Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (22 page)

Despite Aurangzeb’s efforts in the north and in the east, his big push was into the southern peninsula. He shifted to the Deccan in 1682 and would never see Delhi again. Instead, he lived in a state of constant campaigning for the next twenty-six years. Although Aurangzeb extended the empire to its maximum geographical coverage, he also effectively destroyed
it. His constant wars devastated the landscape and drained the exchequer. This is why Bernier comments that, although the Mughal emperor had revenues that exceeded the combined receipts of the Shah of Persia and the Ottoman Sultan, he could not be considered wealthy because it was all consumed by expenditure. Thus, Bernier tells us that Aurangzeb was ‘perplexed how to pay and supply his armies’.

Equally important, Aurangzeb was a religious bigot who needlessly destroyed Hindu temples and re-imposed the hated jiziya tax on non-Muslims. It is said that when this tax was first announced, the Hindus of Delhi gathered in large numbers in front of the Red Fort to protest against it. The emperor set his elephants against them and many were trampled to death. Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh guru, was executed in Delhi in 1675 for standing up for the Hindu Pandits of Kashmir. The Gurudwara Sis Gunj in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk stands at the spot where he was beheaded.

Not surprisingly, the pact between the Hindu majority and the Mughals began to come unstuck. There were revolts in many places across the empire. One of the most successful revolts was led by the Maratha rebel Shivaji. The exploits of Shivaji and his band of Maratha guerrillas are so audacious that one would not believe them but for contemporary accounts of them. Using the volcanic outcrops of the Deccan Traps, the Marathas repeatedly outwitted the larger Mughal armies and remained a constant thorn in Aurangzeb’s side. One of my favourite tales is about how the Marathas captured Sinhagadh by using a trained monitor lizard named Yeshwanti to scale the walls. The guerrillas tied a rope around the lizard, which climbed up a rock-face that was so steep that it had
been left unguarded. A boy then climbed up the rope and secured it for the rest. The fort of Sinhagad is just outside Pune and can be easily visited. You will see cadets from the nearby military training school climbing up the hill with their heavy packs.

Another group that broke out in open revolt were the Bundelas. Their leader Raja Chhatrasaal used the low hills of the Vindhya range to wage a campaign against the Mughals. There is a colourful tale that links the Bundelas and the Marathas. Raja Chhatrasaal had a very beautiful dancer named Mastani in his court (some claim she may have been his daughter by a concubine). When the Marathas rescued the Bundela chief from a tight spot, Chhatrasaal thanked the Maratha commander Baji Rao by gifting him Mastani. Baji Rao would rise to become the Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Marathas and Mastani would become his favourite. Although Mastani is usually left out of history books, she was a significant figure in her times and is said to have ridden with Baji Rao on his many campaigns. On the highway between Orchha and Khajuraho, there is a small but picturesque palace built on a lake by Chhatrasaal for Mastani during her younger days. Not many people know about it and visitors are likely to have it all to themselves. The surrounding hills are heavily fortified, a reminder of the turbulent times in which Mastani lived.

Nonetheless, it was not at the hands of the Marathas or the Bundelas that the Mughals suffered their first decisive defeat. This happened in the middle of the Brahmaputra in faraway Assam at the hands of the Ahom general Lachit Borphukan. The Ahoms came to India as refugees in the early thirteenth century. They were distantly related to the Thais from what is
now the Burma–China border and were probably no more than a few thousand in number. Soon, they converted to Hindusim and established a kingdom that would last from 1228 till 1826. Mir Jumla’s raid of 1662 had hurt them, but they had survived and were steadily clawing back territory. The conflict reached a climax in 1671 in the Battle of Saraighat, not far from modern Guwahati. The Assamese forces were far smaller but their commander cleverly avoided a battle on open ground. Instead, he coaxed the Mughals into a naval battle on the Brahmaputra river, where the smaller and more manoeuvrable Assamese boats won a decisive victory. Although seriously ill, Lachit Borphukan personally led the assault. It was the Indian equivalent of the Battle of Salamis where the ancient Greeks defeated the Persian fleet against overwhelming odds. The myth of Mughal invincibility had been shattered.

The Mughal empire may yet have survived religious bigotry, leaky public finances, Maratha guerrillas, Bundela chieftains and the Assamese navy. The foundations built up by Akbar and his immediate successors were still quite strong, but Aurangzeb committed the ultimate sin—he stayed on the throne too long. He ruled till he died at the age of ninety in 1707. As happened in the case of Ashoka and Feroze Shah Tughlaq, he was followed by a succession of weak rulers culminating in a foreign invasion. In 1739, the Persian army of Nadir Shah occupied Shah Jehan’s Delhi and massacred twenty thousand of its citizens. They left with much treasure, including the famous Peacock Throne. With the prestige of the Mughals fast waning, the Marathas occupied large swathes of central India even as the governors of far-flung provinces like Bengal
and Hyderabad became virtually independent. Eighteenth-century India dissolved into a chaotic scramble.

A number of foreign players saw the opportunity to extend their influence in the subcontinent. In the North West were the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani, even as the Burmese eyed the North East. In peninsular India, the rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese had been replaced by that between the French and the English. Mercenary armies wandered the countryside, feared by rulers and common people alike. For a short while it appeared that the Marathas would replace the Mughals and establish order, but their internal rivalries let them down. Defeat at the hands of the Afghans in January 1761, in Panipat, Haryana, came as a big blow to their reputation. They would never quite regain their momentum. The scene was set for a war of maps.

As we have already seen, maps were a very important military weapon (and remain so today). One can almost trace the ascendancy of a particular European power by the relative quality of its maps. The Marathas were the only Indian power who developed some cartographic ability. Although their maps are not as rigorous as their European counterparts, they were complemented by an intuitive knowledge of the terrain. Meanwhile, the French and British cartographers replaced the Dutch at the cutting-edge of mapping. At first, it was the French who held the advantage, both on the ground as well as in the quality of their maps. By the early eighteenth century, they had a well-established network of enclaves on the Indian
coast. The most important were Pondicherry, just south of Madras (Chennai) and the ancient submerged port of Mahabalipuram. There were smaller outposts like Mahé on the Kerala coast, Yanam on the Andhra coast and Chandannagar on the Hooghly channel of the Ganga, just north of the English settlement at Calcutta. The French also controlled the strategically important island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Mirroring the strategic advantage of the French, their maps of India are also superior to those of their rivals. Arguably the best of the French cartographers was D’Anville. He never visited India but appears to have collected the best available information from his Paris home. Cartographic historian Susan Gole has called him the first scientific map-maker. Unlike his predecessors, he strictly focused on geographical accuracy and refrained from eye-catching embellishments. The influence of John Mandeville was finally wearing off. Thus, when D’Anville wanted to correctly locate Satara, the Maratha capital, he asked the Portuguese ambassador to the French court for more information. The Portuguese were fighting the Marathas at that time. D’Anville was told that Satara was in the Ghats and that it was eight days’ journey from both Goa and from Bombay, at the apex of a triangle formed by these two lines and the coast. For most cartographers of that time, this would have been more than enough information but D’Anville left Satara out of his map on the grounds that this was not exact enough.
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The British, meanwhile, were only marginally behind. The first half of the eighteenth century saw a series of British mapmakers—Herman Moll, John Thornton and Thomas Jefferys.
Their records show that they keenly kept abreast of the latest French maps. There are also detailed local maps of specific ports and military installations. One of the most interesting is an English map of Maratha admiral Kanoji Angre’s sea fort. From its fortified base at Vijaydurg, the Maratha navy harassed European shipping up and down the Konkan coast for several decades. Angre also defeated the Abyssinian pirates, the Sidis, but was unable to evict them from their base at Murud-Janjira.

The forts of Vijaydurg and Janjira lie south of Mumbai and are worth a visit. The fort at Janjira is built on a small island but local fishermen are happy to take visitors out on a rowboat for a small consideration. Vijaydurg is built on a peninsula but also offers spectacular views of the Arabian Sea. The eighteenth-century English map of Angre’s fort shows a worryingly detailed knowledge of its defences. It also gives an amusing insight into the European attitude towards the Maratha admiral. Prominently marked is a building labelled as ‘Godowns where he keeps his Plunder’. To them, he was no more than a pirate!

One of the characteristic features of European cartography till the mid-1700s is the obvious nautical orientation. By now, we have maps of India that show detailed depth measurements along the coast and even greater detail for the entrances of major ports. Yet, they remain curiously ignorant of the Himalayas, one of the most prominent geographical features on the planet. Most maps do show some awareness of mountains to the north, but the range is not systematically marked anywhere. There was a widespread belief going back to the time of Alexander that the northern mountains were a continuation of the Caucasus.

Nonetheless, the redoubtable François Bernier did visit Kashmir, and left a detailed eye-witness account of the province that was used by the Mughal Emperors as a summer retreat.
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He tells us that there were two wooden bridges over the Jhelum at Srinagar and beautiful gardens along the river banks. Most of the houses were made of wood, although some larger buildings, including the ruins of ancient Hindu temples, were made of stone. He tells us that the rich owned pleasure boats on Dal Lake and that they threw lovely parties in the summer.

Bernier also tells us that the Mughals used their base in Kashmir to extend their influence into Little Tibet (i.e. Ladakh) and, intriguingly, Greater Tibet (i.e. Tibet itself). The cold, bleak but stunningly beautiful landscape does not seem to have impressed a contemporary chronicler who wrote, ‘No other useless place can be compared with it.’
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I could not disagree more. For me, Ladakh is the most spiritual place in the world. To experience it, spend a full-moon night—alone—on one of the lonely mountain passes. It is impossible to describe the way stars look at these altitudes and the way the moonlight reflects on the bare rocky mountainsides. The moon can be so bright that one could almost read a book by it. I have spent nights in the open in the African savannah and have watched the sun rise over the Mayan pyramids of Tikal—but nothing comes close to a full-moon night in Ladakh.

It appears that the Mughals also made some inroads into Tibet itself. The Tibetans promised to pay an annual tribute, allow the building of a mosque in their capital and to issue coins in the name of Aurangzeb. We know that the Ladakhis did allow a mosque to be built in Leh; it can still be visited at the head of the main bazaar (and just below the old palace).
However, given the difficult terrain, the Mughals had no way to ensure compliance from Tibet, and Bernier tells us that no one really believed that the Tibetans would honour the promises.

Bernier was very intrigued by the stories he heard about Tibet, including those about the institution of the Dalai Lama. He tried to question Tibetan merchants about their country but received little useful information. As we shall see, the British would have to make great efforts to get reliable information about this land in the nineteenth century. For now, the Europeans needed to find out about more about the geography of the subcontinent itself. Indeed, knowledge of India’s interiors remained quite basic except for major trade routes. This would change with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 where the troops of the English East India Company, led by Robert Clive, decisively defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. With this victory, for the first time, a European power came to control a major province. Soon, the British would be acquiring large territories and sustaining campaigns in the deep interiors of the country. Accurate maps were more important than ever. Enter Colonel James Rennel.

The Portuguese first arrived in Bengal in
1530. They set up trading posts at Chittagong in the east and Satgaon in the west.
Over time, the river near Satgaon silted up and the river port of Hooghly became the
main trading hub. The port was on the Bhagirathi distributary of the
Ganga—although we now usually call it the Hooghly after the old port town.
By the seventeenth century, other Europeans had also set up trading posts along the
river—the French at Chandannagar, the Danes at Srirampur and the Dutch at
Chinsurah. The English East India Company initially had its local headquarters at
Hooghly. However, it seems to have had problems with the local Mughal officials and
was forced to sail downriver after a skirmish in 1686. When matters were finally
settled two years later, the English sent a squadron on ships from Madras (now
renamed Chennai) to re-establish their presence in Bengal. The initiative was headed
by the company’s chief agent Job Charnock.

On 24 August 1690, Charnock landed at a
village called Sutanuti on the east bank of the river. He had already visited the
spot during the retreat two years earlier and had obviously liked it. So he decided
to build the new English trading post here. It would grow into the city of Calcutta,
now renamed Kolkata. This was not, however, an uninhabited landscape. There were
three villages in the area—Sutanuti, Gobindapore and Kalikata The
city’s name is derived from that of the last village. The merchant
families of the Setts and Basaks already ran sizeable business establishments here.
There was a fourth village nearby, called Chitpur, from where the road ran all the
way to the ancient temple of Kalighat. Just off this road, in the middle of
tiger-infested jungle, was a Shiva temple erected by a hermit called Chowranghi.
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The temple no longer exists, and the place is now occupied by the Asiatic
Society on Park Street. The hermit’s name, however, was retained as
Chowringhee Road, which would become one of the city’s principal arteries.
In an act of misplaced nationalism, the road was renamed after Jawaharlal Nehru in
the 1980s, which is especially inappropriate since the hermit was one of the
original inhabitants of the place. Fortunately most citizens of Kolkata persist with
the old name.

Job Charnock probably chose this site
from a standpoint of defensibility. The river ran along the west of the site while
there were marshy salt lakes to the east. To the south there were dense,
tiger-infested jungles, while to the north there was a creek that ran from the river
to the salt lakes and was navigable by large boats. Many of these features are still
discernible. The creek has long since silted up but is
remembered in place-names like Creek Row and Creek Lane. The eastward suburban
extensions of the 1970s, officially called Bidhannagar, are commonly called Salt
Lake, recalling the marshlands. A few of the lakes still exist as the East Kolkata
Wetlands that provide the city with a unique natural sewage recycling system that is
now protected under the Ramsar Convention.

Most of the early British settlement was
build around a preexisting water tank called Lal Dighi that had been excavated by
the Bengali merchant Lal Mohan Sett. The name Lal Dighi literally means Red Pond;
there is a story that it gets its name from the colours used by the locals during
the festival of Dol (or Holi). The waterbody still exists and stands in the middle
of the business district. Soon, the British had built a number of substantial
buildings around Lal Dighi, including a fort that they named Fort William. It stood
on the site now occupied by the General Post Office and should not be confused with
the later Fort William that we see today.

Commerce may have prospered but it came
at a huge human cost. Surrounded by mosquito-infested swamps, the early European
residents of Calcutta suffered horrible casualty rates. Alexander Hamilton,
Charnock’s contemporary, tells us that there were 1200 English of various
ranks when he visited the city. Within six months, 460 of them died. While this may
have been an especially bad year, it gives a sense of the mortality rates that the
East India Company employees had to contend with. Less than three years after
establishing the trading post at Calcutta, Job Charnock too died. His body was
interred in a mausoleum that can be visited on the grounds
of
St.John’s Church, just off Lal Dighi. His eldest daughter Mary died a few
years later and is buried in the same tomb.

Meanwhile, Calcutta continued to grow. A
map from 1757 shows that the British had built a fortified trench called the Maratha
Ditch all around Calcutta to defend it from attacks by Indian rulers. The name of
the ditch tells us how the threat perception had shifted from the Mughals to the
Marathas since the death of Aurangzeb. Most of the area within the fortifications
was still largely rural, but there is a small but significant urban cluster around
Lal Dighi and along the river. Nevertheless, contemporary maps of Madras suggest
that it was a much more important settlement than Calcutta at this stage.

In 1756, the Nawab of Bengal
Siraj-ud-Daulah briefly occupied Kolkata and renamed it Alinagar. However, just a
year later, Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey and established
British control over this large province. Calcutta now became the headquarters of a
rapidly expanding empire. Over the next century, Calcutta would become the largest
city in the subcontinent and one of the most important urban hubs in the world. One
can see the transformation by comparing the 1757 map of Calcutta with one published
by Chapman and Hall in 1842. A few of the old features are still visible. Lal Dighi
still exists but is surrounded by large buildings including the Writers’
Building. This is not the magnificently red Writers’ Building built in
1882 that functions today as the secretariat of the state of West Bengal. The
original Writers’ Building was also a substantial building and was used as
rent-free accommodation for clerks and other junior employees of the East India
Company. The Maratha Ditch has been filled
up but its outline is
discerned in the 1842 map as the Upper Circular and Lower Circular
roads—and they continue to be the city’s arterial roads to this
day, albeit with new names.

For anyone familiar with Kolkata, the
1842 map is very interesting because many of the basic contours of the modern city
are clearly visible. The old Fort William has been replaced by the large star-shaped
fort that is still used by the Indian Army as its eastern headquarters. The British
town planners left large open spaces around the new fort in order to allow a clear
line of fire for the fort’s cannons. These are now the parks of the
Maidan. The Victoria Memorial, of course, does not exist at this stage and its site
is occupied by a complex marked as the Grand Jail. However, the site of the Turf
Club already has a race course. Well-known roads such as Park Street and Camac
Street have taken shape and are clearly marked. But for the fact that many of the
street-names have been changed since the 1970s, one could probably find
one’s way around most of central Kolkata by using the 1842
map—especially since the old names remain in common use in many cases. The
map also shows how, by the mid-nineteenth century, the rapidly growing city was
spilling out of the confines of the old city limits marked by the former Maratha
Ditch. We can see how the new suburbs of Sealdah, Ballygunge and Bhowanipur are just
beginning to appear. Their conversion into fully urban settlements would happen very
gradually. I remember that even in the early 1980s, some parts of Ballygunge
retained a semi-rural feel with large bungalows, fish-ponds and weekly village
markets. These open spaces are now occupied by multistorey residential towers, but
some reminders of the past remain: the idiosyncratic lanes, the odd
hut amidst modern buildings, the old village shrine stranded in
the middle of the road.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Calcutta
was not just a commercial and administrative hub, but also the centre of
intellectual and cultural activity. Indians from across the subcontinent came here
to seek their fortune. There were even sizeable communities of Jews, Armenians,
Greeks and even Chinese in the city. Although these communities have dwindled in
recent decades, they have left behind buildings and place-names that recall them.
This multicultural milieu set the stage for the next phase of evolution of
India’s civilization. Over the next century, Calcutta would attract social
reformers like Ram Mohun Roy, who pushed through important changes that have shaped
modern India. Interestingly, these early reformers also argued in favour of
providing education to Indians in the English language. This would be a profoundly
important choice.

It is popularly assumed that English
education was used by the colonial rulers to create a class of Indians who would be
loyal to them. This view is based a note written by Thomas Macaulay in 1835 where he
argued, ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian
in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in
intellect’. In fact, the matter was hotly debated by the British officials
and there were many who disagreed with Macaulay. The factor that tipped the balance
was that many reformist Indians favoured English. This preference for a foreign
language is not as strange as it may appear at first sight. The early reformers were
very conscious that Indian
civilization had been in decline for
a long time and correctly blamed it on lack of technological and intellectual
innovation. The knowledge of English was seen as a window to the world of ideas
emanating from Europe. Far from creating a class of loyal Indians, the
English-educated middle-class would be at the forefront of India’s
struggle for independence.

One of the important venues for the
Anglo-Indian intellectual interaction of this era was a unique college founded in
1800 by Governor General Wellesley. The College of Fort William was set up for the
training of British civil servants who spent their first three years studying and
training there. The curriculum for the three-year course was surprisingly eclectic
and tells of a generalist ethos that remains embedded in the Indian Administrative
Service of today:
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1. Choice of Languages: Arabic, Persian,
   Sanskrit, Marhatta (Marathi), Tamalua (Tamil), Bengali, Telenga (Telugu).
   
2. Mahomedan Law
   
3. Hindoo Law
   
4. Ethics, Civil Jurisprudence, and the Law of
   Nations
   
5. English Law
   
6. The Regulations and Laws enacted by the
   Governor General in Council at Fort St. George (Madras) and Bombay for civil
   government in the British territories in India
   
7. Political Economy and particularly the
   commercial institutions and interests of the East India Company.
   
8. Geography and Mathematics
   
9. Modern Languages of Europe
   
10. Greek, Latin and English Classics
    
11. The History and Antiquities of Hindoostan and
    Deccan
    
12. Natural History
    
13. Botany, Chemistry and Astronomy
    

The college was meant for training
civil servants, but it brought together a mix of remarkable Indian and British
scholars. This interaction generated both new scholarship as well as new thinking.
One of these scholars was Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, who taught there in the 1840s.
An extraordinary polymath, his contributions include giving the Bengali language its
modern form, the emancipation and education of women and the teaching of Sanskrit
texts to low-caste Hindus. Indian civilization would benefit enormously from this
new way of thinking.

Meanwhile, the students of the college
were not always immersed in their studies. A student named Mr Chisholme was sued in
1802 and brought before the court by one Jagonnaut Singh, a lawyer. A cat had been
sitting in a shop near the deponent’s house. The student set his dog on
the cat but it fled into the lawyer’s house and into the women’s
quarters. Mr Chisholme and his dog followed in hot pursuit. When Jagonnaut Singh
objected to this intrusion, the student punched him in the forehead. In the end, Mr
Chisholme admitted his guilt and was reported for proper action.

Not all the young officials of the East
India Company were quite so loutish. One of the most talented was Thomas Stamford
Raffles, who was sent by Governor General Minto to Penang (now in Malaysia) to keep
an eye on the Dutch in South East Asia. The British and the Dutch had long been
bitter rivals in South East Asia, and the English East India Company wanted to
ensure that the shipping routes between India and the Far East were secure. When
Napoleon annexed Holland, the British occupied the Dutch possessions in the East
Indies. Raffles played a leading role in these events, and
we
get a wonderful insight into the man and the times from the letters he sent back to
Calcutta for Lord Minto and other senior officials. It is amazing that, in the
middle of organizing military operations and administrative systems in far-flung
islands, people like Raffles found the time to study the flora and fauna, record
local customs and investigate ancient ruins.

After Napoleon was defeated, the Dutch
wanted their colonies back. There were heated negotiations between Calcutta and
Batavia (the Dutch headquarters, now Jakarta). The Dutch would eventually get back
most of their possessions as per the Anglo–Dutch Treaty of 1824, but not
before Stamford Raffles had ensured that the British would retain effective control
of the Straits of Malacca. The key to his strategy was the establishment of a new
British outpost in Singapore. The island had been under the nominal control of the
Sultan of Johore but Raffles was able to secure it in exchange for the payment of an
annual rent and British support against the Sultan’s local rival.
Singapore was formally founded on 6 February 1819 with a great deal of pomp and the
firing of cannons. Raffles wrote, ‘I shall say nothing of the importance
of the position I have taken in Singapore; it is a child of my own … Our
object is not territory but trade; a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum,
whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter
require’.
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