For years, she lectured her students in Geography and instilled the love for the subject and the land in her students. Things haven’t changed much. Now she is all set to tell the masses how the country got its modern day map.
Pin drop silence prevailed in the auditorium as the well-known academician Manosi Lahiri unwrapped her book, Mapping India. Through this book, Lahiri has brought to light the delightful art of map-making.
Mapping India can be best described as a labour of love. With over 160 coloured maps and photographs, it is a visual treat. It starts its journey when even the idea of India was new. The notion preceded the nation. The West enamoured by the tales of the exotic east, set out with their fleets, in search for the riches that lay untouched in this unexplored land. Travellers drew the land, from hearsay and other sources. The elusive map was the sole key to the land that had long being shrouded in mystique.
The early explorers arrived lead by the Portuguese with Vasco da Gama. And the flood gates opened. They arrived in hordes and started their journeys inward from the ports. Early maps were just sketches and drawings, representing the landscape of the place. Then they went on to be more detailed.
The maps don’t just reflect the geographical positions and locations of cities, mountains and other physical features. They also reflect the social and political changes that happen around. They also record the routes of armies, courses of rivers. They denote the economic conditions that were prevalent in those times.
When the British arrived in India, they spearheaded the documentation of the maps and very keenly kept the records of the places that were discovered. But there was a dearth of information for the period before them. What about that time? Lahiri replies, “The history of mapping and cartography is well-documented of the British period, but what about the time before1764? I was sure that maps must have existed, may be not in the current form, but definitely they were there. There was a wide gap between the two time periods and it was very difficult to find any books pertaining to the maps of that period, that’s what egged me on to write this book.”
Lahiri’s book is a reflection of the painstaking effort that she made. She sat through map repositories, various archives and many a libraries, to find the maps that would be a fit for her book. It was a challenge to choose the right map and many a maps have been reproduced time and again. “It was a tough task. Also to be able to restrict oneself was important. There were so many maps. And the general idea was to know how it all happened, how did the map of India got to its present form?” she explains.
In the book, the author also explains the various cartouche, that at times, were found at the bottom corner of the map. They also share history in their own way. There is one map of the Mughal empire titled Magni Mogolis Imperium. It has the cartouche with cherubs shooting arrows at India. It was the recurring thought of angels equipped with knowledge conquering the heathens.
But the book is not just a collection of maps and pictures. The text accompanying pictures is vivid retelling of the times and history that the map holds. “The writing should support the map, and the map should support the writing. This book was not just supposed to be pictorial. The text has been illustrated where it was required,” explains Lahiri.
Lahiri had been working on this project for a while. Out of sheer interest. “The idea of India has been there for a long long time. This was Bharat varsha, after all. But there were no maps. There were pictures and sketches, sure but no maps. There were creations of the mind and not the reflections of the ground. It took me a long time to research and put this together. We had the information, we had the technique, but there was no book”.
Mapping India is not just for academician or scholars. “It would be liked by anyone who would be interested in the history of this country, and also in knowing how the geography of the nation changed,” concludes Lahiri.
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