Spatial Imaginings in the Age of Colonial Cartographic Reason

Maps, Landscapes, Travelogues in Britain and India

Nilanjana Mukherjee

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000193299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores how India as a geographical space was constructed by the British colonial regime in visual and material terms. It demonstrates the instrumentalisation of cultural artefacts such as landscape paintings, travel literature and cartography, as spatial practices overtly carrying scientific truth claims, to materially produce artificial spaces that reinforced power relations. It sheds light on the primary dominance of cartographic reason in the age of European Enlightenment which framed aesthetic and scientific modes of representation and imagination. The author cross-examines this imperial gaze as a visual perspective which bore the material inscriptions of a will to assert, possess and control. The distinguishing theme in this study is the production of India as a new geography sourced from Britain's own interaction with its rural outskirts and domination in its fringes.

This book:

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• Addresses the concept of "production of space" to study the formulation of a colonial geography which resulted in the birth of a new place, later a nation;

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• Investigates a generative period in the formation of British India c. 1750–1850 as a colonial territory vis-à-vis its representation and reiteration in British maps, landscape paintings and travel writings;

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• Brings Great Britain and British India together on one plane not only in terms of the physical geo-spaces but also in the excavation of critical domains by alluding to critics from both spaces;

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• Seeks to understand the pictorial grammar that legitimised the expansive British imperial cartographic gaze as the dominant narrative which marginalised all other existing local ideas of space and inhabitation.

Rethinking colonial constructions of modern India, this volume will be of immense interest to scholars and researchers of modern history, cultural geography, colonial studies, English literature, cultural studies, art, visual studies and area studies.

Part I

CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

With post-colonial scholarship as the backdrop, it is important to see the functional dimension of cartographic endeavours in scheming the metropolis, the colony and the empire in general. Whereas the oppositional binary of the home state and the empire stands unaltered, it is essential to view the emergence of both the geographies as constructions of the same gaze. The fashioning of both the geographies happened to be acts born out of an identical cartographic impulse that shaped both the nation state of Great Britain and the British Empire. In the chapters in this section, the first is an account of the process of cartographic formulation and formalisation of the British Isles, and the second deals with the extension of those ideas implemented on the Indian colony: the act involving a translation of sorts devised to appropriate complexities and peculiarities under a totalitarian all-encompassing gaze.

1

Maps

The onset and dominance of cartographic reason

Only geometry can hand us the thread [which will lead us through] the labyrinth of the continuum’s composition.

Gottfried Leibniz (1676)¹

Francis Bacon lays down some foundations in the political construction of territory from space: that territories be compacted and not dispersed; that the heart and seat of the region or the centre of the state be sufficient to support provinces and additions; that no part or province of the state be utterly unprofitable and must confer some use or service to the state.² The map is the political instrument through which land can be converted to territory, by subjecting it to rigorous geometrical rules. It outlines the process of consolidation, the forced or wilful submission of dominions before a commonwealth for their common good³, or a merger of smaller king-heads into the larger geo-body of the sovereign godhead.⁴

The map is a crucial technology of control over space. Map production over centuries went through various transitory phases to arrive at what we equate them with today – as images of spatial realities. Whether the places precede maps or maps pre-empt geo-political realities is a debate which has been dealt with and intrigued the minds of numerous scholars from across disciplines. Benedict Anderson, for one, points out how indebted present-day nationalisms are on enumerative and geographical artefacts, namely the census, map and the museum. In this chapter, I shall discuss the instrumentality of maps in fashioning geo-political realities in concrete spatial terms. After exploring, briefly, the historical evolution and transformation of maps in the post-Renaissance West, I shall focus on cartographic practices and cultures of map production in England. My objective in this chapter, remains, as in the latter ones, to see the geographical artefact of the map as an ideologically constructed representation of space, as are landscape paintings or travel writings. Maps, and such other representative artefacts of modernity act as a demiurgic force that mediates experiential reality of space and imbues it with a superficial structural value. Further, it is the map, which is the visual apparatus which envisions space as territory and inscribes it with power. The formation of Great Britain as a geo-political reality, its existence as a nation, is as much chequered by and entrenched in such assumption of power as is its empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I intend to argue in this chapter and the next, that the map and its acclaimed scientific principles were as much used in fashioning the spatial conglomerate of Great Britain as it was in forging the empire in tectonically visible terms.

Maps as ideological constructs

The map, which seems to be a simple and natural representation of landscape is, in fact, a highly artificial construction. Today, it is generally linked to power and control. The story of its progress and development from being indexical of emotional or moral state to its present connotation as a spatial representation is an interesting one. The English usage of the term “map” dates back to around 1527, but at this time the term usually recurred in poetry and drama as a conceit, shorn of the scientific and mimetic implications it has today.⁵ The word used today derives from late Latin “mappa”, by way of “mappa mundi”, a cloth painted with the representation of the world. In some other European languages, it derives from late Latin “carta”, which meant any sort of formal document. Hence the art/science of construction of maps is called cartography. The development of maps in Europe was more or less complete and standardised by the sixteenth century.⁶ The ancient Greeks had developed a theory of geography allied to their knowledge of distant lands acquired by military expansion and commerce in the Roman Empire which culminated in the work of Ptolemy resulting in maps of the world as known to Europe. He was the first to devise a system of grids, later realised as faulty. According to Ptolemy, the goal of “chorography is to deal separately with a part of a whole”, whereas the task of “geography is to survey the whole in its just proportion”.⁷ Simultaneously, he also asserted the theoretical distinction of the global and the local, the whole and its parts. Christendom produced very different maps later on, which were probably influenced by Babylonian sources, circular in shape and Jerusalem at the centre. Most of these early maps, however, were pictorial in form. The modern topographical map was quite a late development. The maturing of this technology heralded a new age of representations based on a scientific temperament of accuracy.

This chapter will deal with the constructed nature of maps. As numerous scholars have pointed out, maps are not neutral or disembodied representations. As they transformed the world into portable pictures, they have become embedded in the embattled domain of ownership and possession. They have been used for military and political purposes in being able to graphically represent a space. Its capability of providing knowledge about specific locations has helped in formulating strategies of defence or fortification through ages. Properties of scalar fixation and graticular accuracy and thus the map’s equivalency with the world outside were additions which gradually took shape in post-Renaissance Europe. As David Harvey puts it, the Renaissance invention of perspectivism furnished an entire set of fundamental qualities such as objectivity, practicality and functionality to map making.⁸ The cartographic image, then, is a visual reproduction based on a technology of signs invested with the unique power to imitate what is thought of as the real world:

it manages, without any apparent effort, to replace a natural world beyond our physical control with the promise of mental order wrapped in the Euclidean rhetoric of “poynt, lyne, angle or measure’”.⁹

In the later chapters, I will show how space is visualised and narrativised. This chapter will deal with the stage in the final conceptualisation of space in the process of its reproduction: that of measurement of space by mapping it. The grid provided the structure to absorb the inflow of new information which ordered the distribution of life, population and societies across the globe.¹⁰ Landscape paintings and travelogues therefore become the correlatives which supplied information about the differential phenomena into the mathematically derived reconciliatory and totalitarian framework of the map.

Fine art to field science

Among the many questions opened up by scholarship within the history of cartography is that of the complexity of discourses between art and science which cartography mediates. As Denis Cosgrove points out, the obvious parallelism between map and pictorial art emerge from both practices being concerned with “technical questions of content selection and emphasis, medium, line, colour and symbolization, and both require similar decisions about form, composition, framing and perspective”.¹¹ A number of historians of early modern art, such as Samuel Edgerton and Svetlana Alpers, have exposed the shared techniques and interests among Italian and Dutch painters and mapmakers.¹² On another note, Brian Harley sees the essential dichotomy between art and science as disabling and using the Foucauldian paradigm locates cartographic practice in the domain of cultural production and as a human artefact on a par with any other social practice. What Harley terms the “sacred dichotomy” between science and art is itself a late eighteenth-century construction and this is also the time when maps shed their last remnant of aesthetic colouring and emerged into the domain of science under the pervasive scientism of the age. However, the steady veering of map making towards accuracy and objectivity and thereby the deployment of specific instruments to optimise its verifiability definitely shows a transition.

According to Alpers, the link between maps and picture-making is an old one that dates back to Ptolemy’s Geography (c. 150 A.D.). While Ptolemy invokes the analogy of picture making with both geography as well as chorography, he “connects the training and skills of the mathematician to geography and those of the artist to chorography”.¹³ Having laid this distinction, Ptolemy’s own work and his maps were inclined towards the former and employed mathematical principles in working out planar projections of the earth’s spheroid. Harvey reads Ptolemy’s innovation of the system of grid, as connected to perspectivism in that “Ptolemy had imagined how the globe as a whole would look to a human eye looking at it from outside”. This entails also, an epistemological possibility of perceiving the “globe as a knowable totality”. Therefore, the seemingly infinite space once uninterpretable could be represented and scaled down to finitude following mathematical principles to appropriate the globular space onto a plane surface.¹⁴ With the translation of Ptolemy’s writings in Renaissance Europe, there came about a resurgence of his geometrical framework and ideas of linear perspective in projecting spaces and bodies onto a plane surface whether in art or cartography, elaborated by Florentine artists such as Brunelleschi and Alberti:

It supplied to geography the same aesthetic principles of geometrical harmony which Florentines demanded of all their art.¹⁵

According to Harvey, however, though this elevated and distant view could provide an all-encompassing view, a territorial totality in effect, it lost much of the sensuous quality of medieval maps and pictures and generated images “completely out of plastic or sensory reach.”¹⁶ The dilution of boundary between what is generally deemed a view and what is deemed a map is furthered when taking into account that the specular position constructed within Western cartography is essentially the same for panoramas, picturesque views and other visual delights. All of them are constructed with the viewer at its centre, at a privileged vantage point with the framed image under surveillance. It posits the power of the mapmaker and the view made available comes mediated through his vision. One cultural construct is that the vision in maps is used to negotiate another cultural construct, the space.¹⁷

The use value of the map derives from its ability to convince its users of its accuracy, which too is constructed and culturally mediated by the mentioned relationship between the viewer and the viewed. Renaissance maps, while maintaining their aesthetic qualities, took on this quality of scientific precision and accuracy which were increasingly being valued for determining property rights, political boundaries and navigation. English estate maps belonging to the age were no less regarded than works of art. The decoration in these maps was an integral part of such maps. William Leybourne, in his instructive treatise...