in England, and at a much earlier age. Moreover, Scottish education, both at
school and university, was much broader than in England, covering (besides Latin
and Greek) history, navigation, geography, mensuration, and natural and moral phi-
losophy.19 However, Scotland itself did not have the capacity to absorb its qualified
workforce, which consequently emigrated to England and beyond.20 A large number

16 For a list of expressly commissioned works, see J. Duncan M. Derrett, "Sanskrit Legal Treatises
Compiled at the Instance of the British," Zeitschrift fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, 1961,
63:72-117. For an evaluation of the nature of the Vivadabhangarnava, see idem, Religion, Law and
the State in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), pp. 247-8.
17 Jonathan Duncan, Resident Benares, to the Earl of Cornwallis, Governor-General, 1 Jan. 1792,
in Selections from Educational Records, ed. Henry Sharp, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Superintendent Govern-
ment Printing, 1920), vol. 1, p. 11.
18 See Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1951), pp. 32-6.
19 See Paul Wood, "The Scientific Revolution in Scotland," in Porter and Teich, The Scientif
Revolution, (cit. n. 6), pp. 263-87.
20 Francis Buchanan is a good illustration of this. See Marika Vicziani, "Imperialism, Botany and
Statistics in Early Nineteenth-Century India: The Surveys of Francis Buchanan (1762-1829)," Mod-
ern Asian Studies, 1986, 20, 4:625-60.

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 124 KAPIL RAJ

Figure 1. 'An European Gen

Languages" from Charles D
frontispiece. (British Libra

were absorbed into Britain

nical positions as engineer
ists. Indeed, it was predom
ational, scientific, and te
Thus, Scottish medical o
make meteorological rec
the Botanic Gardens in Calcutta that William Roxburgh consolidated, assisted by
William Hunter, James Anderson, and Francis Buchanan. John McCleland headed
the first committee for the exploration of mineral resources. Buchanan and Colin
Mackenzie were among the pioneers of large-scale topographical surveys in the sub-
continent, and David Ross was called to teach natural and experimental philosophy
when the Hindu College was set up in Calcutta in 1817. As army medics, Scots came
to learn the vemnaculars of the subcontinent. Many mastered Persian and Arabic, the
court languages of Mughal India, and with the help of Persian munshis compiled

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 125

bilingual dictionaries and translated texts. Diplomatic missions were thus often en-
trusted to them: Alexander Hannay to the Mughal court; George Bogle, Alexander
Hamilton, and Samuel Turner to Tibet.
However, linguistic ability was not the prerogative solely of the High-Church En-
glishmen or opportunistic Scots. Another group-Baptist missionaries-was also
busy discovering the languages of the subcontinent's inhabitants. Persecuted like
other nonconformists in England during this period, a few sought refuge in India,
establishing themselves at the Danish colony of Serampore near Calcutta.2' Under
William Carey, a Baptist fugitive turned indigo factory owner and small-time trades-
man, they tried to introduce the Bible to the crafts-oriented lower castes through an
understanding of their languages and ways of life.22 With their populist notions, they
mastered a large number of the subcontinent's vernaculars and gained deep insights
into its cultures. They, too, were to write grammars of Indian languages and collect
folk tales and other lore, the better to understand the people they set out to prosely-
tize. In 1800, the Serampore missionaries founded a printing press where, with their
indigenous interlocutors, they cast fonts of many Indian vernaculars. This press was
the first and most important in its time for books in living oriental languages.
Developments at the turn of the nineteenth century were to bring these different
British groups and their respective indigenous collaborators together in a formalized
institutional context. In an effort to stem the spread among its employees of the
"erroneous principles of the same dangerous tendency [as the doctrines of the
French Revolution]," which "had reached the minds of some individuals in the civil
and military service of the Company in India," and instead "to fix and establish
sound and correct principles of religion and government in their minds at an early
period of life," the East India Company set up a college at Fort William, Calcutta in
1800.23 Newly arrived, covenanted officers of the East India Company were to spend
three years in residence at this "University of the East", "removed from the danger
of profusion, extravagance and excess."24 They studied Hindu, Islamic, and English
law; civil jurisprudence, political economy, general history, world geography, and
mathematics. The rigorous curriculum also included natural history, botany, chemis-
try, astronomy, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and modern European lan-
guages in addition to the culture and the six major languages of their South-Asian
subjects (Hindustani, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Kannada).25 Many of
these subjects and languages had never before been taught in Britain or in Europe
at any level. The college, which cost ?250,000 in its first three years alone, soon
grew to a size comparable to its models-contemporary Oxford and Cambridge.26
In order to teach these various subjects, staff members were recruited from among

21 See Michael Watts, The Dissenters from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Ox
ford Univ. Press, 1978).
22 William Carey, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use the Means for the Conver-
sion of the Heathens, new facsimile ed. (London: Carey Kingsgate Ltd., 1961), p. 74.
23 Quotations from Wellesley's "Minutes on the Foundation of a College at Fort William, 10 July
1800," reprinted in The Despatches, Minutes and Correspondence, of the Marquess Wellesley, K. G.,
During his Administration in India, ed. Robert Montgomery Martin, 5 vols. (London: W. H. Allen &
Co., 1836), vol. 2, p. 346.
24 Ibid.

25 "Regulation for the Foundation of a College at Fort William ... Passed by the Governor-Gen
in Council, on the 10th July, 1800. .. " in ibid., vol. 2, p. 359 ff.
26 Farrington, Haileybury Records (cit. n. 13), p. 6. See also David Kopf, British Orientalism an
the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of Indian Modernization 1773-1835 (Calcutta: Firma KL

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 126 KAPIL RAJ

.... . . . ..

Figure 2. The Pub

the College of For
Writers Buildings
Views of Calcutta
India Office Colle

the Bnitish in Calcutta. Persian was entrusted to Neil Edmonstone, Arabic to John
Baillie, Hindustani to John Gilchrist (Scotsmen all), Sanskrit to Henry Thomas
Colebrooke, and the five remaining Indian vemnaculars to the Baptist William Carey
(thereby giving the Baptists a fig leaf of respectability in exchange for their knowl-
edge about indigenous cultures that was inaccessible to official Indo-British culture).
Natural and experimental philosophy were taught by a Scotsman, James Dinwiddie.
A number of Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, were recruited to assist the Euro-

1969), and Kapil Raj, "L'Orientalisme en Inde au tournant du XIXe si'de: La R6ponse britannique I
la Revolution Franqaise," Annales Historiques de la Revolution Fran!aise, 2000, 320:89-99.

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 127

pean staff members and very often taught in their place.27 It was this institution that
provided the first sustained, professional contact between the different "confessional
nations" of the British in India.
In addition to teaching, the college organized and sponsored expeditions in com-
pany-controlled territories in order to discover and catalogue manuscripts for its
library. By 1805, its Indo-British staff had succeeded in encoding a number of spo-
ken languages of the subcontinent into grammatical forms, and translating them into
English. The College of Fort William was the first of a series of institutions in which
these different knowledge traditions and their corresponding skills were brought
together, standardized, and rendered teachable. When in 1806 the company's Court
of Directors set up the East India College at Hertford Castle (later transferred to
Haileybury) in England as a preparatory school for new recruits before they left for
India, some of the staff members of Fort William and their hybrid networks were
transferred to the metropolis to teach alongside the mathematician Bewick Bridge,
FRS and fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge; the jurist Edward Christian, Downing
Professor of Law at Cambridge, and the political economist Thomas Malthus.28
This focus on Calcutta reveals some of the contingencies that shaped the multicul-
tural encounters, and the integration of the resulting networks into the newly emerg-
ing academic system of metropolitan Britain. A brief look at one of the principal,
and undoubtedly the most prestigious, colonial scientific institutions-the Survey
of India, also established in the latter half of the eighteenth century-throws similar
light on the nature of intercultural collaboration and the kind of knowledge that re-
sulted.

INDIA AS A SOURCE OF NEW SCIENTIFIC PRACTICES AND KNOWLEDGE MAKING

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the British, like other Euro-
peans trading with the East, charted the seas and coasts between western Europe
and Asia. However, they had little knowledge of the geography of mainland South
Asia. For this, they relied principally upon information culled from travelers and
missionaries, and on the occasional map, like that of the French armchair mapmaker
Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville, who in 1752 had published a Carte de 1lInde
based on European travelers' accounts. Territorial acquisition changed needs and, in
the wake of the conquest of Bengal, surveys of the new possessions were ordered to
defend frontiers, to ascertain the extent and revenue potential of cultivated lands,
and to ensure the safety and regularity of communications.
Like other British colonial institutions, the Survey of India had to rely upon indig-
enous staff members and their skills. Not only were the British too few to undertake
surveys, but those few had little or no experience in countrywide terrestrial survey-
ing. In the 1760s, when survey work was first undertaken in India, there was no
unified, detailed map of the British Isles-with the notable exception of a map of
Scotland, made by Scotsmen in the aftermath of the 1745 uprising-although there
was no dearth of coastal, harbor, and fortification maps made for the Board of Ord-

27 See Bernard S. Cohn, "The Recruitment and Training of British Civil Servants in India, 1600-
1860," in idem, An Anthropologist Amongst the Historians and Other Essays (New Delhi: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 500-53, especially pp. 529 ff.
28 "Staff of the East India College, Haileybury," in Farrington, Haileybury Records (cit. n. 13),
pp. 104-6.

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 128 KAPIL RAJ

nance, and estate, route, and county maps in the civilian domain. The latter were
based on measurements made by estate and county surveyors whose skills and in-
struments, besides being unavailable in India, were inadequate for the purposes of
extensive surveying. Indeed, the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and Ireland was
founded only in 1791, and it was not until 1801 that the first ordnance map ap-
peared.29
Like the British, the Indians possessed no detailed maps of the whole of the sub-
continent, although there is evidence of maps for the northwestern, central, and
western parts dating to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These do not show
a uniform scale or orientation and their exact use is not known.30 At any rate, the
need for maps in precolonial India seems to have been obviated by gazetteers and
manuals, used for administration and revenue collection, that provided systematic
descriptions, in tabular form, of provinces and their subdivisions, noting their gen-
eral location and territorial extent. The most famous of these was the Ain-i Akbari
(Institutions of Akbar) made for the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1542-1605; reigned
from 1556), who had his roads measured with great care. The Jesuit Antonio Mon-
serrate (1536-1600), who spent many years in Akbar's court, describes the measure-
ment of the latter's march to Kabul in Afghanistan in 1581:

[Akbar] orders the road to be measured, to find the distance marched each day. The
measurers, using ten-foot rods, follow the king, measuring from the palace. By this one
operation he learns both the extent of his dominions, and the distances from place to
place, in case he has to send embassies or orders, or meet some emergency. A distance
of 200 times the ten-foot rod, called the coroo in Persian, or cos in the Indian language,
equal to two miles, is the measure for calculating distances.3'

There was also a well-established tradition of land measurement and surveying for
the purposes of establishing property rights and fiscal dues. An eighteenth-century
Sanskrit manuscript on land measurement from peninsular India, translated for the
Moravian missionary, naturalist, and surveyor for the East India Company Benjamin
Heyne (1770-1819), describes a method based on the use of corporeal and other
techniques:

The fundamental measure is that of an Inch which is determined in three different ways.

First, By placing three rice corns in a line length ways-the place they occupy is called
an Inch.

29 Almost all of the 184 eighteenth-century British surveyors in India picked up surveying and
mapmaking techniques on the job. See Reginald Henry Phillimore's authoritative study, Historical
Records of the Survey of India, 5 vols. (Dehra Dun, India: Survey of India, 1945-1968), vol. 1,
"Biographical Notes," pp. 307-400. For a history of the survey of Scotland and the techniques em-
ployed, see Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, "The Military Survey of Scotland 1747-1755," The Scottish
Geographical Magazine, 1967, 83:1-15. For the early history of surveying in England, see Charles
Close, The Early Years of the Ordnance Survey (Newton Abbot, U.K.: David and Charles Reprints,
1969) and W. A. Seymour, ed., A History of the Ordnance Survey (Folkestone, U.K.: William Daw-
son, 1980).
30 See Joseph E. Schwartzberg. "South Asian Cartography," in The History of Cartography,
John Brian Harley and David Woodward, vol. 2, book 1: Cartography in the Traditional Islami
South Asian Societies (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 400 ff.
3i Antonio Monserrate, "Mongolicae Legationis Commentarius," trans. and cited by Phillim
Historical Records (cit. n. 29), vol. 1, p. 1O.

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 129

Secondly, By measuring the circumference

length of which is an Inch.

Thirdly, By measuring the second joint of the middle finger, the half of which is called
an Inch.

12 of these Inches are One Jana (literally translated as paw)-32 Janas are One Ghada
(or Bamboo)-4 Ghadas (or One Square Bamboo) is One Kunta.

These measures . . . are universally understood.32

The mapping of India started by mobilizing available resources. The French savant-
traveler Abraham-Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805) has left the following
amusing account of an early (1758) European military route survey:

I have traveled in the interior of India alone, with others and with the army. The com-
manding officer spends the better part of his day sleeping in his palanquin. At dinner
he asks his Dubash [interpreter] . . . what distance they have traveled and which places
they have passed. The latter in turn asks the porters or else replies himself, for reply
one must; and the distances and place names are inscribed on the itinerary, on the map
. . . (which, by the way, I found perfectly well made).33

James Rennell (1742-1830) can be considered the first Englishman to have brought
these disparate traditions together on the same map. Rennell started his career as an
ensign on a British naval vessel off the coast of Brittany during the Seven Years'
War (1756-1763). There he learned the art of coastal and harbor surveying, a skill he
was to use to great advantage during his thirteen years in the service of the East India
Company as surveyor-general of Bengal. Indeed, since the Ganges-Brahmaputra
delta forms a large part of this territory, Rennell used its navigable distributaries in
the same way as one would a sea coast, tracing an outline of the whole delta.34
For the terrestrial cartography, Rennell sent both Indian and British soldiers on
long route marches. From their accounts, as well as those of other Asian and Euro-
pean travelers and missionaries, he began compiling his map of the whole subconti-
nent. Foremost among the contributors were Ghulam Mohammad for peninsular
India, Mirza Mughal Beg for northwestern India, and Sadanand for Gujarat. His
European informants consisted mainly of the Jesuit Fathers Antonio Monserrate and
Joseph Tieffenthaler (1710-1785), and Frenchmen in India like Claude Martin
(1735-1800)-who themselves relied on "native" surveyors.36 And, of course, Ren-
nell extensively used the tables of the Ain-i Akbari. Interestingly, he acknowledged

32 "The 'Chetrie Ganietam'-A Sanskrit Work on Land Measurement Translated by Benjamin

Heyne," Memoirs of the Survey of India (1773-1866), Memoir 3, f. 2, National Archives of India,
New Delhi.
33 Translated by the present author from the original French published in Jean Bernoulli, ed.,
scription historique et geographique de linde, 3 vols. (Berlin: Pierre Bourdeux, 1786-1788), vol
pp. 466-7.
34 See Rennell's correspondence with his guardian, the Rev. Gilbert Burrington, India Office R
cords, MSS Eur/D1073; and his manuscript maps held at the Royal Geographical Society Archiv
London.
35 James Rennell, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, or the Mogul's Empire, 1st ed. (London:
the author, 1783), pp. vi, 66 n., 69; and idem, A Bengal Atlas: Containing Maps of the Theatre
War and Commerce on that Side of Hindoostan (London, 1781), p. x.
36 Bernoulli, Description historique (cit. n. 33), vol. 1, p. ix.

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130 KAPIL RAJ

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 131

In recognition of his achievements, Rennell was awarded the Copley Medal of the
Royal Society in 1791. On the occasion, Sir Joseph Banks, the society's president,
proclaimed:

Would I could say that England proud as she is of being esteemed by surrounding na-
tions the Queen of Scientific improvement, could boast of a general Map as well exe-
cuted as the Majors [Rennell's] delineation of Bengal and Baher [sic], a tract of Country
considerably larger in extent than the whole of Great Britain and Ireland . . . the accu-
racy of his particular surveys stands unrivalled by the most laboured County Maps this
nation has hitherto been able to produce.37

And if Banks's plea was answered that very year with the founding of the Ordnance
Survey, the surveying techniques and instruments used in Britain were very different
from those developed in India. While triangulation was adopted as the sole tech-
nique of extensive surveying in Britain, it was Rennell's composite method of data
collection that was extended by his successors in India. Thus, Thomas Call (sur-
veyor-general of Bengal, 1777-1788) employed at least forty Indians to collect infor-
mation for his "Grand Atlas of India."38 And when triangulation was introduced to
the subcontinent, it was just one-albeit important-technique, used alongside oth-
ers such as pacing and reckoning distance as a function of time (with the day's march
as the common unit). The task of translating and arranging reports into maps was
not a simple one, as a whole gamut of special procedures and protocols had to be
constructed. Charles Reynolds (surveyor-general of Bombay, 1796-1807), who or-
ganized a series of survey teams composed exclusively of South Asians to crisscross
the subcontinent, wrote to superiors who were anxious at the size of his budget,
"The[ir] surveys cannot be rendered to use if they are taken down and translated by
any other than a person conversant with the business."39
In the following decades, new methods for the reproduction of maps were devel-
oped for use in the Survey of India. For instance, the first-ever use of lithography in
map printing was in Calcutta in 1823.40 The adaptation, maintenance, and repair of
instruments often involved modifications of their structure and protocols for use,
and hence recalibration. For instance, the English perambulators were found to
be "flimsy, bad in principle, and incapable of working except on a smooth road or
bowling green; across country they go to pieces in a mile or two."4' In the 1780s a
Captain John Pringle of the Madras Infantry designed an instrument that was more
resilient and better suited to the stature and gait of Indian lascars (footmen). By the
mid-nineteenth century, the instrument, having undergone continuous modification,
was still in use, but was very different in looks and operation from its English cousin.

Royal Society Journal, 1790-1793, Book 34: 389-90.

38 India Office Records, Bengal Public Consultations, 6 Oct. 1783 and 29 Nov. 1784: P/2/63 and
P/3/7, respectively. A number of maps from similar surveys are held in the British Library, London,
Add. MSS 13907 (a, b, c, d, e).
39 India Office Records, Bombay Military Consultations, 13 Jan. 1807, cited by Phillimore, Histori-
cal Records (cit. n. 29), vol. 1, p. 288.
40 See Andrew S. Cook, "The Beginning of Lithographic Map Printing in Calcutta," in India: A
Pageant of Prints, eds. Pauline Rohatgi and Pheroza Godrej (Bombay: Marg Publishers, 1989), pp.
125-34.
41 Ralph Smyth and Henry Landour Thuillier, comps., A Manual of Surveying for India, Detaili
the Mode of Operations on the Revenue Surveys in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces (Cal-
cutta: W. Thacker and Co., 1851), pp. 360-1.

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Figure 4. Some survey perambulators of the Survey of India: The Madras Pattern
Perambulator introduced in 1780 (above) and the Everest Pattern Perambulator devised
between 1832 and 1836 (below). Adapted by the author from Ralph Smyth and Henry
Landour Thuillier, comps., A Manual of Surveying for India, Detailing the Mode of
Operations on the Revenue Surveys in Bengal and the North-Western Provinces
(Calcutta: W. Thacker and Co., 1851).

132

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 COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS 133

Novel survey methods had at times to be

precluded the use of standard techniques-the mapping of central Asia in the 1 860s
using the rigorously calibrated pace of Indian surveyors is a good example.42 Indeed,
so distinct were the practices of the Survey of India that when, in 1851, the Thom-
ason Engineering College was established in Roorkee (northern India) to train sur-
veyors, an entirely new manual had to be written, for "scarcely any of the English
works on Geodesy extant, touch on, or afford any practical insight into, the system
of Survey, as carried on and as peculiarly applicable to this country.43 More than
half the book was written by Radhanath Sikhdar, the survey's chief computer.

CONCLUSION

Beyond pointing to the inadequacy of the diffusionist, confrontationis

dering of traditional knowledge" approaches to the spread of Western science, the
case of India stresses the complexity and reciprocity involved in the construction of
modern science, even in the asymmetrical colonial situation. It also points to the
active role that the heterogeneous knowledge networks developed in India played
in the forging of a British identity and research-and-teaching tradition in the early
nineteenth century, a role that needs to be worked out in much greater detail than
the scope of this essay allows.
However, the perspective adumbrated here implies an apparent paradox. As
pointed out above, the material practices of the Survey of India differed in crucial
ways from those of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and Ireland. Yet the knowl-
edge produced out of these differing practices and protocols could be rendered com-
mensurable and placed on the same map. How does the switch from these local
practices to universal science operate?
In order to answer this, one has to distinguish between two aspects of science: its
material and social practices on the one hand, and the knowledge to which they
give rise on the other. While the former are always local-mapping procedures and
protocols, for instance, have varied, and indeed continue to vary, between countries
institutions, and even individual laboratories-knowledge is made universal
through a series of mediations, measurement and its calibration being among t
It is through calibration that instruments or techniques developed in a given place
can be compared with those developed in another place, that the results obtained
through one set can be compared with those obtained through another set-and thus
that contemporary science can claim to be universal.44 In the case of the Indo-British
surveys of India, it was precisely this operation of calibration that allowed data col-
lected through such varied methods as Rennell's translation of tabular data and
Reynold's assistants to be legitimately incorporated into a single map of the subcon-

42 See Kapil Raj, "La construction de l'empire de la geographic: L'Odys6e des arpenteurs de Sa
Tres Gracieuse Majeste, la reine Victoria, en Asie centrale," Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales,
1997, 5:1153-80; and idem, "When Humans Become Instruments: The Indo-British Exploration of
Tibet and Central Asia in the Mid-19th Century," in Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of
Precision in the Natural Sciences, 18th-20th Centuries, eds. Marie-Noille Bourguet, Christian Li-
coppe, and Hans Otto Sibum (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, forthcoming).
43 Smyth and Thuillier, Manual of Surveying (cit. n. 41), p. iii.
4 See Harry M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Lon-
don: Sage, 1985), pp. 100-6.

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 134 KAPIL RAJ

tinent, which in turn could be commensurated with other local, regional, and na-
tional maps into one of the world.
However, a word of caution needs to be immediately spelled out: if Indians and
Britons mobilized and transformed their specialized practices for the common reso-
lution of problems, this does not mean, as some historians have recently argued,
that they participated equally in a dialogic process in an idyllic "commonwealth of
letters."45 On the contrary, the kinds of knowledge discussed in this essay could only
be constructed and sustained within a strong framework of formalized institutions
with their imperatives of teamwork and a stratified division of labor. Hence, while
the British and Indians collaborated in the making of new knowledge, their respec-
tive specialized practices were distinguishable and perfectly well hierarchized in the
formal structures of teaching establishments, like the College of Fort William, and
of science-dependent administrative organizations, like the Survey of India, creating
a commonly made knowledge while creating different identities.

4 See, for instance, Eugene Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, 1795-1895
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1994) and Thomas R. Trautmann, "Hulla-
baloo about Telugu," South Asia Research, 1999, 19, 1:53-70.

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