the context
In the previous week, we surveyed a range of observations and ideas about ‘India’ that circulated in the Euro-Asian world between the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD. Earliest of these accounts were written by the Greeks, who, after Alexander the Great’s expeditions, had established an Asian empire and opened up the subcontinent to direct contact for the western world. Similarly, the spread of Buddhism from India via the Silk Road to eastern Asia created the conditions for pilgrims from that part of the world to visit the land of the Buddha’s birth and extensively record their travels. Then, with Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route to India in the late-15th century marking the definitive entry of European powers in the Indian Ocean affairs, information about India in the European sphere saw a qualitative leap. Many more accounts, written in all kinds of western European languages, about different subjects of interest, began emerging soon thereafter.
But this collective and cumulative body of knowledge and information about 'India', diversely shaped over more than 2,000 years and rich as it is, nevertheless pales in comparison to the astounding variety of ways India was studied during the 200-year British colonial rule in the subcontinent and the mind-boggling volume of data, analyses, and scholarship it produced. Regardless of whether they were for academic, administrative, or purely exploitative ends, British efforts in recording, measuring, classifying, and studying every aspect of Indian society, culture, economy, polity, history, geography, flora, and fauna, ‘invented’ the India that we know today for all practical purposes.
It is, therefore, important for us to obtain a sense of the unprecedented nature of the British intervention in studying and knowing India, to fully appreciate how disruptive a force colonialism was. Colonial forms of knowledge were not produced for merely research and academic interests, even if these were involved in the process. Rather, much of this knowledge was put to practice in terms of control and government of the colonized peoples, for ruling India, in a manner that the British claimed was 'enlightened'. This knowledge, in fundamental ways, reshaped the very alignments of Indian society and continues to vitally inform the present, just like it did the worldviews of almost every nationalist leader of the Indian freedom movement.
The lectures, readings, and viewings this week will give you a sense of the mind-boggling scale and scope of British knowledge production in and about India. Specifically, we will look at how the British in India took theories, technologies, methodologies of studying the natural and social worlds that were emegent in Europe during the so-called Age of Enlightenment and deployed--sometimes, even developed--them in the colony. And in order to make this task manageable for ourselves, we will focus on three different areas of British knowledge production in India: (i) study of ancient Indian civilization, under the ideology of Orientalism; (ii) the dizzying number of subcontinent-wide surveys that the British undertook in India, supposedly to understand and govern it better; and (iii) the restructuring of the Indian education system, informed by Utilitarianism--a certain moral philosophy developed in England that had a deep influence on the principles of British governance in the colony.
This video gives a broad overview of the Great Trigonometrical Survey. Note: This film has been culled from a longer documentary on the GTS. The editing, and the narration therefore, choppy. [Click on the thumbnail above to play]
A Million Steps is a shoft film made for the Survey of India, celebrating the incredible feats of Indian explorers in Tibet, like Kinthup, Nain Singh, and Kishen Singh. [Click on the thumbnail above to play]
This video provides a historical overview of yet another survey agency established by the British--the Geological Survey of India. [Click on the thumbnail to play]
preparing for the week
READINGS:
There are three readings suggested for the week, out of which you can choose to read only one, depending on which of the three respective themes interests you the most. If you ever wondered, while doing ‘topo sheets’ in your school geography class, who made those minutely detailed maps, then your go-to reading will be the one by historian David Arnold. His essay on the East India Company’s scientific investments and enterprises in the Indian subcontinent will give you a sense of their sheer scale, ambition, and the motivations behind them, not to mention their transformative impact. If the thought—where does this general idea today, that in the ancient times a glorious Hindu civilization flourished in India, comes from?—has crossed your mind, then you should read the pioneering Orientalist William Jones’s piece. It was Jones, who, in the year 1786, first made this argument most forcefully. And, lastly, if you have ever been curious about how this school-college-university system of education that we all go through came into being in India, then T.B. Macaulay's Minutes on Education in India is who you should read. Holding very different views from William Jones on India, Macaulay, in 1835, advocated a thorough reorganization of the education system, founded on Utilitarianist principle. Much of his suggestions would be formalized into policy and implemented by the British in India through an act of the government, called the Wood's Despatch.
​VIEWINGS:
The viewings to go along for this week will focus on the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, an extraordinary land survey initiative undertaken by the East India Company that continued for almost 70 years, from 1802 to 1871. The survey’s ambition, over time, grew beyond its plan to map and measure every inch of the subcontinent’s territorial expanse—quite mind-boggling in itself—and spilt over to its surrounding regions, especially Tibet and Central Asia. These latter were a great unknown to the European imagination—a land unmapped, known only through vague traveller accounts, not precise scientific knowledge. It was also the case that the British believed accurate knowledge of the Tibetian landscape and control of the region was of great importance in maintaining geo-strategic advantage over the Russian Empire, who also had designs on the region.
What is particularly interesting for us in these surveys of staggering scale is that they were worked out on the ground with the labor of Indian people, doing the actual survey work. Some of them, from very humble backgrounds, were given rudimentary training by the British and sent disguised as ‘Pundits’ to survey Tibet and Central Asia. The short videos for this week will introduce us to three such characters of almost mythological proportions: the cousins, Kishen and Nain Singh, who hailed from a village on today’s India-China border in Uttarakhand, and Kinthup, a tailor belonging to the Lepcha community in Sikkim. They undertook incredible journeys, not to mention hardships. But with barely believable skills of measurement and memory, they surveyed distances between places, altitudes, lengths of rivers, and other features of the lands they travelled. And then, even more unbelievably, returned to India to tell their tales, including the numbers, often entirely from memory, which later modern technology has verified to be quite accurate. Also look out in the videos for Radhanath Sikdar, the Bengali mathematician who measured the height of the tallest mountain on earth, but which was named after the British Surveyor General of India, George Everest.
key concepts:
There are three key but slightly heavy concepts through which we will process our engagements this week: (i) Orientalism; (ii) Utilitarianism; and (iii) power/knowledge. The reading that you do will have one of these concepts at its core. Thus, in the William Jones piece, you will find Orientalism at play; The Macaulay’s Minute, on the other hand, is founded on Utilitarianist principles; and David Arnold’s essay shows how key scientific knowledge was for British colonial control of the subcontinent and beyond. Given the ‘heavy’ nature of these concepts, here we will engage with them only to the extent that they help us understand the topic at hand better.
Read this article on how the political map of India changed through the centuries.
Here are some rare maps of the Indian sub-continent for you to explore.
Explore this website that documents Indian map making traditions
Key concept #1:
orientalism
To put it simply, today the term ‘Orientalism’ refers to that perspective/ideology which views the ‘Orient’ or the ‘East' in culturally stereotypical ways, as fundamentally different from Europe and America, which are modern, liberal, and rational civilizations. The Orient in this conception appears in a decidedly exoticized and mainly inferior light, as an 'Other'. It is represented like this in stories, travelogues, paintings, photography, and movies, as that part of the world where people do not yet have an understanding of individual freedom or possess a scientific temper. As a result, they are prone to tolerate the cruelty of their rulers, believe in superstition and magic, and remain ‘backward’ in their thinking and social outlook—as if they are stuck in some other time. This worldview and the stereotypes it engendered were often used for justifying European colonial rule in the non-western world, as Europeans bringing an enlightened civilization to uncivilized peoples.
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Specific to India, the history of Orientalism played out a little differently but no less consequentially. The early Orientalists in India, during the late-18th and early 19th century, did not view India of their present, the place they traveled to for work all the way from Europe, as being very different from how Orientalists described other parts of Asia. But their understanding of India's ancient past was a different matter altogether. Researches into Indian languages, literary and aesthetic traditions, etc., led them to argue that India, in its ancient past, had a great and flourishing ‘Hindu’ civilization, which was great as their own--the Greco-Roman civilization. To the question: "how come then India declined into the 'corrupted' state that the British supposedly found it in?"--the Orientalist reasoned that it was the advent of Muslim rule in the Indian subcontinent that was responsible. Indeed, this idea, which colors our own present in increasingly violent ways, was first floated not by the people of the subcontinent but by European Orientalists, like William Jones, some 250-odd years ago!
Key concept #2:
utilitarianism
Simply put, Utilitarianism is a moral philosophy that says all action—be that by an individual or by a government—needs to be evaluated on the ground of whether it increases the total happiness/pleasure/good. If any action diminishes this, then it is not morally and ethically justifiable. Justified and just action ought to always maximize the desirable states of happiness/pleasure/good, whether for an individual or a collective. Hence, the utilitarian maxim: “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This is the basic idea of Utilitarianism, associated most closely with the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (the top portrait in the sidebar) .
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The reason why we are concerned with it here, in discussing colonial forms of knowledge, is because historically Utilitarianism reached its maturity as a philosophical orientation at around the same time that British colonialism took a definite shape in late-18th century India. became. Not surprisingly, therefore, as colonial rule unfolded in the subcontinent, through some ardent followers of Bentham who became involved in colonial administration, utilitarianism came to significantly inform colonial policies in the Indian subcontinent. Some of the most historically significant measures undertaken by the colonial government in India during the first half of the 19th century, such as the abolition of sati and the restructuring of the Indian education system to name just two, we based on utilitarian principles by ardent Benthamites, including the Governor General William Bentinck (bottom portrait in the sidebar), as well as T.B. Macaulay (the middle portrait), whose Minutes on Education in India some of you will be reading this week.
It is important to keep in mind one important distinction between the Orientalists and the Utilitarians in India. The latter, unlike the former, did not care much at all for any glorious Hindu civilization that might have existed in ancient India or not. Utilitarians were unabashedly European supremacists, who never doubted that Indian civilization, if it ever existed, was a decidedly inferior to the West. They were, therefore, of the firm opinion that their Orientalist compatriots in India were misguided in spending the East India Company’s resources on researching India’s past, rather than enacting policies and improving statecraft such that it produced “greatest good for the greatest number” among the colonized subject population. Needless to say, this confidence, did not always produced the best outcome on the ground and heaped hardships on Indians in the form of famines, poverty, loss of habitats and destruction of older forms of life.
Key concept #3:
power/
knowledge
“Knowledge is power” is a phrase that most of us are familiar with; this claim has long entered our collective common-sense and acquired the status of an idiom. And, living in a world and at a time when data is king, its validity seems self-evident. But what if we invert the idiom and have it read “power is knowledge”—does it make any sense? What could it possibly mean? Well, if you are this guy, then a lot, apparently! Together, they are responsible for drawing our attention to a relationship between knowledge and power that is not always made as clear as the idiom above. That is, power, in order to preserve, entrench, and reproduce itself, requires to produce knowledge that enables it to do so. In other words, there is no ‘pure’ knowledge that is not also a product of power. Thus, power/knowledge is a 'complex,' constantly co-informing each other. Most importantly, such a formulation of power and knowledge also draws attention to the fact that knowledge is not simply produced and locked within the ivory tower of academics; nor is power contained only within corridors of formal politics. Rather, in their entwinement, they make their presence felt in the broad arena of our social lives--in how we think and act and what their limits are. In other words, power/knowledge frames our thought and conduct in the world.
Colonial forms of knowledge that we are concerned with this week, are an example par excellence of power/knowledge. The various kinds of investments in knowledge production that the British had in India—the various surveys, data classification and analysis, policies based on such data—were undertaken not simply to further the objective of scientific understanding of the natural and social world that they found themselves in. It was also done such that this knowledge—soemtimes entirely new kinds of knowledge—would help them ‘tame’ an alien landscape and environment and control an equally strange subject population. And what is especially important to recognize is that through these measures of control and through the variety of knowledge producing institutions that the British set up in India, Indians, over time, learned to think about themselves and India in
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Key Concept #4: CARTOGRAPHY
Quite simply, cartography is the art and science of map-making, i.e., of making a two-dimensional visual representation on any given surface—it could be a piece of paper or parchment, a clay tablet or a computer screen—of how things are arranged in space in relation to one another. Relatedly then, ‘cartographic imagination’ is how a person imagines and re-presents (on a surface) the spatial relations they envision. While cartography produces maps of many different kinds, the ones we
encounter most commonly today depict the spatial layout of geographical features and landscapes (physical maps) or of nation-states and their borders (political maps) on the earth’s surface.
As an art cartography has a long history. In the history of civilizations all over the world, we find efforts to depict spatial arrangements of the earth’s—even of the heaven’s, sometimes—features as they knew and conceived of it. Some of these maps are based on an imagination that the earth is flat. Others incorporate in the same map both earthly and religious geographies and look very different from the maps we have grown up and are familiar with. Still others, the Chinese and Arab ones for example, were fairly sophisticated for their times and do not look very different from modern maps.
As a science, however, cartography is of a relatively more recent vintage than it is as an art. The roots of modern mapmaking that cartography today primarily refers to can be traced to the late-15th and the early-16th century, during the so-called Age of Discovery. With European explorers ‘finding’ the Americas and the invention of certain key instruments, like the modern compass, sextant,
quadrant, etc., this period witnessed some epochal changes in terms of how the world was viewed,
measured, and represented—in this case, in and as a map.
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Soon enough, especially with the Dutch cartographer Gerardus Mercator’s innovation in 1569, maps became key to sea navigation. Over the next century, cartography was brought into the service of marking and representing the territorial borders of a new political configuration that emerged in Europe called the ‘nation-state’. Mapping and mapmaking were central to the ‘taming’ of the lands that Europeans colonized in the non-western world.
SOME TAKEAWAYS & QUESTIONs
The British in India not only made colonial subjects of Indians, the ways of knowing the social and the natural worlds they brought along with them and the way this knowledge informed colonial rule were historically unprecedented in this part of the world.
In other words, colonial forms of knowledge not only were not only markedly different from forms of knowledge that existed in India before the British arrived, they also fundamentally changed what we know about India and the way we know it. In the process, over time, ‘India’ and ‘Indians’ emerged as objects of study, classified and categorized as data, in extensive surveys that mapped the land, its people and flora and fauna.
While this knowledge was largely meant to solidify British colonial rule, facilitate the government of Indian subjects, and exploit the land and its resources for economic profit, it had the unintended consequence of also empowering Indians, especially some of its most marginalized communities.
Colonial forms of knowledge, in other words, also created the possibility for the people of the Indian subcontinent to imagine themselves as ‘Indians’, with a claim to certain territory as their country that had its own history and culture that it could be proud of—all essential elements for a people to be considered a nation.
Now here is a question: do you think now that India is an independent nation-state that overthrew British colonial rule, we should be moving towards removing colonial forms of knowledge from our habits of thought? Do you think this is possible and desirable?