Critical Cartography and India’s Map Policy (original) (raw)
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With the implementation of India's new map policy (NMP), the user community is looking towards a transformation of spatial database (from Everest-1830 ellipsoid polyconic projection system to WGS-1984 ellipsoid, UTM projection system). Different transformation parameters are available from different sources, which provide different spatial positions for the same location and thus generate confusion among users. Further, mismatch in the two data leads to error in the registration of existing topographic maps with new maps. This study aims at finding out the impact of the different readily available transformation parameters on the spatial location and to determine the extent to which the existing database can be used along with the new series maps without losing accuracy. Results show that there are some geographic regions in India whose topographic database can be used without the need for transformation and within the acceptable positional accuracy requirements, depending on the scale of topographic maps.
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Since India attained independence, its foreign policy discourse has imagined its South Asian neighbourhood through the politics of realism. This imagination explicates state interest in South Asia by establishing it as a space of sovereign territoriality. Even today, India’s foreign and security policies are primarily shaped by geopolitical centrism, and remain unaffected by economic prosperity and community concerns. As a part of the Oxford International Relations in South Asia series, this volume examines alternative conceptions of South Asian space in terms of geo-economics and community, and justifies why they have been unable to replace its dominant understanding, irrespective of the political regime. This volume probes reasons behind the relevance of differentiated cartography of territorial nationalism in our shared understanding of space, politics, society, and the community.
Mapping Governmentality of Colonial Spaces in India
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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.
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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.
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