Colonial routes: reorienting the northern frontier of British India (original) (raw)
Related papers
Indian Cartographer |Vol, 37, 2017
The colonial cartographic exercise of the Indian Subcontinent was initially intended for geographic knowledge base creation to answer three questions of "where to go", "how to reach" and "what to exploit" to meet the British colonial interests. This cartographic exercise gradually provided the impetus to the colonial project of acquisition of space which began with mapping the coastline, to expansion of hinterland and their territorial limits, to legitimize spaces of commerce followed by marking administrative boundaries and establishing control. While such colonial scheme of economic and political consolidation in India was dependent on the thematic mapping of India, Maps became the instruments of knowledge creation facilitating the imposition of the colonial power over the physically, socially and culturally diverse regions of India. Rural and regional cartography was aimed at carving out administrative units for revenue generation, exploitation of resources, and demarcating racially segregated living spaces. This paper explores patterns of regionalization of India etched by colonial cartography through analyzing the changing pattern of regions from 1774 AD. The process of regionalization of India would also be analyzed through the lens of Colonial footprints embedded on the cartographic imagination through the British colonial towns of Port Towns, Cantonments, and Hill Stations.
Boundaries and space in Gilgit-Baltistan
Boundary-making in the Karakoram–Himalayan borderlands has found a diverse set of actors and expressions over time. Legacies from colonial borders are part of contemporary disputes about affiliation, participation, and space. Three aspects are addressed in this paper: first, the debate about ‘natural’ and ‘scientific’ boundaries for purposes of colonial territorial acquisition; second, postcolonial debates in the recent renaming game in Gilgit-Baltistan and its implications; and third, the attitudes of actors in exile and geopolitical players claiming to represent the aspirations of the inhabitants of Gilgit-Baltistan. The three perspectives reveal opportunities and constraints in border regimes that reflect power structures, internal and external modes of interference, and participation.
Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in Colonial Northeastern India
Routledge: Delhi and London, 2015
Becoming a Borderland ii Becoming a Borderland Transition in Northeastern India Series Editor: Sumi Krishna, Independent scholar, Bangalore The uniquely diverse landscapes, societies and cultures of northeastern India, forged through complex bio-geographic and socio-political forces, are now facing rapid transition. This series focuses on the processes and practices that have shaped, and are shaping, the peoples' identities, outlook, institutions, and economy. Eschewing the homogenising term 'North East', which was imposed on the region in a particular political context half a century ago, the series title refers to the 'northeastern' region to more accurately refl ect its heterogeneity. Seeking to explore how the 'mainstream' and the 'margins' impact each other, the series will foreground both historical and contemporary research on the region including the Eastern Himalaya, the adjoining hills and valleys,
Understanding Northeast India through a ‘ Spatial ’ Lens
2015
Applying ‘spatial’ lens to Northeast India (NEI) is merely not for hermeneutic purposes but for a nuanced understanding of the flux accompanying the region.Spatial analysis helps us to move beyond the ‘territorial trap’ imposed on NEI through various cartographic exercises. The implications of applying the territoriality principle during the colonial and post-colonial periods are quite evident in NEI today. Now with the advent of globalization, as capital seeks to reinforce its spatiality, new imaginaries are being created both by the Indian state as well as the ‘people’ in the region, which have both overlapping and contradictory connotations. Spatial analysis helps us to understand these overlappings and contradictions between the economic imperatives of the state and the socio-cultural imperatives of the communities, all linked to their respective imaginaries associated with the region. Under such a scenario, what are its ramifications? Will it change the somatic proximity of the...
Mapping a Contested Space: Northeast India Through the Ages
Space and Culture, India, 2023
Northeast India, home to diverse ethnic communities, has often been described as the cauldron of ethnic violence and insurgencies. The ongoing crisis in Manipur (in the form of a fratricidal war between the Meiteis and Kukis) and the State's failure to contain it calls for deeper scrutiny of the geopolitics of the region. Whereas the region was once a crossroad that facilitated the movement of these ethnic groups, its transformation into a frontier area during colonial times and as a borderland after India's partition turned it into a contested space. Further, with the introduction of colonial modernity, the old socio-cultural and economic structures have radically altered the relationship among the communities giving space to necropolitics. In this context, by referring to Rituparna Bhattacharyya's edited volume Northeast India through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Prehistory, History, and Oral History and other research works, this commentary maps the transformation of the territory into a necrospace. In doing so, this study argues that while much of the complications had been foisted due to the colonial map-making process and immigration, an ethnic resurgence had further facilitated the growth of necropolitics in the region. Additionally, the study will focus on the representations of socio-cultural history and politics by relating those to the multifaceted aspect of necropolitics and its entangled colonial history.
Dismantling Colonial Cartography: Indigenous Urbanism as Spatiality, India
SDGs in the Asia and Pacific Region, Implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals – Regional Perspectives - The Asia and Pacific Region , 2023
Cartography in India, beginning with The Great Trigonometric Survey's civilisational project, was used by the colonial and postcolonial states to survey and earmark territories for various kinds of resources. This resource knowledge was critical in establishing colonial authority over indigenous lands. These cartographic projects became an instrument to guide the growth and expansion of roads and railways, timber felling, metallurgical industries, mines and townships. Drawing on field experiences in Jharkhand and Meghalaya, two tribal/ indigenous states, the author highlights in this chapter how tribes classify the territories and lands they inhabit and how specific historic relationships are built between indigenous peoples and territories through customs, traditions, myths and values that have sustained land and resources over time. It is thereby imperative that land control be returned to the indigenous communities who have a more holistic understanding of it, rather than keeping it in the vestige of the state, for the purpose of a holistic and sustainable urban development. Through this process, indigenous communities can bring their traditional
'Clean out of the map': Knowing and doubting space at India's high imperial frontiers
History of Science, 2017
During the second half of the nineteenth century, land frontiers became areas of unique significance for surveyors in colonial India. These regions were understood to provide the most stringent tests for the men, instruments, and techniques that collectively constituted spatial data and representations. In many instances, however, the severity of the challenges that India's frontiers afforded stretched practices in the field and in the survey office beyond breaking point. Far from producing supposedly unequivocal maps, many involved in frontier surveying acknowledged that their work was problematic, partial, and prone to contrary readings. They increasingly came to construe frontiers as spaces that exceeded scientific understanding, and resorted to descriptions that emphasized fantastical and disorienting embodied experiences. Through examining the many crises and multiple agents of frontier mapping in British India, this article argues that colonial surveying and its outputs were less assured and more convoluted than previous histories have acknowledged.
Bordering and frontier-making in nineteenth-century British India
The Historical Journal, 2015
From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state’s power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.
Mapping Governmentality of Colonial Spaces in India
Indian Cartographer |Vol 35, 2015
Maps represent history. Historical Cartography in India has been used to meet diverse motives of empire building (colonialist ideology) and nation building (nationalist ideology) (Edney, 1999). Colonial cartographic investigations look into the rationalities of three significant questions viz. who is mapping, who is being mapped, and what purposes are served by the cartographic projects (Sarkar, 2012). Colonial cartography is understood as part of the process of appropriation, reconfiguration and modification of colonial spaces rather than a purely technical project (Thompson, 2012). The Colonial Power has almost always resorted to governmental rationalities to exclude, racialize, and pathologize the subject population. Colonial cities in India were mostly developed under the 'garden city' concept aimed at segregation of the colonizers from the native population. While colonial towns acted as disciplinary institutions (e.g., military cantonments, schools, hospitals, asylums), they were also assigned as means of surveillance (e.g., hill station towns acting as panoptic). The case of Delhi bears testimony to the organization, reorganization and representation of space used as a central mechanism of exclusion and control (Legg, 2007). While the motive and patterns of segregation remains consistent in all Colonial settlements; it is interesting to classify urban spaces in categories assigned by the colonizers and draw out the physical and cultural landscapes that were produced from the segregation processes as well as question of access to goods and services of the settlement concerned. The paper attempts to explore aspects of Historical Cartography which was used as a tool for creation and appropriation of spaces in India by the Colonial power. The different strategies of colonial domination and control would be analyzed with the help of Foucauldian concepts of 'governmentality'; 'power over subjects' (techniques of power and their effects upon subjects) and as reorganization of spaces as panopticons for surveillance over native population. Methodology: Colonial towns of India have been selected as the subjects of colonial domains of power. The strategies of 'authoritarian governmentality' adopted by the colonizers have been studied in terms of the pattern of colonial spaces created in the colonial towns as the units of analysis. The categories of colonial towns undertaken for the analysis are Cantonment towns, Administration towns, Hill stations, Port towns (trading towns) in India which were assigned with special functions of ordering, grading, excluding, dominating and appropriating the colonial system in India. The various patterns of colonial spaces would be analyzed cartographically using archival documents and historical maps.