Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe 9780226476742

Citation preview

T e r r e s T r i a l lessons

TERRESTRIAL LESSONS T h e Co n q u e s T o f The Wor ld a s G lo b e

Sumathi Ramaswamy

T h e u n i v e r si T y o f C hi C aGo Pre ss C h i C aG o a n d l ondon

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-47657-5 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-47674-2 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476742.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ramaswamy, Sumathi, author. Title: Terrestrial lessons : the conquest of the world as globe / Sumathi Ramaswamy. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lCCn 2016057345 | isbn 9780226476575 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226476742 (e-book) Subjects: lCsh: Earth (Planet)—Study and teaching—India—History. | Geography—Study and teaching—India—History. | Globes—India—History. Classification: lCC G76.5.i5 r36 2017 | ddC 910/.020954—dc23 lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057345 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi /niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Rich

The Earth, the Heavens— are fraught with Instruction. Caleb binGham, 1796

And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind. alan berGman and marilyn berGman, 1968

CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations · xi Prologue: Global Itineraries, Earth Inscriptions · xiii 1. In Pursuit of a Global Thing · 1 2. “As You Live in the World, You Ought to Know Something of the World” · 37 3. The Global Pandit · 91 4. Down to Earth? Of Girls and Globes · 147 5. “It’s Called a Globe. It Is the Earth. Our Earth.” · 217 Epilogue: The Conquest of the World as Globe · 281 In Gratitude · 295

Notes · 297

ix

References · 381 Index · 415

ABBREVIATIONS

AJMM AMM BBRAS BC BePol BePub BL BMS BNES BoE BoPub CCO CLS CMS CMSA CR CSBS

Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany American Marathi Mission Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Bombay Courier Bengal Political Consultations Bengal Public Consultations British Library Baptist Missionary Society Bombay Native Education Society Bombay Education Consultations Bombay Public Proceedings The Calcutta Christian Observer Christian Literature Society Church Missionary Society CMS Archives, University of Birmingham Special Collections Calcutta Review Calcutta School Book Society

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CVES DPI EIC FI GCPI IOR IPC LMS MBoR MC MCMR MGA MMC MPub MR MSBS NWP RAS SDUK SFP

Christian Vernacular Education Society Department of Public Instruction East India Company Friend of India General Committee of Public Instruction India Office Records, British Library India Political Consultations London Missionary Society Madras Board of Revenue Proceedings Madras Courier Madras Church Missionary Record Madras Geographical Association Madras Military Consultations Madras Public Consultations The Missionary Register Madras School Book Society Northwestern Provinces Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Sherwood Family Papers, Department of Special Collections, UCLA SLSS Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay SPCK Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts TDR Tanjore District Records TMSSML Thanjavur Maharaja Serfoji Sarasvati Mahal Library TNSA Tamil Nadu State Archives UTC United Theological College, Bangalore V&A Victoria & Albert Museum, London VOC Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie

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PROLOGUE

GLOBAL ITINERARIES, EARTH INSCRIPTIONS

The earth . . . will belong to whoever knows it best.1

This is an unconventional history of a commonplace object we moderns have likely encountered at some point of time in our lives, especially as school-going children. I introduce you to it by way of a fleeting but luminous appearance it makes in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, when its teenage heroine, Sai, mails off a coupon to a distant American address in Omaha, Nebraska, from Kalimpong, a small town in the Himalayan foothills of northeastern India. The coupon is for a free National Geographic inflatable globe: When so much time passed that they had forgotten about it, it arrived along with a certificate congratulating them for being adventure-loving members pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and daring for almost a full century. Sai and the cook had inflated the globe, attached it to the axis with the provided screws. Rarely was there something unexpected in the mail and never anything beautiful. They looked at the deserts, the mountains, the

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fresh spring colors of green and yellow, the snow at the poles; somewhere on this glorious orb was Biju [the cook’s son]. They searched out New York, and Sai attempted to explain to the cook why it was night there when it was day here, just as Sister Alice had demonstrated in St. Augustine’s [her school] with an orange and a flashlight. The cook found it strange that India went first with the day, a funny back-to-front fact that didn’t seem mirrored by any other circumstances involving the two nations.2

This is a moment from the very beginning of Desai’s award-winning novel, set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a fiery separatist movement. Desai’s story concludes with another fleeting but telling appearance of my book’s chief protagonist: Sai stood there— She thought of her father and the space program. She thought of all the National Geographics and the books she had read. Of the judge’s journey, of the cook’s journey, of Biju’s. Of the globe twirling on its axis. And she felt a glimmer of strength. Of resolve. She [too] must leave.3

Terrestrial Lessons, as well, is about arrivals, encounters, and departures, about bonds established with one another and between the self and the world, and about the wonder and reverie that flow from such acts of forging but also the unease and uncertainty that may follow. Mostly, though, this book is about relationships forged with and around a singular artifact that was once laden with the circumstances of history but now appears self-evident and banal, even in places like contemporary India, notwithstanding Sai and the cook’s joyous response to it in Desai’s fictional narrative. I write of the object that is named in English, but also in many other languages of India, as “globe,” which, since at least 1492— from when the earliest European example survives in Nuremberg in the famous Behaim erdapfel— has served as the model of and for the physical form of Earth, the planet whose surface we inhabit as sentient beings. For the last half millennium, the terrestrial (or terraqueous) globe has been a master object of its time, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to, indeed constitutive of, one’s status as literate and schooled, even enlightened. Today, it is a ubiquitous symbol of our “global” times, its familiar spherical outline seemingly everywhere, from billboard logos on our streets to screen savers on our computers. Scholars of cartographic science and practice have written quite extensively on its appearance in Europe and its complex history on that continent.4 This

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is understandable to some extent because, after all, the terrestrial globe as we know it today was quintessentially a European invention of the so-called early modern centuries when it was fabricated in workshops across Western Europe, from where it was exported over a period of time when the planet for which it served as a “thingly” proxy was also taken over by the very peoples who had thought up the artifact. It was an extraordinary early modern thing thrown into motion beyond its own time.5 Yet, does this singular artifact have the same history elsewhere and everywhere, and with the same affect and effects? This is a key question that I explore in Terrestrial Lessons, locating myself in the Indian subcontinent, home today to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, and yet a place where its arrival, dispersal, and work has been completely ignored by both scholars of South Asian studies and by historians of cartography and science.6 My primary interest lies in tracking the terrestrial globe’s itineraries as it makes its way across the subcontinent, picking up the elusive traces of its travels from south to north, west to east, the architecture of my book more or less reproducing the geo-body of British India put in place under two centuries of colonial rule from the later decades of the eighteenth century. As I attend to numerous histories disclosed by its travels and travails, I am particularly focused upon its transformation over the course of the long nineteenth century from a thing of distinction, whose possession was the prerogative of elite (European) men, into a mass-produced commodity— a throw-away even, like Sai’s National Geographic inflatable globe— primarily associated with the learning child and related beings like woman and native.7 In the process, I also explore three connected sets of questions that the circulation of this object reveals more generally about the relationship between terrestrial sphericity and pedagogic modernity.8 First, despite pronouncements by media pundits like Thomas Friedman that we live in a flat world (or should aspire to live in one such), our status as moderns is resolutely and unambiguously grounded in our acceptance of the foundational fact of Earth’s sphericity. As Lesley Cormack puts it pointedly, rotundity equals modernity.9 There might well be scholarly consensus today that “the infamous idea” that medieval Europeans believed our planet to be flat was itself a modern invention.10 Nevertheless, knowledge of Earth’s spherical form has not come to us naturally or easily. “It is a residue of cultural activities, of watching ships come to us up out of the sea for eons, of thinking about what that means, of observing shadows at different locations, of sailing great distances, of contemplating all this and more at one time. It is hard won knowledge. It is map knowledge.”11 What is at stake, then, in the repeated, indeed anxious,

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insistence that our world is round, and not any other form? How and why does the innocuous question “What is the shape of Earth?” posed at the very beginning of one’s formal schooling— and demonstrated with a globe (or its makeshift substitutes, like the orange Sai’s teacher showed her in school)— become an influential gatekeeper, the one and only correct response determining entry into the select club of the educated and the enlightened, indeed, the modern? As the fictional example of Sai and her cook in Kalimpong also suggests, we are schooled from a very young age to size each other up— as individuals, but more often as denizens of bounded territories, colored pink, green, yellow, and so on— from our varied locations on this spinning sphere that we learn to call Earth. Such schooling is essential to what literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt so felicitously described as “planetary consciousness” focused upon Earth as a knowable subject.12 Such schooling also helped underwrite the conquest— literally, but also cognitively and epistemologically— of most parts of our world in the centuries of European imperial expansion through a process that Gayatri Spivak, following Heidegger, characterizes as “worlding.”13 A primary objective of this book is to underscore the indispensable, indeed constitutive, role of the terrestrial globe in the pedagogic production of planetary consciousness, and in the transformation of a hitherto un-inscribed Earth into the gridded “geo-coded” sphere onto whose surface we are worlded.14 As Carl Schmitt reminds us, In all the ages of mankind, the earth has been appropriated, divided, and cultivated. But before the age of the great discoveries, before the 16th century of our system of dating, men had no global concept of the planet on which they lived. Certainly, they had a mythical image of heaven and earth, and of land and sea, but the earth still was not measured as a globe.15

This indeed is the “first revolution,” this capacity “to think the world no longer as an abstract sphere, largely unknown and imaginary, but as a globe— ‘a perfect globe or ball . . . that has its boundaries and limits, its roundness and vastness.’”16 As I demonstrate, this “first revolution” is conducted largely in schoolrooms across our (spherical) world from the eighteenth century onward and in the delivery of foundational terrestrial lessons to the learning child. How, then, is planetary consciousness taught in a manner that each one of us is put in place on the surface of a mapped round artifact and schooled to recognize our relative position on it? Not least, but most elusively, I ask what constitutes worldliness— of being in the world and of being curious about that world— in the age of mathe-

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matized terrestrial sphericity, after we have been cartographically worlded as subjects of the imaginary lines drawn on the surface of the gridded globe? “The struggle over geography,” Edward Said wisely noted many years ago, “is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”17 On the one hand, the terrestrial globe— “unexpected,” “beautiful”— is an artifact that elicits wonder, joy, and curiosity, “pushing the frontiers of knowledge and daring,” in the words of the National Geographic brochure that reaches young Sai and her cook in remote Kalimpong. On the other, it is an object around which anxieties and doubts accumulate (darkness in one place, light in another; some of us resplendent on its northern hemisphere, others confined to its antipodal bottom). How, then, does this artifact participate in— indeed enable— a Great Divide between those who are schooled to cross over the threshold into a new worldliness grounded in geographic curiosity, cartographic reason, and planetary consciousness, and those who are unwilling or unable to do so? These questions have pertinence for all of us as moderns wherever we live on the surface of this gridded sphere, and whenever we allow ourselves to be schooled in the discipline of geography (lit. “Earth writing”; but, following Spivak, “Earth inscription”) and learn to abstract ourselves to look at ourselves from afar but placed amid “the deserts, the mountains, the fresh spring colors of green and yellow, the snow at the poles,” to recall Desai. Such matters, however, take on an extra charge for those who live(d) in places that became subject to British rule from the later eighteenth century, like the Indian subcontinent, where alternative visions of our world and of the universe in which it exists were delegitimized and dismissed, and where the arrival of modern Europe’s “useful knowledge” also underwrote imperial governance and the exercise of colonial power.18 Our Earth indeed comes to belong to those who know it best, to hark back to this chapter’s epigraph, and to know it as a spherical entity. Hence also the subtitle of this book, inspired by philosopher Martin Heidegger’s insistence that “the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.” For Heidegger, the age of the world picture does not mean a picture of the world in the sense of being its copy, “but the world conceived and grasped as a picture,” so that it appears as an “enframed” image. Enframing is revelatory of the emergence of the modern subject, who stands abstracted from a world that he can observe, manipulate, and have at his “disposal.”19 The increasing circulation from the closing years of the fifteenth century in Europe of the terrestrial globe coincides with the emergence of the modern subject who imagines himself as abstracted from the planet whose surface he inhabits and which he begins to see as a whole, as if from a point afar and

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above. In 1803, at the height of the enthusiasm in Europe for this thingly proxy for our planet, Jacob de Gelder, professor at the University of Leiden, declared that terrestrial and celestial globes “give us, as it were, wings to consider at our leasure [sic], far away from the limits of our dwelling place, from all the viewpoints we would like, the great earth and immeasurable celestial sphere.”20 These are words that signal an aspiration for an Apollonian gaze— synoptic, omniscient, intellectually detached, and not least masculine— exemplified by the dashing figure of the astronaut of the US space program whose missions from the 1960s and early 1970s provided the first photographic images of the whole Earth taken by human hands. In the words of William Anders who is credited with the iconic photograph named Earthrise, dated December 24, 1968, “I think that all of us subconsciously think that the Earth is flat, or at least almost infinite. Let me assure you that, rather than a massive giant, it should be thought of as [a] fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should handle with considerable care.”21 For centuries before influential photographs such as Earthrise or Blue Marble (December 7, 1972) were technologically possible, the mounted terrestrial globe enabled an Apollonian vision, allowing the modern subject to observe, twirl around, and have at his disposal the planet that he inhabited but could not otherwise see as a whole. The globe stands in for the unfathomable Earth-as-a-whole, even as it offers a reduced, manageable, and readable model of it.22 This is the promise— as well as the hubris— of this master object of scientific and pedagogic modernity whose Indian travels and (mis)adventures I narrate in this book. As I do so, I follow historian Giorgio Riello’s call to connect artifacts to narratives and concepts.23 The chapters that follow are accordingly organized around four inaugural “global” encounters. Each reveals a new contour, a different curve, or a novel moment in the terrestrial globe’s subcontinental peregrinations, as that part of the world itself came to be increasingly incorporated into a globalizing British Empire, and as a European preoccupation with terrestrial sphericity becomes an Indian concern, reflected as well in the very name of the new discipline of geography in the region’s languages: bhugol, “Earth sphere.” In adopting this strategy of connecting objects and narratives, I have also been encouraged by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s invitation to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through an analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the thingsin-motion that illuminate their human and social context.24

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Accordingly, the first of the thingly encounters with the terrestrial globe that I examine in chapter 2 takes me to July 1794 when an exiled teenage prince in southern India was presented with one by an East India Company (EIC) official in the colonial metropolis of Madras. On the one hand, I use this encounter to explore royal entanglements with this proxy for our planet, as these transpire in a period when different parts of India were progressively coming under the dominion of the Company State, hollowing out native crowns and sovereignties. On the other, this encounter also allows me to chart terrestrial lessons delivered in schoolrooms across nineteenth-century Madras Presidency, as propagated by a new fervent figure that I characterize as “cartographic evangelist,” an enthusiastic emissary of the new useful knowledge centered on atlases, maps, and globes whose mastery was deemed critical to the improvement, even salvation, of the native, and in whose capacity to redeem the world there was confidence, indeed certitude. My next global encounter transports me to northern India, circa 1815, and to a small outpost of colonial progress near Delhi called Meerut where a devout Christian woman presents a globe— a makeshift “ball of silk,” fashioned out of some cloth at hand— to a young Brahman plagued by doubt about his ancestral beliefs. The result of this brief but consequential transaction was transformative, as the Brahman abandons his inherited faith and even undergoes baptism, subsequently becoming a teacher of terrestrial lessons to a new generation of native pupils in mission schools. While this encounter that I explore in some detail in chapter 3 allows me to deepen my analysis of the role of the Protestant missionary in cartographic evangelism that I began in chapter 2, I also use this story to track the advance of the terrestrial globe in pedagogic contexts across northern India, focusing especially on the decades following 1815 when colonial rule both expanded and consolidated itself in this part of the subcontinent that was formerly the heartland of the vast Mughal Empire. As I do this, I bring to the fore an enigmatic entity I have named “the global pandit,” an intellectual belonging to a formidable caste which had the most at stake— apparently— in upholding the ancestral and the antiquated and yet without whose consent and participation the new Empire of Geography could not take root, as we will see. Anchoring chapter 4 is an exceptionally lovely photograph dated to 1873, which focuses in on a schoolroom in Bombay and shows a group of girls seated around a handsome terrestrial globe, one of them lightly touching it (see cover of book). The chapter foregrounds the circumstances for the creation of this photograph, and others like it, to explore the unfolding of pedagogic modernity across schoolrooms in western India and Bombay Presidency. At the same time, I also analyze how terrestrial lessons produced gendered governable sub-

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jects across Britain’s Indian realm, in a consequential period leading up to 1882– 83 when a major review of colonial education policies was undertaken. The terrestrial globe, I have noted, circulated in early modern Europe as a sign of an increasing masculine preoccupation with the spherical world whose surface we inhabit, and of a desire to manage and dominate it. Interestingly, though, in Europe and its far-flung colonies by the nineteenth century, its pedagogical dissemination is largely gender-neutral, with women and men, girls and boys sought to be brought within its ambit. Gender and geography are thus the key concerns of this chapter. The final global encounter I analyze is a fictional moment as it appears in a 1956 Bengali-language film, directed by one of independent India’s most famous creative spirits. It is based upon a narrative set in late colonial Bengal that has been likened to a bildungsroman, “a novel of education/formation” that charts the struggles “that make up the actual and sometimes messy work of forging a modern consciousness.”25 The movie has been much analyzed in the scholarly literature, but virtually no one has attended to the luminous part played by the humble school globe in the magical worlding of an adolescent boy as he grows into manhood and modernity. In chapter 5, I draw upon this story to explore the terrestrial lessons taught across the nineteenth century into the twentieth in Bengal, a region of India that has often stood in for all of colonial India in historical scholarship. Does the itinerary of the terrestrial globe display a particular precociousness in the Bengali modern? That, too, is one of my questions. As a child growing up in India, like millions of others, I, too, followed with utter fascination NASA’s space explorations and especially the Apollo missions to the moon. As the last of the Apollo rockets left Earth’s orbit on December 7, 1972, Commander Eugene Cernan radioed back to base in Houston, “I know we are not the first to discover this, but we would like to confirm . . . that the world is round.” Houston responded, “That is a good data point.” A little over a decade later, when the first Indian astronaut went into orbit on April 3, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi reportedly asked Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma what India looked like from space, and he responded with words made memorable by the poet Muhammad Iqbal (ironically one of the founding fathers of Pakistan): “Saare jahan se achcha Hindustan hamara,” “Of all places on Earth, India is the best.”26 This, too, is a “good data point” for this study about the pedagogic formation of planetary consciousness that I have undertaken three decades later in which I track the colonial history of the conquest of our world as a terrestrial globe in order to understand how my fellow Indians have been worlded as subjects of the spherical home that we call Earth.

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CHAPTER ONE

IN PURSUIT OF A GLOBAL THING

There is a story to tell every time people and objects meet.1

An air of melancholy seems to hang over the scholarship on the terrestrial globe as an object that was once consequential, but no more. Thus, Peter van der Krogt, one of the foremost scholars on the European history of the artifact, ends his meticulous analysis of Dutch globe production from its very beginning in the sixteenth century into our time with the following account of globe use in the Netherlands in 1978: In many geography classrooms, the beginning of a new school year often brings with it the following scene: the teacher climbs on a wobbly chair, carefully takes down the globe from the shelf and blows off a layer of dust, much to the amusement of the students (and tells his yearly joke: these are the snow storms at the North Pole). He then begins to explain parallels and meridians to the diligent seven and eight year-olds; after two or three lessons

1

when he thinks he has succeeded, the globe disappears again to its elevated position until the following year.2

The literary scholar Jerry Brotton might well argue that this anecdote is yet another sign of “the waning of the image of the terrestrial globe under the sign of [contemporary] globalism.” Formerly an artifact of acute distinction— the prerogative of monarchs and ministers, the possession of which suggested mastery of the world; often taking the pride of place in gentlemen’s studies and libraries in genteel homes in Europe; and a gift worthy of emperors elsewhere— the terrestrial globe, frequently dusty and scratched, sometimes even dented and damaged, seems no longer a “socially affective object.”3 It seems to have spent its force, rarely able to summon up the excitement or interest that it elicited in former times. Today, it undoubtedly has a diminished role in our lives, a residual educational tool, possibly even a toy, to be recalled (albeit not without affection) by adults as something that they had once enjoyed when they were kids. Not surprisingly, as scholar of cartography Elly Dekker laments, “Too many historians have regarded the globe as if it were a piece of furniture and, even if they fancy a rare and antique example to adorn their study, they hardly see it as an object for research.”4 Yet, as the architectural historian and critic Siegfried Giedion reminded his peers, “for the historian, there are no banal things.” Taking heart from this proposition, and from his exhortation to seek out “the unworn eyes of contemporaries” to whom things which are now commonplace “once appeared marvelous or frightening,” I have self-consciously instated— and as a historian who “does not take anything for granted”— the terrestrial globe, this apparently commonplace object, as the chief protagonist of this book.5 Yet, as I follow its itineraries across the subcontinent, I am up against the fact that until recently most historians “have survived, even thrived, during the last two centuries with little or no engagement with objects. In many ways, it appears that historians do not feel at ease when dealing with material things.” 6 As a professional class, we are, it seems, generally “suspicious of things,” our stockin-trade words and narratives.7 Even with few precedents in my home discipline of modern (South Asian) history,8 however, the timing is just right for cultivating “an ease” with material things, dropping our customary “suspicion,” and for taking “a fresh look at the world around us— or rather, at the innumerable objects among which we find ourselves, perpetually withdrawing from our grasp, and yet ever bursting forth in surprising new configurations.”9 There is a history to be learned from things, as there is a history of things, even a thing-driven history. It is also

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about time we acknowledged that “even when we have shaped things into tools, and thereby constrained them to serve our own purposes, they still have independent lives of their own.”10 As things— and indeed other nonhuman entities— enter into partnership with us, we demand participation from them, and “we ask them to be our witnesses and accomplices.”11 Yet, they do so often with an element of “surprise” to them that exceeds our ability to control and manage them.12 In coming to this recognition about the liveliness— but also the recalcitrance— of objects, I have been aided by a cluster of recent disciplinary interventions that have succeeded in pulling away from a subject-centered ontology toward the recognition that “things, too, can be actors, and mingle with us in our everyday life-worlds and publics . . . and as we dwell together with them we become vulnerable to them, and they to us.”13 From philosopher of science Bruno Latour, I have learned to think of the globe-object as an actant, “a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.”14 With political theorist Jane Bennett, I see the school globe— the humblest iteration of this once-wondrous object— pulsating with a “vital materiality,” and have been persuaded to follow “the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power,” as it leaves an elusive trail in the vast archives of empire.15 Learning from scholars who have contributed to the emergent subgenre of “Thing Theory,” I too pay attention to the form of the globe and its sheer materiality, even as I consider moments when it eludes my attempt to “grasp” it in the archives I have inherited or sought out.16 In doing so, I resist the all-tooquick translation of the object, when I encounter it, into sign. Instead, when and where I can, I take account of the sheer materiality of the globe as a palpable and implacable textural presence in the world(s) that it creates as it does its work, especially in the schoolroom and in the company of the learning child.17 Most of all, though, my pursuit of the terrestrial globe is undertaken as a postcolonial historian, seeking to write a different history of and for this object that as scholars we think we know all too well. For, although the very form of the object ought to have fostered a truly “global” knowledge about it, alas, this has been not the case with the current scholarship focused as it is on EuroAmerica. My task, therefore, is to begin pluralizing the history and politics of this icon of European modernity and science, as it leaves its putative originary home in the metropole and goes elsewhere, in this case, to the Indian subcontinent. In doing so, I attempt to also make strange the familiar and the ubiquitous, in order to understand the lessons there are to learn from the (European) conquest of the world as globe.

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· 3

Not least of the important lessons I have learned in following the elusive scent of my thingly protagonist is that for much of its career until the nineteenth century when advances in lithography enabled its mass production, the terrestrial globe was in fact quite a vulnerable object, its material fragility recognized almost from the very beginning of its early modern invention.18 Thus the Dutch cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512−94), the foremost globe maker of his time, complained about the difficulties he faced in shipping to customers all over Europe the artifacts that he so carefully and laboriously crafted, with each piece having to be individually padded with straw in specially made containers.19 As working instruments, all but the most expensive of globes were meant to be not merely seen and apprehended from afar— as is the case today, when many have been turned into collectors’ items and museum artifacts, and placed under lock and key and behind glass— but also to be touched, and turned around and about. Repeated handling, however, meant that if the artifact survived at all, it is frequently worn out, its parts and accessories frequently thrown askew, as the 1580 will of the Spanish mathematician and cartographer Juan Gesio suggests.20 Its inherent vulnerability increased exponentially when the object was shipped abroad, especially to the tropics. Although all manner of materials— gold, silver, brass, glass, even ivory— were used to produce them, globes were most often made of papier-mâché or wooden shells, which were not infrequently smashed in the long sea voyages over to places like India, the printed gores on their surface torn or smudged, not to mention the inclement weather of the subcontinent that took its toll after their arrival. Not surprisingly, few globes from early modern and colonial India have survived into our times as material objects, including those that arrived from Europe, which were the majority into the twentieth century. So, even as I make a plea for understanding the materiality of the terrestrial globe as pedagogical object, ironically, I can study its Indian travels largely through discourse and representation, words and images, the thing as such rarely if ever encountered.

THE INDIAN TR AVAILS OF A WORLDLY OBJECT

So it is with pleasure that I flag here the instances when the pursuit of this non-human thing has led me to three material survivors, which have managed somehow to elude the passage of time, use, and neglect to linger on in our midst, albeit poorly documented, underappreciated, and barely studied. The first of these hardy survivors hails me from Jaipur in northwestern India where in the early eighteenth century, an astronomer-king, on whom I will

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fiG. 1. 1. Wooden terrestrial globe on stand, ca. 1730s. Jantar Mantar Observatory, Jaipur. Photograph courtesy of Rudolf Schmidt Archives, Vienna.

have more to say in the following section, likely commissioned it (see fig. 1.1). Measuring about thirty-eight centimeters in diameter, it was fashioned out of wood, on which a layer of paint and varnish was applied by hand, and seated on a four-legged wooden stand with cross beams. The wooden horizon does not have any markings, and if there were meridian rings once upon a time,

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these have not survived. The oceans are painted a grayish-green, landmasses in brown, and Tasmania is still connected to Australia, as it was believed in the eighteenth century.21 The equator, the tropics of Cancer and Capricon, and the elliptic are painted in alternating orange and black. Most interestingly, key landmarks on the globe are labeled in Rajasthani Hindi in Nagari script.22 The late Rudolf Schmidt, the Vienna-based founder of the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes, first reported this globe in 1972, and wrote of it to the American geographer Joseph Schwartzberg on September 21, 1989: In 1972, on a business tour to India, I paid [a] visit to the Jaipur Observatory. In one of the big instruments-building, a guardian— after receiving a tip and under a seal of secrecy— opened a green paint door in the building and carried out of a closet two globes: one of the usual brass celestial globes to which I did not pay much attention but another [a] terrestrial globe. . . . The guardian did not allow me to take many fotos nor I have a camera for close up shots, so all I can send you is this one . . . (after the guardian wiping the dust from the globe’s surface by means of his sleeve of his jacket!!!) To my memory the globe diameter [was] 30 cm ca., having inscriptions in Sanskrit letters showed a cartography of early eighteenth century which is corresponding to the time of the construction of Jaipur city. My first idea was the influence of French cartographers— de l’Isle for example.23

By the time Schmidt encountered it, the object— which must have been truly singular and unusual to its beholders in its own time— wore a totally forlorn air, its paint dull and chipped off, its wooden stand dusty and cracked, the writing on its surface difficult to read. Of the same vintage as many European globes which are lovingly preserved and displayed in the best of museums of the West, the Jaipur artifact has had a very different fate indeed, locked away in a cupboard, out of sight, out of mind. The lure of the object leads me next to the bowels of one such great museum in the heart of the former British Empire, where, in the summer of 2014, I spent some time with another terrestrial globe that had been produced in India, circa 1860 (see fig. 1.2). It is not entirely clear how and through what routes this object reached London where, in 1988, the London Science Museum in South Kensington acquired it from an antique dealer David Weston Limited.24 That great institution has never put the object on display, and today it resides in its large storage facility at Blythe House in West Kensington. Unlike the wooden Jaipur globe, the London globe is made of brass, which once must have had a high polish (although today it is a tarnished dark brown). With a diameter of

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fiG. 1.2. Brass terrestrial globe on wooden stand, ca. 1860s. London Science Museum, 1988– 95. Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.

48 cm, it is comparable to many such large globes that some European mapmakers were producing at this time. At one point, the object had obviously been suspended from a two-legged wooden stand— which the Museum still owns, albeit in a condition today that can no longer support its weight— and weighs twenty-two kilograms.25 In contrast to the typical modern terrestrial

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globe, there are no lines drawn on its highly polished surface, the join of the two hemispheres serving as the equator (labeled vishwatrekha). There is no horizon ring, and even the meridian ring that is strung between the two poles has no markings. The map drawn on the surface shows all five continents, and Antarctica, although the interior of Africa is largely blank, as would be true on most maps from this period.26 Most distinctively, the surface of the globe is covered with legends and markings, with attention especially to rivers and mountains, which are distinctively marked. India is identified as “Hindustan,” with some idiosyncratic references (for example, the small town of Nagor is the most distinctive place on the Coromandel coast, “Bombay” has been etched upside down, and Madras and Calcutta, the other great colonial metropolises, are not distinguishable among the welter of names and phrases). Along with names of places, rivers, oceans, and mountain systems, the most distinctive aspect is the confluence of demographic and geographic data, the longest inscription inscribed in a north-south direction in an area identified as the North Atlantic (“Uttar Atlantic Mahasagar”): Of the area of dry land on the surface of this earth, rather more than two and three quarter parts out of ten are of water, in other words if the surface of the earth were divided into 1000 equal parts, there would be 266 parts of dry land and 734 parts of water. The area of the dry land over all the earth is 52100000 miles, and an estimated 1110000000 people live on it; one book book says 80 crore, one 90 crore, one 100 krore, but those are old books. The circumference of the whole world is 25020 miles; one mile is 3520 cubits [hāth]. The area of England is 50900, which means that England could be divided into portions a mile long and the same in width.27

While the surface of the globe is covered, literally, with numerous such inscriptions and data, what is not mentioned anywhere is the name of the maker or the place and date of its making. The language of the globe is Hindi (albeit with idiosyncratic spellings) in the Devanagari script, so one can conclude that the globe was made somewhere in northern India, perhaps even Rajasthan (given the concentration and accuracy of place names from that part of the subcontinent). From its size and makeup, it is also possible to say that it was not a cheap object, and that it required expertise in working with brass, and obviously the patronage of someone who was willing to pay for it. In contrast to the brass London globe, quite possibly a vanity project, probably commissioned by an elite man in colonial India to display his newly ac-

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quired modern geographic and demographic knowledge, is my third example, today part of the private collection of the late Rudolf Schmidt in Vienna (see fig. 1.3).28 Its origins are truly humble in an everyday household comestible, the common pumpkin! The maker of the globe hollowed out one of these vegetables, allowed its outer skin to harden, covered it with paper, painted on it with a protective finish (which is partially flaked off ), and mounted it on a singlelegged turned wooden stand with red lacquer finish.29 The globe, whose diameter measures about fifteen centimeters, has no horizon ring, and even the meridian ring is not really functional, but in contrast to the London globe— whose pedagogical use is very doubtful— it was clearly intended for schoolroom use, the familiar cartographic grid laid out neatly on its surface. This use is also confirmed by a cartouche on the globe (see fig. 1.4). From the cartouche we learn that its maker’s name was Ayodhya Prasad Chauve Mastar, the last word obviously a reference to the fact that he was a schoolmaster, and likely, a geography teacher. We also learn that Chauve (or more correctly, Chaube) worked in the Government Cantonment School in Sagar, a town in Central India and the scene of some interesting global encounters, which I recount in chapter 3. Chaube also identifies the object in Hindi, simply, as prthvika glov— literally, “Earth globe”— using the English word “globe” instead of the linguistically more precise bhugol. The map in Hindi drawn on the globe is contemporaneous with late nineteenth-century cartographic representations of the world’s landmasses and oceans, although it is not the most accurate of renderings. Several oceanic shipping routes are delineated, and the Suez Canal, an engineering wonder of its time, is clearly identified. The fact that a humble school globe— especially one fashioned by a smalltown school teacher in the later nineteenth century out of dried pumpkin shell!— has survived into our time is nothing short of a miracle. Schmidt acquired this globe from a Dutch dealer, Paul Peters of Iris Globes, who in turn purchased it in 1994 in London.30 As I note later, similar makeshift objects were made by schoolmasters across British India— in the absence of the real thing, which was frequently the case— to demonstrate to their wards the gatekeeping lesson of terrestrial sphericity. Although most disappeared as material objects, a handful of such expedient globes traveled all the way to the West, and were displayed for a few weeks in London in the summer of 1871 in the London International Exhibition. Responding to an invitation from Her Majesty’s Commissioners who signaled their intention to showcase progress in education at home and abroad in the exhibition, the Government of India, on the express desire of the Viceroy, decided to tout its achievements in this field,

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fiG. 1.3. Pumpkin-shell terrestrial globe on wooden stand, late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Made by Ayodhya Prasad Chauve, Sagar. Photograph courtesy of Rudolf Schmidt Archives, Vienna.

fiG. 1.4. Cartouche on pumpkin-shell terrestrial globe on wooden stand, late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Made by Ayodhya Prasad Chauve, Sagar.

although it will probably be at once admitted that India, even in those Provinces where education is most advanced, is not capable of competing with European countries in any of the means and appliances of instruction . . . enumerated. Our educational machinery is for the most part supplied from England, or at best is a rude imitation of European models; and if our object were to compete with other countries and to offer models intended for adoption elsewhere, our show would be very poor.

In many places, India’s colonial bureaucrats conceded that “the school house is an open shed. There are no maps, forms, chairs, tables, desks or globes or the usual apparatus of a school; or, if any they are of the very rudest possible description. A round earthen pot serves for a globe.”31 Undaunted though by the realization that their “show would be very poor,” the Local Committees that were quickly constituted across British India to meet the government’s order enthusiastically went about gathering evidence that proved the ingenuity of the natives in this regard, and the following objects were proudly shipped off to London:

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Large terrestrial globe, in Marathee. Made by Wanum Trimbuk, Head Master of the Vernacular School at Akola, Berar. Bombay Committee. Small globe, in Bengalee. Made of cow dung, and costing 1s 6d. Used in the Circle School of Shologur, Dacca. Bengal Committee. Small globe. Made of cocoa nut, and costing 1s 6d. Rev. J. Long. Small globe, in Hindustanee. Made of wood. By the son of a carpenter. Government of Oude. Small globe, in Hindee. Made of pasteboard. By schoolboy of Alyghur. N.W. Provinces Committee. Small globe. On stand. By student of Normal School, Meerut. N. W. Provinces Committee. Globe. Made of paper.32

Two years later, a couple of these humble objects— the globe made out of cocoanut shell, and the Marathi globe made by the Berar schoolmaster— crossed the Atlantic again, and were put on display at the Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873, alongside other locally produced globes and maps from different parts of India.33 Once so displayed, these objects were returned to London to become part of the collection of the India Museum from where, in 1879, they were transferred to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum.34 To the best of my knowledge, they were never again put on public display, and at some point after 1909, disappeared from the Museum’s storage facility for reasons not specified in the records. In 1937, they were declared “missing,” and ordered to be “written off,” and were permanently obliterated.35 In the face of loss of these objects— made once upon a time with excitement and curiosity by newly-worlded men in a distant colony, deemed important enough to be displayed in international venues, but yet ultimately, destroyed after decades of neglect and oversight— a melancholic pall does hang over me as well as I write this book. Nonetheless, their very loss also obliges me to heed their call as discursive and pictorial presences, and follow this call where it leads me, taking me briefly first to early modern Europe where the terrestrial globe was first wrought as an object of fancy and learning.

A PEDAGOGIC PROXY FOR OUR PLANET

The utility, the enjoyment and the pleasure of the mounted globe, which is composed with such skill, are hard to believe, if one has not tasted the sweetness of the experience. For, certainly this is the only one of all instruments

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whose frequent usage delights astronomers, leads geographers, confirms historians, enriches and improved legists [sic], is admired by grammarians, guides pilots, in short, aside from its beauty, its form is indescribably useful and necessary for everyone.

So wrote physician, mathematician, and globe maker Gemma Frisius (1508– 1555), in an early Latin manual that described in 1553 the construction and use of the terrestrial globe.36 The Dutchman’s sentiments at this point were surely aspirational for despite Frisius’s assertion that the terrestrial globe was “indescribably useful and necessary for everyone,” for much of the sixteenth century, its owners in Europe were primarily “heads of state and diplomats who were concerned with the new balance of power after the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494); the Church, which heeded the call to bring Christianity to the new areas; and tradesmen, who wanted to increase their commerce.”37 Over the course of the next century, as Western Europe increasingly looked outward in the so-called age of discovery, others joined this select group as the globe widened and quickened its travels: explorers, navigators, astronomers, burghers, and the occasional scholar. That it remained very much an object of symbolic prestige and elite privilege, is confirmed by numerous artworks of the period— such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533)— in which adult men take pride in offering calculated displays of themselves in its company.38 With the possible exception of Elizabeth I of England, even elite women rarely appeared in the globe’s company until the eighteenth century.39 Nor did the common man and woman, or the learning child. From the time it was first fashioned in classical antiquity, and especially after it resurfaced in the sixteenth century in Europe as an early modern object that was useful but also offered enjoyment and pleasure (to recall Frisius), the terrestrial globe has been a repository of knowledge regarding the physical form of our Earth, and alongside its celestial companion, of Earth’s place in the Universe. It has therefore always served as a pedagogic proxy for our planet, placing the unfathomable in our grasp.40 Its role as a teaching aid and instructional apparatus, however, became most manifest from the eighteenth century in the so-called Age of the Enlightenment at a time when our Earth became “the subject of scientific study as never before,” as Charles Withers notes. The “ardor” of the age was to discover everything there was to know about it: its shape and size, its antiquity, its features, its place in the universe, even the role of God, if any, in its creation and maintenance. “The task was huge, the object seemingly without order.” Nevertheless, it was a project pursued diligently and with enthusiasm by the greatest minds of the age across Western and Central Europe, for “geographical knowledge was central to how the world came

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to understand itself in the Enlightenment— to how, indeed, the earth came to be known as a world.”41 Fortified thus by this Enlightenment ardor, the globe appeared seemingly everywhere, in letters and narratives, but also in artwork, in which astronomers, scientists, and geographers are shown working with or posing with them and other cartographic instruments. Prior to the Enlightenment, even as its study came to be progressively incorporated into the curricula of early modern universities across Europe, the terrestrial globe remained largely an adult instrument. The image of the learning child whose attention is focused on the object came to the fore largely in the eighteenth century, at first limited to young boys obviously belonging to royal, elite, and genteel families, and then, progressively, as the great project of educating the masses began to trickle down the social ladder, the generic pupil seated in a modern classroom. We get some intimations of this fundamental shift of focus in two texts from the seventeenth century, the first, the biography of Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596– 1687), which shows us how fathers and sons could bond around the study of this spherical object: Constantine and Christian, now having adequate control of the Latin language, began to wish to use the same and [to learn] history; to which end, desiring to lead them along the right path, I took for them and read aloud the Introductionem Cluverij so that they could learn geography in broad terms. . . . I instructed the children in an easy way in the general principles of Spherical Circles, and their use, so that they examined and studied the terrestrial globe every day, calculating the moment of sunrise and sunset at various times of the year, and the like. Next there was a general and more particular division of the world. . . . To strengthen them more and more in this area, I hung up the four parts of the world by Willem Blaeu in my front room, where they often played, so that they would gain a firm idea in their minds of the shape of the world and its parts.42

These two young boys, so guided on “the right path” through a daily study of the terrestrial globe with their father when they were ten- and eleven-yearolds, went on to become among the most illustrious men of their times, the poet Constantijn Huygens, Jr. (1628– 97), and the mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629– 95). Across the North Sea, and toward the later part of the century in which these young men were so worlded, the English philosopher John Locke (1632– 1704) wrote in 1693, “I now live in the House with a Child whom his Mother has so well instructed this Way in Geography,

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that he knew the Limits of the four Parts of the World, could readily point, being ask’d, to any Country upon the Globe, or any County in the Map of England; knew all the great Rivers, Promontories, Straits and Bays in the World, and could find the Longitude and Latitude of any Place, before he was six Years old.”43 Although it would be a while before the mother became the principal instructor for the child in the average British home, as she apparently was in Locke’s, nevertheless, over the course of the eighteenth century, a growing number of oil paintings and watercolors, engravings, and pen-and-ink illustrations show the young student absorbed in acts of learning maps, atlases, and the terrestrial globe often at hand, as I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. Across the Atlantic in the United States as well, “the new child” surfaced in an emergent pedagogical landscape that saw in the teaching of terrestrial lessons one of the fundamental ways in which a new nation could be rendered literate.44 By the nineteenth century, the child in the classroom surrounded by maps, atlases, and globes becomes a staple of pedagogic culture in both Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, we have virtually no knowledge of such matters for other parts of the world, hence also my concern in this book with asking the question— What happens to the terrestrial globe when it goes elsewhere?— and providing a suite of responses from colonial India.45 From almost the very start of its modern career, the terrestrial globe— and its companion until the nineteenth century, the celestial— had to be explained, and was invariably accompanied by the equivalent of a user manual (at first in Latin, and then increasingly in other European languages), which was quite frequently also furnished with illustrations that introduced its various parts and components.46 As Joseph Moxon (1627– 91), globe maker and author of one such manual published in 1674 in English put it, “The Globes is the first Study a Learner ought to undertake, for without a competent apprehension of them he will not be able to understand any author either in Astronomy, Astrology, Navigation or Trigonometry.”47 As the teaching of Earth’s physical form to the learning child became the object’s primary function from the eighteenth century, the task once performed by such learned manuals— which had been largely mathematical and technical— was delegated to the elementary geography schoolbook. The latter’s opening chapters made Earth legible by offering preliminary terrestrial lessons: its spherical shape, its diurnal motion on its own axis and annual motion around the sun, the phenomenon of eclipses, and so on. The importance of such lessons is also manifest in the command to the child to memorize these facts, and in the instruction to teachers to test their pupils on their mastery of such

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facts. Often, such lessons took the form of the question-and-answer format, as especially illustrated by a subgenre called “geographical catechism”— also introduced into classrooms in colonial India— that mimicked an older Christian pedagogy now drafted into the service of the teaching as well of the natural and physical sciences. With its roots in the eighteenth century, the geographical catechism was a subgenre that developed as primary education slowly expanded in the Englishspeaking world in the nineteenth century, popularized especially by entrepreneurial writer-publishers like William Pinnock (1782– 1843). In his discussion of the genre in early nineteenth-century United States, Martin Brückner notes that the catechism’s question-and-answer format rehearsed an established formal method of knowledge acquisition in which the interrogatory form was preferred for the young. It encouraged the pursuit of worldly knowledge by supplementing or substituting biblical history with terrestrial lessons. Most importantly, Brückner argues that the catechism’s exhortation to commit geographical lessons to memory was used at a time when visual aids, such as globes, maps, and pictures, were not readily available in the classroom. Instead, the catechism produced what he calls an “inherently antivisual memory,” as geographical truths and names were learned through acts of verbal repetition.48 Even more prolific than the geographical catechism was another pedagogic genre called “the use of the globes,” also widely used in colonial Indian classrooms, as we will see.49 In England, since the time of Milton, but especially from the eighteenth century, books bearing the title “the use of the globes” (or a variation) were meant as a discursive aid to the actual artifacts that were presumed to be in the classroom, giving guidance to the teacher (and the pupil) on how to study them. An early example of this genre authored by Thomas Wright defines the terrestrial globe as “an artificial, spherical Body . . . made to represent the Disposition of Land and Water upon the Earth we inhabit.”50 The genre itself was defined by another author, Thomas Molineux— whose book was read in classrooms in distant India, as we will see— as “the art of performing on [the globes] a variety of curious and interesting Problems both Geographical and Astronomical.”51 Students were expected to hold the globes in their hands, as well as move their various parts— such as the brazen meridian, the hour circle, the quadrant, and the horizon— in order to solve astronomical and geographical “problems” which varied in number from a handful to several scores. In the absence of the actual object in the schoolroom— frequently the case in most colonial schools in India well into the twentieth century— illustrations of the terrestrial globe in such works introduced the learning child to the fundamental lessons of Earth’s form and disposition.

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The work of mathematician and geographer Thomas Keith (1759– 1824) in this regard was especially popular, also in British India. First published in 1805 in London (and going into multiple editions until 1826), the title page of Keith’s book gives us a sense of the range of topics that books in this genre typically covered: A New Treatise on the Use of the Globes, or a Philosophical View of the Earth and Heavens, etc, Comprehending, an account of the figure, magnitude, and motion of the earth; the natural changes of its surface, by floods, earthquakes, etc., together with the elementary principles of meteorology, and astronomy, the theory of the tides, etc., Preceded by an extensive Selection of astronomical, and other Definitions; and illustrated by a great variety of problems, questions for the examination of the student, etc. etc. Designed for the instruction of youth.

The book began by noting, “Amongst the various branches of science studied in our academies and places of public education, there are few of greater importance than that of the Use of the Globes.” Keith was not a professional missionary: indeed, he explicitly identifies himself in the preface to his work as “a man of science.” Nonetheless, like many a peer and not unlike the evangelizing missionary, he too suggested that without knowledge of our Earth and other celestial bodies, “our ideas of the power and wisdom of the Creator would be greatly circumscribed and confined.” There were also purely pragmatic reasons for instruction in the use of the globes, for “without some acquaintance with the different tracts of land, the oceans, seas, etc. on the terrestrial globe, no intercourse could be carried on with the inhabitants of distant regions; and consequently, their manners, customs, etc. would be totally unknown to us.”52 The genre thus facilitated worlding through the logic of cartographic reason, and spurred the consolidation of modern planetary consciousness. Indeed, it exemplifies most systematically the ideological work of geography as the paradigmatic Enlightenment knowledge formation that concerned itself with Earth as a wholly knowable and legible thing. As the range of topics referred to in the very title page of Keith’s treatise exemplifies, the use of the globes genre ordered our planet “with a place for everything, and everything in its place.”53 Many of the exercises and problems enumerated in the work to be performed on the terrestrial globe— sixty-four of them in Keith’s 1805 edition— were designed precisely to enable the student to locate places on Earth’s spherical surface, especially in relationship to the learning subject. “Merely twirling the globe around” was not sufficient in Keith’s opinion, without understanding the

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principles and problems that the bulk of his book incorporated “to make a lasting impression on the student’s memory.”54 These problems ranged from relatively simple ones— such as locating the latitude and longitude of any given place, and the distance between places— to complex questions such as the determination of future eclipses. The genre thus transformed Earth as such into a mathematically knowable place, and attempted to convince the European student— and his colonial Indian counterpart— that such knowledge was infinitely superior to other forms of knowing the inhabited world and dwelling on/in it. All such works, which entered the nineteenth-century classroom through the emergent school subjects of geography and astronomy, ushered in Modern Earth, and its counterpart, Modern Sky.55 Unambiguously, Modern Earth is spherical, and exists in space without props of any sort. Modern Earth is also heliocentric, turning diurnally on its own axis and moving annually around the sun, which movements themselves cause those phenomenal occurrences that (once) frightened the non-modern (and relatedly, the native), namely, lunar and solar eclipses.56 Not least, Modern Earth is objectified as the terrestrial globe and placed at the disposal of the discerning subject— and of the learning child who was expected to study it and master its shape and contours as a mandatory part of schooling. Indeed, by the nineteenth century, the terrestrial globe’s primary function had largely narrowed down to the educational, and its principal context for use and display was increasingly the schoolroom, the singular work of art and sign of masculine mastery of the early modern centuries giving way to the massproduced pedagogic object for the young learner. Correspondingly, the cost of its production went down, as map publishers began producing these objects increasingly for a broadening educational market, both at home and overseas. Although by the early twentieth century, the school globe was no longer used for “problem solving” various terrestrial and celestial matters as exemplified in the use of the globes genre, its core function— that of teaching the fundamental, indeed gatekeeping, lesson of terrestrial sphericity— has remained. Indeed, this may well be its only critical pedagogic use today, with a secondary use for the child to learn where he or she is located on this spinning ball that we call Earth. Accordingly, even though the contours of the maps on globes have changed over the last four hundred years, not to mention boundaries of various countries, the form of the instrument has remained virtually unchanged, also perpetuating the (mis)conception that our Earth is a perfect sphere, when, from the early eighteenth century, scientists have known otherwise.57 Modern Earth is unequivocally spherical and heliocentric. It was also Eu-

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rocentric in the manner in which it was described and presented in the first few centuries since its early modern reappearance, which coincided with the imperial take over of the planet for which it served as pedagogical proxy. The conceit of the modern terrestrial globe is that it seemingly privileges no specific point on our planet’s surface, “spreading a non-hierarchic net across the sphere.” The dispassionate and disenchanted goal of the science of cartography in this regard is to generate “uniform global space.”58 Yet, this master object of pedagogic modernity joined an array of devices and strategies by which an epistemological and cognitive takeover of the world by other means was conducted, alongside the real conquest of lands and peoples by the force of European arms. Its “global” form might well militate against any formal privileging of one part over another, but the mathematization of its surface (especially after the invention of the Mercator projection in 1569), the use of particular colors, the visibility accorded to some features over others, helped to reinstate a Europecentered view of the world and our Earth in ways large and small that this book details, from the perspective of one colonized place. To rescue the object from the dominant Eurocentric ways in which it circulated, and has largely been written about in the scholarly literature, is also therefore one of the charges of this project. In order to do this, I now turn to its passage to and its itineraries in one part of the geo-coded world outside Europe, to begin writing a different history for this most worldly of objects.

COURTLY LANDINGS IN EARLY MODERN INDIA

The primary focus of my book is on the circulation of the terrestrial globe as a pedagogical object within the context of the spread of public instruction in nineteenth-century British India. Nonetheless, it is important to note that it arrived in the subcontinent— as representation and as a material thing— much earlier and at a time when its primary audience was not the young learner but sovereigns and other elite men. At the start of its Indian career, thus, the trajectory of the terrestrial globe in the colony rehearses the history of the object in the metropole. With the establishment in the early sixteenth century of the Estado da Índia, the coastal areas of the subcontinent were witness to the increasing presence of personnel associated with the Portuguese Empire— and of Catholic ritual objects and imagery, such as God the Father and Salvator Mundi holding an earthly globe. Subsequent to the visit of the first Jesuits to the capital of the vast Mughal Empire in 1580, such imagery also entered the imperial atelier

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where scholars have noted their proliferation in the works of royal artists from the closing years of the sixteenth century. Thus, a September 1608 letter by Jerónimo ( Jerome) Xavier (1549−1617) noted an image of “Christ Our Lord with the Globe of the World in His left hand” painted on one of the palace walls in Agra, presumably by a Mughal artist. In turn, Christmas decorations put up by the priests in the Mughal capital in 1610— and open to a curious public— included “an ape which squirted water from its eyes and mouth, and above it a bird which sang mysteriously . . . and a globe of the world supported on the backs of two elephants.”59 The latter event reminds us that the Jesuit priest scholar in early modern India was an agent not just for the dissemination of Christian theological knowledge and Catholic images, but also of European science, including geographical and cartographic knowledge, itself going through a tremendous period of change under the pressure of the so-called Copernican revolution, which these missionaries transmitted in varying ways to the new territories to which they migrated.60 Maps, globes, telescopes, and other such geographical and astronomical objects that early modern Jesuits carried with them to diverse parts of the world were all part of what Jacques Gernet has characterized as “an enterprise of seduction.”61 Not surprisingly— but rarely noted in the scholarship on early modern India— the very first gift that the first Jesuit Mission to the Mughal court offered to Emperor Akbar on its very first meeting with him in his capital on or around February 28, 1580, was a geographical book ( geographiae liber), quite possibly Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum, or, equally likely, a printed edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, possibly even Mercator’s 1578 prestigious edition of that work. Although we may never know the exact identity of the book that was presented, we do know that it included maps, about which Akbar later quizzed the visitors.62 If, indeed, the work presented was the Theatrum, or the Geographia in its Mercator edition, the emperor and members of his court would have seen printed representations of the terrestrial globe that adorned the magnificent title pages of these books.63 This would have likely been the first time that any of them had seen such a gridded and mapped representation of the whole Earth, for despite some stray hints about the existence of terrestrial globes in the Islamicate world in the distant past, such an artifact was neither produced nor circulated in Mughal India, or indeed anywhere else for that matter outside Western Europe at this time.64 So, we learn from a later Jesuit colleague’s recollection that Father Jerome was apparently esteemed by the emperor and his court for his knowledge of the sciences, especially philosophy, and “above all, mathematical astronomy . . . many prominent noblemen went to him merely in order to see his works which he made

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by a map of the world of a rotund shape, like a big globe, and sun-dials, and other mathematical figures.”65 Around the same time, and far away from the imperial Mughal court, in the coastal city of Calicut in southwestern India, another Jesuit priest scholar, the Neapolitan Jacome (or Giacomo) Fenicio (ca. 1558– 1632) took up residence around 1601 and was a frequent visitor to the court of the local ruler, the Samudri (aka “Zamorin” in European sources).66 His annual letter of 1602 reported a lengthy dispute with the Samudri’s chief priest on astronomical issues, and by 1603, he thought he had learned enough from the court’s Brahmans regarding their belief system to commence writing what would become an important early Jesuit critique— and a very powerful one at that— of their religion.67 In the course of such disputations, he also had an audience with the Zamorin, “who was very curious about his terrestrial and celestial globes. Fenicio fully explained these to him, and then had a discussion on astronomy and cosmology with the Brahmans, who told him about their extraordinary notions of the universe, the seven oceans, etc.”68 Reporting back on this discussion to his superiors in Rome, he wrote, They infer also that the earth is not round but flat, as it appears to the eye. And they are most firmly convinced that the earth is supported on the top of a bull’s horn, and when he grows tired he moves the earth from one horn to another, and from that movement and change arise the earthquakes. O, what a lot of errors on reason of a false first principle! . . . A certain Brahmin told me . . . there existed different opinions [on the fable of the bull supporting the earth]: some say that the earth rests upon the horn of a bull, while others (whose opinion is looked upon as a more probable one) say on the back of the cobra Ananta; and when I asked him, “Well, and upon what does the cobra Ananta support itself ?” he answered me: “On the back of a tortoise.” “And, pray, upon what does that tortoise rest?” He answered, “On the top of eight elephants.” “Well, and those eight elephants?” But then he smiled and told me not to ask him any more, as he did not know how to answer.69

This discussion over rivaling conceptions of the shape of Earth and its disposition in the universe apparently led to Fenicio holding forth to the Zamorin about the sins of Hindu idolatry. As we will see in the pages that follow, similar exchanges over rivaling “facts” on our planet’s form would be reported in conversations between European and native well into the twentieth century in British India. A few decades after Fenicio’s time in Calicut, in the neighboring Nayaka

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kingdom of Madurai— home to a Mission founded by the Italian savant Roberto Nobili (1577– 1656) in 1606— the French Jesuit scholar priest Jean Venantius Bouchet (1655– 1732) arrived to take up residence around 1689.70 Madurai was at that time presided over by Rani Mangammal (r. 1689– 1706), ruling as Regent with the help of her chief minister (or Dalavay) Narasappaiya on behalf of her teenage grandson, the future Vijayaranga Chokkanatha (r. 1706– 32).71 As recounted in a letter written to the French Jesuit Le Gobien on December 11, 1700, by Father Pierre Martin (who had recently arrived in Madurai), Bouchet had been confronted a few months earlier with a rebellion by his native catechists, an unexpected event that led the French priest to take the unusual step of appealing to the Nayaka overlords of the region for assistance.72 “Observing the Ceremonial of the Country,” he did not go empty-handed to meet the Dalavay (or Prince Regent, as he is called) but armed himself with some gifts to take along with him. In Martin’s words, What he had prepar’d were things of small Value, but they were New, and it was all he had. He therefore carry’d with him a Terrestrial Globe of about two Foot Diameter, on which the Names of all the Kingdoms, Provinces, Coasts, Seas, were Written in the Tamul Language; also an other Globe of Glass of about nine Inches Diameter; some multiplying, and some burning Glasses, several Curiosities of China, which had been sent him from the Coast of Coromandel; some Bracelets of Jet wrought with Silver; a Figure of a Cock neatly made up of Shells; and lastly common Looking-glasses, and such like other Curiosities which had either been given him, or he himself had Purchas’d.73

At the end of the seventeenth century, globes measuring two feet along the diameter were not all that common even in Europe, let alone in distant places like India. Even rarer, this particular globe was marked with Tamil words, possibly inscribed under the supervision of Bouchet himself who also is credited with one of the earliest maps of southern India.74 As such, this is quite likely the very first time that a European-style terrestrial globe with identifications in any Indian language was produced anywhere in the world.75 While we may never know from where Bouchet acquired the globe (if he did not fabricate it himself ), we learn from Martin’s account that the Prince Regent was sufficiently impressed with the object and with the other gifts that he received to conclude, “by the Presents he [Bouchet] brought, that ’twas not out of Necessity he had abandon’d his own Country.” All the same, preoccupied as he was with numerous matters including war, the Dalavay had no time

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to learn— even though he desired to do so— the “Figures traced with so much Art upon the Globe.” Instead, he ordered “the prime Astrologer of the Kingdom,” a Brahman like himself, to confer with Bouchet, so as “to be instructed in the Use of that wonderful machine.”76 These early modern accounts left behind in Jesuit letters anticipate later confrontations between European and native conceptions regarding the shape of Earth that further intensified as the terrestrial globe was introduced as a pedagogic object into colonial schoolrooms, as we will shortly see. That this confrontation was frequently conducted around the figure of the Brahman, the keeper of ancestral wisdom for a vast majority of the populace, is something I explore at greater length in chapter 3. From around 1727 into the early 1740s, Jesuit priests also served as emissaries for European science in the Kachavaha court of Sawai Jai Singh II (b. 1688; r. 1700– 1743) in Amber (or Amer) and Jaipur in northern India.77 Jai Singh, a descendant of Rajput grandees who had risen to prominence through service to and in the Mughal court since the later sixteenth century, took advantage of the slow decline of the imperial center to consolidate his own dominion as well as pursue his scientific interests. These latter were informed by his pedagogic immersion from around 1706 in the Sanskrit Siddhantas— the primary fount of what might be called “Hindu” astronomy, on which more in a bit— and also in the astronomy of Muslim scholastics who he began to gather about him from around 1717. Both systems, rooted as they were in Ptolemy, were committed to a spherical Earth, albeit one that was stationary on its axis and with the sun in motion about it. In the 1720s, Jai Singh supplemented his study of these systems with knowledge gleaned from the astronomers of Europe, as a series of Portuguese, French, and Bavarian Jesuit priest astronomers were employed by the Raja and mediated what he learned about the West.78 In the words of Susan Johnson-Roehr, “Without ever leaving his seat of power in Jaipur, Sawai Jai Singh appropriated the infrastructure of the Jesuit mission . . . in order to bring representatives of European science back to his capital city.”79 Around 1727, having heard of the advances made in Europe on the building of observatories, Jai Singh sent a small delegation of astronomers— under the leadership of Padre Manuel de Figueredo (1688– ?), formerly Rector of the Jesuit College in Agra— to “the land of the Phirangas,” Portugal.80 Jesuits also largely mediated the knowledge of European astronomy he subsequently received on the return of this embassy around 1730. They helped translate key texts for him, and also procured for him European astronomical works and maps, including, possibly, a copy of Homann’s Grosser Atlas published in 1725, and a model of the Ptolemaic world system.81

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The focus on his astronomical pursuits in the historical scholarship— not unjustified, given the Raja’s considerable investment in this science— has overshadowed a small detail that has huge relevance for the itineraries of the terrestrial globe that I track in these pages. We learn from a Sanskrit text dated to 1730 and produced in Jai Singh’s court that “globes that originated in the land of the Phirangas were brought from Surat.”82 Unfortunately, we do not know any further details about these globes— either their make, size, or their number— though they might well be of French or Italian provenance, given their domination of the European market at this time. Although Jai Singh remained committed to his ancestral knowledge (in spite of his obvious curiosity regarding what the firangis on his doorstep and further afield knew and thought about the heavens), it is likely that as a result of his exposure to these objects that arrived from Europe, he ordered the production of the wooden terraqueous globe that I discussed earlier in this chapter (see fig. 1.1). It is arguably the first instance of a locally produced terrestrial globe in the European style, made on the order of a subcontinental ruler, and the earliest such known globe with Hindi-language inscriptions.83 Cartographic objects, such as world maps, atlases, and globes were also brought into early modern India by laymen associated with the two trading companies: the Dutch VOC and, increasingly, the English East India Company (EIC), the institution which was to have such a major impact on India’s modern history as well as on the itineraries of the object whose adventures I narrate in these pages. A surviving oil portrait of James Lancaster (1554/55– 1618), the Elizabethan merchant director who commanded the first EIC voyage in 1601 to the Indies, shows him posing with a gridded globe at his side, his hand resting lightly on the object, and Kees Zandvliet has similarly documented the calculated appearance of various cartographic objects in artworks featuring VOC officials and traders.84 The EIC and Dutch “factory” records from the seventeenth century contain passing reference to globes, maps, and other cartographic objects on their ships arriving in India, as indeed elsewhere in other Asian ports. Given that the European market was largely dominated by Dutch cartographic productions at this time, it is more than likely that the occasional globes that were brought in India were from the Low Countries, especially those published in Amsterdam in the great workshops of Jodocus Hondius (1563−1612) and his heirs, and of Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571−1638) and his successors. These objects were meant as gifts for native rulers and power brokers, whose reaction to these novel artifacts has hardly left a trace in the archives of the subcontinent.85 A notable exception in this regard, however, is the presentation around

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1617 of a pair of globes to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605– 27) by Sir Thomas Roe (ca. 1580– 1644), the first official English ambassador appointed to further the trading interests of the EIC, along with maps and a copy of Mercator’s atlas. Elsewhere I have documented at length the consequences that ensued from the presentation of these cartographic gifts as manifest in a series of remarkable portraits of Jahangir and his son and successor, Shah Jahan (r. 1627/28– 58).86 Remarkably, the terrestrial globe— an utterly novel object, arriving from elsewhere— was drawn into critical painted performances of millennial sovereignty. The object was recast within the pictorial realm as a talismanic repository of imperial power to be transmitted from emperor to heir, or by holy men to the emperor, in a manner akin to other more conventional objects that did similar work, such as the crown, the turban ornament, and the inscribed gem. The globe’s arrival thus allowed the imperial artist to materialize— for the first time and in a highly iconic manner— the claim to universal kingship advanced by Muslim rulers on the subcontinent for a number of centuries, and reinvigorated by the Mughal padshah. At the same time, its mapped surface allowed the imperial artist to pictorially insist that it was not so much territory that mattered to the great emperor, but the fact that lion and lamb lay together peacefully in his benevolent shade. These “global” paintings of the Mughal atelier are historically important in that they are the earliest known instances on the Indian subcontinent of the terrestrial globe’s calculated display in association with the human body and in assertions of the self. In turn that painted body was able to distinguish itself as a worldly, indeed “global,” body. Possibly because of its very alterity in the Mughal realm, the globe in these painted productions is generally more than the prop it appears in contemporary European art. Instead, all manner of complex dramas of self and sovereignty are staged around its very presence in these imperial paintings. With the exception of a late seventeenth-century example from the Sultanate of Bijapur,87 no other ruler of early modern India, not even Sawai Jai Singh II, the “astronomer-king,” appears to have had himself painted in the company of the terrestrial globe or other such cartographic objects. Similarly, as we will see in the next chapter, EIC officials gifted the terrestrial globe from the later eighteenth century on to various royals with whom the Company was seeking to form alliances as they turned increasingly from traders to sovereign rulers themselves. Yet none of these men chose to publicly present themselves— either in portraits, or from the later nineteenth century, in photographs— in its company. Thus, its appearance in the company of the Mughal emperor in the first half of the seventeenth century is both a precocious and exceptional

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moment in the itineraries of the globe’s travels in and across the subcontinent in these early modern years.

“SEAS OF TREACLE, SEAS OF BUTTER”

Any attempt to chart the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in the subcontinent has to contend with and work against the mockery of popular Indic conceptions of Earth by disseminators of European useful knowledge, many of which statements are repeated ad nauseum in the colonial archive to the point of becoming caricatures. Of these the most invoked undoubtedly is a jeer by the influential English historian and colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800– 1859)— on whom, more in chapter 5— who famously dismissed such conceptions as “astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of butter and seas of treacle.”88 Others, however— who historians identify as of an “Orientalist” bent— were a little more discriminating in their conviction that, despite the inherent superiority of Europe’s knowledges, there was much to admire in India’s ancient and classical past which it was their duty to salvage and use progressively to “engraft” modern sciences on to. Indeed, as early as 1788 at the very start of the formal colonizing of Indian knowledges that accompanied the expansion of territorial control, that doyen of scholar-administrators, Sir William Jones (1746– 94), Judge and Orientalist-in-Chief, warned his fellow Europeans: In our conversations with the Pandits, we must never confound the system of the Jyautishicas, or mathematical astronomers, with that of the Pauranicas, or poetical fabulists; for to such a conclusion alone we must impute the many mistakes of Europeans on the subject of Indian science. . . . A venerable mathematician of this province, named Ramachandra . . . visited me lately at Crishnonagar.”The Pauranics,” he said, “will tell you, that our earth is a plane figure studded with eight mountains, and surrounded by seven seas of milk, nectar, and other fluids; and that the part which we inhabit, is one of seven islands.”89

Jones was right to sound this word of warning for, in his time, several alternative conceptions of the shape of our planet prevailed even among the majority of the peoples who we designate as Hindu, let alone among Muslims

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of the region, that many in colonial circles tended to overlook in the heat of their polemics. In those venerable texts in Sanskrit dating back to the early centuries of the Common Era called the Puranas, Earth was anthropomorphized as the goddess Bhudevi, and even theriomorphized as Cow. Most dominantly, however, it was conceived as a flat-bottom circular disk, five hundred million yojanas in diameter, with a sacred mountain called Meru at its center measuring 84,000 yojanas. “Surrounding Meru is the circular continent of Jambudvipa, which is in turn surrounded by a ring of water known as the Salt Ocean. There follow alternating rings of land and sea until there are seven continents and seven oceans. In the southern quarter of Jambudvipa lies India— Bharatavarsa.” 90 The disk-shaped Earth with its seven annular continents and oceans rests upon animal supports variously imagined as the turtle, the elephant, or the multiheaded cobra. From around the fifth century and under the impact of Ptolemaic astronomy— the same system that was also inherited by Arab geographers a few hundred years later, and innovated upon— the dominant discoidal view of the Puranas was repeatedly challenged in a body of Sanskrit texts that are collectively referred to as the Siddhantas (lit. “astronomical systems”). In these “mathematical” works as transmitted over the centuries in a body of knowledge broadly called jyotisastra, Earth is unambiguously and consistently posited as a sphere “only about 5000 yojanas in circumference, suspended in the middle of a sphere of fixed stars, around whose center the planets including the sun and moon were considered to move in tilted circular orbits.”91 Siddhanta texts often included complex instructions on how to construct the Earth sphere (gola), but such instructions notwithstanding, terrestrial globes were not really produced on their basis, even the armillary spheres that were fabricated for demonstration purposes only incorporating a notional Earth. Indeed, although its Orientalist admirers would wish otherwise— and contrary to the jyotisha Ramachandra’s attempts to distance himself from “Pauraniks” in his comments to William Jones— the Siddhanta system from very early on but especially in the second millennium (possibly in response to the growing dominance of Islam in the subcontinent) worked out all manner of compromises, so that the obvious “formal” contradictions between the discoidal and the spherical, around which there was much vitriolic debate, even outright ridicule by one of the other, never reached the brink. As Kim Plofker observes, “Siddhanta authors were often trying to have the best of both worlds— relying on their measurable and calculable universe while still availing themselves at

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need of Puranic authority.”92 Thus, from around the time of Lalla in the eight century, despite the fundamental incommensurability between the Puranic discoidal conception of Earth and the Siddhantas’ commitment to sphericity, the latter had repeatedly compromised with the former on the matter of terrestrial geography, “redistributing Jambudvipa, the six surrounding concentric continents, Mount Meru, and the various oceans, around a globe, which took the place of the Puranic circular plane.”93 The circumference of the disk-shaped Earth was recast as the equator on the globe, and Mount Meru was placed at the North Pole. Even the Earth-supporting tortoise or serpent was located inside the shell of a spherical Earth. “Or a text might simply combine both cosmologies, either metaphysically (claiming, for example, that the Puranic universe represents transcendent truth while the spherical universe of the Siddhantas is adapted to degraded human perceptions) or physically (for example, situating the spherical earth above the larger flat earth).”94 In this manner over the centuries of coexistence, there was never in fact an “open breach,” as “contradiction continued to be softened by compromise.”95 It is this complex assemblage of coexistence and compromise alongside disagreement and dissonance that confronted Protestant missionaries and EIC administrators as they formally embarked in the early decades of the nineteenth century on their pedagogical project of educating the native, hesitantly at first and with numerous countervailing agendas at work, but always with the sense of themselves as givers of science and hence of true and useful knowledge.96 The one thing that they could all seemingly agree upon is what one of them colorfully dismissed as “the trash of the Purans”: these most popular of Sanskritic Hindu narratives had few if any friends in colonial circles.97 However, as we will see in what follows and especially in chapter 3, there were quite a few admirers— among the aforementioned Orientalists— of the Siddhantas who argued that since their worldview was predicated on terrestrial sphericity (to which there was foundational commitment, even through centuries of debates and compromises had “corrupted” a pristine truth), these venerable texts which the natives held dear would become useful allies in the ultimate goal of disseminating useful knowledge. Undoubtedly, there was suspicion of claims of the divine inspiration for the Siddhantas, but nevertheless, for many, these texts conveniently offered— with their own habit of ridiculing the Puranas— the front behind which the colonial mockery of popular and priestly Hinduism could be conducted and the new advances of European science smuggled in.98 As the imperial century gathered strength, even this tactical alliance between European science and Sanskritic Siddhanta was questioned, the charge led by men whom historians have labeled as “Anglicists.” “It is the great advantage

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of our European science as an engine of education that it calls for free and independent investigation. The Siddhantic astronomy, on the other hand, is just as dogmatic as the Puranic.”99 For such men, the native mind that was a blank slate was infinitely more impressionable than one already filled with “error” and “darkness.” In her influential work Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan convincingly argued that the colonial state’s “solution” to the problem of reconciling an avowed policy of “improvement” with the equally avowed claims of noninterference in native religions was to introduce a curriculum in English literature that would smuggle in Protestant morality under a different guise.100 The teaching of terrestrial lessons, I propose, was also such a mask of conquest, enabling “conversion” by another means, if not to Christianity— indeed not all that desirable for many who served officially in British India— but to a planetary consciousness grounded in Earth’s sphericity. In making this argument, I also build on the seminal work of Christopher Bayly who suggested that the British colonial pedagogy was “relentlessly matter-of-fact and empirical . . . deliberately dry and untheoretical, an antidote to romance and imagination.” Given this stance, it is not surprising that the colonial pedagogue delighted in showing up “the wild conceptions of the Poorans by demonstrating the absurdity of the popular beliefs about the centrality of Mount Meru. . . . True geography as much as astronomy was seen as a way of demolishing heathenism by stealth, and the distribution of globes to schools became a significant aspect of the attempt to spread ‘useful knowledge.’”101

PEDAGOGIC MODERNITY: THE SCHOOLED ITINER ARIES OF A GLOBAL OBJECT

Taking my cue from this tantalizing perspective on the terrestrial globe as a “stealth” object smuggled into British India to be unleashed on a hapless populace, I set out to follow its varying itineraries as it leaves behind an elusive trail in the vast archives of empire, discursively, visually, and, very occasionally, materially. Inspired by Jane Bennett and others writing about “happy objects” and “sticky things,”102 I heed the summons of the globe in the chapters that follow, and follow the traces of its trail where it takes me sometimes to princely courts, at other times into city libraries, mission compounds, and home interiors, but most often, into the schoolroom. The colonial school was Ground Zero for the conquest of the world as globe in colonial India. This pedagogic setting in not surprising because, as I have already suggested, the learning child was

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the principal target for the work of the terrestrial globe in Britain and Europe, the United States, and, increasingly, elsewhere in the world, by the nineteenth century. Correspondingly, by this time, the market for globe production was also increasingly directed toward school students— and their teachers— as the principal consumer of this object. The school was also the critical site for the unfolding of what I am calling pedagogic modernity, the disciplined cultivation of learning intrinsic to the production of the educated modern citizen who in turn is expected to use learned knowledge to advance self and other, indeed an abstract humanity. If colonialism itself, as Sanjay Seth has proposed, is a pedagogic enterprise, conducted in various parts of the world by European powers who took on themselves the mantle of the enlightened teacher who coaxed and guided the (recalcitrant) native onto the path of civilization and progressive modernity, (Western) education was its principal instrument and useful knowledge its primary currency.103 The colony was indeed the paradigmatic modern school. It has been argued that the modern school emerged in Europe at the intersection, and, as a result of the interaction, of at least two different historical forces. In Ian Hunter’s sophisticated analysis, written under the impact of Michel Foucault’s proposal regarding the school as a disciplinary site for the production of “docile bodies,” these forces have been identified as secular governmentality and the Christian pastorate.104 On the one hand, modern schooling was “the means by which ‘absolute states’ could pursue the social training of entire populations,” as a necessary correlate to the survival and prosperity of the state itself. On the other, Christian pastoral pedagogy sought to equip “lay individuals with the special practices through which they could problematize themselves, relate to themselves as beings in need of ethical labor, and hence begin that ‘work of the self on the self ’ that we recognize as the reflective person.”105 For the modern state, therefore, schooling is a technology of governance, part and parcel of the means through which its resources, especially its human resources, are marshaled, husbanded, and continually enhanced in a manner that eventually places the schooled body at its disposal. For the Christian pastorate, schooling was a technology for living, a particular set of practices for the individual’s governing of the self.106 In other words, the school was the site where the Christian interest in self-reflective souls found a ready ally in the governmental interest in a self-disciplined citizenry, and vice versa.107 What many historians of schooling in the modern metropole, including Foucault and Hunter, ignored is that developments in colonies like India “prematurely” anticipated the state’s involvement in mass or public education at home.108 Twenty years before the state took the plunge in Britain in this regard,

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the EIC— the de facto ruler already of vast swathes of territory with several million inhabitants by the early nineteenth century— was compelled by Parliamentary mandate in 1813 to set aside an annual sum of “not less than one lack of rupees” (about £10,000) for “the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.”109 This was indeed the first time in the wider British realm that the education of the populace became “thinkable as a state objective.”110 Bolstered though by the conviction that “the light” of European knowledge was a “cure” for Indian “darkness,” the funds set aside for such an incandescent project were paltry and the squabbles that followed— often among men who themselves, ironically, frequently had limited formal schooling themselves!— interminable.111 From the 1820s when the EIC finally got down to the business of systematically implementing the Parliamentary directive through the transition to Crown rule in 1858 to the hand over of education planning in 1919 to elected Indian representatives, and finally through Indian independence in 1947, the colonial state’s support for public instruction was rolled out quite haphazardly with various retreats and regressions along the way, and never in a uniform fashion across its vast dominion. “Native education” was chronically underfunded, and plagued by debates about who to teach, what to teach (and in which language), and through whose agency. Not least, the state could not have accomplished the little that it did if it had not been for two other more active agents, namely, the Protestant missionary and the native educator, frequently with agendas at cross-purposes. And, as we will also see, alongside these actors, from the closing years of the eighteenth century, expatriate entrepreneurs— the enterprising merchant, the decommissioned soldier, the idealist nonconformist— opened schools (or academies, as they were frequently called) where globes were introduced. Although such schools were meant at first for Eurasians or “East Indians”— mixed-race children of a European father and a native mother— others soon enrolled as well. Such institutions, therefore, emerge as one of the earliest sites in which “the idea of the citizen-subject— educated, enlightened, responsible, and conscious of his freedoms— was beginning to take root across racial lines.”112 Given the bewildering array of understandings of the concept that prevailed across diverse parts of British India over two centuries and more, not to mention words used to name it ( patshala, maktab, madrasa, tol, pallikutam, even iskool), I assume a necessarily capacious understanding of “the school” that was central to empire’s pedagogic project. Financially, a school could be privately funded

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(even with European or American subscriptions, as was the case with most missionary enterprises), or partly aided by government, or entirely supported by the state. In material terms as well, there was tremendous variation in the built form of the school, which “may be a substantial building, an open shed, a hired verandah or the shadow of a tree.”113 From the 1820s, as some elegant buildings were constructed to house some of colonial India’s more privileged educational institutions, the average primary school— in locations far away from the big cities and small towns— in which by far the vast majority of native children were enrolled (if and when they went to school at all), was a very humble affair indeed, frequently housed in kuccha or makeshift quarters. Close to a hundred years after the colonial schooling project commenced, as one administrator reported: The building (if the school has one of its own) generally consists of one room, the overflow classes sitting in the verandah. There is some simple furniture for the teacher. There are a black board, some maps, pictures (including those of the King-Emperor and Queen-Empress). . . . Many schools have only one teacher.114

Some government regulators even insisted that given that Indians from their childhood were used to sitting on the floor, both teacher and student could forgo use of furniture as a cost-saving measure. In such a context where benches and desks were deemed unnecessary, and even textbooks a precious commodity, what were the possibilities for acquiring expensive apparatus and pedagogic aids, like the world map or the school globe, also critical to the enterprise of pedagogic modernity? Even among the best of schools of which there were a handful sprinkled across the vast Indian landscape, as a rare 1911 report on educational buildings shows, few reported a specifically designated Geography Room— equipped with globes and maps— that many institutions in Britain proudly touted.115 As I have already noted, in the face of the shortage, even absence, of the manufactured terrestrial globe, the teacher in the colonial schoolroom resorted to all manner of ingenious makeshift substitutes to communicate the gatekeeping lesson of terrestrial sphericity. Visual and material proof of this foundational modern fact was deemed especially necessary in (Hindu) India where, officials and missionaries alike were convinced, there was a pernicious attachment to those dangerous other things— native idols. The goal was to wean away the native child from such “mischievous” attachment, and be taught the value of empirical observation and rational thinking with “object

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lessons” that helped him understand his “proper” place in the (spherical) world he inhabited.116 It is thus in matters of curriculum and methods of teaching that the colonial school was most distinguishable from its “indigenous” counterparts.117 Occasional voices to the contrary, the colonial schooling project was premised on the foundational assumption that instruction provided by the various agents of pedagogical modernity— the missionary, the expatriate, the “Western” educated native, and the state— was inevitably an improvement over the disorderly and random learning pursued in the “wretched” indigenous school whose only intention, apparently, was “to narrow the mind, to confine its attention to sordid gain, and low cunning, [rather] than to improve the heart and enlarge the understanding.”118 European (or “Western” or “modern”) light, in other words, would have to penetrate such native “darkness” and rip it apart. The critical argument I pursue in these pages is that from its earliest moments, pedagogical modernity entrusted what I call terrestrial lessons about Modern Earth with the mission of rescuing young Indians from “darkness” and bringing them into the brilliance of (European) “light.” Such lessons had never been taught before to the native child, and the failure to do so, it was implicitly believed, contributed to the state of India’s backwardness. Typically, the foundational truths regarding Modern Earth— its sphericity, its diurnal motion on its axis, its annual travel around the Sun, and so on— were taught in the opening lessons of that novel subject called geography (or “bhugol(am),” in various Indian languages, its very etymology reaffirming terrestrial rotundity) which was introduced into the colonial curriculum from the mid-1820s, although for much of the nineteenth century, these lessons were also delivered through “primers” and “readers” for instruction in English and other languages, and in related subjects such as astronomy, natural history and natural philosophy.119 By the early years of the twentieth century, the learning child typically learned to recognize the contours of Modern Earth at some point in the final year or two of Primary School (itself varying between four to seven years across British India), with more advanced lessons on the geography of India and of the British Empire, and the use of the globes and map reading following right after (see fig. 1.5).120 The important point to underscore is that for much of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, immediately after instruction in the so-called 3 Rs— reading, writing, and arithmetic— geography was the one subject to which the child was invariably introduced. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, passing the geography examination was mandatory in employment tests

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fiG. 1.5. School room with wall maps. Lithograph published by Chitrashala Press, Poona, ca. 1920. Image courtesy of Christopher Pinney.

for government clerks, revenue servants, teachers, and sundry other professions in various parts of British India. As such, its study was rarely contested— although not infrequently dismissed as “boring” and “tedious,” by even its instructors— such was the importance accorded to terrestrial lessons in the elementary schooling of the colonial child.121 It was the paradigmatic useful knowledge in India and elsewhere in the nineteenth century, indeed “the mother of all sciences.”122 The reason for its importance, as I underscore in this book, is that its lessons worlded the modern subject and put him in his “proper” place. Important enough as the project was in the modern West, in places like British India, it assumed even greater salience as a means for producing “enlightened but colonized” natives123 who learned to recognize themselves as inhabitants of not just Modern Earth, but also as subjects of the vast empire— colored a conspicuous pink in their maps, atlases, and globes— that encompassed such a world and their proper place in an emergent new world ordered centered on Britain. In what follows, therefore, I detail the manner in which such an Empire of Geography (was) rolled out in fits and starts, with the help of seemingly humble objects, such as the school globe, the wall map, and the bound atlas to

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establish what I call the Dominion of Modern Earth, as British rule advanced in different parts of the vast subcontinent. I bring this opening chapter to a close, however, with a disclosure about a fundamental, likely irresolvable, conundrum at the heart of my analysis. I have already noted that the new child is the focus of pedagogical modernity as it takes off in the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe. Such a new child— enlightened but colonized— also become a novel feature of the landscape of British India, as native education became a fact of empire, albeit on a scale far more limited than intended or planned.124 One of the goals of my project is to (re)instate the learning child as a lively and earnest protagonist of India’s modern history. Yet in doing so, I am up against the prevailing sentiment of the archives of empire that, like so many other subalterns, children cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.125 Scarcely do we encounter the voice of the child in pedagogic contexts, unmediated, unadulterated, or free of adult intervention in some fashion. Such voices were not thought of as worth documenting systematically or archiving consistently in the vast paperwork produced by the colonial state and others on the subject of school instruction. Under these circumstances, we rarely directly apprehend the learning pupil’s excitement— or confusion, even shock and anxiety— on first being confronted with Modern Earth as presented in the form of the school globe, let alone get a sense of what it must have meant to go school in the first place. It is in the shadow of this dilemma that I set out to track the itineraries of the terrestrial globe as a pedagogical object as it was drawn into the project of schooling and subject formation in colonial India, with the recognition that this irresolvable issue— this aporia— too, is part of the varied and complex history of this proxy for our planet.

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CHAPTER TWO

“AS YOU LIVE IN THE WORLD, YOU OUGHT TO KNOW SOMETHING OF THE WORLD”

Some first encounters with the terrestrial globe have inspired wonder, others kindled existential doubt, still others— such as in the seventeenth-century Mughal court— were dramatic in their pictorial consequences. In contrast to these, the first encounter with which I begin this chapter is recalled in a rather matter-of-fact fashion, reminding us to heed obstructions, misrecognitions, and failure to perform and impress in the global circulation of scientific artifacts.1 In fact, this first encounter could well have been easily lost in the welter of other details if I were not in hot pursuit of this elusive object in the archival traces left behind by Britain’s Indian Empire. Yet, as I hope to show, such quiet meetings can also, occasionally, be quite transformative for the itineraries of the earthly globe that I chart in these pages. In the summer of 1794, a terrestrial globe changed hands, when it was gifted by an officer in the EIC’s army to a teenager, a Maratha prince exiled from his native Tanjavur and temporarily resident in the colonial metropolis of Madras, where he had been brought ostensibly for his safekeeping but also for an appropriate “English” education.2 On July 31, 1794, here is what the seventeen-yearold “presumptive heir” to the Tanjore throne wrote in English to his German

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guardian and mentor in one of his periodical letters reporting on progress made inside and outside the classroom: I went to the Rev. Mr. Gericke Mr. Ince and Colonel Braithwaite’s Houses who received me kindly. The Colonel has presented me a Globe. I make exercise on horseback twice a Day which gives me much Pleasure and Health. By the Grace of God we are all well hoping to hear the same from you. No more at present to communicate you. I remain your ever affectionate Scholar Serfojee.3

A few days later, on August 6, his mentor, the Reverend Christian Friedrich Schwartz (1726– 98), responded, also in English but in a pedagogical vein, to his ward’s letter: As Colonel Braithwaite has given you a Globe you ought to learn something of Geography, as you live in the world you ought to know something of the world which God has created that you may get some Idea of the great God— the creator of the heaven & earth. It is ignorance of the work of God that incline us to value the Creature more than God— a good prince is obliged to imitate God— But how can he imitate him if he does not know him & his goodness wisdom power & justice.4

The man responsible for this particular “global” gift, Colonel John Brathwaite (1739– 1803, whose name is misspelled in the letters by both prince and Reverend, and by some scholars in their wake), was the ranking military officer in Madras in 1794, as president of the Military Board, and the commander of the troops on the Coast. Around the time he met the young prince and gifted him the globe, Brathwaite was involved in several complicated military maneuvers (including an aborted invasion of Mauritius), in pleading with his superiors to improve the conditions of service for the Company’s troops, as well as in ongoing negotiations regarding Tipu Sultan (r. 1782– 99), the recently defeated— but not destroyed— ruler of Mysore who had proven to be such a threat to British expansionist plans in southern India over the past decade. It is revealing that amid attending to these complex matters, he chose to make such a gift to a young royal. It is possible that Brathwaite’s act might have been inspired by a similar presentation earlier that year of a set of philosophical apparatus by Madras Governor Sir Charles Oakeley (in office, 1792– 94) to Tipu

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Sultan via his young sons, held in hostage by the British in Madras (on which more in a bit). The young prince’s own correspondence includes passing allusions to a few other meetings with Brathwaite earlier that year and subsequently; on one occasion, the Colonel apparently presented him with “some books,” and on another, arranged for “a European” to teach him English.5 Unfortunately, we do not know the make or the size of the globe that Brathwaite presented to the teenage prince, or from where he acquired it. It was likely a British manufacture, for by the later eighteenth century, after lagging behind continental publishers for much of the early modern period, instrument makers and globe producers in London and Edinburgh began to make their presence felt in the market, and their productions started to increasingly appear in Britain’s new colonial outposts in India with their growing expatriate populations.6 Thus, in 1795, the auction house of Wright and Hurst in Madras advertised the sale of “a pair of globes by Gilbert and Wright [sic], whereas all the new Discoveries are correctly laid down.”7 Earlier, the expatriate John Holmes advertised in 1790 an Academy in the city’s Black Town, where he proposed, among other subjects, to teach “the use of the globes.” Presumably, although not necessarily, he would have done so with instruments that he had in his possession.8 Another institution that attempted to school the growing number of mixed-race boys in the Presidency, the Madras Male Orphan Asylum— as one of whose directors Brathwaite served— also possibly had a pair of globes on its premises in Egmore, as we will see later in this chapter. As well, Brathwaite may have parted with a globe that he personally owned: it was not unusual for officers in the Company’s army to travel with maps and other cartographic and survey instruments in their possession. The Reverend Schwartz who advised the teenage prince to study the terrestrial globe and learn geography, reminding him “as you live in the world you ought to know something of the world which God has created,” was a German Pietist of the Danish-English-Halle Tranquebar Mission.9 He served as chaplain, a diplomat for the Danish governor, a go-between and translator for the EIC in its complex evolving relations with various native courts including Mysore and Tanjore, and also, most pertinently, as the guardian for the young Maratha prince who was entrusted to his care in 1787. Much has been written about Schwartz’s life and work in India by several scholars, including on the role he played, with the assistance of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in London, the EIC government in Madras, and the mission in Tranquebar, in setting up a network of “provincial” schools in Tanjavur and its environs, on which I will say a little more later in this chapter.10 For the purpose of the arguments I develop at this moment, Schwartz’s emphasis in

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his letter to the prince on the study of geography is not surprising, given the importance of physico-theology in the Halle curriculum, which— contrary to tired arguments about the heated confrontation with religion attending the socalled scientific revolution— encouraged learning about God through learning about the natural world, and vice versa. In Halle itself, such a pedagogic philosophy required an intense study of globes, both terrestrial and celestial.11 In 1711, about five years after the Halle missionaries set up their outpost on the Coromandel Coast in Tranquebar, they requested and acquired a pair of globes, for which the EIC provided free freight through their mission partners, the SPCK; this is quite possibly the earliest instance when a terrestrial globe was acquired in the subcontinent for a pedagogical purpose by Protestant missionaries.12 Several decades later, when Schwartz established a school in Tanjore in 1778, geography was taught as a subject by 1787, although available records do not allow us to say very much more, including whether globes were used in the classroom. We know that later around 1802, they were indeed so introduced, thanks to the young prince who had by then been crowned king.13 This then takes me back to the royal teenager at the center of these “global” transactions, the young man who signed his name as Serfojee, and whose many surviving letters about the education he received in Madras offer a rare opportunity for us— centuries later— to hear the learning pupil’s voice distinctly in and from the archives. The prince succeeded in 1798 when he was twenty-one to the throne of Tanjavur where, until his death in 1832, he presided over a remarkable “center of calculation” and knowledge and cultural production, even while politically, as a EIC tributary from 1799, his sovereignty was highly circumscribed.14 At long last, Serfoji II has recently become the subject of some stellar studies that have (re)cast him as a scholar-king with a penchant for the new Enlightenment sciences being ushered into India from the West— by the EIC, but also by its Protestant allies, such as the German missionaries based in nearby Tranquebar.15 My own concern is with tracking Serfoji’s interest in the new knowledge formations of astronomy and geography, which materially manifested itself in his amassing of books, objects, and scientific instruments related to these disciplines in his palace in Tanjavur. I also seek to understand how he was worlded by his precocious engagement with these knowledge systems that sought to introduce him to Modern Sky and Modern Earth. Serfoji’s “global” engagements anchor my analysis in the latter half of this chapter where I track the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in the Madras Presidency over the century or so after his time, with a particular emphasis on the cartographic evangelism of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries.16 To anticipate one of my key conclusions, notwithstanding the efforts made from

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the closing years of the eighteenth century by many— missionaries certainly, but also the colonial state, and from the 1840s, by native educators— to teach terrestrial lessons in Madras schools, the globe was still a relatively rare object well into the twentieth century in the native classroom. Serfoji’s “global” encounters, acquisitions, and study remains an exceptional outlier in the wider terrain of instruction and learning centered on this master object of pedagogic modernity, even among other contemporary royals like him.

A R AJA’S GLOBAL ENGAGEMENTS

The surviving records do not show if or how Serfoji specifically responded to Schwartz’s admonition in August 1794 that in order to prepare himself to be a good king, the young prince needed to study the globe gifted to him and the lessons of geography, for these would help him understand the wonder of God’s “works and words.” Serfoji could well have replied to his missionary mentor that he had indeed been studying geography from earlier in that year with his colleague, the Reverend Christian Wilhelm Gericke (1742– 1803) of the Vepery mission on the outskirts of Madras, although the exact contours of his terrestrial lessons are not available in the existing records.17 Indira Peterson notes that another Tranquebar missionary, the erudite Christoph Samuel John (1746– 1813), visited the exiled prince in 1795 and “explained to him the solar system, the zodiac, and European cosmology by enacting the movement of the earth and planets around the sun in the large hall of Serfoji’s Madras residence employing himself, the king, and his minister as stand-ins for the earth and the celestial bodies.”18 One wonders if the precocious young man drew Brathwaite’s globe into such performances. In late 1795, Serfoji wrote to Schwartz of his intention of visiting the Observatory— “Mr. Topping’s House”— newly founded in Madras, “to see the stars and some other curious things.”19 While these scattered observations from his tenure in Madras give us a glimpse of some of the ways in which the young prince was beginning to be worlded through the mediation of the new sciences of Earth and the sky and through exposure to objects like the terrestrial globe and the telescope, it is the library of European scientific books and instruments that he began to amass after 1798 when he succeeded to the Tanjavur throne, that is indicative of the sustained interest he developed as an adult in this regard. A large number of surviving books on geography and astronomy, and atlases and map books carry Serfoji’s name or signature on the title page, alongside a date, and there is every reason to believe that he read (at) them and reflected upon them, and that these

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were not just props to shore up his attempts at projecting an “enlightened” persona, especially to European visitors to his court.20 Several of these books reiterated and expanded upon his mentor Schwartz’s conviction that the study of geography was necessary for everyone, including rulers, but especially those who were curious “about the transactions of the world.” Thus, geography, one author insisted, must be allowed to be, of all the Sciences, one of the most pleasing, and, at the same time, the most useful: it is of almost universal concern; persons, of every rank and situation in life, are more or less interested in it, and reap advantage from an acquaintance with it. While it is indispensably necessary to the statesman, the merchant, the mariner, and the traveller, it likewise furnishes abundant matter for investigation to the philosopher; assists the divine in understanding and explaining many parts of holy writ, that without its aid would be obscure and uninteresting; is necessary to the reader of history; and, indeed, to every one, who peruses the daily accounts of the events that are taking place in different parts of the world, or even in our own country.21

Similarly, R. Brookes’s General Gazeteer (of which the Raja owned a signed copy of the seventh “corrected” edition dated to 1791) insisted that all “except the very dregs” of society ought to know geography. Given such encouragement, it is not surprising that Serfoji requested his agent in London, the former British Resident of Tanjore, Benjamin Torin (1762– 1839), to purchase and send him books on the subject, many of which were pretty much the standard for an Enlightened education at this time in England.22 All such works unequivocally reaffirmed the truths of Modern Earth and Modern Sky imparted to him by his missionary and European teachers when he was a student in Madras. Thus, the Raja’s personal copy of Ouiseau’s Practical Geography (sixth edition, “carefully revised”), across whose title page is inscribed in bold black ink “Serfojee Rajah 1829,” concluded, “The Earth’s figure is spherical; and the assent to this truth is not determined by speculative reasoning, but it is founded on facts, and actual observation.”23 Similarly, the fourth edition of William Guthrie’s A New System of Modern Geography published in 1788 (on whose title page in the Raja’s collection is inscribed, “Serfojee Rahah 1819 . . . J. C. Kohlhoff, Gift”) began by noting that our Earth was no longer “considered as one extensive plane,” and went on to provide the menu of proofs regarding our planet’s sphericity that had become standard in Enlightenment geography books. These included a ship’s progressive disappearance and appearance over the horizon; the shape

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of Earth’s shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse; and the various circumnavigations of intrepid voyagers (all European, of course).24 The books Serfoji acquired for his library would also have reminded him that Modern Earth was made up of four continents— Europe, Asia, Africa, and America— although some did mention the fifth new land that Britons were increasingly begin to occupy in the wake of Captain Cook’s voyages. The Raja, whose own sovereignty was confined to the town of Tanjavur and its environs by his 1799 treaty with the EIC, would have also learned from these works of Britain’s growing power in the subcontinent and in the world, and of the glory that was Europe, almost always the first continent to be described and the one most extensively known and illustrated.25 Thus, the third edition published in 1811 of Nicolas Hamel’s The World in Miniature noted that although Europe was the least extensive quarter of the globe, [it] is, in many respects, that which most deserves our attention. Here the human mind has made the greatest progress towards improvement; and here the arts, whether of utility or ornament, the sciences both military civil, have been carried to the greatest perfection. It is in Europe that we find the greatest variety of characters, government, and manners; and from whence we draw the greatest numbers of facts and memorials, either for our entertainment or instruction.26

As we will see, well into the twentieth century (when “nationalist” geography books began to be written by Indians), the message that “Geography gives to Europe the superiority over the rest of the world” would resound across the subcontinent.27 Some of the books, maps, and atlases that Serfoji acquired were gifts, such as “a Dutch Map of the Coast of the Island of Ceylon, containing the Soundings of the whole Coast, and of the neighbouring Continental Coast,” presented to him in 1816 by Sir Alexander Johnston as “a Mark of His Highnesses personal Kindness, and a proof, highly satisfactory of His Highness[’s] attention to the promise of the Arts and Sciences in his Dominions”28; and William Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar “in 2 vols with the Maps belonging to it,” gifted to him by C. S. John in 1802 on the eve of his first ever journey as king outside Tanjavur.29 Similarly, in May 1823, George Theophilus Bärenbruck— a German missionary who was resident for about a decade in Tranquebar from around 1822— presented Serfoji with a set of Pinnock’s readers on many subjects, including geography and history, along with instructions on how to use them so as to get the best benefit of such useful knowledge for the education of the Raja’s young son, Shivaji.30

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Other works Serfoji purchased from Europe via Benjamin Torin, whose correspondence with the Raja in this regard— which continued for the latter’s lifetime— deserves a fascinating study in its own right. Thus, in 1802, he commissioned the former Resident to purchase for him a pair of globes for the “Provincial” or mission school that had been founded by his mentor Schwartz and was now under the care of Johann Caspar Kohlhoff (1762– 1844).31 The agent dutifully dispatched these, along with “a large Map of all the world,” which, after a few hours of study, he wrote the Raja, “will give you the best idea of all the places on the Globe.”32 Sometime before 1829, when they were inventoried, the Raja received a large shipment of books from London, which included John William’s An Introduction to Mr. Pinkerton’s Abridgement of his Modern Geography, for the Use of Schools; J. Ouiseau’s Practical Geography, with the Description and Use of the Celestial and Terrestrial Globes; and Cary’s New Universal Atlas and Arrowsmith’s Map of India. In 1820, Torin also acquired from the London booksellers B. G. Lloyd and Sons copies of “Goldsmith’s Geography” and “Guthrie’s Geography.”33 Colonial newspapers of the early years of the nineteenth century make clear that there was already an emergent market for scientific instruments of all sorts in cities like Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras where expatriates congregated. It is thus possible that the Raja acquired from one of these places (through the intervention of Johann Caspar Kohlhoff ) a tellurium for “Two Hundred & Fifty pagodas,” that demonstrated “the motion of the Earth, and of the inferior planets about the Sun.”34 He also owned a planetarium that was borrowed by the British Resident.35 When and how Serfoji acquired a pair of globes that were loaned in April 1821 by his son Shivaji to the Resident William Blackburne— who asked to borrow them and take them with him when he visited the sea coast town of Setubhavachatram for the hot season— is not clear from the records. We learn from this exchange (in which the young Shivaji at first misunderstood Blackburne’s request and sent him “three dozen globe lamps” instead) that this pair was located “in the apartment where are the skeletons, and various philosophical machines.”36 Surviving photographs of the palace durbar (public hall) show a pair of large standing celestial and terrestrial globes that likely belonged to Serfoji (see fig. 2.1).37 While it is hard to tell from the grainy photograph in figure 2.1 of the make of these globes, they may well have been of British origin, since by Serfoji’s time a whole host of globe makers had come to the fore in London and Edinburgh, as I noted earlier in this chapter, from whom his agent Benjamin Torin could have easily acquired them. Or, Serfoji might have been able to purchase

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fiG. 2.1. Rajah Sakaram Sahib’s Hall, ca. 1885. Photographic print, possibly by Nicholas and Company. © The British Library Board, Photo 807/1 (23).

them from auction houses in Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta, which periodically announced them, especially as part of estate sales of departing Europeans. In addition to the material presence of these objects he possessed, Serfoji would have also encountered the terrestrial globe discursively and visually in the books he collected. Almost without fail, geography books of this period routinely began with a discussion of “the Artificial Sphere” that is the proxy for our planet, with detailed explanations of its various components: the horizon circle and the meridian circle; the quadrant and the hour circle; and the grid of latitudes and longitudes. The goal was, as Oiuseau noted, to not merely “turn a Globe about,” but instead to understand the principles that govern its work, which principles many of these books laid out at great length, along with

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problems related to distance, time, and relative placement on Earth’s gridded surface that the student was expected to solve.38 The Raja’s collection at the TMSSML today includes the sixth edition of the one of the most representative books of the use of the globes genre, the work of Thomas Keith, which took teacher and student through a detailed workout on these objects with the help of illustrative diagrams, as I have already noted in chapter 1.39 Many printed atlases in Serfoji’s possession with their beautifully illustrated frontispieces and plates with diagrams of the terrestrial globe would have also visually confirmed Earth’s sphericity.40 For example, the Raja owned a copy of Johann Baptist Homann’s beautiful Atlas Novus Terrarum, with its glorious title page with a large terrestrial globe (on which the continents of “Europa” and “Africa” are delineated), atop which stands the imposing figure of Atlas holding up the heavens. Similarly, when Serfoji opened his copy of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr’s sumptuous Atlas Novus Coelestis, he would have been confronted by its stunning title page on whose lower half “two pairs of celebrated astronomers stand in front of a large celestial globe. To the left is Claudius Ptolemaeus holding a model of his geo-centric solar system, and at his side Nicolaus Copernicus who rests his arm on that of his long deceased predecessor as if in apologetic support. To the right, conversing with each other are Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler.” Doppelmayer had already converted to the heliocentric universe which is gloriously represented in color on the upper half of the frontispiece.41 Although printed in black and white, the title page to Robert Wilkinson’s A General Atlas, first published around 1794, is also visually arresting in its depiction of two female figures, one of which is poised over a large terrestrial globe that she is touching with one hand. On the floor beside the globe rests a double hemispheres map, half visible under a large book; inscribed above this are the words “Columbus,” “Drake,” “Raleigh”; the other female figure is shown writing the word “Cook” on a wall behind the ensemble; in the distance the large sails of an East Indiaman are clearly visible. Many of the geography books Serfoji collected included beautifully printed double-hemisphere maps of the world that offered yet another visual confirmation of the spherical planet whose surface he inhabited, even as they offered an attractive “visual synopsis” of that world.42 By the nineteenth century, such double-hemisphere maps typically used the Mercator projection, which in turn, as we know quite well, visually privileged the North and Europe in a manner that found a textual echo in the discursive parts of the geography books that Serfoji would have read. Even with such diverse cartographic objects in his possession, I have seen no surviving portrait of Serfoji posing with the globe— like the Mughal emperors

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chose to do in an earlier century— despite the fact that the art of Europeanstyle portraiture was quite in vogue in his time in Tanjavur as well as the wider Madras Presidency. In fact, despite his obvious passion for anatomy and astronomy, for skeletons and telescopes, in none of his surviving portraits do we see the Raja in the company of the diverse objects that he lovingly collected as a consequence of his entanglement with the enlightened sciences of Europe. Instead, almost all surviving portraits and imagery associated with or commissioned by him show Serfoji with the usual repertoire associated with martial kingship (horses and swords, jewels and banners), notwithstanding the fundamental shift in representational practices in his court that Indira Peterson has deftly flagged.43 It is also hard to conclude that the study of Modern Earth— as exemplified by several books in the royal library on geography and astronomy as school subjects— was pursued systematically in the educational institutions that the Raja set up, despite the fact that he renamed around 1807 their curriculum as navavidya, “new learning,” and stressed in his correspondence with the colonial government his interest in ensuring that his schools were “extremely useful.”44 Nor have I seen any surviving examples of geography books, especially for children, produced by the short-lived printing press established by the Raja, despite his professed interest in “the encouragement of all the arts and sciences.”45 Even in the “colleges” for higher learning he founded or supported in Tanjavur and Muktambalpuram, it was the ancestral discipline of jyotisastra (cotitam in Tamil; sodesh or jotish in colonial records) that appears as part of the curriculum, rather than the useful knowledge of (European) astronomy with which Serfoji himself was quite enthralled within the confines of his palace.46 In 1802, he did acquire all the way from London a pair of globes for the mission school in Tanjavur run by the Kohlhoff brothers, as I have already indicated, but surviving records I have seen are silent on whether he did the same for the educational institutions that were directly supported by him. In fact, in response to the news that he had been inducted into the prestigious RAS as an Honorary Member in May 1823, he wrote back— modestly but quite honestly— in 1828, almost at the tail end of an “enlightened” life devoted to the pursuit and support of learning: It is true indeed that I have always taken great pleasure in endeavouring by the Establishment of Free Schools, and every other means in my power to promote among my people the General diffusion of Useful Knowledge, and the study of such Arts and Sciences as I thought might be conducive to their temporal advantage or moral improvement, but it would be wrong to say that from what little has been done, much good has already resulted.47

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All the same, in contrast to many other royals of his generation and time, Serfoji was possibly the only one to commission— or perhaps even pen— a literary work that takes stock of the new sciences that he was schooled in. This is a Marathi work, dated to around 1806, titled Devendra Kuravanji, “The Fortuneteller Play of the King of Gods.”48 Indira Peterson, the only scholar who has analyzed it in some detail, describes it as a “modern cosmology-geography,” and “a geography of the world in songs,” set up in the form of a conversational exchange between two women, a queen and a visiting fortune-teller-cumdancer (kuratti). It has been suggested that Serfoji intended it for use in his navavidya institutions, although I have seen little direct evidence for such use.49 If this was indeed the case, and this is speculation at this point, it is an instance when the new useful knowledge of geography came to be taught not primarily through the agency of prose, as was increasingly the case in England, but poetry and song.50 Peterson’s analysis shows us that readers of the Devendra Kuravanji (and listeners and viewers, for the text was meant to be narrated and performed in its time) were introduced to the Copernican world-system built around a spherical Earth turning on its own axis and revolving around the sun. Thus, the Queen asks of the kuratti, “I want to know all about the world’s mountains, rivers, and countries. I want to learn the geography of the world. Tell me, does the earth revolve around the sun, or does the sun revolve round the earth? Tell me, what is the moon’s orbit, and what planets revolve around the sun? What is the diameter of the earth sphere?” In response, she is treated to a disquisition by the fortune-teller that is congruent with the Enlightenment’s vision of the terrestrial world, “a verifiable, European-style, modern terrestrial geography, [but] shorn of its Christian cosmographic connotations”: Like a flaming torch whirled round and round, the sun rotates in place on its own, and not around anything else. . . . But the earth revolves around the sun in a year’s time. The sun is a bright star. Many planets revolve around it, the earth among them.

The four known continents, various countries, and their capitals are all then enumerated with a precision that suggests that the composer had indeed scrutinized globes, maps, and atlases, and geography books, presumably the very same that were available in Serfoji’s library and palace.51 If we follow Peterson in proposing that the Devendra Kuravanji was if not authored by Serfoji himself, at least reflective of the world view that he had acquired through an Enlightened education in the new sciences, possibly the

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most striking aspect is there is no value judgment passed on the inherited world view of the Sanskritic Puranas which most missionaries scorned, and which would have offered, as I detailed in chapter 1, a diametrically opposed view of our world: as flat, as stationary, as geocentric, and as constituted by seven concentric circles of land alternating with waters. Instead, the fortune-teller tells the Queen, “You know the cosmology of the Puranas. Listen! I shall now tell you a cosmography and geography different from that one!”52 The text presents the new geography without necessarily displacing the old cosmology, even as it chooses not to take on board the physico-theological dogma that, through the study of the terrestrial globe, “the serious mind will hereby discover unnumbered proofs of the wisdom, power, and goodness, of the great Creator.”53 Indeed, notwithstanding Schwartz’s sustained efforts to confront him as a young man with the grand truths of Christianity, and in spite of the essentially Christian view of the world and its sacred history espoused by the majority of the books he collected, Serfoji neither changed his religious faith nor did he (publicly) become agnostic. Instead he remained for all purposes a devout Shaivite for his entire life, following the codes of ritual performance, patronage, and pilgrimage (armed albeit with modern maps of the places he visited!) that “tradition” had enjoined upon him as an earthly sovereign.54 So much so that when the Calcutta chaplain Claudius Buchanan visited Tanjavur in 1806— around the time of the composition of the Devendra Kuravanji— he observed that the Raja was constructing “a brass Orrery to represent the Tychonic system, which he wishes to believe rather then the Copernican, as it is the System of the Bramins. He is still a Heathen, but Dr. J[ohn] says he is a Cornelius.”55 As with Jai Singh, there is “a conservatism of purpose” at work here, rather than a willful neglect or ignorance of new knowledges.56 Sometime in the late 1880s when the Kingdom of Tanjore was no more, its royals pensioned off a few decades earlier by a triumphant colonial state, C. H. Phipps, a Member of the Diocesan Committee in Madras, visited the town and in the course of taking in the sights, arrived at the palace to see its durbar hall. Instead of a grand edifice, he encountered “a collection of rubbish”: Broken down gilded chairs with torn and faded velvet seats, mechanical toys, seedy battered stuffed birds, snakes, dogs and deer, damaged French clocks under broken glass cases, astronomical [sic] and terrestrial globes with the paint all knocked off. . . . These are all arranged about the halls in glorious confusion. . . . In the days of its departed grandeur, it must have been a very imposing sight when the Rajah with his Court was sitting in judgment, but

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now it almost makes one melancholy to see the remains of what was once so grand.57

From brilliant Enlightenment to glorious confusion, arriving bright and shiny from a distant continent and ending its career “with the paint all knocked off,” as with Jai Singh’s locally-wrought wooden globe that I briefly considered in chapter 1, in Tanjavur as well, the proxy for our planet, once imported from elsewhere with eagerness and curiosity, is cast aside in the refuse-bin of history. All too often, such is the melancholic fate of the terrestrial globe in its itineraries across the subcontinent.58

“THE SCIENCE OF PRINCES”

When John Brathwaite presented a terrestrial globe in Madras to Prince Serfoji in July 1794, he was following in the footsteps of other EIC officials who had in recent years made similar gifts to other royals in the subcontinent. In turn, these men might well have been heeding the words of fellow Briton and globe maker George Adams (Senior) who, in 1766, had reminded his patron and monarch George III, “Geography is in a peculiar manner the science of princes.”59 As others have documented, the terrestrial globe— and other related cartographic instrument such as maps and atlases— became first visible in early European modernity primarily as an instrument of statecraft and nation building.60 Sovereigns across Europe routinely commissioned and collected the artifact, and offered calculated displays of themselves in its presence to signal masculine monarchical worldliness. The new position (with attendant honors) of Geographer Royal (or géographes du roi) created in Britain and France in the seventeenth century, also signaled the increasing importance of mapmakers to early modern statecraft and governance. Sumptuous atlases, such as Saxton’s in England in 1579, were also produced under state patronage, as were large globes, as evidenced, for example, in Louis XVI’s Coronelli globes (1681– 83), with a diameter of almost four meters.61 Geography was indeed the science of the princes, and of their modernizing states, as territories came to be surveyed, mapped, and bounded off across a Europe that was increasingly getting carto-graphed. When the first Britons arrived in India from such a map-minded Europe and began to visit native courts, they might well have encountered the royal astronomer ( jyotisharaja or munajjim), a hallowed figure who frequently counted among the sovereign’s close advisors.62 But there was no equivalent to the Ge-

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ographer Royal in these subcontinental settings. Rather than introduce such a novel figure to these courts, the Company’s administrators did the next best thing in the form of materialized proxies, such as globes and maps, orreries and atlases, and the geography book. These objects in turn, representing as they did an essentially European, or in some cases even British, point of view attempted a conquest by means other than arms, even as they advanced the cause of the conquest of the world as globe. That such a conquest did not always have the consequences intended for them by the bearer(s) of these gifts is apparent, again and again, in the archives of empire, reminding us in turn of the unexpected itineraries charted by the terrestrial globe as it travels elsewhere. As I have already noted, a few weeks before Brathwaite presented a globe to young Serfoji, the Governor of Madras Sir Charles Oakeley gifted in early 1794 “a complete and curious apparatus, for shewing experiments in different Branches of natural philosophy and mechanics” to that most recalcitrant of the EIC’s foes, Tipu Sultan, when the Mysore ruler’s two young sons, held hostage under the terms of the Treaty of Seringapatam (1792), were returned to their father.63 Oakeley paid the sizeable sum of £600 to locally acquire these instruments from the Reverend Andrew Bell (1753– 1832, on whom more a little later), and they included among others, an orrery and “a machine to demonstrate the figure of the Earth.”64 Also dispatched to Mysore along with the instruments was a young man called William Smith— a Eurasian youth of seventeen years and one of the first graduates of the Madras Male Orphan Asylum— who “went through a course of experiments in natural philosophy in the presence of the Sultan,” and also instructed some of his courtiers in their use, although it is clear that Tipu himself was already quite familiar with some of the instruments and not as readily awed by this display of European science (and power) as was hoped for in Madras.65 Indeed, the Sultan subsequently responded to the British gift with characteristic cheekiness, “The apparatus which you were so good to send me for exhibiting some experiments of European Arts and Science was extremely acceptable and while it affords me much amusement and satisfaction it excited my admiration of the Grand Source of all Science[,] the Divine Wisdom.”66 In light of Tipu’s stated commitments as a devout Muslim, one can be fairly sure that this Grand Source was not the Christian God of the makers of these instruments.67 About two decades prior to this event and exchange, the Madras government had made a similar gift of an orrery— this time, ordered from England, rather than purchased locally— to another royal, Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah (r. 1749– 95), the Nawab of Carnatic (or “Arcot”). In contrast to Tipu Sultan, the Arcot Nawab had been since 1752 a close, if not always reliable, ally.68 This

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object changed hands in 1772 when the orrery was still a rather novel instrument even in England, “an Instrument of curious design and workmanship . . . which exhibits the revolutions of the Planets.”69 The orrery (so named after Charles Boyle, the fourth Earl of Orrery) was a complicated instrument designed in the early eighteenth century to demonstrate celestial mechanics. Offering a model of the Solar System, it incorporated a terrestrial globe— frequently showing the distribution of land and water on its surface— as a model of and for our Earth. Representing the triumph of the Copernican revolution and Newtonian experimental philosophy, it began its career as a gentleman’s toy and developed over the course of the eighteenth century into a serious pedagogical instrument for demonstrating heliocentrism, among other truths.70 Although such a “curious” instrument was eventually dispatched from England only in 1771, the request for the orrery had originated from Madras a number of years earlier in October 1764 when the Madras government at Fort St. George, in the wake of the British success in the Seven Years War, wrote to the Company’s Directors in London that since the Nabob will expect some compliment from your Honors in acknowledgement of the new Grant, we beg leave to recommend a Present be prepared for him on the occasion, which may consist of a couple of pieces of rich gold brocade, some carpets, an Orrery, a pair of Globes, a sett of spying glasses of different sizes, and any curiosities that your Honors may judge proper. We imagine a handsome light roomy landau, with light harness for six Horses will be very acceptable.71

While the Directors responded to this request a year later in December 1765 by sanctioning “a very elegant Coach” (that they sent from England, asking their representatives in India to locally procure the horses to pull it), they demurred on the request for the other items, noting “the Orrery, Globes, etc. shall be sent on some future occasion as We think Presents tho’ of no great Value frequently repeated may have a better effect than to send all at once.”72 Persistence on the part of the Madras government appears to have paid off, for although “a pair of Globes” did not materialize as a gift (or if it did, left no archival trace that I have been able to detect),73 the Directors finally wrote to Madras in April 1771 that they were dispatching the orrery, and that the instrument should be presented to the nawab “with such publick ceremony and marks of respect as are suitable to the occasion.”74 It is interesting that they specified a public ceremony for the occasion, for as Natasha Eaton astutely points out, by this time, the Directors were increasingly suspicious of native

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gifting practices and ceremonies, and had in fact just a few years earlier in March 1767, written to the governors in all three presidencies against such exaggerated display. “In your public system you seem to entertain the idea that the Company is to adapt Eastern parade and dignity, but we are of the opinion, as we have repeatedly observed to you, that European simplicity is much more likely to engage the respect of the natives than any imitation of their manners.”75 The orrery so dispatched finally arrived in June 1772 (via Bengal), and following the new set of instructions, it was delivered to the nawab “with all due Honors.” Unfortunately, when unpacked, “many of the Panes of Glass, on which the Constellations are represented” were broken. As these could not be replaced in India, the Madras government sent back the “Dimensions and Draughts of the Figures of the broken Panes by the help of which the Artist who made the Orrery may with great Exactness make others.” Despite this mishap, Company officials in Fort St. George were happy to inform the Directors, “The Nabob is highly pleased with the Present and desired We would return you his Thanks and in His Name request that you will procure, and send out the Panes of Glass to replace those that are broken.”76 Highly pleased though he might have been (at least, in the reporting of the event) with the object, it is not clear what the nawab subsequently did with it. The Arcot court certainly did not become a new center of calculation for European science in the manner of Serfoji’s Tanjavur a few decades later, nor did the nawab have himself painted in its company, in spite of his own enthusiastic participation in the new emerging visual culture of Anglo-Indian portraiture.77 The saga of the Carnatic orrery is yet another reminder that the global itineraries of delicate scientific instruments is rarely free of surprises and accidents, even serendipity, especially in this early period. It is also a reminder that it could sometimes take close to a decade for a gift object to be conjured up, secured, and finally reach its intended destination, and even after that, one had to hope that these fragile instruments would survive the rigors of the long sea voyage and arrive intact. Not least, it is worth noting that although the orrery was still relatively a novel item in Europe, officials in distant India thought it would make a gift appropriate enough to seal an important political treaty, add a symbolic touch to complex diplomatic negotiations, and lubricate lucrative commercial deals for the EIC, after all still at its core a trading enterprise at this time despite starting out on its (in)famous career as a territorial power. Commercial prospects appear to indeed have been the initial motivation for another “global” gift intended for another contemporary royal, a young man, like Serfoji, but already the reigning Peshwa as a consequence of the Treaty of Salbai signed in 1782 by the EIC with that formidable western Indian power,

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the Marathas.78 The year is 1789, and the place Poona (the hub of Maratha power), and the Englishman involved was the ambitious Resident Charles Malet (1753– 1815), appointed to that key position in 1785 and arriving to take up his charge in March 1786.79 The royal whom Malet sought to seduce as both political ally but also consumer of Company products with a presentation of cartographic objects, including globes and maps, was the young Madhav Rao II (b. 1774; r. 1774– 95).80 By June 1789, in the lead up to what was one of the most significant of EIC maneuvers— the so-called Triple Alliance forged in June 1790 against Tipu Sultan— Malet found himself entangled in what he called an “Intercourse of Presents” between the powerful Maratha court and the Company’s headquarters in Calcutta, an “intercourse” he willingly participated in to further his real agenda, which was to lay “the Foundation of Commercial Advantages” for the Company in western India. So he urged the Bengal Governor Lord Cornwallis (in office, 1786– 93) to send a sample of wares from Calcutta of fine cotton and flowered muslins— such as “Agabanoo, Tartore, but above all of the most delicate Shubnum,”— since these would catch the eye of a “People whose affectation of delicacy in their dress is excessive.” In so urging he also added: As however in the Prosecution of this Intercourse, I should be glad to convert it to the Propagation of an Esteem for the Arts and Sciences of our Native Country, and as the Minister has on more occasion than one desired me to give the young Peshwah an Idea of our Geographical System with which I have complied as well as my scanty collection of maps permitted, I have to crave your Lordships indulgence in suggesting your commissioning or permitting me to commission from England to Bombay an orrery, a pair of Globes, a set of instruments, and a set of the largest and best coloured Maps procurable; in which great attention should be paid to the durability of the articles and the real goodness of their workmanship, particularly in the orrery and globes, as none but of the strongest and best materials would stand in this country, and the smallest disorder would render them totally useless where no damage can be repaired.81

Malet wrote this letter on June 26, 1789. Cornwallis at first responded with alacrity and approval on August 26, 1789, writing “I shall be extremely glad to offer the present of globes and maps that you recommend to the young Peshwa, and as it will be necessary to procure them from England, an application shall be made to the Court of Directors for them, with a request that they be sent out with all possible dispatch.”82 However, despite the fact that the commer-

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cial advantage for the Company as well as “the Propagation of an Esteem for the Arts and Sciences of our Native Country” were at stake, as was “another important objective, “the Increase of cordiality with this Court by mutual Habits of Kindness and Remembrance . . . [to be] preserved on a footing of liberal equality and reciprocity,” Cornwallis took his time in writing to London, doing so only on November 5, 1789, when he asked the Directors to send from England, “an Orrery, a Pair of Globes, a sett of Instruments, and a set of the largest and best coloured Maps procurable,” and to make sure that these were fashioned out of the strongest and best materials.83 This letter was received in London in April 1790, and a little over a year later, on May 5, 1791, the Directors wrote to the Bombay government that an orrery, a planetarium, a lunarium, and a tellurian had been dispatched as gifts to be presented to the young Peshwa.84 However, a “pair of large Globes” was not yet ready by the time the ship carrying the other instruments had set sail.85 These globes were available toward year’s end, and the Directors informed the Bombay government that a pair, along with a small case of mathematical instruments, was being soon sent. “We rely on your utmost care to prevent the abovementioned articles being damaged, and it will be highly necessary to have them deposited in some place where they may be effectually guarded from damp and vermin. Particular attention must also be paid in their safe conveyance to the Peshwa.”86 These globes reached Bombay “in perfect good order.”87 However, despite Malet’s explicit request that due precaution should be taken in the procurement and transportation of these valuable instruments, the orrery arrived “much damaged . . . owing to some fault in the package or carriage.” Fortunately, Malet was able to secure the services of George Lobey Emmitt (in India, 1789– 95) in the Surveyor’s office with whose help the object was “almost completely repaired. . . . I now wait only a good opportunity of presenting these and I shall do it in such a manner as may be most likely to increase this Court’s respect for our nation and the cordiality that so happily subsists between the two Governments.”88 The care taken in procuring these instruments, transporting them over a vast distance, and presenting them so as to make an impression notwithstanding, the intended goal of cultivating in the Peshwa “esteem for the Arts and Sciences of our Native Country” was rendered moot, for the young Madhav Rao died unexpectedly— and tragically— in October 1795, a couple years after these cartographic gifts arrived in Poona. Another revealing global encounter in a courtly context takes me a little farther north, to the Rajput court of Kotah, a few decades later when, in exchange for a gift of a painting (made by a local artist) from the twenty-four year old Maharao Ram Singh II (b. 1808, r. 1827– 66) to Governor-General Lord

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William Bentinck (in office 1828– 35), the colonial government made a return gift of a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes among other cartographic objects, scientific instruments, and geographical works.89 (Oriental) Art was thus sought to be countered by (European) Knowledge, Tradition by Modernity, and as we will shortly see, Native Science by European Science. 90 The large painting on cloth (1.05 x 0.88 meters) showed the governor-general and the young Maharao seated on chairs, facing each other and surrounded by their respective retinues, while entertained by dancers and wrestlers in the foreground. The unknown artist recalls a meeting between the Maharao and the governor-general in January 1832 in Ajmer, the scene of a historic durbar, an official audience, which inaugurated the so-called Rajputana Agency and ratified what was already a fact on the ground, namely, the subordination of this part of India to “indirect” British rule.91 Several months after this historic meeting, Ram Singh sent the painting to Bentinck in June 1833 along with a letter in which he admitted “my anxiety to gratify you[;] your virtues, your kind attentions to myself, and the excellency of your arrangements for the reception of my chiefs at your Durbar are the themes of my constant admiration.” In response to this unexpected gift (since customary presents had already been exchanged), Bentinck wrote to the Maharao a few months later on January 3, 1834, that the sight of the painting “calls to my recollection the agreeable intercourse which passed between us at Ajmere and the care you have taken to have it prepared and sent to me convinces me that I some time occupy a place in your thoughts.”92 But he did not stop with these routine pleasantries. Instead, he went on to note that he was dispatching some “acceptable” return gift, the selection of which was motivated by the fact that he had heard that the Maharao was “fond of scientific pursuits and to be a liberal patron of learned men.” In particular, he had heard that since the Maharao’s ancestors had for ages past been “patrons of Geography and Astronomy,” he had chosen the return gift in the belief that students in the college established in Kotah for the study of these subjects should profit by the light which has been thrown upon Astronomy by the labours of many generations of learned men in different parts of Europe aided by the most powerful Telescopes and they should also be made acquainted with the accessions [sic] to the knowledge of Geography derived from the maritime discoveries which have been made by the English and the nations of Europe in every part of the World. By comparing the Globes and maps existing in your college at Kotah with those which are now sent you will be

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able to see the relative state of the sciences in the East and West, how far the results at which the learned of the two Hemispheres have arrived coincide, and in what particulars they have surpassed each other. This enquiry will form a highly interesting occupation for some of your leisure hours and I hope you will enable me to participate in the pleasure you will derive from it by letting me know the result of your observations. A Telescope is sent which will help you to see the distant wonders in the skies and [a] microscope which discovers the minutest parts of little animals and reveals some of the finer and more curious works of nature.

There is much to parse in this letter that sought to introduce Modern Earth and Modern Sky to Kotah, but of particular interest for now is Bentinck’s reference to “the Globes and maps existing in your college at Kotah.”93 A contemporary “eye-witness” account noted that such globes did indeed exist in the Kotah palace at this time, but that they depicted the world as understood in the Siddhantas, especially following the writings of Bhaskaracharya. “The axes of the globes are fixed at an elevation of 24°30’, the supposed altitude of the North Polar Star at Kota. But the latitudes given by the native astronomers, for all the principal cities of Rajputana and Malwa are under-rated by about 40’; that of Kotah is, I believe, 25°10’. . . . The authority of Bhaskar Acharya has led to this error.”94 Bentinck’s letter subtly set up the stage by which Kotah’s scholars (and perhaps Ram Singh himself in his “leisure” hours) would discover for themselves the “error” of their foremost native authorities by being exposed to advances made in “the West.” In order to absolutely ensure that the Maharao and his men would arrive at the right conclusion about who had “surpassed” whom, Bentinck and his men in Calcutta had put together quite a package of delectable items that were itemized in the governor-general’s letter: List of Geographical and Astronomical Books and Instruments Presented by the Governor General to the Maha Rao of Kotah A Pair of Carey’s [sic] 18 Inch globes in reeded Frames— Figures coloured— the Terrestrial containing the corrections and additions to 1831.95 A New General Atlas consisting of a series of geographical design of the various projections exhibiting the form and Component part of the Globe and a Collection of maps and Charts delineating the natural and political divisions of the Empires Kingdoms and the states in the world in a series of 76 beautifully coloured maps together with a table of maps and a con-

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sulting Index. From the best systematic Works, and the most authentic voyages and travels with the new discoveries to the date of publication by John Thomson [sic].96 Walker’s newly constructed and extended map of India from the latest surveys of the best authorities, 1831. In two parts mounted in cloth in a case.97 An Historical Atlas, in a Series of Maps of the World as known at different periods constructed upon an uniform scale and coloured according to the political changes of each period, accompanied by a narrative of the leading events exhibited in the Maps forming together a general view of Universal History from the creation to A. D. 1828 by Edward Quin M. A. of Magdalen Hall Oxford, and Barrister at Law of the Honorable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, The Maps engraved by Sidney Hall, 1830. Brooke’s General Gazeteer, or Compendious Geographical Dictionary containing description of the Empires, Kingdoms, States, Provinces, Cities, Towns, Forts, Seas, Harbours, Rivers, Lakes, Mountains, Capes in the Known World. Eighteenth edition with additions of Pigot, London 1827. Geography illustrated in a popular plan for the use of schools and young persons containing all the interesting and amusing features of geographical knowledge and calculated to convey instruction by means of the striking and pleasing associations produced by the peculiar manners customs and characters of all nations and countries, a New Edition including Extracts from all the Principal recent Voyages and Travels with a beautiful engravings representing the dresses, customs, etc. of all nations maps etc. Pinnock’s Elements of Modern Geography, and General History, in a plan entirely new containing an accurate and interesting description of all the countries, states, etc. in the known world, with the manners and customs of the Inhabitants, to which are added Historical notices of each country to the present time, and questions for examination, the whole illustrated by numerous maps, a new edition, corrected to 1829 by G. Roberts . . . A Camera Obscura. A Microscope etc. A Telescope etc. etc. A Steblings marine Barometer with Thermometer attached A Thermometer with [?] scales, graduated above the Boiling Points; Hutton’s Wonders of Nature and Art, Containing an Account of the Most Remarkable and Curious and Mineral and Vegetable Productions in the world, also the manufactures, buildings, and wonderful inventions of men, London, 1823.

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The Book of English Trades and Library of the Useful Arts, with Seventy Engravings, new edition with 500 questions, London. The Cabinet of Curiosities, or wonders of the world display from a repository of whatever is remarkable in the reigns of nature and art, extraordinary events, eccentric biography, London, 1831. Wilson’s introduction to Universal History, containing a complete list of Indian Sovereigns (in successive dynasties), Plates, cloth bound. Digdurshun, Or Indian Youth’s Magazine in one volume, complete bound. Goldsmith’s History of England to the access of His Present Majesty, cloth bound; Introduction to Natural Philosophy, with Plates . . . (the last two works prepared by the Committee of Useful Knowledge, England). II. Hindostanee 6 Introductions to Geography III Hindave 6 Outlines of Geography and History Kaythie Nagri character IV Persian 6 sets of maps as far as completed 6 Mejmua Shumsee, a Summary of the Copernican Astronomy 2 Euclid’s Elements, first 6 Books Map of the world, large sheet Map of Hindoostan, large sheet.

In the entire history of interactions between Europeans and royal courts in India over the course of the last few centuries, this is quite possibly the largest cartographic gift that ever changed hands (and not just in number, but also in the range of artifacts and objects).98 It is also worth nothing that nothing outdated and discarded was gifted; instead only the latest and the best were carefully chosen in this show of colonial benevolence. A grateful Maharao acknowledged the “valuable” presents a few months later on March 26, 1834, in a letter in which he wrote to Bentinck that they “have afforded me the greatest satisfaction,” and added My Lord! Altho’ I have with me men more or less versed in the above sciences yet to find them equally conversant in these matters with yourself, is not to be expected, for in you God has entered all virtues, still I have hopes that under

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your favor, and by associating myself with men of learning etc. that I may in time make myself acquainted in them.99

The arrival of these “rare and curious” articles in Kotah from Calcutta was greeted, we learn from a later letter, with “a salute of cannon fired in honor of the occasion.”100 In contrast, however, to his near-contemporary Serfoji in distant Tanjavur who, when confronted with Modern Earth and Modern Sky as materialized in European terrestrial and celestial globes, strived to understand them and respond to them in ways I have detailed earlier, it is not clear that Ram Singh took any time off to “acquaint” himself with the new objects and knowledges.101 The Kotah Court did not turn into a new center for calculation for these sciences, its considerable investments historically in jyotisastra notwithstanding. Nor in the number of portraits where Ram Singh II put himself on display— “since he vastly enjoyed being painted in dramatic roles”— did the Maharao choose to present himself with the globes, or with anything else he received with such gratitude from the colonial government.102 Instead, the several months after the arrival of the cartographic objects from Calcutta appear to have been invested in fashioning for Bentinck a return gift— “a native astronomical instrument”— that Ram Singh sent to Calcutta in January 1835 as a mark of his continuing friendship with the governor-general.103 Bentinck accepted his gift with pleasure, commenting on “the neatness of the workmanship, and the regularity with which the degrees have been delineated.” But lest Ram Singh thought he had had the final word in countering European science with the wonders of Siddhantic science, Bentinck also let the Maharao know that in return for his return gift, he had sent off a request to England “for an European astronomical instrument called an Orrery.”104 One final word about Bentinck’s original choice of a pair of globes as part of the package of cartographic and geographic gifts he sent to Kotah, and that precipitated this subsequent exchange of rivaling scientific instruments. The records show that the idea for such a gift emerged not from the fertile mind of the governor-general but was mooted by another man on whom I will have much more to say in the next chapter. His name is Lancelot Wilkinson (ca. 1805– 1841). Like Charles Malet, he too was Resident (or more precisely, acting political agent) in Kotah, and like Malet, he was a typical “man on the spot,” with all manner of local pedagogical (and political) ambitions that will become apparent in the discussion to follow in chapter 3. For now, I note that it was Wilkinson who had taken the liberty to suggest that in exchange for the Maharao’s gift of a painting, the governor-general should consider making a return gift of

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“a small pair of 12 inch English Globes.” Wilkinson noted that the Maharao’s “native astronomers ( jyotishees)” had seen such a pair in his own possession, and had compared them with their own globes “which have been constructed according to their own astronomical Books.” These native astronomers had “understood and appreciated the correctness and nicety” with which every part of Wilkinson’s European globes “had been filled up,” and had reported to the Maharao the very incomplete and imperfect state of their own Globes. The Maharao has accordingly instructed his principal Jyotishee to make himself acquainted with the English character with a view to enable him to fill up the names deficient in theirs from the English Globes.105

Men like Wilkinson are exemplary of a type of new individual that I characterize as cartographic evangelist, a figure who placed enormous faith in this novel spherical artifact that made Modern Earth portable and readable, alongside its avowed capacity to save the benighted and idolatrous.106 Material confrontations with this object (or a discursive exposure to it in schoolbooks, or pictorially in hemispheric world maps and plates drawn to show “the true figure of the earth”), it was fervently believed, would unleash a revolutionary transformation, weaning the native from an attachment to inherited or ancestral ways of viewing and narrating the world, and initiating, at the very least, a commitment to the Gospel of Modern Earth preached by astronomy, geography, natural philosophy, indeed (Western) science. For some among these cartographic evangelists, the expression of such a commitment was a worthy end in and of itself. For others, this was but a step on the hallowed route to conversion to the one true faith that proclaimed God’s glory as manifest in the (spherical) world that He had created.107 That not all cartographic evangelists were necessarily Christian, Protestant, or even European is not least of the reasons that the conquest of the world as globe cannot be viewed simply as a colonial or “Western” project, as we will see later in this chapter. But first, I turn to those for whom their cartographic evangelism was very much a critical ingredient of their professed faith, with few contradictions perceived between the goals of the Empire of Christ and of the Empire of Geography.108

GLOBAL MISSIONARIES, CARTOGR APHIC EVANGELISTS

The earliest of Protestant missionaries whose lives got entangled with the pedagogical itineraries of the terrestrial globe in southern India were German

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Pietists from Halle who first settled in the early years of the eighteenth century in the Danish outpost— a fort adjacent to a small clutch of settlements— of Tranquebar (Tarangambadi) on the Coromandel Coast.109 The natural sciences were central to the Halle Pietist curriculum, first formulated by August Hermann Francke (1663– 1727), with its emphasis on experiential learning and physico-theology. By the 1730s, in Halle itself, a chamber on the top floor of the main building of the Franckeschen Stiftungen included “two gigantic armillary spheres representing the world systems of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, symmetrically flanked by celestial and terrestrial globes and models of biblical topography.” The room, where these objects were placed centrally, Indira Peterson notes, was meant “to reflect as clearly as possible the idea of the macrocosm, a vision of God’s creation in encyclopedic fullness, with Heaven, Earth, the topography of the Bible, and representatives of all the species of Nature and the works of man forming a totality.”110 Schooling was the principal instrument with which a Self that subscribed to such a (Pietist) Truth was produced. Even as this world-view was being formulated in Halle, the first Protestant missionaries to settle in the subcontinent, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682– 1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (ca. 1675– 1752) arrived in India in July 1706. By October of that year, they had set up “their own schoolmaster with a small school,” and in the following year, the first formal mission schools began to take shape in Tranquebar.111 As early as 1707, Ziegenbalg wrote to his patron, the Danish king, that his intention was “to deal with all kinds of sciences” in his schools.112 It is likely that the pair of globes given free freight soon after on a EIC ship in 1711 that I noted earlier, were meant for their use, a transaction enabled by the Halle missionaries’ compact in 1710 with the London-based SPCK to jointly pursue their pedagogical pursuits in distant India.113 Over the next few decades, in the “Portuguese” and “Malabar” schools these missionaries progressively set up (many in collaboration with the SPCK, and with the support of the EIC) in neighboring villages and towns adjacent to Tranquebar, including Cuddalore and Madras, the curriculum (in Tamil and Portuguese) largely emphasized reading, writing, arithmetic, and the Bible. Although there is no explicit mention of the teaching of terrestrial lessons in these early years, the Franckean emphasis on “praxis-oriented education,” meant that a modicum of instruction in the natural sciences was likely imparted to older boys.114 Indeed, in 1737 when Johann Anton Sartorius (1704– 38) and Johann Ernst Geister (in India, 1732– 46) went to Cuddalore to teach in a school established by the SPCK in that settlement, “they made a copy of a globe” that they had been using in Madras, entering geographical terms in

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Tamil script along with “some geographical and astronomical aphorisms.”115 After Bouchet’s attempt over three decades earlier to make a similar object that I wrote about in the previous chapter, this is the earliest archival trace I have found for a Tamil globe. Soon after, the mission’s headquarters in Halle noted that its emissaries in India had been provided with a telescope, a microscope, a thermometer, and an air pump, but that a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes were still needed.116 The missionaries must have received a pair by 1756, as Indira Peterson’s analysis of mission reports for Tranquebar and Cuddalore shows. One reads: “A heathen merchant, who had come from Tranquebar a short time before, and had settled here along with some others, visited one of us, and wanted to know how things were in Tranquebar. We showed him and the others the terrestrial globe, and the voyage that ships make from Europe to this place, and took the opportunity to talk about god and his great work of Creation.” Another noted in a similar vein, “A heathen merchant in Cudalur visited us along with several of his relatives and friends, and saw the terrestrial and celestial globes, whereupon, we took the opportunity, first to help them know the Creator through His great and wondrous works.”117 By the 1780s, under the pedagogical leadership of C.S. John— the same man who in 1795 offered in Madras the young Serfoji a lesson in circumnavigation, the solar system, and other spherical truths— geography, cosmography, natural history and “useful sciences” became part of the curriculum in schools run by the Tranquebar missionaries, especially for talented boys, the so-called “selectans” who were being “prepared for the service of the Church and the common good.”118 In October 1784, John (along with his colleague Johann Peter Rottler) wrote to Halle asking for a terrestrial globe (along with a microscope, thermometer, and other instruments) for use in his schools as well as for ongoing research.119 Karsten Hommel notes that by the 1790s, John’s favored “instrument of conversion” was the personal conversation, which he often conducted at home and in the mission garden, frequently using various scientific instruments including “globes of earth and heaven” in his possession. One of his diary entries from 1793 records a conversation with a native regarding astronomy, which he regarded as one of “the noblest sciences which portrays God most clearly in His infinite greatness and which awakens the deepest admiration and worship.” Another dairy entry from 1797 recalls an encounter with a Brahman who he had encouraged to use the large microscope in his possession and who apparently had claimed after a session with it, “You don’t need to say anything more. One look through your microscope is enough to convince me, more than an entire sermon.”120 As Hommel notes, as “the chief

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advocate of physico-theology” in the Tranqubar Mission, John was convinced “that God’s revelation in nature is the only universal one.”121 Correspondingly, he became one of the earliest advocates for using science education to subtly delegitimize rivaling worldviews, especially the Puranic Hinduism that apparently saturated the everyday world of his Tamil neighbors. Thus, in January 1796, he wrote to Andrew Bell in Madras, regretting that he would be unable to attend a public lecture in Madras offered by James Dinwiddie (1746– 1815) on his experimental philosophy but hoping that he would be “able to arrest this valuable doctor of philosophy and his whole apparatus in the most honourable manner”: I never feel the want of money (which has, in other respects, no great value in my eyes) more than when it deprives me of doing some good, or of promoting knowledge and sciences in India. I think 100 pagodas but a trifle for an orrery or tellurium, by which we may give a proper idea of the motions of our terrestrial globe, and the relative celestial bodies, to the youth, and remove a great part of foolish superstition amongst the natives.122

It was such a Pietist milieu that also sustained Christian Friedrich Schwartz, Serfojee’s guardian and mentor who we encountered earlier in this chapter, commanding his ward to study the terrestrial globe so as to learn the Word and Work of (his Christian) God. Schwartz, a Prussian from Sonnenburg, trained in Halle, and ordained in Copenhagen, arrived in Tranquebar in 1750, and subsequently founded the Tanjore Mission in 1778. From his Tanjore base and with the financial support of the EIC, the SPCK, and local royals, he sought from 1787 to establish (with mixed success) elementary schools in Tanjavur, Tiruchirappalli, Ramanathapuram, and Shivaganga. These “provincial” schools were mostly staffed by German-speaking Tranquebar missionaries and native teachers trained by them, with an occasional Englishman such as William Wheatley.123 A letter Schwartz wrote to his EIC patrons in Fort St. George in July 1787 noted that the English school in Tanjore— the most successful of the lot— had twenty pupils “whose father is European” and eight “black” children, and that the school day began as early as half-past six with prayers (led by the padre himself ). Alongside studies in English, “the Moorish language,” and “Malabar,” reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic, “the elder children read books of easy language,” in history and geography every afternoon, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.124 Unfortunately, these books “of easy language” themselves do not appear to have survived, although they may well have been printed by the SPCK, either in London or maybe even at its press in the Madras suburb

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of Vepery, or in Tranquebar. Nor do we know if the Kohlhoff brothers (who taught many of the subjects, including astronomy, by 1796) used globes in the classroom at this point, although a little over a decade later by 1802, as I have already noted, they were indeed doing so.125 In addition to the English school, the missionaries also maintained a free Tamil School, which in 1786 had twenty six pupils who were taught the Bible, reading, writing, and arithmetic (and for some who requested, a smattering of English).126 It was this school which could count as one of its graduates a remarkable man, among the earliest of the many native cartographic evangelists that I write about in his book. His name was Vedanayaka Sastri (1774– 1864), hailed as the first major Tamil Protestant Christian poet.127 Indira Peterson has superbly analyzed his literary works, especially those that were clearly influenced by an exposure to Halle-inflected physico-theology and natural philosophy. Vedanayakam, the son of a Roman Catholic who had converted to Protestantism, first came under Schwartz’s care in 1785, and after a brief stint in the Tamil (“Malabar”) mission school in Tanjavur, he underwent rigorous training in Tranquebar between 1789 and 1794 in the seminary established there for catechists, where he studied astronomy, among other subjects, with C. S. John. From 1794, he headed the Tanjore mission’s Tamil school where he taught astronomy (among other subjects) to a new generation of native learners until about 1829. Like Serfoji’s Marathi drama Devendra Kuravanji that I discussed earlier, Vedanayakam’s Tamil poem, Bethlehem Kuravanji (Fortune-Teller Play of Bethlehem), offered numerous verses, albeit in a rudimentary form, on the Copernican world system in the course of its narration of Christian sacred history.128 Those who heard the poem (or read it, when it was subsequently printed) would have been introduced to the solar system as an entity consisting of our spinning spherical planet, revolving around the sun, in the company of seven others (including the recently-discovered Neptune and Uranus). Undoubtedly, Vedanayakam would have been introduced to this knowledge during his tenure at Tranquebar and that mission’s Tanjore school system, and also possibly through his many interactions with the Kohlhoff brothers with their own astronomical interests. Peterson’s fine analysis of the poem’s structure confirms that its verses had a didactic purpose, and quite possibly Vedanayakam may have taught it in his classroom. It is not entirely clear from what has survived of Vedanayakam’s writings whether he wrote or published any formal Tamil textbooks in geography, astronomy, or the new sciences he learned. None are mentioned in Heike Liebau’s comprehensive work on the Danish-HalleEnglish Mission which shows that as early as 1716, the printing press in Tran-

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quebar was producing elementary reading books, grammars, and of course, the New Testament and related religious books in Tamil and Portuguese for use in schools.129 In the early nineteenth century, another German missionary’s life intersects with the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in India and the emergence of geography as a pedagogical subject in the Tamil country. His name was Carl (or Charles) Theophilus Ewald Rhenius (1790– 1838). Born and raised in West Prussia, he arrived in Madras in 1814 to preach and teach— until 1835 when he was summarily dismissed— under the aegis of another British organization that we will repeatedly encounter in this book, the Church Missionary Society (CMS).130 In 1820, after a brief stint as well in Tranquebar, Rhenius moved farther south to Palayamkottai where the CMS had opened an outpost as an offshoot of the Schwartz’s Tanjore Mission. In the eighteen or so years that followed, Rhenius set up a fierce program of evangelization, some of the fervor of which is clearly reflected in his reports and letters home. Indeed within five years of his arrival in Palayamkottai, Rhenius claimed more than three thousand converts that he had apparently secured to his faith.131 Schooling was essential to this project. As he wrote in a letter dated April 30, 1831, to a colleague, the Reverend F. Spring: Our only consideration should be, how to make our schools really subservient to the great end in view. . . . If instruction in the vital truths of Christianity be made the principal business of every school, and the masters and their pupils be, to that end, actively and faithfully dealt with, then these schools prove to be nurseries for the kingdom of God, and are a means of spreading Divine knowledge, and causing the downfall of idolatry. . . . The minds of masters and pupils become enlarged; they take their books home to their parents and neighbors: these begin to see the excellency of the Christian religion; the character of the boys improves; the people are pleased; and thus a farther good effect follows. Other heathen places, hearing and seeing these things, desire the establishment of similar schools among them. . . . When knowledge increases, and the heart is touched by the truth . . . men now become open advocates for Christianity.132

With such a viewpoint that looked to printed books as a means through which to enable “the downfall of idolatry” in the mission school and in the native home, Rhenius took to writing them. Around 1822, “knowing the utility and need of a work which might give to the natives the history and geography of the various countries on the earth,” he began a series of lectures, translating

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from European writings, which were subsequently transcribed and compiled. He also started teaching from the text in his seminary in Palayamkottai.133 A few years later in 1829, he reported to the General Committee of the CMS that “a Tamul geography and history are now in the Madras Press.”134 In 1832, the mission’s press in Madras released Pumicastiram (lit. “Earth science”), one of the earliest such works published in Tamil.135 The book’s long subtitle provided its author’s vision of “geography” as a subject that took up “the nature of this Earth sphere and its continents and oceans, the countries and islands in them, the people who inhabit them, their varieties and so on, and the histories of these peoples.”136 A work of over seven hundred pages (albeit the printed text was only six and half inches in length), Pumicastiram is written in a manner that shows the author’s awareness that he was introducing a new subject to his readers, and as such, it included a two-page glossary in English (beginning with “geography,” “pumicastiram”) with Tamil translations. Thus, “the Globe” is translated as pumi untai (lit. “Earth ball”) and “a Map” as pumippatam (lit. “Earth picture”), terms that have endured over time in the Tamil country.137 However, no illustrations are included to show the reader what the pumi untai or pumippatam might look like. Indeed it is clear that Rhenius assumes that the reader of his book would not have seen maps and globes, for he introduces them as novel artifacts and has to describe them discursively. Thus, he writes that that the globe or pumi untai has been created to show Earth’s rotundity, and the map or pumippatam, to show the lay of the land, water bodies, etc.138 He concludes the introductory section of his Pumicastiram— after taking the student-reader through the various features and parts of a terrestrial globe, including how to locate various places and the distances between them on the object— with a statement about the utility of such cartographic artifacts.139 Rhenius noted to his superiors in a report that the goal of his pedagogy was “not to make [his native students] great astronomers, or expert mathematicians, or profound philologists . . . but to make them generally well-informed men, sound reasoners, able theologians, of whom this country at present stands much in need.” As such, any native who comprehended his Pumicastiram would have certainly been worlded as per the terms of Enlightenment geography (albeit considerably leavened with a heavy dose of Christian salvational truths).140 Pumicastiram is an exemplary text for understanding the Protestant iteration of Modern Earth: the advent of Modern Earth did not mean the elimination of God; on the contrary. Thus, the opening line of Rhenius’s first chapter (titled “The Nature of Earth”) informs the reader, “Earth ( pumi) is one among the many round planets (grikam) in the sky created by God.” Rhenius also similarly

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concludes that the reader is filled with wonder when studying the much-varied Earth— described in great detail in the preceding pages of his massive tome— created by God.141 The advent of Modern Earth for such missionaries also meant the disavowal of prior ways of viewing our home planet. Early in his text, Rhenius dismissed as “myths” (lit. kattukkatai) ancestral knowledges that his (Hindu) readers might have inherited from their cultural milieu, such as Earth being borne by a thousand-headed snake or on the backs of eight elephants. Instead, he argues in the spirit of physico-theology that is typical of these early missionaries that it is (the Christian) God’s will that ensures that the sun and its planets move about in universe, and that such a God is worthy of our salutations.142 As such, the modern terrestrial lesson becomes a weapon with which to fight ancient idolatry. “It is well known that the sacred books of the Hindus are full of the most absurd statements regarding the physical world, and in imparting just and rational views on these subjects, we strike at the very foundation of Hinduism. How can a Native youth acquire a knowledge of even the most common facts of Geography and believe the sacred books of his fathers? How can a mind, expanded by knowledge, credit the monstrous fables of the Hindu Mythology,” asked one of Rhenius’s successors a couple decades later?143 The advent of Modern Earth also always meant the superiority of Europe and its “enlightened” useful knowledge. As Rhenius informed his reader: If you want to know how is it that we acquired so much knowledge to show so much about so many different countries, several people of Europe who went to different parts of the world to trade wrote down everything they saw and heard, and synthesized all this material, and cultivated the field of geography. They have great wisdom and abilities and this is apparent in the field of learning. They are not like those who have little knowledge of this Earth, living there like those who languish in a remote corner of their home.144

Having summarily dismissed local knowledge as “little knowledge,” Rhenius goes on drive home to his Tamil reader his contention that “there are those in this country who do not realize that their land is part of our large Earth, and assume [instead] that their country is the world.” Among the tasks of his “Earth science” was to demonstrate to his flock that “your country is only a small one among many others.”145 So not least, the advent of Modern Earth also meant cultivating a relational perspective in which individuals who had been rescued through the light of geography from the (dark unexamined) lives to which their ancient errors had hitherto confined them, were now able

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to locate themselves vis-à-vis each other on the surface of the spherical body that they inhabited. In developing this relational perspective, Rhenius devotes the bulk of his Pumicastiram to a detailing of Europe’s geography with a long section on the British Isles, with far briefer treatments of other parts of the then-known world (Asia and “Intutecam” [Hindu land, India]; Africa, America, and ten or so pages on Australasia). Europe deserves the lion’s share in this presentation, because although admittedly that continent is very small in terms of area, its people are “far more intelligent, wise and discriminating, and hence are the lords of this Earth.”146 Among these very intelligent people, the English in particular are singled out for praise, although Rhenius himself, ironically, was Prussian! Not surprisingly, Europe’s greatness is attributed to Christianity (kirustuva markam), which had rescued that continent from darkness and positioned it to lead the world. “Amen!” So ends this very long text, sealing the deal between geography and Gospel mounted around the study of the pumi untai. Rhenius must have been proud of his work and book, for he tells us that soon after its publication, when he was visited in August 1833 by Yogi Narayana Swamiar, “the great Guru of the Brahmans”— who traveled all over India in great pomp, on the back of an elephant, surrounded by followers who carried drums, badges, and silver staffs— the missionary presented him with a copy of his Tamil geography, with which the learned native appeared most pleased amid all the other gifts he received.147 In his cartographic evangelism, Rhenius was already part of a growing network of Protestant missionaries who taught terrestrial lessons to the native in the course of their proselytization activities. This included the ardent American Daniel Poor (ca. 1789– 1855) on whom Richard Fox Young has written a fascinating essay.148 Indeed, in many regards, as Rhenius noted in his reports, American missionaries like Poor based among the Tamils in neighboring Jaffna and Batticaloa in Ceylon were far ahead at this point in their “astronomical” struggles with Hindu idolatry and native belief, particularly because they also possessed the necessary instruments like globes and telescopes, in which the Tiruneveli mission was still sorely lacking.149 Rhenius’s complaints notwithstanding, Modern Earth and Modern Sky were slowly but surely introduced in various unexpected corners of southern India in the early decades of the nineteenth century, thanks mostly to mission pedagogy with its focus on rural education. Thus, a young man called Vedadrisadasan (ca. 1820-?) recalled studying geography and “the use of the globes” when attending a LMS school around 1833 in Nagarkovil, although it is not entirely clear whether the object was materially present in his classroom.150 A few years later, the Reverend Henry W. Fox who was attached to the CMS’s “Teloogoo Mission” in Masulipatnam re-

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ported in 1847 that he had adorned his home with all manner of knick-knacks, including “a small globe,” which offered “grand attractions to my visitors, who are as delighted to see these things as a child is to see a raree-show.” Like C. S. John before him, Fox too strived to show up “the low morality of Hindu religious books brought out in common conversation,” and especially ridiculed native conceptions of Earth.151 That the teaching of terrestrial lessons is what distinguished the rural and small-town mission school for much of the nineteenth century is apparent from a Tamil narrative set up in the form of a dialogue between a schoolmaster and two of his neighbors, Kalimuttu and Chinnapen, in which the virtues of a mission education are touted. In response to Kalimuttu’s question, “Why should my son go to a Mission School merely to learn to cipher [write]? The old schoolmaster Nallaperumal will teach that,” Chinnapen (the enthusiastic convert) retorts, “Do other schools deserve to be compared with Mission Schools? Can a turkey compete with a peacock in dancing? In Mission Schools, do they teach only to cipher? They teach also poetry, grammar, astronomy, geography, etc.”152 Even as these rural missionaries were valiantly attempting to conquer and convert the native mind to the Gospel of Modern Earth, the terrestrial globe began its pedagogical journeys in the growing colonial metropolis of Madras from the early 1790s. Andrew Bell, whose name has already flickered across these pages, plays an interesting role here. Arriving in India in 1787 with other objectives in mind, the Scotsman set up on behalf of the EIC a school in Egmore for boys (most of Eurasian origin, illegitimate and destitute) called the Madras Male Orphan Asylum, which opened its doors in 1789.153 Bell’s letters show he owned at least one pair of terrestrial and celestial globes which he gifted in August 1796— damaged though one of them appears to have been— to a lady friend in Tiruchirapalli on the eve of his departure from India.154 It is hard to imagine that he did not show them off in his school, given that its curriculum included terrestrial lessons for the older boys. A few weeks before leaving India, Bell submitted to the Company’s Directors a report dated August 6, 1796 (that was subsequently published in 1797, and reprinted in 1808 as the fame of his “experiments in education” in Madras grew). From this report, we learn the names of several teenage boys, among the first students in India who learned about Modern Earth in a schoolroom setting such as Charles Hancock and George Stevens. Following Bell’s system (that copied “Malabar” methods), these older students, once they had learned the rudiments, taught the others, so that boys of twelve years of age were tutored in “geography, geometry, mensuration, navigation, and astronomy.” Although Bell was careful to note “in regard to several of these sciences, nothing more is meant, in general, than

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that some of the boys, for whom it may seem eligible, are initiated in their first elements,” the report also noted, “some of the boys copy charts, etc., wonderfully for their age; and make globes for themselves, by which they teach one another the first principles of geography and astronomy.”155 It is quite likely that these boys might well have used Bell’s personal set of globes to order to make their own copies, and are thus among the earliest of native men to produce make-shift versions of the object. When he had set out for Calcutta in 1787, Bell had intended to make a living as a “philosophical lecturer,” and hence had carried along with him numerous apparatus, which he supplemented once he got to Madras with other pieces. He gave fairly remunerative public demonstrations with his instruments in Madras and in Calcutta (supplementing thus his income as Chaplain to the Company’s army).156 A plan to publish these lectures— the discourse around which is fascinating in itself— did not succeed, but Bell’s spectacular experiments obviously left their mark in the pedagogical landscape of the city.157 In June 1805, the expatriate newsmagazine Madras Courier carried an announcement for “a course of Lectures on Astronomy and Geography” at the Vepery Academy, to be “simply illustrated by means of Globes, Maps, etc. every Wednesday morning at half past 9.”158 A month later in July 1805, J. Durham advertised a school for boarders and day scholars, also at Vepery, where in addition to reading, writing and arithmetic, parents were assured that their children would be taught “Navigation, Geography with the use of the Globes and other branches of Mathematics taught on reasonable terms.”159 Not to be outdone, an expatriate woman announced a Mrs. Smith’s Seminary for “Young Ladies Boarded, and instructed in the English Language, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, the use of the Globes, and the different branches of Needle-work, at eight pagodas per month.”160 As I discuss in chapter 4, for much of the nineteenth century— otherwise marked by deepening of gender divisions and consolidation of new forms of patriarchy— the study of geography and the globes was curiously a non-discriminatory pedagogical enterprise. Such sundry and scattered pedagogical efforts mostly led by missionaries— with some Company administrators and local royals joining in the efforts— only became a formal governmental concern when Governor Thomas Munro (in office, 1820– 27) ordered in 1822 a review of “the actual state of Education” with a focus on gathering information about the teaching of theology, law, and astronomy in the existing “seminaries” of the region. This review, which produced a mixed response from across the Presidency, showed clearly that geography was not a subject that had ever been studied by native boys. Several places reported the teaching of jyotisastra, “Hindu astronomy.”161 Native stu-

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dents were however “quite ignorant” of even this one field of knowledge that colonial administrators were willing to label “science.” Instead, native knowledge was “confined to the distinction of foretelling a fortunate hour for reaping or a lucky day for a marriage, and of contriving a horoscope for persons of distinction in the village.”162 Given this limited ambition, jyotisastra was certainly not to be confused with (Western) astronomy, the latter a useful science that “at first view, might seem to be one that the orthodox Hindu would not wish to learn, as it is in opposition to what . . . they are taught to believe.” Nevertheless, “present experience shews that the novelty of the study, if not the superiority of knowledge which it promises to impart quickly dispels these superstitious prejudices.”163 Consequently, “Astronomy and Geography, and their subordinate sciences Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry,” were deemed “a necessary part of Education” and from 1826, these subjects were incorporated into the curriculum of a Central School attached to the College of Fort St. George (an institution that was created in 1812 to provide language instruction for the EIC’s European personnel). The Central School (sometimes also referred to as the Central College) was charged with the vital task of educating young men “in the higher branches of European science and literature,” who would then eventually go on to become masters in the provincial institutions that were part of a network of “Collectorate” (or district) and “Tahsildari” (or village) schools.164 The teaching of geography in the School, undertaken in the first school year ending in 1827, included its “elementary principles” and the “use of the Globes.” It is clear though that these topics were taught in the absence of the material objects themselves. Noting the lack of globes, orreries, and philosophical apparatus, Henry Harkness (the Secretary to the Committee on Public Instruction, which was charged in 1826 with the overall supervision of the new system) put in a request for these instruments.165 Despite such measures, a key Dispatch from the Court of Directors in September 1830 signaled dissatisfaction that not enough was being done in Madras— in comparison to Bengal— to disseminate useful knowledge among “the higher classes of Natives.”166 In the course of the education review initiated by Munro and of the pedagogic experiments of the 1820s, several other related problems became visible, especially the utter lack of schoolbooks in the principal languages of the Presidency (Tamil and Telugu) or, for that matter, in English. To tackle this situation, the government decided to extend limited financial support in March 1826 to an initiative undertaken in April 1820 by a group of “gentlemen” who, inspired by a similar effort in Calcutta, launched the Madras School Book Society (MSBS) with a view “to procure, compile, print and distribute elementary works both in the English and Vernacular languages, to afford such moral

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and intellectual instructions as should tend to improve the character and open the minds of the Natives.”167 Among the very first works that the society considered to translate into Tamil and Telugu with the intent to “open the minds of the natives,” were the Bengali book Goladhyay or Geography, and Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, both of which had been recently published by the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS), and Mrs. Trimmer’s Easy Introduction to a Knowledge of Nature.168 The society’s second annual report for the year 1823 noted that “one thousand copies of preliminary Definitions to a work on Geography” were ready, as were “a series of Maps . . . already in an advanced state of preparation.”169 By 1828, a Tamil translation of Reverend J. Kindlinger’s “Introduction to Geography, to be accompanied by a Tamil map of the World and of Hindustan (India),” was also in the works, although it is not clear if this ever got published once many errors became quite apparent.170 The society’s minutes also provide us with the earliest names from this part of the Presidency of men who were recruited to translate from English into local languages: Caumayappa Mudaliar, Jaligamma Venkatarow, and Ram Raz, men who we may deem native foot soldiers in the growing Empire of Geography.171 In spite of this good start and in stark contrast to its counterparts in Calcutta and Bombay (on which more in chapters 4 and 5), the MSBS’s impact on schoolbook production in Madras was limited until the 1850s, when efforts were made to revive it.172 Given this lack of success by civilian forces, terrestrial lessons assembled by missionaries more often than found their way into public schoolrooms, despite the government’s stated commitment to religious neutrality.173 All the same, not all works published by missionaries or their organizations were necessarily shot through with Christian rhetoric. A case in point is a schoolbook titled Exercises in Geography. Although published by the SPCK, it was sought after by the Board of Public Instruction in 1834 for use in schools under its jurisdiction, precisely because it kept God and Christian principles at bay even while delivering the Gospel of Modern Earth.174 The decade of the 1840s started with two important pedagogical events, both of which had potential implications for the itineraries of the globe in the Presidency. First, on the heels of a key Minute on Education issued by GovernorGeneral Auckland (in office, 1836– 42) in November 1839, the Government of Madras ordered in December 1840 the compilation of “a series of useful and comprehensive class books” with a view toward translating these into “the vernacular languages” of the Presidency.175 And second, following the growing demand for English and “useful” education, the Madras High School— which would eventually turn into Madras University— opened its doors in 1841, followed in the year after by a school set up with funds diverted from a bequest

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of a native grandee and managed entirely by local Hindus, Pachaiyappa’s Central Institution. In both institutions, the curriculum (in English) included the study of geography, “use of maps & Globes,” and exercises “on the Terrestrial Globe,” although existing records are not clear about the material existence of the object in the classrooms of either institution.176 Indeed, from around this time and for the rest of that century and into the new one, geography was frequently the only subject through which some first principles regarding the physical and natural world entered the elementary classroom (typically in the third or fourth year of schooling) across Madras.177 Its study was incentivized from the 1840s when it was made a required subject of examination for anyone seeking government employment, alongside the 3 Rs, and “the leading facts of the history of India and England.” This was especially the case for prospective schoolmasters and teachers, as well as for candidates seeking jobs in the revenue and engineering departments. In 1842, when the rules were first formulated for the certificate of employment, the books recommended for examination in geography and astronomy included Keith’s Use of the Globes (which I discussed at some length in chapter 1). A decade later, when a fresh set of rules was drafted for testing the eligibility of a candidate for public service, it was specifically required that he “must be so far acquainted with Geography as to know Earth’s form, its great divisions and subdivisions into countries, the names of the capitals of each country, the names and positions of the chief mountains, and the origin and course of the chief rivers. He must be able to delineate skeleton maps.”178 With terrestrial lessons rendered essential to livelihood and careers, the Dominion of Modern Earth began to accrue a growing number of subjects, who, of course, like all subjects, professed varying degrees of overt allegiance to it. The Dominion’s tentacles deepened when after 1854, the growing emphasis on the use of “vernacular” languages for instruction for the general populace (rather than just the elites) began to create a cadre of teachers and translators of terrestrial lessons, and the systematic printing of books and maps in Tamil and Telugu, even atlases. And yet, while the importance of globes for the teaching of terrestrial lessons was widely affirmed, they were still too expensive, especially for village schools, and educational societies were encouraged to “advertise for tenders for some thousands, made in the plainest and cheapest manner, yet sufficient to answer the more important purposes for which they are designed.”179 The grants-in-aid program announced in 1855— in imitation of a similar measure in England, and following a key educational “dispatch” issued in 1854 by the Court of Directors— was meant to facilitate the acquisition of textbooks and other “instruments of education,” with a budget for maps and

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apparatus that schools could apply for in exchange of demonstrating concrete progress. Despite the cost-sharing burdens and other demands placed on them to take advantage of such grants, several schools in the Presidency did put in requests for globes and maps.180 However, as the next couple decades made clear, the system did not really work, and complaints accumulated about the absence of the most basic needs. Thus, a gathering of missionary teachers in 1857 continued to insist, “Globes and maps are another urgent want of our schools. Some exertion should be made to supply our schools with cheap globes, large enough to represent distinctly the different countries and their principal features, without names, however, so as to secure cheapness.”181 Or again, in 1873, the plaint: “A Terrestrial Globe would be very useful. The expense is the great difficulty; but perhaps one might be prepared sufficiently cheap to be available. Some of the boys attending the village schools of the Rev. J. Long, south of Calcutta, have made neat globes out of cocoa-nuts, with paper pasted on them.”182 Laments like these continued well into the next century, across the subcontinent, as did suggestions for various make shift substitutes: the orange and the lemon, the flower of the kudumba tree and the fruit of the wood apple, even an earthen pot.183 All the more strange— but perhaps symptomatic of government logic— that in 1869, despite the fact that the headmasters of schools across the Presidency (in Calicut, Bellary, Cuddalore, Salem, and Vizagaptnam) requested globes for their classrooms, because of “the difficulty and expense of packing and transmitting them to distant stations, and the risk of their breaking while in transit,” it was deemed more expedient to dispose of some spare instruments— ten terrestrial and seven celestial— through public auction in Madras.184 Typically then, the average pupil in the Madras classroom was introduced— in his third or fourth year of schooling— to Modern Earth primarily through discursive assertions about its shape and its various parts, through genres such as the use of the globes, a subject that many schools reported teaching by the 1840s.185 Even when materially not present as such, the Earth’s global form also appeared visually in the Madras schoolroom in maps of the hemispheres which became occasionally available as printed objects, and then increasingly in books that circulated in the Presidency from the 1830s, first in English and later in other languages (see also fig. 1.5).186 As one missionary-educator put it in the 1840s, “Maps of the Hemispheres, Asia, Europe, India, Palestine, and the Ancient World should be furnished to all the Schools to give the children correct ideas of the surface of earth.”187 Such maps, however, came with a problem of which cartographic evangelists— and not just the European among them— were acutely aware, namely, that the learning child could mistakenly look at

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the two circles that represented the two hemispheres and think that our Earth was flat! Thus, in his Hindi textbook Bhugolhastamalaka, or The Earth as a Drop of Clear Water in Hand, published in 1855, bureaucrat-scholar Babu Shivaprasad (1823– 95) worried enough about this problem to keep insisting on Earth’s rotundity even while introducing the young learner to the map. “No one who sees the map of the world (bhugol ki naksha) should think it is flat.”188 In the Tamil country, an elementary book translated by J. M. Velupillai had a similar intent. After informing the student that the “Earth is not flat, as some say, but a sphere,” and commanding him to think of it as a ball, the author turns to the more difficult task of introducing the hemispheres (Tam. kolarttam) as shown in the map ( patam) that presumably the teacher would show at this point. Such maps are necessary, the book tells the reading-pupil, because you can only ever see the globe-ball from one side, the other being always hidden from us. However, “when you see images ( patam) like this, because the pictures are flat (tattai), do not think that Earth that they represent is so.”189 Of course, such explanations were also given in classrooms in England as well, as for instance, in this reminder from 1835, “Representations of the surface of the Earth are called Maps. On a Map which represents the whole world, you see two circles. But you must not on that account imagine that the Earth consists of two such circles. The whole surface of a globe or ball cannot be shown in any other way.”190 In the Indian context, however, the risk that the child would misrecognize the map of the world laid out in hemispheres and think that our Earth was therefore flat was greater because of the danger of Puranic idolatry, which lurked in every corner, from which the colonial pedagogue sought to rescue the (Hindu) native. In this enterprise, the goal was to wean the child away from his attachment to those dangerous other things— native idols— and inculcate in its place an attachment to a new artifact, also man-made, but one that encouraged empirical observation and rational thinking (even the beauty of God’s Work, in missionary books). Ocular demonstrations of Earth’s sphericity were also provided by illustrations that begin to appear in books meant for classroom adoption. The earliest I have seen in Tamil class books are illustrations printed in a language primer published in 1835— likely also used in schools run by the American Mission in Madurai— and titled pukolam, “Earth ball” (see figs. 2.2 and 2.3).191 Or consider an introduction to the English language called Fourth Book which included an illustration of a gridded globe (with the continental masses shaded in) on which are perched a couple ships as they recede over the horizon (see fig. 2.4). The accompanying lesson informed the young child:

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fiG. 2.2. “Pūkōlam” (Earth), 1835. Illustration in Tamil schoolbook published by American Mission ˙ Press, Manepy. © The British Library Board, 14172.h.1 (1).

fiG. 2.3. “Pūkōlam” (Earth) 1835. Illustration in Tamil schoolbook published by American Mission ˙ Press, Manepy. © The British Library Board, 14172.h.1 (1).

fiG. 2.4. “The Shape of the Earth,” 1864. Illustration in Fourth Book, published by the Madras Branch of the Christian Vernacular Education Society, London, p. 107.

If we stand upon a hill in the midst of a level country, we look down upon a plain, stretching out far in all directions and bounded by the sky; and we might, perhaps, at first be surprised if we were told that we were, in fact, standing upon a great ball; but this is in truth the shape of the earth. It was a long time before this was found out, but now we know it with certainty. If we watch a ship sailing away from the sea-shore into the far distance, its hull will first disappear and then the masts will gradually sink below the boundary line of the sea. . . . As the earth is round, there is some part exactly opposite to that on which we stand, and the people, who live there, must be standing with their feet towards our feet. At first this might seem strange, and we may fancy that these people are standing head downwards; but we must

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remember that the world is round, and no part is really more up or down than another, but all the people in the world stand with their feet towards its centre, and with their head raised towards the sky. This earth, then, is a large globe, with the heavens all around it; and in all parts of the heavens are shining stars. Many people in India believe that the earth is supported by a great serpent with a thousand heads. Such persons may be asked, on what does the serpent rest? To say that it is ananta, or without termination, is a mere assertion without proof.192

This illustration and statement appeared in a schoolbook published in 1864 by the Christian Vernacular Education Society (CVES), whose extensive publications program for much of the later nineteenth century was under the management of one of the most enthusiastic cartographic evangelists we will likely encounter in these pages, the Glaswegian John Murdoch (1819– 1904).193 “From the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, and from the borders of Afghanistan to the frontier of Burma— that shall be my parish,” he once declared, reminding us that the ardent Christian missionary and the secular empire builder in India were frequently two sides of the same coin.194 There is not much critical scholarship on this fascinating man who has been called “a modern Bede, surrounded with proof sheets, which he had been correcting almost to the end.”195 Beginning his career as a missionary-teacher in Ceylon in the 1830s, Murdoch cut his teeth on publishing with two early short-lived ventures, one in the 1840s called the India School-Books Society, and the other in 1854 called South India Christian School Book Society, convinced as he was that “native education” necessarily meant “Christian education.” The goal was to publish books and maps, and the hope, to counter the secularizing tendencies of colonial pedagogy, which, in the name of maintaining neutrality in religious instruction was actually delivering “godless” knowledge to the hapless native child.196 Moving to Madras in 1854— where he eventually died in 1904— Murdoch was of the firm belief (of which he tried to convince donors to his cause) that India “is a land full of idols, from the dark chambers of imagery of whose temples the pure mind shrinks back with abhorrence— whose deities are stained with every vice, and where the foulest crimes are perpetrated in the name of religion. To meet the case of a nation laboring under such a complication of maladies is no easy task. It will require the most powerful remedies, the combined skill of all who can minister to the mind diseased.”197 The principal remedy with which Murdoch (“the traveling bookman”) sought to cure the “diseased” mind of the native was the schoolbook, and over the many decades of his career, he dedicated himself to its production and dis-

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tribution across the length and breadth of India, but with a particular focus on Madras. Produced as they were under Murdoch’s eagle-eye supervision, the typical CVES schoolbook, even those concerned with delivering terrestrial lessons, was saturated with Christian truths. To quote one example from numerous such, here is a lesson titled “How the World was Made” that the native child was made to read in The English Third Reader: God made this world in which we live. It did not make itself; it did not grow from a seed; it was not made by any man; it was made by God. God made the world from nothing. He only spoke, and it was made. Making things of nothing, is called ‘creating.’ No one can create anything but God. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. When that was, we do not know. Afterwards, God, in six days, made the world fit for man to live in. God made the light; He made the air; He made the wide deep sea. He made the dry land also, and covered it with grass, and trees, and flowers.198

Murdoch was convinced that such iterations laced through his books enabled the conversion of the native, proudly noting in his correspondence with his employers in England of several such instances, including one ostensibly sparked off by the reading of the Tamil First Book.199 Like Schwartz, John, and Rhenius, who we have encountered earlier in this chapter, Murdoch too put his faith in geography and astronomy as pedagogic weapons with which to combat Hindu idolatry and “prejudice”:200 The different modes adopted by Hindus and Europeans in framing systems of geography are well worthy of notice. A Hindu, without any investigation, sat down and wrote that the centre of our universe consisted of an immense rock, surrounded by concentric oceans of ghee, milk, and other fluids. To induce men to believe his account, he then pretended that it was inspired. Europeans, on the other hand, visited countries, measured distances, and after very careful investigation, wrote descriptions of the earth. Which is the more worthy of credit?201

Murdoch’s answer to this rhetorical question (posed in his Indian Teacher’s Manual) was unambiguous, but the goal was to convince the “idolatrous” student as well who, when confronted rationally with the new knowledge backed by ocular demonstrations provided by globes and maps, could and would also willingly come to the same conclusion about which system indeed was worthy of credit. Hence Murdoch’s important piece of advice to the Indian teacher:

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Endeavour to give clear ideas of the shape of the earth: Every school should be supplied with a globe. If one cannot be purchased, the teacher should endeavor to make one himself. . . . “It is a great achievement,” says Moseley, “to present vividly to the mind of a child the isolation of the earth in space, to disabuse it of the impression that its surface is an infinitely extended plain or an island floating in the abysses of space, or the summit of a mountain whose base reposes in some fathomless region unknown to use— to convince the child that the world rests upon no pedestal, hangs upon nothing, floats in space, not being buoyed up and not being supported, does not fall.”202

“Every school should be supplied with a globe.” Nearly three quarters of a century after the terrestrial globe’s pedagogical work began in Madras, such a sentiment remained very much aspiration rather than reality, despite Murdoch’s ceaseless labors on behalf of the Empire of Geography until the very end of his life in 1904.

“UNDER THE SPELL OF MODERN GEOGR APHY”: MADR AS ENTHUSIASMS

On the evening of March 16, 1926, a diverse group of men and women convened at Presidency College for the inaugural meeting of the Madras Geographical Association (MGA). The idea to form such a body had emerged about a year earlier among a handful of native enthusiasts who “under the spell of Modern Geography” came together with the conviction that “as a potent instrument of liberal education in schools and colleges, Geography is unique, in that it is both the handmaid of all the sciences and their common meeting place.” Yet, and regrettably, “Geography has not, as yet, come into its own, in South India.” This was a telling conclusion to reach a century after the Empire of Geography put its first soldiers to work in southern India. It is also a revealing lament, given that by the later nineteenth century, Madras also saw the publication of journals in English such as the School Master, but also the more enduring Madras Journal of Education, and the Tamil Janavinotini, which carried insightful articles on geography and how to teach the terrestrial globe to the young, many clearly written by native teachers, geographers, and enthusiasts like V. Krishnamachariar.203 Notwithstanding such efforts to popularize Modern Earth and Modern Sky, as Rao Bahadur Narayana Rao noted at the 1926 inaugural meeting of the MGA, “the Madras prejudice against Geography” had resulted in its demotion as a serious subject of study in schools beyond primary education, and

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in its exile from colleges altogether since 1911.204 In the face of this prejudice, “many serious earnest workers have thrown up the sponge in sheer disgust.” It was this apathy that the MGA sought to counter by promoting geographical knowledge in schools and colleges, improving methods of teaching the subject, holding exhibitions and excursions, and opening a central library with literature as well as “maps, charts, plans, models, slides and instruments” (sadly, the terrestrial globe is not specifically mentioned!). All of this was necessary for while Macaulay had not been entirely correct when he ridiculed “our Geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter,” the esteemed Rao Bahadur went on to insist in words that echo Rhenius from a century before and Murdoch from fifty years earlier, “Geography is a double necessity to the Indian, who is untraveled and has been in isolation for long. To ignore Geography is to live like frogs in a well.” Narayana Rao thus concluded that “in imparting that modernity which we all desire so intensely, no study offers itself as the best avenue to it as Modern Geography.”205 There can arguably be no clearer expression of faith in that novel knowledge formation that was introduced in fits and starts from the late eighteenth century into the Presidency, and that built up steam over the course of the next century through the work mostly of Protestant missionaries and their native allies, with the colonial state stepping in as time went on. Narayana Rao and the others (mostly, but not exclusively, Indian) gathered that March evening in Madras, were clearly operating “under the spell of Modern Geography.”206 The whiff of such a spell capturing the native can be detected in texts from over a century earlier such as Serfoji’s Devendra Kuravanji in Marathi or Vedanayaka Sastri’s Bethlehem Kuravanji in Tamil that I discussed here. In the former, as I already argued, while the new Copernican world system is presented to the hearer/reader, there is neither an apology offered for the Puranic, nor an attempt to dismiss or delegitimize it. A comparable instance is a manuscript in English titled “The Geography of the Hindoos,” dated to December 27, 1803, by a peripatetic Deshastha Brahmin and sometime resident of Madras called P. Raghaviah.207 In response to a request from his colonial masters to translate and interpret the geography of the Sanskrit Puranas in light of the “General knowledge, both in the system of Geography and Astronomy that obtains among the enlightened western nations,” Raghaviah began by observing that the difference between them is as Heaven to Earth; for the one is founded upon the fertility of imagination, power of traversing the universe in Ideal Balloons, and surveying the world through the medium of fancy; while the other was done by a disposition the

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very reverse, as with a studied attention to accuracy, with a tedious labour of an enterprising navigation, or the Deliberate Travells of an Engineer.208

Such acts of comparison between the old and the new had become, even as early as 1804, already familiar in the colonial archive, and would only continue to intensify over the course of the nineteenth century, especially as Protestant missionaries sought to combat Hindu idolatry through the instrument of geography, as we have seen glimpses of in the writings of Rhenius, Murdoch, and others encountered in this chapter. Like his royal contemporary Serfoji, however, Raghaviah is circumspect about debunking the Puranas in the process, and on the contrary, insists that it would “appear blasphemous in me as a Religious Descendant of Divine Bruhma, if I do not place as much or in a comparative degree more belief in the one than in the other.” Hence his attempt as well to “reconcile them both together,” an attempt that leads him to suggest that the flat and fixed Earth of the Sanskrit Puranas was not entirely incompatible with “the Earth as a round body [that] revolves about the sun at a certain distance, as per “the Western system.”209 Raghaviah likely learned his English, astronomy and geography in a mission school, but this learning did not lead him to turn his back completely on the ancestral knowledges that he had also inherited, especially when reporting to his colonial masters. Like Serfoji, Raghaviah too was “a convinced— yet reluctant— Copernican. The geocentricity of the Puranas is obsolete for him; still he feels compelled to ‘reconcile’ the differences, and not merely report them.”210 In the decades that followed, there was an increasing surrender to the new knowledge arriving from Europe, especially as local writers turned to translating geography and astronomy textbooks for the lucrative educational publishing field. Thus, as I have already discussed earlier in this chapter, Caumayappa Mudaliyar translated Joyce’s important Scientific Dialogues into Tamil for the MSBS in the 1820s with neither a critique of Enlightenment knowledge nor a defense of the Puranic. Other native authors schooled in the new useful knowledge were recruited by publishers like CVES to prepare primers and geography schoolbooks in local languages; sometimes, especially earlier in the nineteenth century, such works were published with overt swipes at the ancestral and the inherited. By the later decades of the nineteenth century, as terrestrial lessons in English, Tamil, Telugu and other languages of the Presidency proliferated across language primers and geography textbooks, the Puranic and Siddhantic are quite ignored with rarely ever a mention of alternate systems of viewing Earth that had once flourished in Tamil-speaking India. Without fail, such texts begin with a disquisition about Modern Earth, indicating the

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extent to which its advent had become part of the new pedagogical common sense in and across Madras.211 Numerous examples can be cited to demonstrate the consolidation of this new common sense, but I choose a work titled Outlines of Geographical Tamil Songs whose genre is different and quaint, namely, poetry, used to teach the subject at a time when it was almost entirely prose-centric. This unusual work too opens with a short poem on Earth’s shape, insisting that it is spherical, offering the usual proofs on why it cannot be assumed to be flat, and ending with the couplet, “Therefore, Earth is Round. Consider its Beauty, and Rejoice.” The author-poet G. Natesa Aiyar was a Brahman by birth but makes no effort to present an orthodox or ancestral point of view (Puranic, Siddhantic or a mix of both). Instead it is Modern Earth that is versified. Natesa Aiyar expected teachers who used his book to use maps to demonstrate the outlines of various parts of the world, although the poem is silent on whether a globe ought to be on hand to provide ocular demonstrations of Earth’s rotundity.212 A few years before the release of the first edition of this book in 1916, at the Madras Educational Exhibition in August 1907— itself in line with such exhibitions that came into vogue in both Europe and in India from the 1850s, but the first of its kind in the city— the enthusiasm for terrestrial lessons was on full display.213 Large numbers of maps, relief models, schoolbooks, sample syllabi, and teaching charts were exhibited, and the show included “a fair display of home-made globes and tellurians.” Such “home-made” globes were fashioned out of “putty or papier-mache.”214 Various speakers who presented papers at the event spoke about the importance of the globe in teaching the subject, one— written by a female teacher— even going as far as to say: Good models come next, and among them the globe comes first. What a world of interesting knowledge may be opened up by its intelligent use! Small wonder then that the Educational Authorities made so much of it under the old rules (and I am not so sure that they do not under the new) as on one occasion to call forth the official dictum, “no globe, no backs to the benches— recognition withheld till provided.” Nor is it enough that the globe be furnished. It should be in constant use, even in classes where geography is not taught as a distinct subject. The children ought to handle and examine it for themselves more than they do, and apply to it and the map whenever any geographical reference chances in a lesson.215

Given that absence of globes would result in a negative assessment (including withholding funds for furniture, hence “no backs to the benches”), a

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teacher named Venkatakrishnamiah of Kottapet School in Guntur secured a prize for his “three globes,” presumably hand-made.216 A few years later, the Madras Exhibition of the Arts and Industries of Southern India held in the city in late 1915 and early 1916 included a display by the publishing firm Longmans, Green and Co. who displayed an array of “maps, globes, atlases, and apparatus for the teaching of Geography,” which was deemed fine enough to be awarded a Diploma of Merit.217 Such enthusiasm is especially worthy of in light of the fact that a few years earlier, the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) had turned down a request in 1897 to construct a giant terrestrial globe in Madras. With a diameter of 84 feet, the proposal had originated with the geographer T. Ruddiman Johnston, who had also around the same time proposed building a globe of similar proportions in London. In turn, Johnston’s proposal was reminiscent of a celebrated attempt in 1851 in the wake of the Great Exhibition by James Wyld (1812– 87) of the London mapmaking firm of J. Wyld & Son, who successfully built a Great Globe with a diameter of 20 meters (65.5 feet) on a plot of land in Leicester Square which he rented for ten years. As Christian Jacob observes, “georamas were a popular entertainment device in European capitals such as London and Paris. While conventional terrestrial globes offered viewers a mastery over a single hemisphere, georamas . . . allowed viewers to see an entire hemisphere in a single glance. In order to reach this unique viewpoint, one had to look at the terrestrial sphere from the inside, from its center, where its whole surface surrounded the spectator. This physical aberration allowed the viewer to go beyond the cartographical abstraction and to get closer to the mimetic and realistic illusion: to see the world without the mediation of signs.”218 I have been unable to find evidence in the existing archive as to why Johnston thought Madras would be a good site to host a georama of this scale, but in any case, his hopes came to naught as the DPI politely turned him down, citing financial constraints. It could well be that the DPI had realized that at a time when the government could not guarantee globes as pedagogical objects as a consistent or familiar presence in Madras classrooms, a monumental venture of this sort might be seen as a wasteful use of limited resources.219 I close this discussion of native enthusiasm for Modern Earth in Madras with a profile of N. Subramanya Aiyar (1885– 1943), described by one admirer as the “Father of Modern Geography in India,” whose life and work intersects in interesting ways with names and institutions elaborated in this chapter. Born in North Arcot, and a student of Muthialpet High School in Madras, he graduated from Pachaiyappa’s College in Madras and went to pursue a life-long career as a geography teacher in schools and colleges across the Presidency

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until his retirement in 1940, honored along the way in 1931 for all his efforts by being “the first Indian gentleman of South India” to be elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, London.220 He was also author of A Geography of the World, which was translated into Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. He partly acquired his love for the subject from his teacher in Pachaiyappa’s College— where the use of the globes, if we recall, had been a subject of study from the very inception of the institution in 1842— but also through a kinsman, M. Subramanyam, one of the key organizers of the Madras Educational Exhibition in 1907 with its intense focus on teaching of terrestrial lessons. Both men were the brains behind the MGA that was formed in March 1926 (with which I began this section), and N. Subramanya Aiyar went on to serve as the Secretary of the organization and as the editor for many years of its quarterly journal, as well as a frequent contributor of essays in which he pleaded for the importance of geography as a school subject. In addition, he organized several provincial Geographical Conferences across the Presidency, summer schools (whose graduates were given certificates which attested to skills learned in map-reading), teacher training institutes, geographical tours and excursions, all of which he hoped would produce a cadre of “Geography-minded” enthusiasts like him. Not least, he worked to restore geography to a status in the school curriculum that it had much enjoyed as the premier useful knowledge in elementary education for much of the nineteenth century, as well to reinstate it in higher education courses. Among his pet projects— likely fueled by the existence of these in England that he doubtless read about in contemporary journals and magazines— was the establishment of a distinctive Geography Room in every high school.221 Such a space would be used for storing maps, globes and other equipment— instead of tossing these into a storeroom when they were not in use— in a manner that would enable the geography teacher to make sustained use of these objects. But mostly, “a separate Geography Room will give the pupils a good opportunity of unconsciously imbibing a lot of geographic knowledge from its atmosphere and surroundings, filled with geographical pictures, maps and appliances.” At the top of the list of apparatus with which the Geography Room ought to be equipped was “the Globe— a sine qua non for the study of Geography in all its stages— a fairly big one, say of 12” diameter, preferably with physical colouring. Funds permitting, it is desirable to have half a dozen small globes also 4 to 6 inches in diameter, which the pupils can handle conveniently. In addition to this, a slate globe, one on which meridians, parallels, and outlines of continents are marked— is highly useful for illustrating a variety of topics.”222 It is not entirely clear if N. Subrahmanyam succeeded in getting globes—

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and related equipment— into Madras schoolrooms, let alone a whole room dedicated exclusively to their use and care. Thirty years later, and in an independent India, his successors and followers created yet another geographical institute based in Madras, the Association of Geography Teachers of India (incorporated in 1966), and attempted to carry forth some of his pioneering work, including the setting up of the Geography Room. In the words of one of the founder members of that successor organization, Subrahmanyam “consecrated his life to modern Geography. Even in his last mortal hours while in agonizing struggles with death, his thoughts lay with the Indian Geographical Society and its future. . . . He lived, moved and had his being in Geography. . . . He was, Geography itself.”223 There can perhaps be no clearer endorsement of the colonial project begun more than a century earlier of the conquest of the native’s mind through the teaching of terrestrial lessons. I began this chapter by focusing on a royal of the Maratha caste who did not turn his back on the ancestral, even while he contended with the novel knowledge formations that he sought out from a Europe that was deepening its own South Asian networks of accumulation. I end with cartographic evangelists who were Brahmans, men of a caste charged with the business of not merely upholding the ancestral, but also formulating its very tenets. And yet, here they are, seemingly at the forefront of advancing the cause of Modern Earth and the teaching of terrestrial lessons, with rarely a defense of the ancestral knowledges that had apparently ensured their ritual and scholastic domination in the first place. Again and again, in the archives of colonial India, when such a Brahman came to the fore, much came to be expected of him although inevitably in the very logic of that discourse, he also disappointed. In 1851, A. R. Symonds, author of a geography schoolbook that had begun to appear in the curriculum of some Madras schools, and also the local Secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), wrote to his peers about the conversion leading to baptism, circa 1850– 51, of one such Brahman of the ritually high Aiyangar caste, V. Streenivasa Charry. He had been a pupil of the Madras High School, which, being funded by the government, had “carefully excluded” any form of religious instruction. However, he had “obtained a good education in English, in history and geography, and in mathematics,” as Symonds wrote. These subjects, as another contemporary noted, directly contravened “the fundamental principles of Hindooism.”224 Subsequently, Streenivasa Charry “became convinced of the absurdity of the gross idolatry of the country, and of many things in the Brahmanical system.” After graduating from school but still nominally adhering to his faith, he was gainfully employed as a translator by an English lawyer who

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practiced in the Madras Supreme Court. He also began to read more widely books in that gentleman’s library, including the Bible (which the government had hitherto kept safely out of his hands), and the groundwork created by the study of terrestrial lessons in school prepared him to accept God’s Good Word. He then “embraced Christianity,” at a time when such an act among members of the region’s highest castes was still inclined to cause a major scandal, his story worth reporting in some detail to supporters in Britain in 1851.225 To further understand the emergence of such a Brahman to the fore in colonial India who through his very engagement with pedagogic modernity appears to have given up his ancestral faith, I travel from the Tamil and Telugu south to the plains of Hindi- and Hindustani-speaking northern India to tell the story of another who, too, went down a similar path but with more charged consequences for the itineraries of the globe I narrate in these pages.

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CHAPTER THREE

THE GLOBAL PANDIT

It was the wintry morning of December 18, 1814. She waited anxiously with her two young daughters, Lucy and Emily, on the verandah of her home in the small town of Meerut, not far from the Mughal capital of Delhi. The congregation had gathered, impatient for the Sunday service to begin in her makeshift chapel, but the East Indian chaplain, Mr. Leonard, was nowhere to be seen. The heathen servants hovered, barely able to conceal their glee that yet another moment in the advance of the Christian faith had been stalled. Time moves heavily in scenes like this, and yet, though it may appear in recollection that this perplexing state of the case continued an hour or more it was probably not of many minutes’ endurance, when suddenly, whilst still standing under the verandah, I saw two well-dressed natives approaching. Let no one now say, after reading this, that real life has not wonders great as fiction. What is here related has been written from documents taken down at the time, and owes nothing to any glosses given too often by fancy to narrations of the past. . . . He was a tall, handsome man, and . . . of a turn of countenance and air resembling the pictures we have been accustomed to see of Abraham.

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She asked of him, “Who are you, and wherefore did you come from here?” When he replied that he was “a Christian,” she realized that not a moment more was to be lost. She led him into the chapel, placed the Hindustani version of the English liturgy in his hand, and directed him on how to proceed. He went through all the forms of the Liturgy as if he had been brought up in Oxford, and the Christians in the place followed his lead. . . . The voice of this gifted native was uncommonly fine, and when he on this occasion broke forth in the praises of Him whose name is the Beloved, I felt that I had never heard such music before. Nor do I ever again expect to hear strains so sweet as those then seemed to be, till all shall be fulfilled of which those songs of holy love were then the earnest.1

These are the fulsome words with which Mary Martha Sherwood (1775– 1851) recalled in her published memoir her first encounter with the “tall, handsome” native who introduced himself to her that Sunday morning in Meerut as “Permunund.”2 Over the next few months, the devout Englishwoman from the village of Stanford in Worcestershire, and the Indian man from Delhi were to forge a brief but intense relationship around the Gospel’s preaching and geography’s teaching, before they parted and went their own separate ways, never to meet again.3 She returned to her native England where she established an impressive career for herself “as one of the most prolific and influential writers of children’s literature, literature that shaped the Victorian world,” and an author who might well have influenced the likes of the Brontës and George Eliot.4 As for him, after having himself baptized soon after as “Anand Masih” and pursuing a brief career as a catechist and school teacher, he more or less disappeared into historical obscurity, until he resurfaced more than a century later, to play a starring role in postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s influential essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” wherein we encounter him standing under a grove of trees outside Delhi in May 1817, trying to convince a crowd of five hundred people, men, women, and children, of the truths of “the European Book.”5 In the current scholarship on Mary Martha Sherwood, there is virtually no mention of the relationship forged between the Englishwoman and her Indian protégé.6 Nor does Bhabha concern himself with how and why Anand Masih became such a passionate catechist in the first place. On that cold Sunday morning in 1814 in Meerut when she first met him, Mrs. Sherwood was quite clearly “saved” by Parmanand’s sudden appearance and the eager willingness with which he led her Hindustani church service. In turn, Parmanand was “saved” by Mrs. Sherwood who introduced him to a makeshift terrestrial globe, fashioned from some fabric at hand:

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This simplest thing he acknowledges had a wonderful effect in biasing his mind to receive the religious instruction of that Lady (now some 16 years ago) whose object it was to lead him to become not only almost but altogether a Christian. His present life now evinces how much her honest endeavours have been blessed!7

As the Reverend James Long (1814– 87) was to observe a few years later after invoking this example, “The same has been the experience of several other Hindus, for when the false geography and the false history of the Paranas [sic] are pointed out, it is but a step to a conviction of the falsity of their religion.”8 In this chapter, I offer an extended account of Parmanand’s conversion to Gospel and geography through his encounter with Sherwood and her “balls of silk,” an entanglement that made him “not only almost but altogether a Christian.” Not of least significance in this act of conviction and conversion was that Anand Masih was a Brahman, and indeed, the first man in northern India from that uppermost— and putatively, most intransigent— caste of the Hindu hierarchy to be ordained as a native clergyman of the Church of England, a fact that was initially touted in missionary circles and later carpeted over on account of the unfortunate fate that befell Mrs. Sherwood’s former protégé, as we will see. Using this fascinating account as my springboard, I next follow the itineraries of the terrestrial globe as it made its way pedagogically across the vast landscape of northern India at a critical period of its colonial history when diverse parts came under British rule, even as the former imperial rulers were reduced to shadowy pensioners and spectral personages in the very Mughal heartland which they had dominated close to three centuries.9 Mrs. Sherwood’s “global” exchange with Parmanand followed soon after the 1813 Parliamentary order to the Company to advance the “religious and moral improvement” of the inhabitants in its territories which now became fertile ground for Christian evangelization. However, Protestant missionaries found their efforts thwarted repeatedly by forces operating on the ground, both British and native, that inflected the manner in which terrestrial lessons were taught in the schools they established over the course of the decades leading up to 1858 when the erstwhile Mughal Empire was formally dismantled and Crown rule established. Like in the Madras Presidency, as we saw in the previous chapter, in northern and central India as well, Christian evangelicalism and cartographic evangelism established a cautious but curious alliance that was worked out against the background of the colonial state’s avowed position on religious neutrality (and suspicion of missionaries) and the globalizing thrust of Enlightenment science. I deepen my exploration of this calculated alliance between the British Empire, the Empire

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of Geography, and the Empire of Christ by turning to a man we met briefly in the previous chapter, the EIC administrator Lancelot Wilkinson, another zealous “subaltern in the army of Orientalism.”10 The “global” experiments that Wilkinson conducted with a circle of learned Brahmans whom he sought to convert to the Gospel of Modern Earth, allows me to introduce you to pandits who became Copernican but not Christian, offering a critical counterpoint to Parmanand/Anand Masih.11 In colonial discourse, the Brahman scholar or “pandit”— on whom the foreign regime intensely depended for gaining access to all manner of knowledges, especially legal— variously and contrarily appears as a die-hard defender of orthodoxy, as mediator between new and the old, as an individual who had to be marginalized, even displaced, in order for the modernizing work of empire to proceed, and as a figure who had to be won over if the project of useful knowledge was to gain any traction at all in (Hindu) India.12 At least one colonial administrator cautioned his fellow Britons, “However much the splendor of our political power may seem to have abashed these dark men, the fact is that their empire over the hearts and understandings of the people has been and is almost entirely unaffected by it.”13 As we follow the trail of the terrestrial globe as it gets entangled in the life-worlds of such a complex and complicated “dark” figure, we encounter an enigmatic entity that I call the global pandit, an essential (albeit not always reliable) partner in the charged enterprise of cartographic evangelism and the dissemination of the foundational truths of Modern Earth.14 In an intriguing essay published about a decade ago, Brian Hatcher asked, “What’s Become of the Pandit?”15 In this chapter, I offer one other answer to this question that Hatcher did not consider. A large number of them, albeit not all, became subject, over the course of the long colonial period, to the Dominion of Modern Earth.

BALLS OF SILK: A BR AHMAN’S GLOBAL CONVERSION

We know very little about Parmanand before he showed up that wintry morning at Mrs. Sherwood’s verandah, and what little we do know is filtered through missionary accounts, and Mary Martha’s journal entries, letters, reconstructed diary and published memoirs, with all their predilections and biases.16 From these we learn that Parmanand was a Brahman— “a Pundit and a Priest”— who hailed from Delhi and had been apparently destined to make his life fulfilling “the various duties of [his] calling.”17 However, doubts began to set in at some point:

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He had inquired into the nature of Mohammadenism, but had felt dissatisfied with it; he then proceeded on a pilgrimage to Nagrakote, where, for seven months, he was exposed to the burning glare of the sun by day, and the pinching cold at night; he then visited an idol covered half the year with snow, which was said by its touch to transmute metals into gold; but he found no satisfaction to his mind. Subsequently, while translating the Bible from Urdu into the Braj Basha, light flashed on his mind.18

The man responsible for helping such an apparently troubled soul see light was the Baptist missionary John Chamberlain (1777– 1821), who, since his arrival in 1803 in India, had had several fraught encounters with Brahmans and pandits (whom he tried to repeatedly persuade about “the folly of idolatry”) in the course of his proselytizing activities. So, he must have been mighty pleased when he met an eager recruit from their community while based briefly at Sirdhana.19 “Purumanunda,” as he is referred to in the missionary’s correspondence, came into Chamberlain’s life sometime in mid-1813 as his head writer, but also as someone who was toying “with the idea of becoming a Christian.”20 In the course of the next few months, even as Parmanand, who had good linguistic skills including “some acquaintance with Joypore [sic] and Punjabee,” helped the missionary with the translation of the New Testament into Braj Bhasha, composed some Christian hymns, and taught in a local Hindustani school, he also apparently changed faith in spite of being subjected to all manner of trials and tribulations for doing so by his fellow Brahmans that Chamberlain duly reported to his superiors.21 Early in January 1814, Parmanand apparently expressed a desire to be baptized, and Chamberlain’s reports are full of praise for the zealousness with which he distributed tracts and books in the countryside around Sirdhana and spoke of and from the Bible, to the point of making himself quite ill. Nonetheless, sometime in the middle of 1814, the new convert obviously transgressed in some manner, for Chamberlain wrote in a letter of June 8, 1814, that “Purumanunda has grieved me, but he appears penitent, and wishes to be baptized; but I am afraid to baptize him.”22 This was Parmanand’s state when he arrived at the Sherwood compound in Meerut a few months later in December 1814, taken there by a friend and Christian convert Mangal Dass, who had earlier been befriended by Mary Martha.23 In contrast to Parmanand, we know considerably more about Mary Martha, thanks to her copious reminiscences and letters, which have been well preserved and not as policed as the native convert’s writings and reflections. Unlike Parmanand of whose age at the time of his fateful meeting with her we are not entirely sure,24 Mary Martha was on the eve of turning forty, having

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been born on May 6, 1775, to the Reverend Dr. and Mrs. Butt in Stanford, Worcestershire, who hailed from families of “considerable antiquity.”25 As a child growing up in the company of a scholarly father (in whose “Black Library” she regularly whiled away many hours) with numerous pupils, and a beloved older brother, the young Mary Martha was exposed to the new sciences and much more, including Latin, at home. Later she recalled, “I can hardly say how young I was when I got ideas of other countries & other times & other modes of life as by the modern style of education could never possibly be obtained & this thro the simple means of listening to my fathers conversation.”26 As Charles Withers notes, for women of her class in the England of her time, “the home was a site of conversation, instrumental instruction, and dialogue, a space for the mutual production of geography and of sociability. Instruction aimed at instilling appropriate learning, particularly at producing ‘politeness’ as a moral quality, commonly involved geography and astronomy in the home and use of instruments like the orrery and the armillary sphere.”27 In fact, writing about her childhood in the 1790s in such a setting, Mary Martha’s famous contemporary, Mary Somerville (1780– 1872)— whose On the Connection of the Physical Sciences (1835) and Physical Geography (1848) were read in classrooms in colonial India— recalled looking forward to the evening visits of the village schoolmaster Mr. Reed who would instruct her with the help of “two small globes” that the family owned. “My bedroom had a window. . . . I spent many hours studying the stars by the aid of the celestial globe.”28 Off and on between 1791 and 1793 when she was in her late teens, Mary Martha attended Mme. St. Quintin’s School for Girls at Reading Abbey, one of whose earlier pupils had been Jane Austen.29 In such academies in late Georgian England, young ladies of her social background were typically schooled in subjects deemed suitable to their sex including French, but they were also beginning to receive a modicum of instruction in geography and astronomy, sometimes even from texts specifically written for young women such as Demarville’s The Young Ladies Geography (1757), Geography and History, Selected by a Lady for the Use of her Own Children (1790)— a book that at least one Bombay school sought to acquire in the 1820s— and William Butler’s Exercises on the Globes . . . Designed for the Use of Young Ladies (1798).30 Mrs. Sherwood’s published memoirs do not explicitly mention what she studied other than French and some botany, although in an undated letter to her mother, she writes that she “was first in Geography this week as well as last. . . . I find it so easy and pleasant. . . . We shall begin the Geography of England next week which has never been taught in the school before.”31 Not surprisingly, given this early enthusiasm, a couple decades later on her return from India when Mrs. Sherwood

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ran a boarding school in Worcester for a few years for “young ladies,” astronomy and geography were part of the curriculum on offer alongside English, French, history, grammar, writing, and ciphering. In June 1803, when Mary Martha was twenty-eight, she married her cousin, Captain Henry Sherwood (1777– 1849), and when his regiment was ordered to India in 1805, she followed him there, leaving behind a baby girl in the care of her family. By all accounts, her Indian years were both traumatic and transformative.32 Relatively short though her tenure there— about ten years, from September 1805 to January 1816— her experiences in the subcontinent (which she seems to have both loved and dreaded at the same time) provided her with the story lines that went into her best-selling books for the rest of her life, many of them seared through with numerous signs of her growing Evangelicalism which only intensified as she lost two successive infants on the one hand, and on the other, as she came under the influence of Henry Martyn (1781– 1812), whose brief tenure as Company chaplain from 1806 to 1810 in India intersected with her travels up the Gangetic valley. Propelled by her new-found Evangelical fervor, she undertook the schooling of children (British and half-caste, and some native) wherever she went, sometimes on her own verandah if need be, as she followed her husband to Calcutta (after a brief few days in Madras in which she recalled “the extreme horror she felt when I first visited an Indian bazaar”), then up “the mighty Gunga, the object of Hindu idolatry,” to Dinapore, southward to Berhampur, and then again upriver to Kanpur, finally reaching Meerut near Delhi in December 1812.33 En route to Meerut from Kanpur, she also started drafting in November 1812 what would become her most famous Moral Tale, The History of the Fairchild Family.34 The book “tells the story of a family striving towards godliness and consists of a series of lessons taught by the Fairchild parents to their three children (Emily, Lucy and Henry) regarding not only the proper orientation of their souls towards Heaven but also proper earthly morality.”35 Of particular relevance for the itineraries of the globe I narrate in these pages is the attempt made by Mr. Fairchild at the very start of the story to impress upon the minds of his young children the beauty of the world around them, the work of the one and only Creator: The Globe which we inhabit is very fair: look at the green fields, full of sweet flowers, in which the cows and the sheep are feeding— how beautiful they are! And how sweet is the smell of the flowers as the wind blows gently over them! . . . All the things that are in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth, are made by the Lord Almighty.36

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A few days later, the children come in from playing in the garden to see “their papa sitting at his study table examining a large round ball, or globe, which was fixed upon a stand before him. The children had never seen this before, because it had just come from London, a present from Mr. Fairchild’s uncle.” When they asked with genuine delight, “What pretty thing is that?” their father set out to make them “understand what is the use of the Globe,” a lesson conducted over the course of several days.37 The lesson begins with her father asking Lucy the shape of the object on the study table, and the young child replies, “It is round, Papa, round like an apple.” Mr. Fairchild then responds, “This thing, my dears, is called a Globe: it is the shape of the world in which we live; and upon it are drawn, as in a picture, all the countries of the world.” When Emily comments on the prettiness of the object and asks, “Is the world in which we live round, like this?” her father answers in the affirmative, “Yes, my dears; and it hangs in the heavens as the Moon does, kept there by the almighty power of God.”38 As I have noted several times already, the sphericity of the planet on whose surface we reside does not come to us naturally: it is a foundational modern lesson that we have to learn— and repeatedly— and typically when we are young when it is drilled into our minds so that it comes to reign as common sense. In this exchange between Mr. Fairchild and his children, we get a classic example of this gatekeeping lesson on Modern Earth conducted within the space of the home, not at all untypical of late Georgian Britain, if we recall Charles Withers’s insights. The Evangelical twist to this foundational terrestrial lesson of pedagogic modernity lies in the role accorded to God in maintaining Earth’s disposition in the universe. It is also instructive that as in village India around this time, young children growing up in rural England in the early nineteenth century were also seemingly unfamiliar with the globe-on-stand and had to be introduced to it as a novel object and by drawing on domestic metaphors such as the round apple. The gap between India and England at this point does not seem all that great, despite contemporary exclamations to the contrary. The next lesson Mr. Fairchild gives his children with the help of the globe is on the world’s division into “four unequal parts— namely, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.” He first tells them about Asia, the home of the Garden of Eden— which he shows them on his globe, “as is supposed, upon the borders of the river Euphrates, which was one of the four rivers of Paradise.” This introduction then provides the context for an extended discourse on Christian sacred history, including an extended lecture on evil and sin and the Fall.39 The following day, the children once again gather in the study, “and Mr. Fairchild shewed them more places on the Globe, and taught them many things which

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they did not know before.” Given that this was an Evangelical household, global consciousness and worldliness was essentially constituted through the lens of sacred history. The father thus “then shewed to his children, upon the Globe, a mountain in Asia, which he said was Arahat, where Noah’s ark rested after the flood. And he shewed them also a place not very distant, to which Noah’s children travelled after they have began to multiply upon the face of the earth.” This then leads into a discussion of those peoples called “the idolaters” who have forgotten the name of the true God, and “have made to themselves vile gods of wood and of stone!”40 Fresh from the drafting of such a narrative, Mrs. Sherwood was thus primed to introduce the terrestrial globe to Parmanand a few months after he arrived on her verandah in December 1814, seeking “advice and instruction from some person of the Established Church of England.”41 Her lesson to him in terrestrial sphericity seems to have taken place sometime in April 1815: On the 22nd, I received a letter from Mr. Sherwood. I find the copy of one I wrote to him. I see by this that it was at this time the Moonshee and Permunund were engaging me in explaining something of Astronomy & the shape of the Earth etc. to them. I had formed in India where globes maps etc. etc. are not to be had— a little way of my own with larger and less balls etc. etc. a plan for teaching the children the rudiments of these things. The grown gentlemen I had then to teach were not only as ignorant as children— but were each furnished with innumerable false notions on these subjects— as, for instance that the world was a vast plain with the sun on a high mountain in the centre of it[.] These notions were to be put away before the others could be understood or at any rate, shoved for a while out of sight— but I found my pupils marvellously [undecipherable] & ready to learn.42

As life imitated art (or writing, in this case), Mrs. Sherwood plays Mr. Fairfield to these grown native men, “as ignorant as children” who, like Henry, Lucy, and Emily, were not even aware that our Earth is indeed a sphere, and instead entertained “innumerable false notions” on this subject including the fact “the world was a vast plain, with the sun on a high mountain in its centre.” Ironically, even as Parmanand functioned as an adult teacher in Mrs. Sherwood’s schoolroom, in his relationship with her, he was reduced to a child who had to be taught the rudiments of Modern Earth and Modern Sky.43 Correspondingly, she who had been “accounted a fool in my own country” and “an idiot” could be mistaken in distant India as “one of the wisest women in the world.”44 Unlike the fictional Mr. Fairfield who was blessed with an uncle in London

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who had gifted him “with a globe on a stand,” Mrs. Sherwood had to make do with a make- shift object— like countless others in the colonial schoolroom in the century to follow— to stand in as proxy for our spherical planet. Being a woman and a mother, she resorts to things female and maternal.45 In one account, we are told that she fashioned “a globe of silk to refute [Parmanand’s] own fabulous notions of geography.”46 From another, we learn that “for want of a better globe, she covered one of the children’s balls with silk, marking on it the lines and principal places, a kindness the convert never forgot.”47 Mrs. Sherwood herself wrote in her diary, “There is a letter from Permunund in one of the Missionary Registers in which he refers most affectionately to me & my balls.”48 This female ingenuity did not go unnoticed in missionary circles, including in an annual report of the CMS two decades later when it was observed, after recounting Mary Martha’s experiments: Of what service then might Globes and Maps prove to our friends, the Natives, who require the surface of things to be made clear to them before hidden things can be communicated to them.49

It is worth pausing here to reflect on Mary Martha Sherwood as an incipient emissary of modern (or “English”) science in the colony at a time when her compatriots’ capacity to do so at home, i.e., in late Georgian Britain, was itself not all that clear or settled. From the late seventeenth and by the early eighteenth century in England but also in France and Germany, gentlewomen had increasingly become consumers of scientific literature, and enthusiastic followers of the new (and rivaling) philosophies of Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and others. Patricia Fara and others have also documented the important role that women (as daughters, sisters, and wives) played across early modern Europe and into the early nineteenth century as silent partners, even active producers, in scientific work that was often publicly credited to men. However, despite efforts of some leading male philosophers to secure the “allegiance of women,” their demonstrated enthusiasm did “little to change the prevailing prejudice . . . against [women’s] active participation in abstract learning beyond an elementary level.”50 In 1647, the Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne after declaring that women were just as capable as men of understanding, was quick to add that this did not mean “spheres and astrolabes be put into their hands rather than wool and needle.”51 A century later, in an English stage play of 1730, “Lady Science confesses, ‘I am justly made a Fool of, for aiming to be a Philosopher . . .’ The dastardly Gainlove rejects Lady Science and marries her daughter instead, because, he insists, ‘the Dressing Room, not the Study, is the Lady’s Province—

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and a Woman makes as ridiculous a Figure, poring over Globes, or thro’ a Telescope, as a Man would with a Pair of Preservers mending Lace.’”52 Precocious women, who, despite such prejudices proceeded to pore over globes or peer through a telescope, also became objects of pictorial ridicule and satire, as in The Geography Lesson (ca. 1750– 52) by the Venetian artist Pietro Longhi, in which, while a well-dressed young woman is poised over a globe, a group of men ogle her breasts.53 Across the Atlantic, in England, John Lodge’s A Philosopher Gives Lectures on the Use of the Globes (ca. 1751– 60) similarly features a woman wearing a dress with a low-cut bodice and a philosopher who calls upon his other pupils to “behold . . . these Celestial Globes, behold the milkyway.”54 In 1770, just five or so years before the birth of Mary Martha, a London publisher put forth a mezzotint with “a female philosopher” seated at a desk with a large globe resting on it, “in extasy at solving a problem.”55 All the same, even in the face of such prejudice, one Miss Cowley went on to produce a selfassembled paper globe, designed to serve as an inexpensive teaching aid.56 Or consider Margaret Bryan’s A Compendious System of Astronomy published in 1797, an early such work of a female writer. Its frontispiece, Margaret Bryan and Her Children, shows Mrs. Bryan posing with her two teenage daughters, holding a quill and surrounded by instruments of science: a celestial globe, an armillary sphere, and a telescope (incidentally, things which would allow her reader “to view the works of God with satisfaction, deriving consolation from every object in nature.”) As other scholars who have commented on this print have noted, Mrs. Bryan softened the threat of a defeminizing science by presenting a maternal approach.57 All the same, the text that it accompanies is genderneutral in content— as many such works of science by female authors tended to be at this time and after— although in form they may have adopted the “chatty, personal style” afforded by conversations, dialogues, and letters.58 Mrs. Bryan and others like her approximate a figure that Barbara Gates and Ann Shteir have recently called “Scientific Mother,” a woman who sees her dedication to the promotion of scientific knowledge as part of her responsibility as a good mother or a mother substitute. As the nineteenth century wore on though, scientific research became increasingly masculinized and professionalized, as it moved outside the private and familial setting of the early modern home in which women (especially wives and sisters) had played an important role albeit frequently as silent partners. Correspondingly, the Scientific Mother was increasingly “edged out by men of science who seem to have appropriated the gaze as well as the words of women.”59 In the colonies though, in this regard as in others, the Scientific Mother could come into her own as (white) race trumped (female) gender vis-à-vis natives, as we will further see in chapter 4.

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For now, I propose that like Mrs. Bryan, Mary Martha Sherwood also performed scientific motherhood with a colonial inflection as she followed Captain Sherwood up the Gangetic valley. From Mrs. Sherwood’s recollections as memorialized in her diary, we cannot conclude in what specific terrestrial lessons she instructed Parmanand, her new adult-child, but we can speculate that some of it may have been akin to what Mr. Fairfield taught Henry, Lucy, and Emily in the story she had just completed. It is also possible that she incorporated some of her teaching of natives during her India years into two textbooks that she wrote a couple years later on her return to England, thus joining the ranks of a small number of enterprising women who were beginning to write for a growing educational market, such as Sarah Trimmer, Margaret Bryan, and Richmal Mangnall.60 Titled An Introduction to Astronomy: Intended for Little Children (1817), and An Introduction to Geography: Intended for Little Children (1818), these texts went into numerous editions over the course of the next decade. As with Mrs. Bryan’s text from a couple decades earlier, both are filled with appropriate scriptural lessons alongside terrestrial ones.61 Thus, the opening lesson in the latter— which was also printed on a card, and which the learning child was expected to memorize and recite— defines geography as “a description of the earth, and of the countries which it contains. The earth is composed of land and water.” This mundane fact is however leavened with scriptural truth, “And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth.”62 Every lesson thereafter— while introducing the child to Modern Earth— also contained an appropriate verse from the Bible. This is then followed by a description of the four quarters of the globe beginning with an extended discussion of Europe, after which the reader-learner arrives at Asia, which is introduced very much in the manner that Mr. Fairfield introduced that continent to his children, as “the birthplace and residence of the Son of God when dwelling upon earth.”63 Given this sacred fact, it was all the more appalling that one of its constituents, “Hindoostaun,” was inhabited by “as gross idolaters as any in the world; and we may apply to a native Hindoo the description in the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah.”64 Such repeated invocations of the Bible notwithstanding (with its own conception of a most “unmodern” Earth and its creation), the teacher of the textbook was nevertheless enjoined to use such profane objects as “globes, or maps, such as may be found in most elementary books of geography, to assist the children in understanding what they learn.”65 Although published in England, at least one missionary in distant northern India heard of Mrs. Sherwood’s little book soon after it was released, to the

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point of waxing eloquently about it: “Elementary Books for Schools are much wanted . . . Mrs. Sherwood’s Geography, which, in my opinion, is an inimitable work: I never met with one more likely to be useful to Native Children. The quotations from Scripture are remarkably beautiful; and it is in this respect that I admire it so much.”66 As was typical of these early books of science published by female authors, there was nothing particularly feminine about the content of either of these works by Mrs. Sherwood: they might just as well have been written by a man.

ANAND MASIH’S CARTOGR APHIC EVANGELISM

As recounted in the correspondence of the CMS missionary Michael Wilkinson (resident in India, 1823– 40) who met him (along with Henry Fisher) in the 1820s, Parmanand apparently recalled that soon after Mangal Dass (a fellow convert) took him to meet Mrs. Sherwood in December 1814: She patiently and perseveringly explained to me, those passages which I did not understand. Light darted into my mind. Oh! She was my friend, she was my mother, she fixed me with God. I found and believed that all my life had been a lie, she often talked to me on other subjects, as well as religion— astronomy, geography etc. and I often compared her excellent words, (words of wisdom) with our foolish fancies on these subjects. Her account of the sun and moon, the earth, and other planets, so satisfied my understanding that I said in my heart, if in these things so wise and true, why not also in religion? Truth brightens all she tells me with peculiar lustre.67

Fortified thus with this “peculiar lustre,” Parmanand appears to have entered the full time service of Mrs. Sherwood in the months that followed. He was employed “to perform the service in the chapel, to overlook [sic] the native schoolmaster; and to instruct the children.” She paid him Rs. 8 a month for his services, and noted that “he took vast pains to instruct his little English pupils to sing Hindustanee hymns; and many a time, when very far from Meerut, under the pale, cold sky of England, have these children caused tears to gush to the eyes of their parents by singing these songs of another land.” In addition to his role in Mary Martha’s household, Parmanand also appears “to have opened a room in the old city of Meerut for reading and expounding the Scriptures.”68 From a handful of Mrs. Sherwood’s surviving personal letters to her husband from this period, and her recollections, there is absolutely no doubt that he was

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a necessary, even intimate, part of her household. He was instructor, mediator, and student all rolled into one. Additionally in February 1815, Parmanand was also appointed (“at a salary which included services of himself and his brother”) by the Reverend Thomas Thomason as master of a school in Meerut (established by the CMS), under Mrs. Sherwood’s watchful care. A month or so later, there were twenty-six boys enrolled in this school.69 As she recollected later in her diary, “It may be remarked that had not God in his great mercy sent Permanund the little door which had been opened at Meerut with much labour— must speedily have been entirely closed.”70 All of this happy communing soon drew to a close when Henry Sherwood— who was away for much of this time, fighting the Gurkhas— was ordered in April 1815 to leave Meerut, and by June, it was clear that the family would be returning to England for good.71 Mrs. Sherwood writes enigmatically, “I will not attempt to describe our feelings on this announcement, but we hastened to prepare for our departure.”72 The party set out around June 20, along with Parmanand who apparently accompanied them as far as Garh Mukteshwar, about 60 miles east of Delhi.73 Situated as it was on the banks of the holy Ganges, Garh Mukteshwar was an important Hindu pilgrimage site— and hence also a place which attracted missionaries, especially Evangelicals. It is telling that one of the last glimpses Mrs. Sherwood had of her protégé was of him confronting a “great meeting of Brahmins” that had congregated at the spot on the occasion of a lunar eclipse: Permunund was anxious to be present at this meeting & to take his balls of silk, to impart some of that knowledge of the heavenly bodies which he had lately acquired concerning the form of the Earth & the motion of the heavenly bodies— which knowledge as he asserted was a powerful instrument in throwing down the fabric of old & monstrous superstitions (he had probably experienced something of this influence on his own mind) . . . he took his Bible with him & held many arguments with the Brahmans— not only on the subject of the motions of the heavenly bodies— but on that of Prophecy which had lately much occupied his mind & was heard with grave interest.74

The Sherwood party stayed on for a few more days, talking “much with Permunund about the conversion of the natives.” Finally, “we parted in much sorrow; the children wept bitterly & long long they talked of poor Permunund— he returned solitary & alone to Meerut— we never saw him more.”75 Recalling the parting a few years later, Parmanand himself apparently exclaimed, “An-

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other trial now came on . . . the soldiers went home to England, and I was left alone.”76 This incident at Garh Mukteswar as well as Parmanand’s subsequent career remind us— as do examples in the previous chapter, and others I discuss a little later— of the fact that cartographic evangelism in colonial India was not just an imperial privilege, but an occasional native passion as well. Soon after parting with Mrs. Sherwood in late June 1815 and returning to Meerut, Parmanand “was not left long enough to mourn,” for at Christmas 1816, he secured what he had been seeking for a while: he was baptized— although not without further inquiries on the part of his missionary minders into the state of his mind and steadfastness of faith— and his name changed: from Parmanand, “Supremely Blissful,” to “Anand Masih,” “Joyful in Christ.”77 He exchanged the maternal mentorship of Mary Martha for the paternalistic supervision of the Reverend Henry Fisher, appointed as Company Chaplain in Meerut in 1815. Although Anand doubled up as a native catechist in the service of the CMS— with some memorable moments that were widely reported in missionary circles, such as the potential conversion of a breakaway sect of former Hindu ascetics called Saadhs that later became the grist for Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial mill— his heart seemed to lie in being a school teacher, like his mentor Mrs. Sherwood, in Meerut.78 Subsequently, around 1822, Anand moved back to Delhi to open a school there— and to be close to his family— and the Reverend Fisher was happy to report that where formerly these kinsmen had scoffed and reviled him, “the very bitterest have asked his forgiveness for their unkind behavior, and salute him cordially when they meet— a striking proof that his unassuming, meek, and Christian-like deportment has disarmed their animosity, and convinced their judgment that he is what he professes to be— an upright, lowlyminded, and pious man.”79 Similarly, the newly appointed Anglican Bishop of Calcutta Reginald Heber (1783– 1826)— on whom more a little later— met Anand in Meerut in December 1824, and while describing him as “a tall, coarselooking man, without much intellect in his countenance,” also noted that he “was pleased by his unassuming and plain manner.”80 Nevertheless, the CMS was clearly worried that their shining paragon of a Brahman convert might slip and revert back to monstrous idolatry, for he was relocated— after some persuasion— to Karnal, a military cantonment northwest of Delhi where a small school was opened around 1828.81 By this time, he had exchanged one male mentor-minder Henry Fisher for another, William Parish. When Parish visited the mission school in Karnal in 1830, he witnessed Anand’s students— nine young men from local land-

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lord families— learning “with avidity the catechisms of geography, arithmetic, etc, etc.”82 Three years later, when Parish once again inspected Anand’s school in 1833, he found thirty scholars “who read the Scriptures, catechisms, geography, Digdurshan, etc, and really understand a great deal, astonishingly well.”83 Parish writes: Anand’s method of Teaching is very simple, but appears to succeed in no small degree. . . . The ages of his scholars are from 5 to 18 and 20 years. In giving them some idea of Geography, Anand illustrates his Lessons by using a small globe which I made for him, and a Book of Maps with which I have furnished him— this is a most interesting subject to the Boys, they look at and examine with open mouths and eyes, the division of the surface of the world into land and water, so irregularly depicted, so strange, compared with the seven countries, and the seven seas of milk, honey, ghi, etc. which they had heard of from their philosophical pandits.84

Thus it appears that by the 1830s, Anand no longer had Mrs. Sherwood’s makeshift “balls of silk” in his possession, and his new male mentor had to fashion for him “a small globe.” It is noteworthy that although by this time, the terrestrial globe as a manufactured artifact was beginning to be more visible in some of the big cities of northern India, as we will shortly see, in smaller towns— like Karnal— one still had to resort to a “homemade” object. No wonder that two years later— in the only account dated April 3, 1835, I have been able to find in the CMS archives of a narrative written in his own hand (in Hindi/ Hindustani in Nagari script)— Anand specifically refers to the gifting to his school of a “paper globe” (kagaz ka gilob) by an Englishman called “Dr. Latan.” Noteworthy also is Anand’s use of the English word “globe,” and that he additionally glosses it as “image of the world” (duniya ka naksha).85 A year later, Anand scaled a new peak— hitherto unheard of— when he was ordained in 1836 by Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, after he had served for over two decades as a catechist and schoolteacher, the first Brahman to become a native clergyman for the Church of England.86 His ordination did not happen without a good deal of discussion among his superiors who worried that “his wife remained a heathen and her influence was sinister.”87 Nevertheless by this time, like another famous convert, the former Muslim renamed Abdul Masih, Anand had become something of a celebrity, as we see in this brief notice by Emily Eden (in India, 1836– 1842), sister of Governor-General Auckland, who has also left for us our only pictorial impression of him after her encounter with the caption, Annan Messee, A Converted Hindoo (see fig. 3.1):

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fiG. 3.1. Annan Messee, A Converted Hindoo, 1844. Hand-colored lithograph based on 1838 drawing by Emily Eden. Reproduced in Emily Eden, Portraits of the Princes and People of India by the Honble Ms. Eden, Drawn on the Stone by L. Dickinson. London: J. Dickinson & Son. © The British Library Board, X43 (21).

Camp, Kurnaul, March 5, 1838 . . . . Mr. Y. brought rather an interesting individual to my tent this morning, a Christianised Indian; he has been a strict Christian for nearly twenty-three years, and last year the Bishop ordained him. He was a Brahmin of the highest class, and is a very learned man. I asked him how his conversion began, whether from discontent with his own belief, or from the persuasion of others; and he said he was dissatisfied with his own superstitions, and got a copy of Henry Martyn’s translation of St. John, and then of the Acts, and then went back to the rest of the Bible. Mrs. Sherwood, who lived at Meerut, was afterwards his chief instructress, and he speaks of her with the greatest gratitude. He keeps a school now, which is attended by about forty children, but he does not think he has made any real converts. I wish he could have spoken English: I wanted to know more about it all. He was here a long time, and I did rather a highly finished picture of him, thinking the old Bishop would like it. He is rather like Sidney Smith blackened, and laughed about as heartily as Sidney would have done at his own picture.88

Several things stand out in this vignette, including the emphasis placed on Anand as “a Brahman of the highest caste” and of great learning. We learn that Anand could not speak English with Emily— who herself could “not speak a word of Hindustani and never shall”— alerting us to the fact that perhaps his conversations with his British interlocutors, including Mrs. Sherwood, took place in Hindustani.89 We also learn that for all the praise he received as a Brahman convert, he himself was not sure if he had succeeded in converting anyone, let alone the school children who he sought to dazzle with his display of globes and teaching of terrestrial lessons.90 And most interestingly, although he spoke with “great gratitude” of Mrs. Sherwood, he does not appear to have recalled her “balls of silk” which were apparently so instrumental in his full conversion to his new faith. Circa 1840, Anand appears to have been relocated to Agra (a city with a deep Christian presence, both Catholic and Protestant), and his pious labors as native clergyman— “a work for which he seems peculiarly fitted”— praised by his missionary employers. Two year later, in 1842, he was still there, “aged and long-tried,” before being relocated to Meerut as the CMS’s head of mission.91 However, something seems to have gone horribly wrong soon after, for he was dismissed after an internal investigation in 1843 and “connection dissolved.”92 The former poster child for the successful transformation of a monstrous idolater into an enlightened Christian— hailed as both “tall and handsome,” and

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also as “gentle and pious”— was now an object lesson for “the great hazard of presenting native converts as candidates for holy orders whilst their adult children and family remain heathen. . . . The sad story of Anand Masih did indeed suggest much greater caution about the ordination of converts, and showed how great the temptations of a man in his position might be if he did not have the constant support of Christian fellowship and counsel.”93 The “sad story” of Anand Masih is also a reminder that “in cases that seem at first to be characterized by the adoption or rejection of new knowledge, a more complicated process of accommodation between different sciences and religions often seems to have occurred.”94 Historian Sujit Sivasundaram’s observation is particularly apposite when we consider Anand’s subsequent fate. Sometime over the course of the next decade, Anand was apparently brought back into the fold and based in Agra, where the missionary Michael Wilkinson described him on the eve of his death as “venerable with age, and though incapable of very active duties, is an ornament to his sacred character, as an officiating priest.”95 Even if in his closing days, Anand regressed in the eyes of his missionary minders and returned to a life of idolatry, possibly opium consumption, his life story presents a contrast to Raja Serfoji for whom being worlded through an encounter with Modern Earth meant a less ambiguous coexistence with the ancestral and the novel. Anand’s confrontation with Mrs. Sherwood’s gridded ball of silk instead resulted in a formal break with his Brahmanical priestly past in favor of proselytizing on behalf of his new faith for a good part of his adult life as a Christian catechist and cartographic evangelist. It is to this fraught face-off between the ancestral and the novel conducted around the spherical object that is the globe to which I turn in the rest of this chapter. As we will see, “the ancestral” is not a homogenous formation even for those— like Serfoji or Parmanand— who were nominally Hindu. In fact, as I have already observed, on the matter of the shape of our planet, there is a foundational rift between the Puranic and the Siddhantic, the former rooted in a discoidal conception of Earth, the latter with a resolute commitment to Ptolemaic sphericity. Similarly, the “novel” knowledge formation that is geography, while by now consistently grounded in Earth’s sphericity and heliocentrism, nevertheless played itself out differently in Protestant pedagogic settings with God and the Bible still accorded a prominent role, as opposed to government institutions supported by public funds committed to a nominal policy of religious neutrality but at the same time divided between those who sought to build bridges between European or “English” science and the Sanskritic Siddhantas, and those who were vehemently opposed to any kind of traf-

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fic with native knowledges. Not least of the reasons that the terrestrial lessons that come to be taught in schools across colonial India were shot through with contradictions and dissonance is because they are a site on which these various conflicts are waged, strategic alliances forged, strongholds stormed, former hegemons defeated, and new mastery proclaimed. The teaching of these lessons, as we will see, is never just about the (spherical) entity whose surface we occupy (although it is that as well), for at stake was the very status of Indian knowledges and millennia of learning as these collided, sometimes catastrophically, with the colonizing thrust of Europe and its knowledge formations.

GLOBAL ADVANCES IN THE GANGETIC VALLEY

When Mary Martha Sherwood noted in her journal in early 1815 that she had found in India that “globes and maps are not to be had,” she was not entirely correct, since such cartographic objects and other scientific instruments had been trickling into the subcontinent, as I have already detailed, since the closing decades of the sixteenth century, and even moving outside the confines of monarchical courts with the growing British presence from the 1780s in the coastal settlements of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras. All the same, while one can make a convincing argument that maps anticipated European empires, it is the case that globes as pedagogical objects (and terrestrial lessons conducted around them) followed the colonial flag rather than clearing the way for its advance. Indeed, starting in the 1780s, as the EIC slowly but surely morphed from a trading company to a full-blown territorial power, spreading its tentacles out from its Bengal bridgehead up the key artery of the Ganga into the former Mughal heartland, its officials began to turn their attention— as they did in Madras— to how best to “enlighten the minds of the Natives,” and at the same time, “to impress them with sentiments of esteem and respect for this British Nation, by making them acquainted with the leading features of our Government so favourable to the rights and happiness of Mankind.”96 Under the pressure of the East India Company Act of 1813 whose “pious clause” ordered the Company to introduce “useful knowledge” and enable “religious and moral improvement” in its territories, schools came to haphazardly dot the landscape of the Gangetic valley, many run by missionaries, some even funded by native donors, and a few nominally under the supervision of a General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI), created in July 1823 and headquartered in Calcutta until January 1842 (on whose “global” endeavors I will have more to say

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in chapter 5). In the extended quarrel over the next several decades— between “Anglicists,” “Orientalists,” and “Vernacularists,” and between Christian missionaries and those who were sponsors of “godless” education— about what and who to teach and through which linguistic medium, the key concept that helped advance the cause of geography was “useful knowledge.” As in Madras, geography and astronomy were the paradigmatic useful knowledges at the very beginning of the colonial pedagogic project in the Gangetic valley as well, on whose value to the learning child there was very little disagreement. From the 1820s, in towns and cities like Delhi, Agra, Allahabad, and Kanpur, the globe as pedagogical object became visible as the teaching of terrestrial lessons took root slowly, especially as English classes, schools, and “colleges” came to be progressively established in spite of the GCPI’s expressed desire at first to offer instruction to the populace “through the medicine of their own tongue,” and notwithstanding the severely-felt absence of suitable elementary textbooks in any language.97 Thus, at Agra College— which commenced operations in June 1824 with the teaching of Persian and Hindi, Arabic and Sanskrit literature, and basic arithmetic— the increasing demand apparently for “useful and general knowledge” led the managers of the institution in 1827 to introduce the teaching of geography and astronomy (in Persian and Hindi), despite the challenges of doing so: “The Maps of the World which have been received from Calcutta are in many respects crude and incorrect, defective in outline and faulty in colouring. The Resalah Ilmi Urz tho’ not so judicious or accurate as might be yet tolerably fulfills the more immediate purpose for which it was intended, viz., a mere introduction of the knowledge of the constituent portions of the Globe.” Accordingly, James Duncan, the Superintendent of the college, put in a request for “Terrestrial and Celestial Globes of pretty large dimensions,” for without Globes it will prove next to impossible to advance with desirable celerity or satisfactory proficiency in Geographical Instruction. Unless to such as are conversant in Arabic learning the familiar fact of the Sphericity of the Earth as grounded on physical proof is unknown nor can those students who have perused the abstract of Geography [the Resalah Ilmi Urz] above alluded to consequently credit the possibility of a Vessel circumnavigating the Globe.98

Duncan’s impassioned plea had an impact, for a pair of globes, celestial and terrestrial, at a cost of Rs. 250 was provided by the GCPI soon after.99 Given that the primary rationale for their presence in the Agra College classroom was

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to provide ocular demonstration of Earth’s spherical form, the fact that the maps shown on the globes were inscribed with English letters might not have mattered at all.100 By 1828, fourteen students were learning terrestrial lessons in Persian and doing “satisfactory” work, although “that greater advance is not made in mathematics and geography is ascribed to the want of competent teachers and means of instruction.”101 A year later, the college managers reported that nineteen pupils were receiving instruction through Hindi in “Elements of Geography, Astronomy and Mathematics agreeably to the European systems,” with the assistance of texts titled “Bhoogol Small,” “Bhoogol Large,” and “Khagol Nirnah” with varying degrees of progress reported. The reports, however, do not mention the specific use to which the globes acquired in 1827 were put in the classroom.102 By 1831, the enrolment in the Hindi class had gone up to twenty-six students (ranging in age from fifteen to twentyone), while the thirty-one students in the Persian department, also in the same age range, were reading “Geograpfeeah Resalah in Oordoo.”103 Giving into local demand and desire, an English class had also came to be added by then. A few years later, when a local commercial enterprise, the Agra Bank, donated Rs. 500 in 1836 for the cause of native education, one suggestion was to use the funds to purchase “two handsome globes” for the college which would also serve as a material reminder to residents of the city “of the liberal conduct” of the donor.104 A year earlier, the college recruited M. W. Woollaston, who had been teaching at the prestigious Hindu College in Calcutta and was the author of a geography schoolbook published by the CSBS, prescribed in many schools across the region, and in anticipation of his arrival, the Principal organized “a Class for English Astronomy and Geography under his own tuition,” all good signs in the GCPI’s reading of improvements to come in the effective delivery of terrestrial lessons at this key institution.105 In nearby Delhi— and still the seat of the Mughal Emperor, as indeed Anand Masih’s hometown— a local committee of mostly British officials secured funds from the GCPI to revive a former Islamic center of learning (the madrasa of Ghazi al-Din Khan) in 1825 when a sum of Rs. 600 per month was set aside from the government’s Education Fund for this purpose. Soon referred to in administrative documents as Delhi College, it had at first a largely Muslim student body engaged in the study of Oriental languages and literatures with a focus on Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic.106 Nevertheless, within a year, the local committee reported as “highly desirable” the necessity for introducing European arts and sciences including rudimentary geography, astronomy, and the use of the globes.107 By 1827, the GCPI observed “the progress of the upper classes in Arabic and Persian was satisfactory, and the attention paid by them

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to geometry, geography, and as much of European astronomy as the ‘Mejmua Shemsi,’ a translation of the Copernican system into Persian can afford, reflected credit on the system of instruction pursued at the College.”108 This early satisfaction gave way to dismay when the management reported a year later in a searing report about the challenges of teaching European science through the medium of “inadequate” Indian languages (almost always demoted in official documents as “vernaculars”) in the absence of appropriate textbooks and through the agency of native teachers, both Hindu and Muslim, who showed a pesky attachment to their ancestral “systems of Astronomy and Geography [which] are mixed up with the wildest notions, void of principle, and truth.” Faced with such challenges, the students had been induced to learn only “a smattering of Geography as a task for a few days previous to the half-yearly examination.”109 In 1828, partly on local demand, but mostly out of the need for creating a class of mediators who would eventually be able to translate European science into local languages, an English class was attached to the college laying the foundations for a distinct seminary (or institution) by 1829, where books were acquired so that “the strict attention to Geography” that was envisaged by the management was indeed carried through.110 Two years later, students at the seminary in the senior class were taught from Guy’s Geography, and by 1835, they were reading selections from more complex works such as Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography, Nicholl’s Geography, and Molineux’s Use of the Globes.111 A few decades later, despite the constraints posed by limited resources and poor enrolments, teachers and graduates of the college (the Oriental and English branches now united), such as the Kayastha-turned-Christian “Yesudas” Ramachandra (1821– 80) and the Muslim polymath Zakaullah (1832– 1910), were key to the intellectual efflorescence— the so-called “Delhi Renaissance”— that radiated from the city, especially under the aegis of the Delhi Vernacular Translation Society, founded in 1842/43. Enthusiastic popularizers of the new sciences, they were also authors of some of the earliest terrestrial lessons in Urdu, demonstrating in the process that language’s capacity to deliver. In other words, these men were among the earliest Hindustani foot soldiers in the advancing Empire of Geography hoped for by members of the Local Committee in their lengthy plea to the GCPI in February 1829.112 Of course, all this does not mean that Modern Earth had smooth sailing, or altogether willing adherents, for painters associated with the Mughal court in Delhi had not entirely given up on continuing to represent their Emperor in the company of the globe configured in a manner that would not have pleased the ardent Christian/cartographic evangelist. Since the eighteenth century,

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fiG. 3.2. Jahangir and His Ancestors, ca. 1830– 1840. Attributed to Ghulam Ali Khan. Opaque watercolor on gouache. San Diego Museum of Art, 1990.409. http://www.TheSanDiegoMuseumofArt.org.

even as the authority of the Mughal Emperor was on the wane, paintings that harked back to the glorious imperial era were “copied” and elaborated upon, as artists, patrons, dealers, and collectors came together to create a protomarket for such works. I have written about these works elsewhere,113 but here draw attention to one such painting, most likely the work of the Delhi-based Ghulam Ali Khan (active 1817– 55) whose repertoire was extensive including dynastic portraits, such as of the Emperor Jahangir standing on a globe (see fig. 3.2). Even at a time when terrestrial globes were being slowly introduced in schools as a pedagogical object, the artist adopts an aesthetic of archaism: the globe under the emperor’s feet is not painted with north on the top but instead oriented to the east; it rests on the Fish-Bull of Islamic cosmology; and not

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least, this entire assemblage rests on another globe whose upper half, visible in the painting, is occupied by the familiar pair of lion and lamb, rather than mapped territories. As in the seventeenth century when the prototype of this painting was first produced, now as well the assertion appears to be that under the just and messianic rule of the Mughal padshah, unlikely animals happily and harmoniously coexist. The painting also makes an emphatic assertion that the gridded sphere and the mapped territory of colonial geography are not always necessary for visualizing worldliness.114 Such images were surely at odds with the European-style globes that began to enter the classroom by the 1840s when the “study of Geography by reference to Globes and Maps, and the preparation of Maps” was deemed mandatory for students in English schools under the management of the GCPI. No boy over age twelve who sought to proceed further in his studies could do so “without knowing the correct form of our Earth and its great divisions.”115 By this time, as I already noted in chapter 2, Governor-General Auckland had also issued a key “minute” on native education in November 1839, as a consequence of which the first attempt was made to take stock across British India of textbooks in use in colonial schools, including for the study of geography and astronomy and in “the vernaculars.” The resulting report makes it clear that in the realm of textbook publishing, in the Gangetic valley as in other parts of India, Protestant missionaries, especially of Evangelical persuasion, were at the forefront, their work of spreading the Gospel aided and abetted by the dissemination of the truths of Modern Earth. Indeed, the journals and letters from the 1820s and 1830s of J. T. Thompson (1790?– 1850) are saturated with the conviction that an exposure to Geography led the doubting native to reach for the Gospel, as had been case with Parmanand.116 Arriving in Delhi in 1818 (when he declared himself as the “solitary Christian in that great city”117) and based there until his death in 1850, Thompson was in the habit of frequenting the great Hindu pilgrimage centers of the Gangetic valley, such as Haridwar and Garh Mukhteshwar, especially during critical moments in the ritual season, where he engaged particularly with Brahmans in whose interest in what he had to say he avidly reported to his superiors. He was typically armed with books and tracts, among them works in geography and astronomy. By 1822, he had translated into Hindi the “Geographical Treatise” published a few years earlier by the Serampore missionaries in Bengal (on which more later), and published a thousand copies printed for the use in the Upper Provinces.118 In 1825, he reported on a meeting with several Charandasi Gosains (Saiva religious mendicants) in a temple in Delhi, including

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Gooroo Nuvas-jee, an old man about eighty but not infirm, having three months since obtained a copy of the Hindee geography from me, took great delight in speaking of its contents, and referred readily to the description of any country mentioned therein. He is satisfied that there is no blazing warwanulanul (* This is described as submarine fire in the form of a horse’s head) in the south, but the climate must be the same as in similar degrees of north latitude; the manner of expressing the distances of the countries by latitude and longitude he is also much taken with, as being very perspicuous. The proofs of the rotundity of the earth are deemed conclusive.

Convinced with his exposure thus to Modern Earth, Gooroo Nuvasjee, “thirsting for knowledge himself, recommends to his followers to read all our books,” and was eager that Thompson provide copies of the Hindi Geography to them as well.119 In 1828, noting in a letter to his brethren in Serampore that the Hindi Geography continued to be in great demand with many, including students from the recently-established Delhi College writing to him for copies, he observed, “some persons have their attention first excited to the gospel through this work, and it diffuses much useful knowledge.”120 Another journal entry for January and February1833 reads, “Gave tracts to a young Hindoo, whose mind once prejudiced has been rendered favourable towards books by reading the Hindee Geography.”121 In Garh Mukteshwar— where just over a decade earlier, Parmanand/Anand Masih had given a demonstration in terrestrial sphericity using his “balls of silk” to pilgrims gathered there for the great eclipse— Thompson reported in November 1829 that he had met an old Brahman from Meerut who looked at the books given to him with “great devotedness,” and “attentively read the four gospels and conversed with some native Christians. But to all this he was led by reading the Hindee geography distributed at Gur’h.”122 A few months prior in February 1829, he recalled connecting up again with a Kashmiri man who five years earlier had taken back a copy of the Hindi Geography to Kashmir “where the pundit Rajdhanee translated it into Sungskrita, enlarged it and affixed maps to it of his own construction.”123 Indeed, in November 1824 when Bishop Heber passed through the hill town of Kumaon, a Brahman eagerly sought an audience with him. This Brahman had met a “European pundit” a couple years earlier “at the great fair of Hurdwar,”— quite possibly Thompson— and clearly that meeting had had an impact. For when Heber quizzed him “about the form of the earth, the source of the Ganges, the situation of Mount Meru,” he received “better answers than I expected” (although the learned Bishop did also confess that “his utterance

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was so rapid and indistinct that I could understand less of his conversation than of Hindoos whom I have met with”): He laughed at the fancy of the elephant and tortoise, whom the Pundits of Benaras placed as supporters to the earth, and said it was a part of the same system with that which made the earth flat, and girded in by six other worlds, each having its own ocean. I drew a diagram of the world with its circles, etc. and he recognized them with great delight, shewing me the sun’s path along the ecliptic. He expressed a great desire to learn more of the European discoveries in astronomy and geography, and listened with much attention to my account . . . of the Copernican system, and of the relative situations of England, Russia, Turkey, Persia, Arabia, and India . . . ; and he knew America under the name of “the New World,” and as one of the proofs that the earth was round. He was very anxious to obtain any Hindoo books containing the improved system of astronomy and geography; and complained that Dr. H.— , when in Kemaoon had promised to send him some, but had forgotten it.124

But it was not just Brahmans— although their potential conversion was exciting to consider, given their hegemonic place in Indian learning— but others as well who seemed to be attracted by Thompson’s terrestrial lessons. Around 1821, Thompson also reported to his superiors that on a recent visit to Haridwar, he had met a group of eager Sikhs who had asked for a translation of Introduction to the Solar System, published by the Serampore missionaries in 1819. The Serampore missionaries, never losing an opportunity to advance their own project of cartographic evangelism, were eager to respond: The desire for knowledge manifested by this intelligent race appearing worthy of encouragement, the Committee have caused a translation of the Introduction to the Solar System and the Geographical Treatise to be made into their language. These [the Sikhs] have already renounced the leading doctrines of Hindooism as a nation; and the earnestness with which they seek information may possibly lead some of them to happier results;— at least, it cannot be unwise to convey to them sound information respecting even the works of creation.125

A few years later, also at Haridwar, Thompson was delighted to have provided eager Gurkhas with “a compendium of Astronomy and Geography, the

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Digdurshan and other school books . . . all published in Hindee” and thus countered “the busy efforts of the brahmuns to supply them with mental poison.”126 Around this time, and perhaps encouraged by all this reported interest in the Gangetic valley in Modern Earth and Modern Sky, the Calcutta-based Baptist Mission Press published in 1836 A Brief Account of the Solar System in English; with the Translation into Hindustani; Arranged as Reading Lessons for the Use of Schools, profusely illustrated with diagrams and maps. Convinced that “from the Prince to the peasant,” the native mind was “blindly guided by the movements and positions of the planets in the heavens,” and hence also trapped in the clutches of the astrologer, “who is usually a Brahmin,” the bilingual book set out to rescue “Reason” from the latter’s “despotism,” by revealing “the glorious truths” of astronomy: Astronomy, more than any other science, conveys to the mind just views of the power and glory of the Creator; for “the heavens declare the glory of GOD, and the firmament sheweth the work of HIS hand.” . . . Especially in this land, therefore, no school surely should be without such instruction . . . to create awe and reverence to the CREATOR, to rectify popular errors, to gratify the scholar, and enlarge whilst it corrects his mind.127

Beginning with the solar system centered on the sun, the book introduced the student-reader to “the third body from the Sun . . . this Earth,” which, “like the moon and all the planets, is round.” A bilingual map in color inserted at this juncture details Earth’s two hemispheres with identifying labels in English and Hindustani (see fig. 3.3). The text goes on to repeat, “This earth is round: it has been sailed around by navigators,” and it is in motion, around its own axis— “at the rate of 1000 miles an hour”— and through the sky, “hurled into space by the fiat of Almighty.”128 After this initial introduction to our planet, followed by a description of the others in our solar system (accompanied by illustrations and punctuated by frequent allusions to the glory of God as it manifests itself in the perfection of the universe), the text brings the studentreader back to Earth, so to speak, and introduces him to heliocentrism, laying out the logic behind it, but also firmly putting in place the contrary position of geo-centric universe of Islamic astronomy and Sanskritic jyotishastra: This ridiculous idea has long since been abandoned by European nations. It is not to be wondered at, however, that the Indian nation should still fancy the firmament to be spinning round our heads! For they have not had the advantages of European telescopes to measure the exact sizes of the sun and planets,

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fiG. 3.3. “The World,” 1836. Lithographed at the Press of H. M. the King of Oude, Lucknow.

and have as yet, but entered the threshold of the science of Astronomy. Ere long, the wise of this nation also, will join the philosophers of Europe, and explain to their Indian brethren the wonderful fact— that God, the great Invisible Spirit, who is every where present, minutely directing all Creation with awful power and watchful care, has, with infinite wisdom and wonderful contrivance, made this Earth on which we dwell.129

After insisting that such a heliocentric universe was sustained by (the Christian) God, the book goes on to challenge the “ancient books of the Hindus [which] erroneously say, that this earth on which we live is a plain or flat surface.” However, this is not the case, for “it has long since been fully and completely provide to be round, and an enormous globe.”130 To drive home this key terrestrial lesson, a chapter with the lengthy but unambiguous title “The World Is Proved to Be Round by Meeting of Ships at Sea, and by Ships Sailing Completely Round It,” includes an illustration of our spherical Earth with ships arranged around it and exhorts, “Look at the picture! It is exactly so at sea . . . many ships have sailed completely round the world, and proved beyond a doubt that it is a globe.”131 Discursive and pictorial assertions of Earth’s sphericity make up for the potential absence of its material proxy, the terrestrial globe, in the

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classroom in northern India as it did in southern India, as we saw in the previous chapter. The book concludes with detailing “the Benefit of Astronomy to Man”: The study of Astronomy enlarges the mind, as much as faith in Astrology enfeebles it. Astronomy leads the mind up to God, and fills it with sublime conceptions of his power and wisdom. On a due acquaintance with Astronomy depends the perfection of Navigation, Geography, Chronology, Commerce, and Dialling [sic]. By the learned and useful calculations of Astronomers has the surface of our globe been measured with scientific accuracy; the distances of kingdoms, capes, continents, and cities have been laid down in miles and furlongs; and above all, by charts or maps, the great ocean is now every where intersected by the lines of science, and has become a well known highway for our fleets and navies.132

The reader would have been left in little doubt by the end of the text that the ancestral knowledges with which he came into the classroom could not compete with the terrestrial lessons of such a mathematized spherical world, scored by “the lines of science,” and delivered to the Indian student by those remarkable nations of Europe who had with the help of astronomy come to his land to trade and buy raw materials in exchange for which, India received “the treasures of Europe: cloth, lead, metals, telescopes, watches, mathematical instruments, steam engines, machinery of every kind; and above all, the wisdom of the best books, teaching science and virtue, for knowledge in which, the European nations are famed.”133 Remarkably, although the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta published this book, it was printed “at the expense of the King of Oude, and will, by the same liberality be distributed gratuitously to seminaries of instruction.”134 The beautiful bilingual world map in color (see fig. 3.3)— one of the earliest such maps to be available for classroom use in North India— was also “lithographed at the Press of H. M. the King of Oude.” At the time of its publication, the former Mughal province of Oudh or Awadh (with its capital at Lucknow) was not yet under formal British rule, although it was hemmed in on three sides by EIC-administered territories, its affairs considerably meddled with by the Company. In September 1831, the occupant of the throne Nasir ud-Din Haidar Shah (r. 1827– 37) wrote an interesting letter intended for the Governor-General William Bentinck who on his visit to Lucknow a few months earlier had taken the Oudh ruler to task for his systematic “maladministration.”135 Eager to assert his own progressive sovereignty by demonstrating his participation in the colo-

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nial project of doing “useful” work, the King expressed a desire to construct an Observatory and asked the governor-general to depute a European to supervise the project. Against the background of the gathering financial crisis in Oudh which led the Company to step in and “assume” its management in 1835, the growing suspicion by the Court of Directors in London that the whole project was “an ill-timed expenditure of the public resources on the part of the King,” the death under highly suspicious circumstances of Nasir ud-Din, and the increasing “capriciousness” of his successor, the Observatory did get finally built, after a fashion.136 From September 1841, the “noble” work of astronomical observation actually began, and several graduates of the newly-established colonial schools of Agra and Allahabad, were also trained in the arts of astronomical observation, although the related ambition for “a school for the young courtiers in which some knowledge of Astronomy and general Physics might be taught” did not materialize.137 Ultimately the ill-fated Observatory was shut down in 1849 by the last King of Oudh Wajid Ali Shah (r. 1847– 1856), but before its closure it did begin to garner some admiration in learned circles when in the course of its brief tenure and in association with His Majesty’s Lithographic Press, it published several translations of European works in Urdu, including well-known texts in European astronomy.138 H. M. the King of Oude Press also printed a number of maps, including A Sketch of the Solar System for the Use in Schools, although these were derisively greeted in some colonial circles (see fig. 3.4).139 The publication of A Brief Account of the Solar System in 1836 has to be placed within this fraught context, especially since in its attack on native knowledge systems, the book remained largely silent about Islam and instead pitched itself against Brahmanical Hinduism and its monstrous astrology. Its reasons for doing so become interesting to consider when we turn to its author, one of the more ardent cartographic evangelists we are likely to meet in these pages. In fact, although Matthew Edney, following Christopher Bayly, has suggested that A Sketch of the Solar System might have been produced under the direction of James Herbert, and Joydeep Sen proposes Lancelot Wilkinson as its author, it is more likely the work of the same man who was responsible for A Brief Account of the Solar System.140 His name was James Paton (1798– 1847), a Scotsman from Edinburgh who was Assistant to the Resident at Lucknow (and frequently Acting Resident) for a decade or so from 1830, on whose instigation Nasir ud-Din Haidar likely wrote to Bentinck about his plans for the Observatory.141 Paton’s participation in that pet colonial project of the extermination of Thugs (or “ritual murderers”) has been richly documented by historians, but his role in promoting native education and in the advancement of “that noble science” of astronomy

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fiG. 3.4. A Sketch of the Solar System for the Use in Schools, ca. 1835. Lithographed at the Press of H. M. the King of Oude, Lucknow. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 523.1:Sk2s Large.

and of the lessons of Modern Earth through the circulation of maps, globes, atlases, and such, has scarcely received attention.142 Thus, in 1835 the Calcutta Christian Observer brought his good work in the realm of Christian and cartographic evangelism to the notice of its subscribers and readers: “At this station [Lucknow] reside many active friends of Native Education, among whom we cannot refrain from mentioning the name of Capt. Paton, though we are aware

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that he will scarcely forgive us for so doing. . . . By the permission of His Majesty the King of Audh, he has, with the exercise of much ingenuity and perseverance, made the Royal Lithographic Press a most useful agent in the work of improvement. At it he has prepared small solid, and large skeleton globes and orreries, both in English and Hindustani.”143 From his correspondence with the editors of the journal in the preceding years, it is clear Paton had with the patronage of His Majesty set up a couple English schools (for boys and girls), and also begun supplying books to schools in neighboring Kanpur, Fatehpur and Fategarh.144 Frustrated, however, with not being able to procure a sufficient number of globes from Calcutta for use in schools in Lucknow and neighboring areas— “Seeing that in the metropolis of British India there are ‘no globes to be had’”— Paton, like many a colonial educator, took to fabricating his own, in English and in Hindustani, small and portable (some solid, others skeletal) as well as larger ones sixteen to eighteen inches in diameter, intended for “gratuitous distribution.” Such globes, he wrote, “seem to take the fancy of the natives from the oddity of their construction, and any thing which leads them to inquiry is good. I fancy such as these might be made for three annas each, and thus every schoolboy might have an explanation of his geographical books. At present the native schools, and perhaps every school of Calcutta, are without a globe of any kind!”145 Proud of his handiwork, he sent along a sample with the instruction, “Please to open out the enclosed one, and press down the slides to the poles, and then a tolerable globe will be formed, sufficient to shew the form of the earth, and dispel the erroneous opinions now entertained by many.”146 By September 1834, he was pleased to report, “English portable globes are now in the press here, and I hope will soon be ready. I will send you 3 or 400, or even more, for gratuitous distribution. Large 8-inch Persian ones will I hope be ready in a fortnight, and English and Persian ones are in hand.”147 Paton’s career as a cartographic evangelist had begun earlier when as a young and eager military officer-cum-administrator, he arrived in nearby Sagar (in what was then called the Nerbudda Territory) around 1826, after a brief stint in the early 1820s in Meerut— where Anand Masih had his fateful encounter with Mrs. Sherwood a few years earlier— when he was reborn, by later accounts, as a “righteous Christian.”148 Although his official appointment was as Commissary of Ordnance, Lieutenant Paton began setting up a network of small schools in Sagar and adjacent villages, from his own personal funds and a grant of Rs. 100 from Local Funds by the Government Agent (and a supply of books from the GCPI). In the course of this pedagogic work, his life intersected with that of a reputable Brahman family headed by Nana Diwan Sahib (a pandit attached to the former Maratha court in the region), and especially the latter’s

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youngest son Krishna Rau who, in the words of a later colonial official, showed “an extreme ardour to be come acquainted with English manner, language, and literature, and has continued during a slight intercourse with English Gentlemen here, to pick up a variety of elementary hints on the Sciences & Arts.”149 Paton took the precocious Krishna Rau, then on the verge of turning twenty, under his wing, and began to educate him in English, geography, and astronomy. In return, the young man helped him with managing the schools he had set up (as well as furthered his knowledge of Persian, which Paton would later put to good use in his work in Lucknow). The pupils were boys of all castes and ages, educated at first in Hindi and then as they advanced, “the more attractive studies of natural history, geography, astronomy, biography, history and mathematics were added.” Paton also prevailed upon his colleagues to assist him “in the construction of globes, maps, etc. Books and instruments were procured from Serampore and Calcutta.”150 Busy though he was as a full-time colonial administrator, Paton regularly paid a visit every Sunday when not otherwise prevailed at the house of Nana Desan [sic] where eight or ten or a dozen Boys from each of the School attend with their Books and specimens of Writing, some of them undergoing a short and superficial examination, which serves at least the purpose of keeping up a feeling of pride, and a spirit of emulation. Here the elders, viz. Nana Desan, his sons and all the Teachers are seen gravely assembled, and the formal aspect of the Quadrangle the ranges of sharp forward little children in clean clothes seated on their mats and artlessly copying [?] their lessons and the show of a few Globes and Maps on the Table and Walls of the Room open to the Court, altogether give the place a cheerful and even classical appearance.151

Although Paton was soon after transferred to Lucknow in February 1830— by which time there were some nine schools in the network, with close to four hundred students— his pedagogical experiments did not come to naught, with the GCPI taking over formal supervision from 1835. Krishna Rau in turn became something of a minor celebrity when he caught the eye of GovernorGeneral Bentinck on the latter’s visit to Sagar in 1833. He was sent to Calcutta for further education, and given the lofty title of “Rao” and a jagir (estate) for his lifetime. Rao Krishna Rau, as he henceforth came to be known, returned to his native Sagar in 1835 armed with books and instruments that he purchased in Calcutta, with renewed interest in continuing to world his students through an exposure to Modern Earth and Modern Sky:

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Two or three have acquired such a knowledge of Geography and Astronomy that they can shew the longitude and latitude of any place on the Globe, the division of the Earth into land and water, the cause of day and night, with the change of the seasons. They can also discern the most distinguished luminous bodies in the heavens, as Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc., the distance they keep from each other, and the period of their respective revolutions which they perform round the Sun in a year, month, day, hour, and minute.

The Local Committee was also proud to report, “Rao Krishna Rao continues with a very praiseworthy zeal and perseverance, in spite of some sources of discouragement, to pursue the great object of enlightening his fellowcountrymen to which he has devoted himself, with every prospect of eventual success.”152 It is worth noting here that in contrast to his fellow Brahman Parmanand and in spite of Lieutanant Paton’s own rekindled Christian zeal, Rao Krishna Rau retained his ancestral faith even while converting to the Gospel of Modern Earth. He is a classic example of the type I am characterizing in this chapter as the global pandit. In concluding this discussion on global advances in the Gangetic valley, I turn to the city where the fraught face-off between the ancestral and the novel— between Christian/cartographic evangelism and Brahmanical panditry— peaked. This was Benares, routinely described in missionary reports in the most lurid of terms as “the great metropolis of Hindoo idolatry,” “a stronghold of Satan,” “a vast resort of blind and misguided devotees,” and the abode of “awful and besotted darkness,” but also recognized by Orientalist scholaradministrators as “the grand seminary of India” and by the Company’s Directors as “the great repository of [Hindu] learning.”153 Benares was ceded to the EIC in 1775, and in January 1792, the Resident Jonathan Duncan (in office 1788– 95) recommended to the governor-general that some of the surplus revenues accruing to the Company should be appropriated for the “Institution of a Hindoo College or Academy for the preservation and cultivation of the Laws, Literature and Religion of that nation.”154 This proposition was made at a time when key EIC administrators saw their role as reviving the ancient learning of the land they had acquired willy-nilly, and indeed, the Benares Sanskrit College, partly funded by the local raja with generous grants of land and money, was for several years the Orientalists’ dream come true— and the Anglicist’s nightmare. On September 7, 1824, the college (or Vidyalaya, as it was also called) was visited in the course of his tour of India by an influential man, the Bishop of Calcutta Reginald Heber (resident in India 1823– 26).155 All his Anglican

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and Anglicist suspicions were confirmed on what he witnessed on meeting its scholars whose curriculum of study included “reading, writing, arithmetic (in the Hindoo manner,) Persian, Hindoo law, and sacred literature, Sanskrit, astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system, and astrology!” He dismissed most of what he heard from students eager to show (off ) their newly acquired knowledge to the visiting dignitary, but he was moved enough by his encounter with “the astronomical lecturer” to write at some length about it in his journal. This pandit, he writes, produced a terrestrial globe, divided according to their system, and elevated to the meridian of Benares. Mount Meru he identified with the North Pole, and under the southern pole he supposed the tortoise ‘chukwa’ to stand, on which the earth rests. The southern hemisphere he apprehended to be uninhabitable, but on its concave surface, in the interior of the globe, he placed Padalon. He then shewed me how the sun went round the earth once in every day, and how, by a very different but equally continuous motion, he also visited the signs of the zodiac. The whole system is precisely that of Ptolemy.156

To be fair to Heber, he was not entirely unsympathetic to the pandit’s plight in presenting with the help of his “terrestrial globe” his “astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system,” but infected with Puranic “rubbish,” such as the Earth-bearing tortoise. Clearly the man knew better for he “smiled once or twice very slily.”157 In fact, the Vidyalaya’s pandit had materially demonstrated— with object at hand— a millennium of compromises that had been worked between the two knowledge systems, Puranic and Siddhantic, as noted in chapter 1. Scholars have documented surviving examples of similar globes from different parts of India in which the flat Earth of the Puranas came to be wrapped around the sphere of the Siddhantas. The earliest of the surviving examples of such globes dates from Gujarat around 1571, and later ones have been placed in a period ranging from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, and might well have been produced to mirror colonial modernity’s archaizing impulses (for example, figure 3.5).158 The Vidyalaya’s “terrestrial globe” is very similar to these examples, although it appears to have survived only discursively rather than materially. It is tempting to see these objects— with Christopher Bayly— as a material response produced from within the Indic tradition to the challenge posed by the arrival of the European terrestrial globe, as representing a joint front presented by the Puranic and Siddhantic against the newcomer, just as earlier in the millennium they had joined forces to transcend contradictions

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fiG. 3.5. “Puranic” globe, ca. mid-nineteenth century. Paint on wood, diameter 19 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IM. 499– 1924.

between themselves against the growing hegemony of Islamic astronomy.159 Indeed, it is possible that Heber himself recognized this, for he noted that there had been discussions regarding the study of Newtonian and Copernican astronomy in the Vidyalaya, but there had been reluctance and resistance to introduce these in the curriculum, partly because of the fear that this would “interfere with the religious prejudices of the professors.” He went on to dismiss

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such fears as “plainly absurd, since the Ptolemaic system, which is now taught, is itself an innovation, and an improvement on the old faith of eight worlds and seven oceans, arranged like a nest of boxes.” Nonetheless, to his credit, Heber generously conceded that one should not be surprised “at their adherence to old usage in these respects . . . when we recollect that the Church of Rome has not even yet withdrawn the Anathema which she leveled at the heresy that the earth turned round, as taught by Copernicus and Galileo.”160 This was the not the first— or only— time that for Protestant men of cloth in colonial India, confrontations with Hindu idolatry raised the specter of (and possibly the far greater evil of ) Popish idolatry. It is revealing that Heber was incensed less with the “absurd” adherence to the outdated Ptolemaic system among the Vidyalaya’s pandits than with the contrast between this “rubbish,” disseminated with the financial support of the government, and “the rudiments of real knowledge which those whom I had visited the day before had acquired, in the very same city, and under circumstances far less favorable.” This “real knowledge” was on display in the Mission School that he visited a day earlier on September 6, housed in a humble “native dwelling.” Here he met close to 140 boys, “mostly belonging to the middling class,” many wearing “the brahmanical string.”161 Yet, in contrast to their kinsmen in the government-funded institution down the road, they were studying all manner of useful things including “geography, and the use of the globes,” and texts such as Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, a text unambiguously premised on a conception of Modern Earth and Modern Sky.162 Established originally by a rich Hindu merchant-banker— Jai Narayan Ghoshal, “whom Mr. Corrie had almost persuaded to become a Christian”— and handed over for management to the CMS around 1817, the school was everything that the Bishop could hope for with its teaching of both the Gospel and geography, “I wish a majority of English school-boys might appear equally well-informed.”163 Within the next decade, the Dominion of Modern Earth had put down some roots, even in this “stronghold of Satan.” Thus, in 1836, the senior class of the English Seminary (established in 1830 under the GCPI’s control) was studying selections from Nicholls’ Geography and “the use of the Terrestrial and Celestial Globes and Maps,” and also doing various exercises “upon the Maps of the four quarters of the world and the Globes.”164 At the other end of the colonial educational spectrum, in a CMS mission school in the city’s Bengalitolah neighborhood, C. B. Leupolt reported in 1833 that he dedicated two hours per week to terrestrial lessons in order to combat the ancestral “rubbish” about Earth and its form:

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One day, having given the general proofs of the earth being of a spherical form, and having mentioned its magnitude, I asked one of the boys to seek for the sea of honey and milk, and the place where it rested upon the head of the old serpent. He, turning the globe round, and looking here and there, said at last, “I can find nothing of either.” Others, hearing this, burst out into laughter, saying, “You cannot find it, because there is no such thing.” . . . Upon which the Monitor of the first class, a Brahmin said, “Look, Sir! our Shasters tell us great lies.”165

The pedagogic stage was thus properly set to receive a Brahman who arrived around 1842 in this city much maligned in colonial discourse for its idolatrous temples, priestly cunning, and Puranic absurdities parading as learning and knowledge. Rising to some fame as teacher of astronomy and the author of a Hindi geography, he was inducted into the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and honored with the title of Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1878. To understand how Bapudeva Sastri (1821– 90), pulled off being a Copernican and “global” Brahman without turning Christian, as Parmanand did, we will leave the Gangetic valley for a while and head south toward central India to a small place called Sehore (Sihura)— not all that far from Krishna Rau’s Sagar— in order to reconnect with Lancelot Wilkinson, who we met briefly in the last chapter, and his circle of learned pandits who he managed to convert— seemingly against all odds— to the Gospel of Modern Earth.166

“LOST IN ADMIR ATION”: COPERNICAN BUT NOT CHRISTIAN

In the middle of 1837, amid numerous pressing matters including looming problems on the recalcitrant new frontier in Afghanistan, Governor-General Auckland’s office in Calcutta took time out to commission and oversee the production of an unusual gift: “two handsome silver emblematical inkstands, representing a jotishi pandit seated between two globes, expounding their use from the Siddhantas— and around the stand, richly embossed, the twelve signs of the zodiac— a Sanskrit couplet on each expressing that it was presented by the Governor General in Council in token of approbation of the astronomical learning and zealous endeavours of the pandits to enlighten their countrymen.”167 On June 7, 1837, these “global” inkstands were shown to the august members of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta by its Secretary W. H. Macnaghten (1793– 1841), also Secretary to the Government of India in the Secret and Polit-

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ical Department, and a former member of the GCPI). Macnaghten read aloud a letter from Lancelot Wilkinson, then political agent in the Bhopal Court, which detailed what the pandits had done “to deserve so high a compliment.” The Brahman recipients of these gifts were Subaji Bapu, a pandit of Telugu origin, “a man of wonderful acuteness, and intelligence, and sound judgment,” even “a genius of the first order,” and Omkar Bhatt, a renowned jyotish from Malwa. Subaji entered Wilkinson’s service as “my own Sastri” and almost from the start won the Englishman’s approbation.168 From a letter dated September 19, 1834, that Wilkinson wrote from Sehore to a missionary correspondent in Calcutta, we learn that Omkar Bhatt and Subaji Bapu were “the two cleverest men here— men most respected for their acquirements, and previously most distinguished for their orthodoxy.” Over time these distinguished but orthodox natives became Wilkinson’s “most promising pupils,” as the Englishman drew them into his own studies of the Sanskrit Siddhantas, especially “the authority of Bhaskar Acharya.” The men “are now greatly ashamed at their past folly and ignorance, in yielding such an implicit assent to all the absurdities of the Puranic system.”169 In his official communication to Secretary Macnaghten a couple years later, Wilkinson wrote on June 5, 1836, that several years of trying to convince the learned Subaji “of the truth of the real size and shape of the earth and of other important physical facts” had finally paid off. Like Parmanand/Anand before him, but less catastrophically, Subaji was lost in admiration when he came fully to comprehend all the facts resulting from the spherical form of the earth, and when the retrogressions of the planets were shewn to be so naturally to be accounted for on the theory of the Earth’s annual motion, and when he reflected on the vastly superior simplicity and credibility of the supposition that the Earth had a diurnal motion, than that the sun and all the stars daily revolve round the Earth, he became a zealous defender of the system of Copernicus. He lamented that his life had been spent in maintaining foolish fancies, and spoke with a bitter indignation against all those of his predecessors who had contributed to the willful concealment of the truths that once had been acknowledged in the land.170

Like Parmanand/Anand, Subaji too apparently wished to disseminate the new (spherical) truths that he had learned and to “enlighten” the people of his native Chanda and Nagpur, and also all those who lived in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Delhi, and Agra.171 Wilkinson reported that he undertook to produce a treatise in Marathi and the result was a work titled Siddhanta Siromani Prakasa, “An Illumination of [Bhaskara’s] Crest Jewel of Astronomical

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Systems,” in which the Puranic, the Siddhantic, and Copernican systems were compared.172 Omkar Bhatt, “who holds the next rank in talent and usefulness,” followed with “a free Hindi version” titled Bhugola Saro Likhyate. Both books were shown to members of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in June 1837 as works that explained “the correct system of astronomy to their countrymen.” 173 In Wilkinson’s words, these books left “none of the numerous vulgar errors held by all Hindus in connection with [their] subjects of Geography and Astronomy to pass without a complete and satisfactory refutation.”174 Soon after, the silver “global” inkstands were dispatched in July 1837, with accompanying certificates, by steamer to Bhopal via Allahabad. Although the pandits appear to have been keener on securing the certificates than the precious silver objects, I remain focused on the inclusion of a pair of globes in the gifted inkstands.175 Such inkstands were in vogue in England at this time, but this was likely the first time that such objects were made in India, or presented to anyone, let alone to Brahman pandits.176 The governor-general offered these “classically ornamented inkstands” in response to Wilkinson’s suggestion that Subaji Bapu and Omkar Bhatt be shown “any small token of approbation and honorable distinction” for their “valuable labours in the spread of education and in the cause of humanity and for their humble but sincere endeavours to vindicate European Literature and Science to their ignorant fellow country men in Malwa and the Deckan.”177 We do not know what the distinguished pandits made of these unusual gifts, although as we will see a little later, Omkar Bhatt’s Bhugolsar in its 1841 iteration, as published by the Agra School-Book Society, included a hand-drawn illustration of a gridded terrestrial globe, possibly the first for a Hindi language textbook written by a native.178 It is not entirely clear from the trail of correspondence between Calcutta and Sehore/Bhopal as to who suggested the specific design for the gift, although I hazard on the basis of everything we know about Wilkinson that it is he who came up with the idea, for he was among the most zealous of cartographic evangelists who we will likely encounter in these pages, convinced as he was that globes representing our spherical Earth constituted “the readiest means of demonstrating to [the natives] the truth.”179 In contrast to the cartographic evangelist of the missionary kind, Wilkinson is a paradigmatic example of a scholar-bureaucrat committed to a “global” mission rooted in the conviction that the essence of enlightened and modern pedagogy lies in the foundational truth of terrestrial sphericity. Born around 1805 in north England, Wilkinson arrived in India in the early 1820s when he was still a teenager himself, equipped with no more than the modicum of education and training that was given around this time to those

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entering EIC service.180 As a member of the Bombay Civil Service in its diplomatic wing, he was assigned for the first few years to a series of native courts across Central India as that part of the subcontinent was progressively brought to heel by the EIC. In his own telling, Wilkinson was from the time he arrived in India, “a warm and zealous friend of the cause of education,” spending a good bit of time in superintending the few schools in his “sphere of influence.” It is at this point that some early ideas that subsequently matured into passionate advocacy for the use of Indian languages (in their own scripts) for science education may have been formulated, as he realized the limited reach and appeal of English-language textbooks in places away from the Presidency towns.181 He also became an early exponent of the evolving colonial pedagogic policy of “engraftment” as baldly enunciated by the bureaucrat J. H. Harington, who suggested that “to allure the learned natives of India to the study of European science and literature, we must, I think, engraft this study upon their own established methods of scientific and literary instruction.”182 In December 1830, while still in his twenties, Wilkinson was elevated to the important position of acting political agent in Bhopal, representing the EIC’s interests at a time of great transition there.183 Nonetheless, like his nearcontemporary James Paton, he also found time to teach not less than a dozen youths, Hindus and Mussulmans, who were tolerably well acquainted before I left with the shape of the earth, and its dimensions, and with the outlines of our astronomical system; who could point out all the capitals of all the kingdoms on the face of the globe; tell me the longitude and latitude, and convert time into degrees of longitude, and vice versà. This was a grand labor accomplished, but it is pleasing to see falsehood dispelled by truth.184

He also worked assiduously to secure financial contributions from the Bhopal government and three neighboring rulers to set up a Superior School— for the training of future native instructors— and in the budget he presented to the GCPI, he included salaries for “a Persian and Arabic teacher versed in Mathematics Geography and the use of the Globe,” “a Sanscrit Teacher also acquainted with the Elements of European Science,” and for “the purchase of Books, maps, a pair of globes.” What is important to note is Wilkinson’s insistence, repeated twice in his letters to his superiors asking for funds, that the principal teachers should also “have knowledge also of the Elements of European Science of Geography the Use of Globes and Mathematics.” That terrestrial lessons conducted around a pair of globes would come in useful to com-

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bat the crime of female infanticide— the most important official reason that Wilkinson gave as primary motivation for his pedagogical experiments— is revealing of his incipient cartographic evangelism that was to mature in the coming years.185 Before he could go further with his projected plans at Sehore, however, he was ordered to Kotah in November 1832 to take charge as acting political agent to the Harowtee Agency. The Kotah years ( January 1833– March 1834) were momentous for Wilkinson, for it was while he was serving in that part of India that he discovered— most likely through conversations with a local pandit called Vaijnath, the purohit (chief priest) of the Maharao Ram Singh II (who we met in chapter 2)— the wonders of Indian astronomy contained in its Sanskrit Siddhanta texts, especially the writings of Bhaskara, the twelfth-century author of the Siddhanta Siromani, which “teach the true shape and size of the earth, and the true theory of eclipses.”186 From around this time to his premature death in 1841, the Englishman remained an admirer of the Siddhantas of which he wrote with the passion that new converts frequently exhibit and that underwrote his conviction in engraftment as a pedagogic strategy. For instance, here he is, a couple years into his learning, when he writes, “there can be little or nothing which we have to teach in Geometry, Surveying, and Trigonometry generally, in Geography or Astronomy, of which Bhaskar Acharya has not already given us the first principles.”187 Or, “the chapter on the globes in Bhaskar Acharya’s book requires . . . a good and clear head, to understand it thoroughly.”188 We may pause here to ask why such admiration for such arcane texts, especially because Wilkinson also observed that Bhaskara showed “such a limited knowledge of geography, as would entail a whipping on any boy of eight years of age in Europe.” Nevertheless, [Bhaskara] shows that he, 800 years ago, had such a perfect knowledge and conviction of the consequences resulting from admitting the spherical form of the earth, viz., of the existence of antipodes etc., as the priests and princes of Europe could not be persuaded to entertain four or even but three hundred years ago; and for asserting which, they were sending our earliest philosophers to the dungeon.189

In other words, Bhaskar Acharya and other Siddhanta authors were strategic allies because, in spite of getting their geography wrong, their commitment to terrestrial sphericity provided Wilkinson with the necessary “native” authority to counter what he colorfully dismissed as “the trash of the Purans.”190 This alliance between science and the Siddhantas “appears the most natural and

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the most national[,] and violating no prejudice may be employed at a comparatively small cost to the public.” He added: Those who receive education at our hands and especially the weak minded will find in them a grand support and a point d’appui when attacked by their ignorant brethren and the honest but begotted Hindoo will have the satisfaction of knowing that their own astronomical systems and the almanacs which they are hourly consulting are founded on the very facts we teach. How much heart burning how much rancour and acrimonious party spirit may thus be subdued if not wholly prevented we shall be taking the wisest means of neutralizing the opposition of the most ignorant & most inveterate bigot.191

The Siddhantas thus were the proverbial Trojan horse in which Modern Earth could be smuggled into the Indian schoolroom to destroy Hindu ignorance without alienating the native. Given this grand plan then, what a disappointment it was to Wilkinson that even those who were supposed to be in the know— namely, the native astronomers or “joshis”— were utterly ignorant of the truth of these texts, some even of their very existence. He observed that between 1832 and 1834 he had met and cross-questioned hundreds of these men of whom only two (Vaijnath of Kotah, and Jinchand of Ajmer) had any awareness at all. The rest were “engaged conjointly with the Puranic brahmans in expounding the Purans, and insisting on the flatness of the earth, and its magnitude of 50 crores of yojans in superficial diameter, as explained in them, with a virulence and boldness which shew their utter ignorance of their proper profession, which had its existence only on the refutation and abandonment of the Puranic system.”192 In other words, Wilkinson had stumbled upon the results of the well-worked out “compromise” between the Puranic and the Siddhantic that had been negotiated since the eighth century, a compromise that he sought to undo. Under such circumstances, the English seeker himself became the teacher to the pandit, taking on as his task the revival of this “lost knowledge,” divinely sanctioned and much revered but little known among even the most learned of natives, his goal to get the learned Brahman to give up “first the Pauranic system for that of the Siddhants, and then that of the Siddhants for that of Copernicus.”193 Wilkinson’s first official opportunity to teach (back) the truth of terrestrial sphericity to natives appears to have risen in Kotah where in his own recall he deftly invoked verse 33 of Bhaskara’s treatise on the globes to defend the EIC’s surveying operations.194 He was able to win the confidence of the Court (“by

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a dexterous use of its blind and prejudiced veneration for authority”195), and within a few months after his arrival, he was petitioned by the chief/prime minister, Raj Rana Madhu Singh to help set up an English School for boys as well as procure a teacher.196 As he wrote to his immediate superior in September 1833— perhaps his earliest articulation of his grand strategy of enlisting the help of the Siddhantas against the “trash of the Purans” to disseminate the truths of Modern Earth: The elements of Geography will doubtless form a part of the course of study to be instituted therein. The students in this school also, will be highly benefitted by commanding the use of a pair of globes and although a wide discrepancy [between] our system of Geography and Astronomy and that of the Hindoos as revealed in their most sacred Pooran the Bhagwut, exists, still with that system of Hindoo astronomy which is detailed in the most scientific and approved books which treat only an astronomy our system agrees in all but one essential particular and the use of our Globes cannot be and are not in respect to the least matter charged with any ulterior and Heterodox effect.197

Consequently, as I have already detailed in chapter 2, he sought to secure from Governor-General Bentinck a pair of European-style globes that could be used by both the royal astronomers and for the school.198 The globes and accompanying related cartographic and geographic works did arrive in Kotah sometime in March 1834, as we saw, but by that time, his ally the Raj Rana had died a month earlier in February and Wilkinson himself had been transferred back to Bhopal. In a later letter to his superiors in Calcutta, he conceded that once he departed, his pedagogical experiments in Kotah had eventually failed, despite the fact that he had hired a successor to take care of the school, thereby confirming a suspicion that even the sympathetic Governor-General Auckland voiced when he wrote in 1839, “Mr. Wilkinson’s system is almost wholly dependent on his own eminent personal talents and exertions.”199 In fact, it was not just the native alone who had to be won over to this project of alliance between the Sanskrit Siddhantas and European science. Wilkinson also sought to convince his fellow Britons, especially the skeptical Anglicists among them, that once upon a time, like the modern European, the ancient Hindu “knew that the earth was a sphere.” So much so that he proudly showed anyone coming through Kotah the Maharau’s globes— even though he himself wrote about the “errors” of their maps— including to a Colonel in the Company’s Engineers “who had never heard that [the Hindus] had any thing like

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them.” Because such knowledge was “confined to a very few,” Wilkinson also had copies made of “the Maharau’s globes” and had them sent to Calcutta. He also wrote to a missionary friend in Calcutta to see if the latter “could get a map of the Hindu globes printed. As such a map is little required in Calcutta, where all the population are on the high road to the top of the hill of science, I anticipated that you might object to the publication as useless. Up here however, and in the interior generally, it will be of infinite use in bringing back peoples’ attention from the trash of the Purans towards what is sound and true.”200 Back in Bhopal by March 1834 with the strategy he had worked out at Kotah still fresh on his mind, he picked up where he left off in late 1832 and set up the Sehore school, for “till the situation of the countries spread over the face of the globe is known, what credit can our histories gain? . . . Till conviction of the truth of the Siddhantic system, as to the size and shape of the earth is felt, the popular absurdities of the Puranic cosmogony will never be abandoned.”201 Given that the pandits in Sehore did “not seem to have been aware of the existence of the Siddhantas; or to have known that Bhaskar Acharya had already spent the whole force of his science and ridicule in exposing the absurdities and impossibilities of the Puranic system,” he took upon himself— novice though he still was with only a few years of studying these complex texts— in teaching “not only the boys of the Sehore school, but also adults, the joshis and brahmans of the town.”202 He also wrote off to the colleges established under the GCPI’s management in Agra, Delhi, and Calcutta, for teachers with “the highest degree of qualifications procurable on the terms I had to offer.” The pandit who arrived from Benares, unfortunately— and here, the resonances with Bishop Heber’s horror a few years earlier are palpable— proved to be wholly ignorant of the true bearing and scope of the sciences he professed. He knew how to calculate an Eclipse but he had learned the calculations by rote and believed the Earth to be an immense circular plain 400,000 miles in width & and that the moon was twice as far from the Earth as the sun is as asserted in the Poorans. This entailed upon me the trouble of teaching him the rationale of his own science from his own books and as much of our system as he could be made to comprehend.203

Despite such setbacks including the absence of adequate textbooks, the boys of the Sehore school as well as the joshis and Brahmans gave a good accounting of themselves at an exam held sometime in mid-1834.204 By June 1836, the momentum had built even further, especially because of the excitement caused

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“by the Honor and credit” heaped upon Subaji Bapu and Omkar Bhatt’s work, as Wilkinson was happy to report in a letter to Secretary Macnaghten in Calcutta in 1836: The number of pupils receiving tuition in the Sehore school is 159. Of these 85 are studying in the Oordoo and Persian departments, 60 in the Hindee department, 8 in Sanscrit mathematics and 6 in [Sanskrit] Grammar and General Literature. Four boys of different classes are also studying English. Ten boys in the Persian department and 20 in the Hindee are well versed in the Elements of Geography Physical and Mathematical and have read most of the Persian and Hindee printed school Books. The 8 studying Sanscrit Mathematics have read the works of Bhascar Asharayu on Arithmetic Algebra and Mensuration and are now engaged in studying the Astronomical Books. They were previously made acquainted with the elements of our systems of Astronomy and Geography.205

Indeed, as he wrote proudly, he and his masters had “shown the existence of many valuable sciences to men that before deemed the power of writing a Sanscrit or Persian couplet the height of knowledge,” even though these labors were performed without “books or other means.”206 Nonetheless, he was quite confident, “we have communicated a knowledge of Geography and Astronomy even superior to that professed by boys of their rank and age in England.”207 As we have seen from a similar comment by Heber that I quoted earlier, Wilkinson was not the first— or last— to make such claims in acts of comparison between students in England and in its distant colony. Eager to do more, Wilkinson also acquired various scientific apparatus “for exhibiting simple experiments in Electricity, Chemistry, Galvanism and Optics,” and also wrote that “no school or college in India ought to be” without a pair of “our” globes.208 Indeed, in a repeat of his experience in Kotah, his own pandit (namely, Subaji Bapu) and the Brahmans of Sehore, “who have become converts to the Siddhanta and our system, all express the utmost anxiety to get globes if possible in Hindi, convinced that they will prove to others as they have done in their own case, the readiest means of demonstrating to them the truth.” 209 A couple years earlier, in September 1834, he wrote to a missionary friend in Calcutta: Separate maps of the world, and of its four quarters, and of Hindustan, are, as well as globes, much wanted. If you can get a pair of globes for me for 50 or 60 rupees, or two pairs, they will be thankfully taken from you.210

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Given his cartographic evangelism, he eagerly sought out Hindi maps as splendid as some Persian maps he had been sent from Calcutta, and also acquired “a map of the world from a learned Maulavi of Bhopal, made up according to Ptolemy, Chaghmani, and other Yunani and Arabian geographers and astronomers.”211 In September 1834, he wrote that he personally owned a pair of globes— it is not clear whether this was the same pair he had in Kotah— and that he had recently purchased for his school a “grand orrery, shewing the motions of all the planets and also an armillary sphere.”212 In June 1836, he also sought funds from Calcutta for giving out globes as rewards to successful pupils in Sehore.213 All of this zeal had a mixed reception in Calcutta, members of the GCPI initially concerned about financially supporting a school on “foreign territory,” but also possibly seized by Anglicist anxiety over Wilkinson’s enthusiasm for Sanskritic knowledge despite his own energetic efforts to convince them of his tactical recourse to the archaic in pursuit of his grand strategy of pedagogically turning natives into European-style moderns. Nevertheless, presumably because the Court of Directors in London were in approval but also from personal admiration for Wilkinson’s achievements, financial support was provided for a period of three years for projects that he had asked for which included globes to be given out as rewards.214 By 1840, the miracle he was seemingly producing in Sehore— of turning Brahmans into Copernicans— was much discussed in the incipient colonial public sphere, as well as in official circles, Governor-General Auckland’s important Minute of 1839 on Education even singling him out for praise (albeit not without caution).215 Wilkinson’s pedagogical ambitions were sky high, like the new astronomy to which he had apparently converted “his” pandits, and he hoped to have his Sehore experiments contribute to the projects that were already under way in Sagar and Nerbudda territory (initiated as we have seen by James Paton), and also prepare a cadre of “school masters who to the knowledge of our system write that of the outline and scope of the siddhants and would prove invaluable assets in allaying opposition & suspicions that must exist however concealed and in satisfying the minds of the people of the soundness of our system.”216 Similarly, in 1838 and on the invitation of the Superintendent of the Poona Sanskrit College Thomas Candy (another cartographic evangelist who we will meet in the next chapter), he was involved in searching for a candidate to replace the outgoing professor Baba Joshee Rore, described as “a man of much talent and learning, but a bigoted upholder of the erroneous system of the Poorans.” The successful candidate must “to [his] knowledge of the Hindoo systems, should add some acquaintance with the European system of astronomy, with

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the true system of geography, the use of the globes and physics in general.”217 Soon after, his pandit Subaji Bapu’s comparison of the Puranic, Siddhantic and Copernican systems became the standard text in the colonial classroom, in spite of the earlier opposition of Poona pandits to this work. All these triumphs, big and small, did not mean that Wilkinson’s path was easy, for he also had to frequently concede resistance and hostility, as in a memo in which he drew attention to the teacher hired at the English school in Hoshangabad under the management of the GCPI who was “utterly ignorant” of the elements of geography, mathematics, and history and was also “one of the sturdiest opponents of the Hindee Teacher (a native of the Sehore school) who endeavoured to persuade him that there were such people [as] antipodes [sic].”218 Wilkinson’s attempts to both publicize the truths of the Siddhantas but also eventually show that they had been superseded by English/ European science led him also to strike up correspondence with other like-minded jyotishas, one of the most intriguing of whom was Durgashankar Pathak (b. 1787), a native of Benaras and a pandit who might have well pleased Heber if the latter had had the chance to meet him. Pathak was the author of a magnificently illustrated manuscript in Sanskrit titled Sarvasiddhantatattvacudamani (The Crest Jewel of the Essence of All Systems of Astronomy), dated on fairly certain grounds to the 1830s, whose primary concern appears to be the creation of a horoscope for his patron. In the context of drawing up such an artifact, the learned pandit also “displays his knowledge of Islamic astrology and takes notes of the Copernican planetary model.”219 Of particular interest for me is the very last painting in this little-studied manuscript of 293 folios (of text, images, and diagrams) in which an unknown artist shows— in one of the first such representations in Indian painting, if not the earliest known— a pair of globes on wooden stands, with latitudes marked correctly as parallel to the equator (and longitudes which are painted as parallels, instead of converging at the poles); one of the globes (on the left) has vaguely delineated territorial landmasses, suggesting that it is a terrestrial globe (see fig. 3.6).220 Other instruments drawn in the painting include an armillary sphere, a sine quadrant with a sighting tube, pocket watches, a telescope on a stand (although not conforming to any known European prototype), and an equatorial sundial. Durgashankar Pathak himself may be the man shown seated on the left, facing his patron Laihna Singh Majithia and possibly the latter’s son. He also possibly appears in another painting— alongside a young man who has been identified as his nephew, also a jyotisha, Jatashankar Pathak— looking at the heavens with a European-style telescope on a wooden stand.221 The manuscript also includes four diagrams of Earth as represented in the Puranas, zodiac patterns, astronomical charts, and

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fiG. 3.6. “Jyotishas at Work, 1833– 1839.” Folio from Sanskrit illuminated manuscript, by Durgashankar Pathak, Sarvasiddhantatattvacudamani (The Crest Jewel of the Essence of All Systems of Astronomy). © The British Library Board, Or. 5259, f.291r.

star maps of the constellations according to the various astronomical systems, Indic, Islamic, and European.222 Durgashankar and his kinsman Lajjashankar declared to Wilkinson that they were avowed followers of the Siddhantas— hence also his interest in them— and indeed, one of Lajjashankar’s pupils went on to write a tract in Sanskrit on Earth’s rotation, apparently influenced by the Englishman.223 Wilkinson’s ambition however did not stop with setting up of schools, training teachers, and corresponding with jyotishas like Durgashankar Pathak and Lajjashankar Pathak. He also sought to give “to the world the best printed editions of the Siddhanta Siromani of Bhaskar Acharya, including the Goladhyaya, or the Treatise on the Globes,” and other such works. “Almost all these works contain a chapter on the construction and use of the globes. These the natives at our colleges should be encouraged to construct accordingly, and to compare and contrast them with our globes,” hence as well his rationale for equipping colonial schools and colleges with European-style globes.224 His enthusiasm for printing these arcane works in Sanskrit infected the newly established Agra School-Book Society, which despite its own stated goals of publishing textbooks, especially for science education in the “vernaculars,” launched a program for publishing key Siddhanta works in Sanskrit, Wilkinson himself subventing some of the costs as well as editing them.225 No doubt on his persuasion, the society also published in 1841 one thousand copies of a new edition of the Bhugolsar of Omkar Bhatt, the same pandit“pupil” of Wilkinson’s who had been the recipient of one of the “global” inkstands in 1837.226 Historian Gyan Prakash has analyzed parts of the 1841 text, including the skillful manner in which Bhatt drew attention to the compatibility between the (Sanskritic) Siddhantas and (English) science on the crucial issue of terrestrial sphericity, but has neglected to draw attention to the many diagrams included in the work, including those that pictured Earth as a gridded globe and the various proofs of its rotundity.227 In addition to providing ocular demonstrations of Earth’s sphericity at a time when the material proxy for our planet in the form of terrestrial globes was not always present in the Indian classroom, these illustrations also mark an innovation in terms of the long tradition of Siddhanta astronomy whose manuscripts going back to the fifth century rarely provided diagrams or visual arguments.228 Subaji Bapu and Omkar Bhatt were not the only illustrious “pupils” for whom Wilkinson could claim credit. Arguably the most distinguished of them all was the pandit known as Bapudeva Sastri, appointed in 1842 to a brand new professorship in arithmetic and natural philosophy at the Benares Sanskrit College. In contrast to Subaji and Omkar who Wilkinson met as learned adults

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whom he took under his wing and reconstituted as Copernicans, Bapudeva arrived as a young boy (named Narasimhadeva Paranjpe) when the Sehore “astronomical” and “global” experiments were in full swing in the 1830s. He studied among others with Subaji, the recipient of one of the “global” inkstands in 1837, and Sevarama, the pandit from Banares whom Wilkinson had earlier apparently reacquainted with his ancestral Siddhantas.229 Here is Wilkinson’s recounting of this period of tutelage: I have two or three youths who are extremely anxious to master English. One youth possesses a wonderful talent for mathematics. He is utterly ignorant of English, but he has lately learned our letters and numbers. . . . I have taught him his own Astronomical system, in which he is complete. If he was sent to Benares or to the Sanscrit College at Calcutta, he would soon initiate some of the most prejudiced of his fellow shastrees, in the mysteries of English sciences and have an opportunity of gratifying his own thirst after a knowledge of the English language. . . . I had picked up a few gems before and thought them, as they are, unequalled by other Sanscrit scholars elsewhere, but this youth is destined be the centre jewel of the necklace. My pundits are all now admirers of English science, but they all became so after years of discussion. He got all his doubts of the truths of the Pooranic system, etc. removed them by them as a boy, and in a few months, and is now all anxious to make himself as ripe and thorough an English scholar as he is a Sanscrit scholar.230

Subsequently in August 1841, just a few months before his premature death, Wilkinson used his considerable influence to recommend the twenty-year old Bapudeva to the newly-instituted professorship in natural philosophy at the Benares Sanskrit College, arguing that his protégé’s appointment to such a prestigious position in the “seat of Brahmanical learning,” would “serve to impress the rising generation . . . at Benares with very proper notions of the vast superiority of European over Native science.”231 There is considerable scholarship now on Bapudeva’s impressive career as teacher of the Siddhantas and Western astronomy and mathematics at the college, as well as his authorship of numerous works in these fields. These scholars note that contrary to Wilkinson’s hope and belief— that he would demonstrate “the vast superiority of European over Native science”— Bapudeva performed a much more complicated maneuver of establishing parity and equivalence between “the astronomy of the Siddhantas, Hindu religiosity, and ‘modern’ scientific norms and practices.”232

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fiG. 3.7. Pandit Bapudeva Sastri Professor of Astronomy Teaching His Pupils with Armillary Sphere in His Hand, 1871. Photographer Brajo Gopal Brahmochary. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4709).

Largely unnoticed however in this scholarship is a remarkable albumen print, circa 1870, attributed to photographer Brajo Gopal Brahmochary, and titled (possibly by another hand) Pandit Bapudeva Sastri Professor of Astronomy teaching his pupils with Armillary Sphere in his hand (see fig. 3.7).233 It shows the learned pandit seated on a dhuri-covered floor, clad in white with a shawl around his shoulders and a turban on his head; he is flanked on either side by young boys and men of varying ages, some of them clearly huddled against the cold as they stare into the camera, only a couple of them holding books in their hand. In the background is the imposing neo-Gothic façade of the college: it is likely that the techno-material challenges of the camera in these early days forced Bapudeva Sastri to conduct his (mock) class outdoors, on what looks like a wintry day. Resting in front of him, as the inscription accompanying the photograph notes, is indeed an armillary sphere. What the caption ignores is the large globe

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on a stand, also placed in front of the pandit.234 While it is difficult to tell with certainty given the quality of the image, I would hazard that Bapudeva Sastri and his students here (are made to) pose with a terrestrial globe. Although Bapudeva Sastri has been recognized in the current scholarship for his important work in astronomy— both Sanskrit and European— he also published in 1853, along with other elementary books in Hindi, a small text that was published in Mirzapore and titled Bhugolavarnana: Geography of the World, Consisting Chiefly of the Geography of India.235 “The people of Bharat [India] are largely ignorant of their own nation, its geographical extent and features, its languages, customs, religions and people. It is for this reason that I consider it necessary to detail the geographical extent and features of Bharat as well as its people and their way of life.”236 Although published a decade after Omkar Bhatt’s Bhugolsar— of which the author must have had some knowledge— there are no diagrams or illustrations that accompany the purely discursive text. Further, in contrast to his “astronomical” work where he sought to demonstrate the intimations of the truths of English science in the (earlier) Sanskrit Siddhantas, in the terrestrial lessons of the Bhugolvarnana, the learned pandit had to— and did— cede the ground to the “superiority” of European geography, and resolutely turned his back on “the trash of the Purans” with its “geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter,” and its claim that Earth was a vast plane. In doing so, he was certainly following in the footsteps of his patron Lancelot Wilkinson, but also those of his immediate boss, the Scotsman James Ballantyne (1813– 64), the energetic Superintendent of the Benares Sanskrit College for fifteen years from 1846, who was convinced that “‘the immediate preparation for a critically intelligent study of history is the study of physical geography,’ for without a proper understanding of physical geography, history is liable to descend into that expressed in the Puranas, with its stories of ‘oceans of treacle, cane-juice, and butter-milk.’”237 In the 1850s, Ballantyne launched a major effort centered in the Benares Sanskrit College of translating into Sanskritized Hindi elementary textbooks in various sciences, and coauthored a series of books in English titled “Reprints for the Pandits,” all locally published in Mirzapore, including a volume which included extracts from Mary Somerville’s Physical Geography (1855). Meant primarily for the senior pandits of the college like Bapudeva, the series intended to demonstrate to them, in Ballantyne’s words, “the deficiencies or errors which in their systems branch away, fruitlessly, opposite the richly fructiferous scientific branches, which European culture has elicited from truths that have here remained barren or run wild.”238 Given this “global” milieu into which he was inserted despite his upbring-

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ing as a humble young man in provincial Sehore, it is not altogether out of the question that Bapudeva would be shown posing with a terrestrial globe (although given his predilections, a telescope would have been just as apposite). As I discuss in the chapter to follow, this photograph is part of a series taken of colonial schoolrooms across many Indian cities, very many of which show the presence of a terrestrial globe similar to the one placed next to the learned pandit. These photographs were then put on display at the London International Exhibition of 1871, where the Government of India sought to showcase its achievements in the education field, thus bucking an overwhelming tendency to represent the Raj at such events in terms of the splendors of its “traditional” and timeless past and the commodities on offer for sale in the present.239 That in the very stronghold of what had been deemed Brahmanical orthodoxy, Puranic idolatry and panditic arrogance, the colonial pedagogical establishment had apparently succeeded in instituting Modern Earth, offered ocular— and material— proof of the success of England’s good work in distant India.

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CHAPTER FOUR

DOWN TO EARTH? OF GIRLS AND GLOBES

My anchor for this chapter is an exceptionally lovely photograph, dated to 1873, centered on a group of young women of varying ages seated around a large terrestrial globe resting on an ornate stand, almost certainly one of English make, perhaps even by the famous Cary family (see fig. 4.1; see also book cover).1 Hanging on the back wall is an outline map of India.2 Other artifacts on display include a blackboard with words scrawled across it (in Gujarati mostly, and some English), while on the desk at the center are some artfully scattered handsome tomes, a stand-in surely for the more humble schoolbooks that were typically in use at this time in the native classroom. Most salient for the argument of this chapter is the young woman seated right next to the globe, her fingers touching it as she looks intently at the object while the other girls look at her— and at it. Who are these young women, and why are they shown posing with a terrestrial globe in this manner? What work is performed by an image like this— and some others that I discuss in this chapter— in a century in which the female learning child became a fraught but also fashionable pedagogical preoccupation? Do the arguments developed so far change when we shift the focus— with the help of the camera, “the eye of history”— to girls

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fiG. 4.1. Class in Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution, Bombay, 1873. Albumen print. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4640).

as they (are made to) encounter globes, maps, and other cartographic objects?3 In other words, did gender matter at all in and to the teaching and learning of terrestrial lessons in the native schoolroom? These are the principal questions that drive this chapter, as I turn to the work of the terrestrial globe as it circulated as a pedagogical object in that important region on India’s western coast that was governed by the British from the island city of Bombay. From the 1820s, “native female education” became a pet venture among Protestant missionaries from Britain and the United States across colonial India, Bombay included, with elite Indian men soon joining the fray alongside groups in England. The colonial state was a relative latecomer to this project, cautious as it always was about anything that ostensibly upset “native sentiment.” However, once ruler and ruled got themselves past the anxieties that rose from the very thought of educating girls in the public classroom, and sorted out— invariably without consulting native women— who to teach, through whose agency, and in what subjects (and in which language), the interest in getting the girl child to school became palpable among many in colonial India from the later decades of the nineteenth century, although the

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state’s investment in this domain lagged behind that of private philanthropy, foreign and native, and although female education remained a fraught issue till the very end of the colonial era.4 As Alfred Croft noted with some sarcasm in the colonial state’s first quinquennial review of the state of education, published in 1886, “girls’ schools are to some extent the fashion; they are regarded as a mark of civilization and enlightenment; they are the theme of constant exhortations addressed to the people by educational and other officers; and those who are urged to establish them have an uneasy feeling that they can put forward no valid grounds for the refusal they would often prefer to give.”5 Even a century or so after the project of native female education became visible in the discursive realm, the percentage of girls of school-going age who attended school remained systemically low, with the vast majority dropping out after four or five years of primary education: “deplorable” is a recurrent word in official reports.6 And yet, once she got past the initial hurdles of joining an elementary school, studying her three Rs, and managing to advance in school, the female learning child began to receive terrestrial lessons, typically starting in year four or five (depending on the province in which she was resident).7 Intriguingly, in all of the fervid discussion that attended “the delicate question of female education” in different parts of British India including Bombay, geography as a subject appropriate for girls seems to have given rise to little contentious debate or caused much anxiety, apart from a grumble here, a demurral there.8 Nor is there any real debate about the capacity of the girl child to apprehend the foundational truths of Modern Earth, as opposed to the debates around her ability or inclination to learn Euclid or algebra or even history (with their potential for “desexing” and “denationalizing” her).9 Although not necessarily high up on the list of subjects such as needlework, home economics, and moral studies that enabled the learning girl’s transformation into a faithful wife, dutiful daughter-in-law, and good mother— the sine qua non for sending her to school in the first place— geography was also not a subject whose teaching was particularly contested or appropriately feminized. In fact, as recorded in the voluminous documents produced by the colonial state, missionary organizations, and native societies set up with the express goal of conducting the benevolent project of female education, the teaching of geography— often the only subject around which some elementary principles of physical and natural science were taught to the girl child for much of the nineteenth century— appears all-too sensible, straightforward, and matter-offact. There is a down-to-earth quality to the manner in which Modern Earth is introduced to young women, through the medium of its fabricated proxy, even as the teaching of terrestrial lessons carried with it the promise of radical ped-

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agogical equality with boys and girls being taught the same content with the same instruments. And yet, the luminous photograph with which I begin this chapter and a cautionary tale with which I end it persuade me to look behind and beyond such obvious conclusions, and explore the challenges of delivering the truths of terrestrial sphericity to the learning child who is also female.

CALCULATED GENDERED DISPLAYS: POSING WITH THE WORLD

It is important for the arguments to follow to note that the photograph in figure 4.1 has an unusual history as an image-object, a history that the few scholars who have written on it do not adequately engage.10 In the British Library copy of the photograph, it is pasted on to a faded display card on which is penciled the caption, “5754/72 (1873). Class Alexandra Native Girls Institution— Bombay.”11 While this caption provides us with the specific name of the school— on which much more in this chapter, later— the numbers and the display card on which they are inscribed clue us into the fact that, alongside some other photographs that are part of the same British Library collection, the image of the Alexandra Girls studying the globe was intended for display in the interesting metropolitan context of the Vienna Universal Exhibition of mid- to late 1873. Although the colonial government’s principal interest in this exhibition was in showing off natural resources and manufactures from India that would improve trade relations with Austria, it also chose to send visual and material proof of the good work that it was doing in educating its native subjects, proof that in turn elicited much admiration on the part of the Commissioners for the Austrian Government: He must carry in his bosom a heart of steel, incapable of all finer emotion, who can contemplate unmoved the writings and other objects devoted to instruction which have been sent us to from India, and which form a focus of brilliancy to the whole of the Universal Exhibition of 1873. From the simple tripedal inkstand belonging to the sheet of writing cloth, prepared on one side and rolled up into a scroll, and the pen of Bengal cane, up to those complicated alphabetical designs in which the songs and writings of the Indians are preserved. . . . What impressions, what a flood of thoughts must these objects in the midst of a Universal Exhibition of this extent and importance excite and conjure up. . . . In this way England has richly compensated us for the void that she has left in the illustration of her own materials for education at the Vienna Universal Exhibition.12

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fiG. 4.2. Mofussil or Up-Country Girls School & Mistress, Bombay, ca. 1873. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4645).

It is hard to miss the irony here: The British may well claim that they had set out to save their Indian subjects by disseminating their useful knowledge, but surely in Vienna in 1873 India helped salvage Britain’s reputation among its European peers as a model state with its edifying display of pedagogical progress along modern lines. Although the Commissioners’ Report did not single out the Alexandra Girls posing artfully with the globe, this photograph was indeed sent in by the Bombay Local Committee along with two others that featured young girls (with their “mistress”) in classrooms in a “mofussil” or “up-country” school and in a vernacular girls’ school in Bombay (see figs. 4.2 and 4.3).13 The girls in these photographs are not as sumptuously adorned in beautiful saris (possibly also because they are much younger than the Alexandra Girls). Nor is the terrestrial globe— a smaller desk model, possibly by an English manufacturer like Newton & Co.— the object of their diligent attention, placed as it is on a bureau to the side.14 Nevertheless, its very presence as the only scientific instrument in the classroom is important to note. Also submitted by the Bombay Committee was

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fiG. 4.3. Vernacular Girls’ School & Mistress— Bombay, ca. 1873. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4644).

the photograph of a “vernacular” schoolroom with boys seated on the floor studying under the watchful eye of a pantojee or elementary school teacher (see fig. 4.4). Here, as well, a similar terrestrial globe is visible on a side bureau— again, the only scientific instrument in sight.15 Despite the various captions that name each of these classrooms as if they were from different schools scattered across the city and even the Presidency, there is little doubt that the unknown photographer(s) used the same space and similar props— including the blackboard, the map of India, and the terrestrial globe— and even, occasionally, the same slightly older women posing as (student) teachers, as these scenes of learning in colonial India were caught on camera to be put on display in distant exhibitions. Not least, the very layout of these photographs underscores my argument that, despite the prevalence at this time of gender-specific classrooms and schools with students wearing gender-and-community specific clothing, no gendered distinctions were seemingly observed in the teaching of terrestrial lessons. In fact, the prominent

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fiG. 4.4. Vernacular School, Bombay, ca. 1873. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4646).

place accorded to the large floor globe in the photograph of the Alexandra Girls points to the desirability of bringing this pedagogic object as much to the attention of girls and women as to boys and men— and to be shown doing so. The organizers of the India section of the Vienna Universal Exhibition also borrowed a number of schoolroom photographs from an earlier International Exhibition held in London in 1871 that I have already invoked in chapters 1 and 3. To recall, anxious to demonstrate the good pedagogic work done in native classrooms across British India, the colonial state submitted numerous specimens of globes made by hand from materials ranging from paper to cow dung. Alongside these objects that confirmed to exhibition visitors that the truth of terrestrial sphericity was very much propagated in Indian schools, were several photographs from across the colony that showed the presence of globes of European manufacture in the classroom, and not just its “rude” native substitutes. Of these, the most spectacular is quite possibly a photograph sent in by the Karachi Committee (reporting at this time to the Bombay Government) of

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fiG. 4.5. High School Class Room in Sind, ca. 1871. Photograph by Michie & Co., Karachi. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4650).

a classroom in the Anglo-Vernacular School (see fig. 4.5). Attributed to Michie & Co., the photograph shows two young men standing next to a pair of large floor globes, and looking at these (without touching them) while other students seated on a bench look on; the classroom walls are adorned with barometer, a book case, and a science wall chart.16 A photograph attributed to Messrs. Tandy & Co. of the Government Male Normal School focuses on the interior of a classroom in Nagpur in central India adorned with two large wall maps, a clutch of young men wearing turbans seated at desks and absorbed in reading, another group placed in front of a blackboard on which is drawn a geometrical diagram. Maps adorn the classroom walls (see fig. 4.6). At the far end of the room is the instructor, also wearing what looks like a ceremonial turban. He is seated at a desk whose sole occupant is a globe on its stand, its spherical shape thrown into relief by the light streaming in from the large windows behind. Although not subject to the

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fiG. 4.6. Govt. Male Normal School, Nagpur, Interior, ca. 1871. Photograph by Messrs. Tandy & Co., Nagpur. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4676).

attentive looking it receives from the Alexandra Girls in Bombay or the AngloVernacular Boys in Karachi, this globe as well takes up the compositional center of the photograph by virtue of its placement. In another photograph of a class at the school attached to the Wards’ Institution in Lucknow, and furnished by the Oudh Committee, the globe, its meridian ring and horizon clearly visible, is drawn into the drama of teaching, as the instructor stands at a desk with one hand resting on it as he offers a lesson, perhaps a terrestrial one (see fig. 4.7). In this photograph, as indeed in most others that belong to this collection, the students are clearly seated more for the convenience of the camera rather than for the purposes of learning. Not all photographs of classrooms sent in by the various local committees to London offered such grand displays, staged though they all clearly are.

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fiG. 4.7. Wards School, Wards Institution Oudh 1871. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4694).

Many show much more humble settings, two of which stand out for the very bleakness on offer: a rural Punjab classroom in Musang with kuccha walls and no roof, where young boys are shown seated on rugs spread out on the dirt floor;17 and a classroom (captioned in pencil as “Girls School Kurrachee Sind,” and photographed by Mitchie & Co.) where the girls are huddled together on benches, shawls covering their thin bodies and heads, and yet seemingly absorbed in the act of learning.18 Both classrooms, however, have maps hanging on their walls, their very material presence signaling the difference between the disorderly and random learning pursued in the “wretched” indigenous school, and the enlightened education offered up in its modern equivalent established under the mantle of the benevolent colonial state (or its proxies). Today the school photo— the genre itself, almost as old as the camera— has become so ubiquitous that we hardly pay any attention to it, either as scholars or as consumers of images.19 Yet there was a time when the very act of

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fiG. 4.8. The Geography Lesson, 1851. Daguerreotype by Antoine F. J. Claudet. Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, SD2.

patiently posing in front of the camera (given the techno-material limits of the equipment) was surely a novelty, producing a range of affective responses from astonishment to anxiety.20 By the 1870s when these schoolroom photographs were commissioned by the Government of India and then exhibited in European cities as a sign of the progress of “native education” with British blessing, the calculated display of young bodies, male and female, in the company of globes, orreries, maps, and atlases in academic or quasi-pedagogical settings, had become something of a visual fashion elsewhere in the metropole. Indeed, there are some remarkable resonances between the photograph of the Alexandra Girls posing with their globe and Antoine Claudet’s stereoscope daguerreotype dated to 1851, which has been frequently reproduced as The Geography Lesson (see fig. 4.8). Like the Alexandra Girls, in Claudet’s photographic composition as well, three young women look intently at a large globe (its horizon and meridian ring prominently visible), one of them also pointing to and touching it. The presumably female teacher of the Bombay classroom is replaced by a male tutor, underscoring the different gender dynamics in colony and metropole. In turn, Claudet’s photograph finds a visual echo in a frontispiece to the General Atlas published across the Atlantic in 1857. It is telling that then well-known New York cartographic publishing firm of Joseph Hutchins Colton and George Woolworth Colton chose to show four female figures ar-

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ranged around the central figure of a standing terrestrial globe; one of them has her fingers resting on a globe— as in the photograph from Bombay a couple decades later— while the three others look intently on as they engage each other in a discussion.21 In her analysis of Claudet’s photograph, Joan Schwartz writes, “The Geography Lesson served up the world for ‘attentive looking.’ In it, reality is reduced to written and visual representations, the world is ordered and presented as an object for the modernist gaze.”22 It is worth adding that in doing so, Claudet’s photograph— as indeed its North American and colonial Indian analogs— seems to suggest that women too need to attend to such an ordered world as captured in and by the form of the terrestrial globe. In such mid-nineteenthcentury visions, there is no difference between men and women as they learn about terrestrial sphericity and the lessons that follow from this foundational truth. Claudet’s image might well be the first photograph of the terrestrial globe in the company of girls who are being taught to learn from it not just Earth’s shape, but also the other details drawn and painted on its surface. Prior to the 1850s, in oil and watercolor paintings, engravings, and pen-and-ink illustrations from both Western Europe and the early United States, school learning had already been aestheticized in works such as Antonio Verri’s Charles II Giving Audience to the Governors, Masters, and Children at the School at Christ’s Hospital (ca. 1680), Richard Wilson’s Prince George and Prince Edward Augustus with their Tutor (ca. 1748– 49), Strickland Lowry’s The Bateson Family (1762), David Martin’s portrait of the astronomer John Russell with his son James (1769), AnneLouis Girodet-Trioson’s La leçon de gèographie (1803), and Samuel Morse’s The Morse Family (1810), to cite some prominent examples from different contexts and across time. In such works, the boy child is shown— sometimes with parents, more often with tutors, but frequently also as a solitary individual— in the company of books and scientific apparatus, including maps and globes.23 Such images also mark a new moment in Euro-American art when all manner of grandees— navigators, explorers, sea captains, astronomers, geographers, philosophers, nobles, statesmen and ambassadors, and the monarch, of course— make way for the young boy learning about and from the terrestrial globe, hitherto an object visually deployed to display adult male mastery and worldliness. By the later eighteenth century, the male child also makes way for the female learner, as in Philip Mercier’s much-discussed Sense of Sight (1744– 46) or as in the frontispiece that accompanied Benjamin Martin’s The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Philosophy (1759), showing a young woman seated, book in hand, and with instruments like the telescope and a large globe by her side on which

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she is being instructed by a young man (who is her brother, as we learn from the accompanying narrative).24 As I have already noted in chapter 3, the entry of the female learner into the privileged space of scientific knowledge production was inevitably also accompanied by ambivalence, as visualized in The Geography Lesson by Pietro Longhi or A Female Philosopher in Extasy Solving a Problem. Such images— part of a history of what Charles Withers calls “geo-pornography”— did eventually make way for images of women as serious learners as in Margaret Bryan and Her Children (that I briefly discussed in chapter 3), and across the Atlantic, in The Miniature Panorama: Scenes from a Seminary for Young Ladies (ca. 1810) in which two young women are shown so absorbed in studying the gridded globe placed in front of them to the point of utter obliviousness to the world around them: learning and knowledge is all that they seem to care about, it seems, despite obvious pressures to subordinate these to the cult of domesticity.25 That such scenes were also imagined transpiring in parts of the world that were still relatively untouched by the imperial West is apparent from a printed engraving of the interior of a schoolroom, apparently in West Africa, from sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, which shows a group of young girls learning from older women, one of whom uses a pointer as she stands in front of a map of the hemispheres. She is quite clearly in the process of delivering a terrestrial lesson, a pair of globes prominently displayed on the shelf behind her.26 Indeed, so irresistible appears the visual penchant for placing girls in the company of cartographic objects that a geography primer titled The Round World: A Reading Book of Geography for Standard II published in London in 1883 has as its frontispiece a print of a young girl standing next to a large floor globe— almost her size— with her finger placed on its surface, gesturing toward England, as she looks at us and announces, “I’ll Show You Where I Live” (see fig. 4.9). At a time when leadership in the natural and physical sciences, and indeed in the business of map and globe publishing, was dominated by men, why this proclivity for showing girls posing with terrestrial globes?27 When geography as a subject— as opposed to needlework or domestic economy— was not particularly emphasized as necessary for girls’ education, what work is performed by the female body as it is placed in the company of this proxy for Modern Earth? In the British Indian context, photographs such as those that were commissioned to be put on display in distant European capitals in the 1870s, showing the tangible presence of maps and globes in the classroom, drew attention to the material transformation of the physical contexts of learning that the colonial state and its proxies and allies in the mission of educating the native child were engaged in from early in the long nineteenth century. A few decades later, this might well have been the intent of Sir Henry Sharp (1869– 1954), an eminent

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fiG. 4.9. I’ll Show You Where I Live, 1883. Frontispiece to book titled The Round World: A Reading Book of Geography for Standard II. London: Marcus Ward & Co. © The British Library Board, 10005.aaa.9.

fiG. 4.10. A Geography Lesson, 1910. Photograph by Photo-Mechanical Department, Thomason Engineering College, Roorkee.

member of the Indian Education Service (IES), when he put together a report to showcase “the progress of education” in India for the quinquennium ending in 1912, which included several fascinating classroom photographs taken by the staff of the Thomason Engineering College, Roorkee, under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Atkinson.28 Of particular relevance for the arguments of this chapter are photographs captioned A Geography Lesson (see fig. 4.10), and Khasi Girls at School (see fig. 4.11). The former shows a European woman seated on a chair, with a blackboard announcing “Geography” (and a date for the class), a map of the British Isles hanging behind her, and a relief map of England laid out on the grass before her, seated around which are several young women, the style of their saris suggesting an eastern India, even Bengali, location. The Khasi Girls at School is remarkable not least because it takes us to a remote part of northeastern India to make visible colonial subjects who are otherwise not all that present in the historical scholarship of the subcontinent. As remarkably, the photograph shows young women clad in warm clothing with scarfs around their heads— seated outdoors on benches, possibly for the good light— listening to a lesson from a young woman (who looks herself only a few years older) who points to the model of a relief map of India, a large Philip’s School Room Map: India, hanging next to them.29

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fiG. 4.11. Khasi Girls at School, ca. 1912. Photograph by Photo-Mechanical Department, Thomason Engineering College, Roorkee.

Such photographs that focus on the learning girl at a time when she was still a relative novelty in the Indian classroom, certainly index the aspirational politics and ethics of colonial pedagogy at this point in its history, even as they compel me to ask again why it was deemed necessary to show the native female learning the truths of terrestrial sphericity and the lay of the land. But before I take on the question of how and why the (spherical) world was brought to the attention of daughters and wives, I introduce the city in which the Alexandra Native Girl went to school, and to the pedagogic landscape of the hinterlands of which it was a part.

TEACHING THE WORLD IN BOMBAY

& BEYOND

Among the photographs that were commissioned for the 1871 London International Exhibition— and also displayed in 1873 in Vienna— were two that

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fiG. 4.12. Elphinstone High School Bombay (a class), ca. 1873. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4634).

showed young men engaged in learning in an institution captioned as “Elphinstone High School, Bombay” (see figs. 4.12 and 4.13).30 The Bombay Local Committee which submitted these photographs— tellingly similar in their configuration to other classrooms that were photographed at this time, including in the placement of the wall map (of the world, in this case) and the desk globe on a bureau to the side31— was justifiably proud in showcasing this school, a bright pedagogical gem that by this time could already boast a number of illustrious alumni, including those who saw themselves as advancing the cause of female education, as we will shortly see. The high school’s formal origins went back to 1834 when it had a rocky start as “the Elphinstone College of Bombay,” an early example of native educational philanthropy that was much lauded by the colonial state.32 There had been “charity schools” in the Island of Bombay established by sundry Europeans since the early eighteenth century targeting half-caste children and orphans of the city, mostly boys. The Society for the Education of the Poor, better known as Bombay Education Society (founded in January 1815), ran a few schools on the island as well as in

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fiG. 4.13. Class in Elphinstone High School Bombay. ca. 1873. Photographer unknown. © The British Library Board, Photo 1000/46 (4635).

neighboring Tannah, Surat, and Broach. However, on its first establishment, the Elphinstone High School largely catered to the respectable (albeit not necessarily wealthy) upper castes of the region and to their desire for the useful knowledge of their new rulers. At first glance it might seem paradoxical that the institution was named after Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779– 1859), Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827, whose Orientalist proclivity led him to believe that European learning and the English language could only be grafted onto revived and reformulated Indian knowledges delivered through Indian languages (although his admiration for things native did not extend to their terrestrial conceptions).33 All the same, Elphinstone’s important “Minute” of December 13, 1823, expressed his conviction “regarding the worth of geometry, algebra, the higher branches of arithmetic, geography, and the knowledge of our system of astronomy,” all of which came to be taught with great vigor in the Bombay institution named after him. He even proposed incentives in the form of annual prizes, although unlike some of his contemporaries in Bengal, he did not

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specifically recommend globes as gifts to students who excelled in the study of geography and astronomy.34 As Thomas Munro did in Madras, Elphinstone’s government also commissioned in March 1824 a review on “the state of Education in the Territories subject to the Presidency of Bombay,” which resulted in a similar consensus view that was reported to the Court of Directors in London in late 1825: “That education is in a low state throughout the country; that the instruction imparted in schools extends, with very limited exceptions, only to such an elementary acquaintance with writing and arithmetic as is absolutely necessary for the business of shopkeeper or tullatee [village accountant]; that but a small proportion of the people acquire even this knowledge; and that the aid of Government, in providing or assisting in the remuneration of school masters, is essential to any advancement of learning; if not to the preservation of the very inefficient and defective means of instruction now existing.”35 While especially in and around Poona (Pune), the stronghold of the erstwhile Maratha Empire, some wealthy natives employed pandits to teach their sons Sanskrit and the sastras, including jyotisastra, nowhere were terrestrial lessons a part of the curriculum.36 As in other parts of India coming under colonial rule, geography was thus a novel pedagogical subject that slowly entered the domain of “native education” from the 1820s in Bombay, although not always with the help of one of its principal instruments of knowing and learning, the terrestrial globe, as we will see. More so than in Madras, and especially similar to the situation in Bengal (as I discuss in the next chapter), the Bombay Government’s efforts to address the dire pedagogical situation in the Presidency in the first half of nineteenth century was aided by an important quasi-private initiative spearheaded by the newly-constituted Bombay Native Education Society (BNES), founded in 1822, with a mixed European and native membership.37 Right off the bat, the new society constituted a Special Committee in 1823 which identified several prevailing “evils,” the foremost being “the deplorable deficiency of books of instruction” in the two principal languages of the Presidency, Gujarati and Marathi, and in English. It is revealing that the committee identified as “necessary” and “requisite” the following “elementary tracts and books”: A Treatise on Geography. In this is indispensable to describe Hindoosthan [India] and the adjacent countries particularly; and England as intimately connected with it. A short but perspicuous account of the solar system, preceded by such a succinct description of the laws of motion, attraction and gravity, as are nec-

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essary to render the systematic plain and intelligible [sic]; to this might be added a comparison of their own system. A short Treatise on Natural Philosophy, Natural History. A compendium of History and Chronology should come next to the foregoing account of the solar system, of the Earth, and of the objects it contains.38

In identifying such works as necessary and requisite, the BNES— like its parent, the Bombay Education Society— was also charting a novel course of study for the native (male) learner, especially because the emphasis among its members was in delivering the useful knowledge of Europe through the medium of local languages (thus demonstrating as well their capacity for this purpose in the face of doubts to the contrary by an influential Anglicist faction of the local administration). Focused though it may be on the production of printed school books— itself a new pedagogic object in this region, as elsewhere in colonial India— it took almost ten years for the society to report the successful translation into Gujarati and Marathi of a book titled Bhoogole: Dialogues on Geography and Astronomy, and Pinnock’s Catechism of General Knowledge.39 The former was “devoted to the fundamentals of geography, an account of Hindustan’s past, a brief description of the parts of the various continents, and a concluding section on section on astronomy.”40 The latter, when read by the students of the BNES’s various schools, would have introduced them to geography in these terms: · What is Geography? A · A description of the Earth. Q · Into how many parts is the Earth divided? A · Into four: namely, Europe, Asia, Africa and America. Q · By whom was the Earth re-peopled, after the flood A · By the children of Noah. . . . Q · For what is Europe celebrated? A · As the centre of the arts, sciences, and commerce; and, although much smaller than either of the other divisions, its power and resources are so great as to give laws to a great portion of the rest of the globe. . . . . Q · Do we derive any advantage from studying Geography? A · Yes; for without a competent knowledge of geography, neither chronology, history, nor politics would be understood; nor is to possible to have Q

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any just ideas either of navigation or commerce; consequently, then, in this country [England], it most particularly becomes an object of education, and should always precede the study of those other sciences.41

Although there is nothing particularly exceptional about this text, I quote it as a reminder of what was at stake in the production of such terrestrial lessons: they served the world up to the learning child— metropolitan and native— in a particular manner, reminding both of their respective place on the surface of an Earth dominated by Europe (and by extension, by Christianity, even in non-denominational books). The BNES— like its counterparts in Calcutta and Madras— insisted that the furnishing of religious books was not part of its brief, but it also announced, like those other schoolbook societies, that this did not “preclude the supply of moral tracts or books of moral tendency which without interfering with the religious sentiments of any person, may be calculated to enlarge the understanding and improve the character.”42 Indeed, when their publications were proudly presented to the government by the society, the accompanying letters noted with confidence “their value and eventual use in expelling from the minds of the Native Population of this side of India, many absurd fancies regarding History, Geography, Astronomy, and Science in general.”43 Of course, by the time that BNES got its apparently secular geography and astronomy books on the market, the American Marathi Mission (AMM)— which began running a few schools in Bombay and its vicinity soon after its founding in 1813— had already published by 1824 its Elements of Astronomy and Geography, quite possibly the earliest printed book in Marathi on these subjects.44 With its more overtly Christian agenda, this schoolbook, like all missionary publications at this time, was dedicated to eradicating absurd native fancies through the foundational narrative regarding terrestrial sphericity that we have already encountered in earlier chapters. By 1838, some other works had been added to BNES’s repertoire: a thousand copies, in both Gujarati and Marathi, of a work titled Bhoogole Vidiyah, or Little Geography (priced at three annas, and hence affordable) and Mathematical Geography of the Library of Useful Knowledge.45 By this date, the society had also printed an atlas with nine maps (in Marathi and Gujarati), and its depository was also able to proudly advertise the sale of sixty-three copies of the “Map of World in English and Nagree characters,” and “Map of the Globe” in Hindoostanee.46 In the subsequent year, thirty copies of Tassin’s School Atlas were also available for sale, acquired from the CSBS.47 It is not altogether clear whether amid such cartographic objects if terrestrial globes entered the classroom, especially those

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inscribed in Gujarati and Marathi, but what is certain is that the first generation of men who we might consider Bombay foot soldiers of the Empire of Geography and the Dominion of Modern Earth was being forged in this part of India as well, men who undertook the translation work from English science to Marathi and Gujarati terrestrial lessons: the Englishman Colonel George Jervis and the Welshman W. B. Mainwaring, but also “global pandits” like Ramchundra Shastree, Hurry Kessowjee, Durgaram Manchharam, and most prominently, Bal Gangadhar Shastri ( Jambhekar, 1812– 46).48 All of this emphasis on Gujarati and Marathi works did not mean that English was not part of the aspirational horizon of the BNES: on the contrary. Its very first report noted, for instance, the availability for sale in its depository of R. Turner’s Geography as well as Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues on Astronomy.49 As importantly for efforts to advance European useful knowledge in the Presidency at this early date was the opening of the Central English School in 1824 with a small entering class of around fifty-five upper-caste boys, who had completed their elementary education in the society’s other schools.50 The going was hard, though, especially in the continued absence of proper books in English and instructional aids. And it is here that the society’s cartographic evangelism— already apparent in the zeal with which it set up its Translating Committee— took a dramatic turn when it sought in 1826 to create for the edification of the boys in its English school a select library which would include books, philosophical apparatus, maps, and terrestrial globes.51 It is worth quoting the list that was assembled since it is reflective of the aspirations of the society with regard to the teaching of terrestrial lessons in the native classroom: List of Books etc. for the English School of the Bombay Native Education Society Voyages, Travels, Geography and Topography Adam’s (Dr. Alexander) Summary of Geography and History with Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Butler’s Modern and Ancient Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Butler’s Outline Maps of ditto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Butler’s Atlas of Ancient Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Butler’s Atlas of Modern Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Butler’s Ancient and Modern Outline Geographical Copybooks . . 12 copies Conversations on Geography and Astronomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Geography for Children by Dufresnoy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Geography and History by a Lady. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies

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Keith’s Treatise on the Use of the Globes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Keith’s Key to ditto by Vine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Keith’s System of Geography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Natural Philosophy Mathematics and Architecture Gregory’s Lessons on Astronomy and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Ferguson’s Astronomy by Brewster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Bonnycastle’s Elements of Astronomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 copies Maps Arrowsmith’s Large Map of the World on Rollers ditto of Europe ditto of Asia ditto of Africa ditto of America ditto of Hindoostan ditto of Central Asia Globes etc. a pair of Carey’s large size [sic]52 a pair of Carey’s small size an armillary sphere large size Philosophical Instruments A complete set adapted for Lectures with descriptive account of books for lectures. The whole of the Books to be half bound in calf and marked inside: Schools Bombay Native Education Society.53

Having put together this impressive list in September 1826, the society waited patiently to hear from the Court of Directors in London. Unfortunately, despite the Bombay Government’s support for the project, the Directors deemed otherwise in early 1829. Stating that they did not think it was necessary for them to supply all of these materials for the purposes of an English Library, they were at best willing “to go to a moderate expense in providing such common books as may be required by the English School of the Society.” However— and it is not hard to miss the paternalism of the tone—

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Many of the books included in the list submitted by you, are in our opinion ill chosen for the purpose; and the remainder, being among the most common English school-books, might, we should think, be more cheaply purchased in India, especially at Calcutta. A set of philosophical instruments adapted for lectures is among the articles solicited by you; but this would form a more suitable appendage to the College now in course of establishment by the native community, than to the English school of the Education Society, the utility and success of which have hitherto been so limited. The consideration, therefore, of this part of your request is for the present postponed.54

Two points are worth noting in the Directors’ response. The first is the view that Calcutta was already leading the race to deliver a proper education to the natives of India. In this regard they were not wrong, and it is quite likely that the BNES was inspired to put together its list of books, and especially its request for globes and philosophical apparatus, because it might have heard of a similar project having succeeded in Calcutta (on which I will have more to say in the next chapter).55 Second, the rival institution that had piqued the Directors’ interest— as signaled in the phrase “the College now in course of establishment by the native community”— was Hindu College in Poona. Established in 1821 by the authority of the Bombay Government and modeled on similar institutions in Benares and Calcutta, this college, which opened with about one hundred students (all Brahman and all male), strategically focused on the Hindu sastras, including jyotisastra, and also “such branches of European knowledge as they may be able and willing to receive.”56 In October 1825, Francis Warden, then an influential Member of the Governor’s Council and an enthusiast for Western scientific education, wrote to the college asking “if they were willing to have a branch for English education added to that institution, holding out the prospect of being supplied with a library of the most useful works, elementary and practical in all departments of literature, arts, and sciences. The proposal was acceded to with readiness, and four students volunteered to repair to Bombay to acquire the necessary education, as candidates for the office of master and assistants.”57 In March 1826, seizing on this opportunity to potentially counter native sastras with European science and that too among Brahmans and pandits, the Bombay Government asked its superiors in London to help fund the setting up of an English Library for the college with a list of works. To this request as well, the Directors— ever penurious and cautious when it came to financial outlays that did not have a demonstrable and direct economic gain— directed the government to local “bazaars,” to

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Calcutta, and local missionary presses where it might be able to procure these “at much less cost than could be supplied from England.”58 Would affordable globes and maps indeed have been available in the bazaars of Bombay at this time, as they were, for instance, in Calcutta? The answer is mixed. From at least 1800 on, in the English-language newspapers of the city catering to the growing expatriate population, maps, globes, orreries, telescopes, and other scientific instruments were advertised, sometimes as part of estate sales of departing colonials, at other times in local auctions.59 Thus, on March 21, 1800, “a pair of Globes, terrestrial and celestial, and a magnificent Map of the World, delineating after the discoveries of Peyrouse in the southern Hemisphere,” belonging to the estate of one John Wilkinson was announced for sale.60 The following year, a local merchant— Baxter & Co.— advertised the sale of “a pair of elegant Globes” that had been received recently from Europe.61 In September 1802, a pair of twelve-inch globes and several pocket globes along with maps and charts on rollers of Egypt, Persia, Hindustan, and Europe arrived on the EIC ships Earl St. Vincent and Sir Edward Hughes, and were put up for sale.62 A few months later in February 1803, a pair of eight-inch globes was placed on the auction block, clearly part of a departing European’s household effects.63 A decade later, Baxter and Co. was still only able to advertise in December 1815 a single pair of “excellent globes, celestial and terrestrial,” and a couple years later in February 1817 they priced “an elegant pair of 18 inchesglobes” at Rs. 450.64 So, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century on the eve of the introduction of terrestrial lessons in Bombay schools, globes were still luxury objects. They were not locally made and hence relatively expensive. Marketed as “Europe goods,” they were meant to appeal to a particular class of clientele. It is highly unlikely that the average native school could have afforded them, and they might well have been beyond the budget of even the more up-market schools that had begun to appear in the region, set up by expatriate men.65 In light of this, it is altogether not surprising that the BNES looked to the government for financial support in 1826 in order to acquire a pair of Cary’s large size and a pair of Cary’s small size globes for its English School. These would have been costly objects indeed in the Indian market, although not necessarily exorbitant.66 Thus when the BNES proudly declared that by the late 1820s “250 boys had been through a course of study in the English language, 50 have left it with a competent knowledge of the language, consisting of an acquaintance with Geography, Mathematics and Geometry,” it is likely that this competency was acquired without the student having seen globes in their material form, or quite possibly even wall maps.67 Things began to improve in the next couple decades. By the 1830s, as in

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other parts of India, instruction in the use of the globes became part of the curriculum for boys in advanced classes, especially in the English schools that had emerged across the region, and scattered evidence suggests that the “use” must have been occasionally demonstrated with the objects at hand, rather than discursively or visually with images in a printed book.68 From 1831, vernacular as well as English schools run and managed by the BNES instituted the new ritual of a public examination conducted in the presence of distinguished European and native men: geography and astronomy were invariably among the subjects on which the pupils were tested, and sometimes with cartographic objects as aids.69 From a contemporary account by Marianne Postans, we learn that the public exams in the 1830s were typically held “in the library [on the Esplanade], a splendid apartment fitted with a good collection of useful works, with globes, maps, and papers, and adorned at either end with full length portraits of the great benefactors of the institution, Sir John Malcolm, and the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone.”70 We can speculate that the maps and globes had been acquired through other sources in the face of the Directors’ rejection of the society’s request a decade earlier and were drawn upon in the course of the examination. The ritual of the public exam was also soon copied by other educational institutions, and not just in Bombay. In October 1833, for instance, at one such exam (with the Governor of Bombay Lord Clare presiding) at the Government English School in Poona (founded in 1832), “the Terrestrial globe and an Orrery were introduced, and six or seven of the head boys shewed, by the quickness and accuracy with which they pointed out the places which the master, and the gentlemen present, selected at the moment, that they had made very satisfactory progress in Geography, while a few, it was interesting to observe, understood well the elements of Astronomy.”71 In 1837, the Bombay Durpan similarly commented on an exam in Poona’s “indigenous Marathi schools” whose students had exhibited “wonderful progress, as the upper boys . . . showed a very correct acquaintance with the principles of geography, and the directions and situations of different countries on maps; all this were taught by schoolmasters educated at Bombay, from translations.”72 A few years later, a Special Report of the Maratha Schools of the Deccan and Concan submitted to the newly constituted Board of Education (which had taken over from the now-defunct BNES in 1840) noted with a sense of pride, “The senior classes in most schools now can point out on the map with great readiness any country or town that may be named in Europe or Asia, and can tell the metropolis of any country, in the four quarters of the Globe.”73 This was high praise indeed, especially since these words were penned by

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Thomas Candy (1804– 1877) who, among his other passions and predilections ranging from literature to schoolbook production, was an avid geographical and cartographic evangelist along the lines of some other bureaucrat pedagogues we have met so far, such as James Paton and Lancelot Wilkinson. In his reports filed over the years from 1837 when he was appointed superintendent of these schools, he rarely failed to comment on his students’ demonstration of their knowledge of geography, albeit not often in the most complimentary of ways.74 He also supervised the translation of a number of books, including Sullivan’s Geography Generalized.”75 In the late 1840s, he began writing a Manual of Geography in Marathi, and by 1850, the opening chapters on “the size and shape of the Earth” had been prepared.76 Candy’s tenure at the Board of Education also saw the recruitment of reform-minded natives— and products of the BNES pedagogical network— like Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar (1814– 1882) who among his other “radical” accomplishments was also a cartographic evangelist in his own right, something that the historical scholarship has not yet recognized.77 Thus, writing about his own efforts in this area (which included work on the Marathi and Gujarati atlas published by the BNES in 1838),78 Dadoba Pandurang reported for the academic year ending in 1849 in his capacity as Superintendent of Schools for Poona, Ahmednagar, Candesh, and Sholapur: In this branch of study [geography] it affords me some degree of gratification to state that the ignorance which has long been prevalent in this country with regard to this subject is now fast giving way, and the Puranic and romantic description of the non-existing oceans and countries, and the hyperbolic heights and lengths of mountains and rivers, are now fast making room for a true and correct knowledge of the earth, and what diversifies [sic] its surface. Our little catechisms of geography and the school maps are working wonders in the task of dispelling darkness on the subject. But it will have added much to the diffusion of true ideas, and to the establishment of the still tottering minds of some of the native youth on a strong and sure footing, had all our schoolmasters been thoroughly impressed with the truth of the subject they are communicating to their pupils. It is a lamentable fact that a considerable number may still be found among them who cannot yet bring their consciences to believe that the earth is not placed on one of the heads of the great serpent, and that there might not yet be discovered, in some parts of it which have not been explored by European navigators, oceans of milk and curd. But in spite of all these drawbacks, I have strong reason to believe that true knowledge is surely making its way, though slowly, but steadily.79

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Similarly, Keru Lakshman Chhatre (1828– 84), a precocious assistant professor of natural philosophy in Poona College in the 1850s, reported with pride to the Board of Education that with the help of an orrery he was able to provide ocular demonstrations to his students of his lectures on celestial mechanics. His senior-most class had successfully “learned the use of the globes, and thus know how to explain why the sun does not rise and set always in the same place . . . [t]hese things they could not be made to comprehend before.”80 Such reporting by native cartographic evangelists is an acute reminder that the Dominion of Modern Earth had eager and accomplished Indian subjects who advanced its cause alongside its European adherents. Even with such scattered reports of “progress” and “accomplishments” coming in from across the Presidency, in general the absence of educational aids and apparatus to help in the teaching of terrestrial lessons in the Bombay schoolroom is palpable in the Board of Education’s reports received and filed. The lone government English School in Kolhapur put in an urgent request for one set of hanging maps of the world and a globe in 1853.81 Similarly, in nearby Ratnagiri, the annual inspection of the English School yielded the realization that “geography is the only subject which has not advanced correspondingly with other studies, but I think this deficiency is much owing to the want of globes in the school.”82 Responding to such demands, Thomas Candy ordered the preparation of globes “in the Marathi and Gujarati character, for the use of the larger schools.”83 Nevertheless, a few years later in 1859, the Director of Public Instruction submitted a review in which he commented on “the grievous absence of maps” (soon to be remedied by a fresh order from England, rather than looking to local publications), and on the fact that in most schools, “clocks, bells, globes, and models are rarely to be seen.”84 Even the much-coddled Elphinstone Institution in Bombay city— the same school that was so proudly exhibited in London in the 1870s— complained of a deficiency in this regard in the 1850s.85 In the face of such challenges, the dedicated geography teacher— and the official reports make clear that they were several of these, who had received their own terrestrial lessons in the local schools— took to fashioning “homemade” globes. Thus, about 1840, a schoolmaster in Akola named Pandurang Triamback presented Thomas Candy with “a Murathee Globe made by himself, which does him very great credit. I took it round to the remaining schools I had to inspect, and the sight of it has stimulated several masters to try and make Globes.”86 Pandurang Triamback is described in various reports as “one of our most zealous and deserving masters,” who in addition to making a terrestrial globe, had also made a celestial globe for which he received an award of a gold

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medal and chain.87 A few years later— and perhaps inspired by this example— a master at a school in neighboring Someshwar (near Ratnagiri) under Shivaram Bhaskar (“a most efficient and persevering teacher”) constructed a terrestrial globe to help his pupils better understand his lessons, “and this had been imitated on a smaller scale by one of his 1st class boys.”88 In 1854, enthusiasts at the Sattara Native Library (opened in 1852 with the help of locally generated funds and the patronage of the Rani of Sattara) purchased “a large countrymade terrestrial globe” for display, with the hope of placing it in a museum connected to their institution.89 Native cartographic evangelism in the Presidency did not necessarily only resort to such homemade devices, a good example to the contrary offered by a notable of the city of Ahmedabad where the first modern schools began to be set up from around 1826. Around 1850, the wealthy Gujarati-Jain merchant— and ancestor of one of modern India’s major industrial-philanthropic families, the Sarabhais— Maganbhai Karamchand (1823– 64) invested the sizeable sum of Rs. 20,000 and founded the first two schools for native girls, for which benevolent act he was granted the title of Rao Bahadur, in the hope as well “that his excellent example will be followed by other wealthy Natives.” By early 1853, there were 154 girls who were reading the same class books as the boys in the city’s schools (including in mathematics, thus dispelling “from the minds of the old Natives their absurd notions about boys alone being able to learn the science of computation.”). It was also remarked that the girls admirably demonstrated their knowledge of history and geography.90 Still, when it came time to make a cartographic gift, Maganbhai chose the city’s more prestigious English School for boys, established in 1846, and made a gift of a pair of “handsome” globes. After the annual public distribution of prizes in early 1853, “Mr. Maganbhai’s new globes were presented to the school, and the conditions of the purchase explained. The Revenue Commissioner seemed much pleased with the handsomeness of the present; and the liberality with which Mr. Maganbhai aids in the diffusion of public education generally was warmly acknowledged, as well by the Native gentry themselves, as by the Europeans who were present on this occasion.”91 Another spectacular cartographic gift from around this time devolved from a different set of circumstances. In 1849, the Bombay Geographical Society (the BGS)— the first such institution to be set up in colonial India, dedicated purely to geographical matters— began a fundraising campaign for its late president, Captain Daniel Ross, “to record his great public service.”92 A large number of BGS’s members and others (including elite native men) subscribed to the fund, and a total of £250 was collected for this purpose.93 Initially it was assumed

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that this amount would only cover a portrait of Ross and framed Charts of the Four Quarters of the World to be placed on public display in the rooms of the BGS in Town Hall. In May 1851, this initial gift was expanded, thanks to the intervention of the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty who added copies of all charts published by their office and “a set of Maps, on Spring Rollers, of the different quarters of the World, and also copies of Arrowsmith’s and Johnstone’s Atlases, together with a pair of Malby’s large globes, corrected to the present time.” The Malby globes that were so dispatched were enormous indeed, thirty-six inches in diameter, and estimated at £40 (their covers alone cost an additional £4). Accompanying them was a copy of Morgen’s Treatise on the Globes.94 These objects reached Bombay by September 1851 and were shown to the members of the BGS, and were eventually placed on either end of a bookcase in the public rooms of the society in which the atlases and other books received as part of “the Ross Testimonial” were also displayed.95 The Malby globes, however, did not stay for long in the BGS. In early 1853, they were loaned, on a request originating from the Bombay branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (BBRAS) to its library in the belief that “their usefulness would be thereby extended.”96 It is likely that at this location these globes came to be viewed and studied by R. S. Sinclair’s students at Elphinstone Institution when he took them to visit the library. Sinclair, a member of the Board of the BBRAS, taught courses in physical, commercial, and political geography, “the most interesting and improving disciplines of the mind.”97 In 1873, when the BGS merged into the BBRAS, an inventory was prepared of the former’s possessions that were transferred to the Asiatic. The inventory included 2,260 books and atlases (priced at Rs. 8,070); maps and charts on rollers and in cases (priced at Rs. 2,500), and two globes (priced at Rs. 700), all of which were put on display in the Geographical Society’s Room created for this purpose.98 In either location, nonetheless, the globes would have been viewed only by an elite few: educated, middle-class, and “respectable,” and almost all male, mostly European, and a few natives (mostly Parsi men).99 Around the time when the Malby globes first appeared in Bombay, possibly also in response to the new grants-in-aid system that came to be put into place in the wake of the educational reforms of 1854 that I have noted in chapter 2, the material culture of Indian schools began to get a boost for the first time, which meant that those ardent cartographic evangelists who hitherto had to be content with handmade makeshift products could purchase, if they wished, manufactured globes that were sold in the government’s stores across the region and with funding provided by the Department of Public Instruction.100 In Bombay Presidency, with various bureaucratic hiccups along the way, the system only

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began to show some impact a decade later from around 1864.101 We learn from Govind Narayan, a keen contemporary eyewitness, that the Government Book Depot (located on Kalbadevi Road) had “a stock of two lakh rupees’ worth of books on various subjects and in numerous languages. English books and maps are imported from England and published here in local languages. They are sent from here to all the villages in the Mumbai Province.”102 A comprehensive inventory of items sold in 1865– 66 itemized standard geography textbooks such as seventeen copies of Keith’s Use of the Globes, a variety of atlases including sixty-one copies of Atlas for Bombay Schools and Colleges (plain) and eleven copies of Atlas for Bombay Schools and Colleges (in color), and large numbers of maps of India, Asia, and the world (in English, Marathi, and Gujarati), as well as 184 copies of a Marathi atlas (priced modestly at Rs. 1 annas 6). Most relevantly, six copies of Betts’s portable globe with stand were sold (each priced at Rs. 8 annas 8), as were five copies of a much more affordable Betts’s portable globe at Rs. 1 annas 12.103 Also sold were a pair of five-inch “English globes” priced at Rs. 7 annas 8, and five copies of the Marathi globe, despite the relatively hefty price of Rs. 35 each.104 An inventory from a couple years later similarly showed the sale of seven Marathi terrestrial globes, again priced at Rs. 35 each, and hundreds of maps in the languages of the region, as well as numerous geography books.105 Over the next few decades, Bombay newspapers began to routinely advertise the sale of European-made terrestrial and celestial globes in bookstores like Thacker & Co., the Educational Trading Company, and Taraporevale.106 One enterprising vendor even went into rhapsody: A pair of globes will ornament and dignify your Library A Terrestrial Globe is an Atlas in itself as well as an ornament A Celestial Globe is equivalent to a Complete treatise on Astronomy A Terrestrial Globe is better than an Atlas, being always open before you and showing at a glance the British Empire and the communications thereto.107

By 1902, a pair of Continental Library and School globes, twelve inches in diameter on four-footed horizontal frame and full graduated meridian and compass cost as little as Rs. 85.108 Thus, about a century after the first globes began to be first advertised in the Bombay Courier, there was a viable market for a variety of globes, small and large, by many different manufacturers. Of course, the increasing availability and affordability of European globes did not mean that native ingenuity did not continue to exercise itself. Thus

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Mrs. Mitchell, Head Mistress of the Poona Normal School for Women (which in 1878– 79 had twenty-seven students enrolled) proudly reported that one of her staff Mr. Gadre “is highly efficient, and has manufactured a school globe in a very ingenious manner, which is said to be at once stronger and cheaper than the globes commonly in use.”109 A few years later— by which time, Mr. Gadre had become the headmaster of the Normal School— when the governor of Bombay and his wife, Lady Reay, visited the premises, two of these globes that he had made were shown to them. “Lady Reay was so pleased with these that she gave Mr. Gadre an order to make three globes especially for herself.”110 It is not clear what Lady Reay did with such “exotic” objects. By 1882 when the Hunter Commission did its major review of the education system across colonial India, the Bombay Provincial Committee was able to report considerable progress on many fronts. It was reported that every “cess-school”— that is, schools maintained on public funding— was furnished with at least one wall map in the local language, and it was specifically noted that these maps were periodically revised and updated. Interestingly, in a list included in the report of the furniture and apparatus supplied typically to the typical cess school, the terrestrial globe (priced at Rs. 30) is the most expensive item. Despite the cost, “terrestrial globes have been supplied to a considerable number of the cess-schools that teach the highest standards of instruction.” The Committee was also able to report that “the old aversion to printed books, and to the teaching of elementary grammar, history and geography was dying out.” The first steps in introducing Modern Earth to the child who were enrolled in government schools began as early as Standard 2, when he was typically six or seven years of age. He was expected to gain “knowledge of what a map is; the boundaries, mountains, rivers, talukas, chief towns, made-roads, railways, etc. of the Collectorate or State to be pointed out on the map.” By the time the student reached Standard 6— on the eve of high school— he had to be familiar with “General Geography and Elementary Physical Geography of the world, inclusive of terms used in relation to the Terrestrial Globe, such as equator, poles, tropics, latitude and longitude, etc. and of natural phenomena, eg., seasons, night and day, eclipses, tides, climate, rains, dew etc. An outline map of India, with any Presidency, large province, or Native State defined, or with mountains, large rivers or towns marked as named by the Examiner.”111 Of course, this happy reporting did not mean that all was necessarily well in the Empire of Geography in its British Bombay reaches. The large numbers of “memorials” submitted by individuals from various walks of life, including natives, that make the Hunter Commission documents such a valuable archive,

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suggest that there was quite a bit of discontent as well, and not just in the Bombay Presidency.112 For instance, in spite of the fact the DPI in Bombay required the teaching of geography as a mandatory subject after the child had been initiated in the three Rs, those who especially supervised or taught in rural vernacular schools were much more discouraged in this regard. The Reverend R. A. Hume noted that the mandatory teaching of geography in government schools compelled many parents to send their children to private schools instead.113 Others complained about rote learning, about the dullness of the curriculum, and the “bookishness” of the teaching.114 But perhaps the last word on this matter was had by Vithal Narayan Pathak, Head Master, High School, Satara, who wondered about the very worth of terrestrial lessons as delivered in the native class room: At present a great many things regarding America and Africa, for example, are told to the student, and great pains are taken by means of charts and globes, to show him the position, say, of Timbuctoo, before, however, he has been shown the position of his heart, or of his brain, on the living chart of his own body. The water-sheds and tributaries of the Senegal, or the Orinoco, are laboriously studied before the pupil, or even the teacher, is aware of the water-sheds and basins of the mysterious streams which circulate in his body, and proper and due circulation on which his health and life depend every moment.115

The Hunter Commission should not have been surprised to hear or read such comments. If they had been reading the many reports generated by the Board of Education or the DPI over the past few decades, they would have caught similar sentiments being aired from time to time from earlier in the century. Thus, one educational inspector noted in 1867, “Cultivators and cess payers have sometimes begged me to order all printed books and maps to be removed from the schools, such knowledge being more than they boys can stand.” However, he also noted, “All ryots [peasants] do not abjure printed Books and Maps, and most would rather have a school with these abstruse adjuncts than none at all.”116 The 1882 review of the state of education by the Education Commission is also invaluable because it allows us to assess the state of learning among native girls across colonial India. In Bombay and its Presidency, almost the same standards were set for girls’ schools, where typically, the student was initiated into terrestrial lessons in Class 3 (instead of in the previous year for boys). The

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report is careful to note that the reading books were the same for boys and girls. But what about the availability of maps and globes? Did the girl child have access to these valuable material objects with which she could “see” Modern Earth at least in its material and portable proxy? The photograph of the classroom in the Alexandra Institution with its large handsome globe might lead us to immediately answer in the affirmative that by the early 1870s such access was commonplace, even routine. Was this the case though? But before I turn to that question, I return for a concluding set of observations to the photographs of the Elphinstone High School with which I began this section, especially about the young “Maratha” men in figure 4.13 who, in contrast to their peers in other similar photo events generated at this point, are shown not as passive pupils but as actively engaged in an act of learning— and with various scientific gadgets at that. Given the prestige of the institution (which also meant that it received more financial attention from the state), it is more than likely that the terrestrial globe shown in the photograph belonged to the school: in fact, the photograph itself, despite its obviously staged quality, is quite possibly proof that this institution possessed at least one of these critical master objects of pedagogic modernity (that it likely loaned out to other schools for photo opportunities, given its appearance in other images in the series, as I have noted). We are quite possibly never going to know the names of the young learners in these images, but we are fortunate that the importance of the institution has also meant that there is something of an archival trace of students who had been through the schooling process within its walls, and who have left us tantalizing glimpses of what it meant to be an Elphinstone “Old Boy.” We have already briefly encountered one of them, T. Vedadrisadasan, in chapter 2.117 After acquiring his early education (including a course in the use of the globes) in a LMS school in Nagarkovil, and then continuing his studies in Trivandrum, the Tamil boy arrived in Bombay around 1836. After passing the required entrance examination, he joined the relatively new but already prestigious Elphinstone College where among other subjects he recalled studying history and geography with William Henderson (a Scottish master attached to the college), and attended meetings where he tells us that he and his fellow students “criticized part of an essay on Geography.” The Elphinstone curriculum at that point included learning and mastering the geographical works written by Horace Clift and J. Goldsmith that were typically in use in many colonial schools at this point, and, in addition, The Catechism of the Geography and History of Maharastra.118 Although he has left us no intimate impressions of such pedagogic encounters with Modern Earth, obviously he learned his terrestrial

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lessons well enough to write a prize-winning essay, extracts from which were published in the very first report of the newly-renamed Elphinstone Native Education Institution in 1841 where he is introduced as “T. Vedadrisadasan Moodaliar, Honorary Elphinstone Scholar, aged 20 years, has been studying English Literature and the Arts and Sciences for about 5 years.” For his part, the young man, after noting that “in point of intellect, the Hindoo is not inferior to any nation on the whole surface of the Earth,” he turned to astronomy, “cultivated among them with great attention.” Indeed, we find that the rotundity of the Earth, which was not believed by the Europeans until a few centuries ago, was established by Hindoo Astronomers some two thousand years since, although the great mass of the people from whom this knowledge has been withheld, do believe up to this day that it is flat.— Again, the revolution of the Earth round its axis, which has been disputed by many Hindoo authors, was, to a certain extend, proved about a thousand years ago, by a distinguished astronomer in his work called the ‘Ariasidhant.’ It has also been discovered that the moon is a ball receiving its light from the sun, notwithstanding the popular impression to the contrary. Pity it is, that these fundamental principles, though discovered so far back, have been neglected by the succeeding generations, and have not been improved upon! Had the Hindoos not stopped at these points, they would have been, perhaps, the first astronomers on the surface of the globe.

The Hindu of the present age, he insisted, had forgotten all this, and had been reduced to a state of sloth from which he would surely be rescued through Europe’s knowledges, especially astronomy, “which will lead him to a right comprehension of the course of nature, and teach him to discard the ideas which have been imbibed by his ignorance.”119 As an Elphinstone Boy, Vedadrisadasan was also drawn into another popular contemporary project, as evidenced by the very last entry in his journal: “In the evening we discussed a very useful point which was ‘whether female education should be encouraged among the Indians.’ Almost all gave their opinions in favor of education and supported their argument very satisfactorily.”120 His peers also wrote in a similar vein, one of them, Kaikhasru Hormasji— training to be a teacher— even declaring in an examination essay (written in Gujarati and translated into English) that it was “needless to dilate on the advantages of female education.”121 Yet “dilate” he did, as did other schoolmates, both Hindu and Parsi, whose essays were proudly published in the annual reports of their

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school. Did their efforts proceed beyond such “dilation?” To answer this, I return us, once again, to the photographs of 1871 and 1873 proudly put on display in distant capitals in Europe.

OF WOMEN AND THE WORLD

Among the photographs of Elphinstone Boys and Alexandra Girls posing with the globe, the British Library’s “School Album” also includes those of students of two Bombay institutions called Juggunath Shankarset Girls’ School and Bhagwandas Purshottum Girls’ School.122 Both images— which photo-capture buildings that appear to be genuine schools, rather than staged spaces— show groups of girls of varying ages (and possibly even varying social classes, given the state of their attire), seated or standing in a verandah, staring intently at what must have surely been a novel object to their young eyes at that time, the camera. Placed awkwardly behind each group of learners is a wall map of India, its very placement betraying its role in the photographic event as studio prop rather than an actual pedagogic object. Nonetheless, it is the only instructional aid on display. Of interest to the argument I want to develop in here is the fact that the plaques on both buildings clearly identify the schools as belonging to the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society (SLSS), a voluntary organization whose detailed history has yet to be written.123 Founded in 1848 by the young (mostly Parsi) men of the Elphinstone Institution (from the remnants of a debating club called the Native Literary Society, and apparently under the guidance of their British professors), the SLSS is a perfect instance of the colonial state’s dream come true of the “downward filtration” of useful knowledge, for its express goal was “to promote the diffusion of knowledge among the uneducated masses, by the reading and discussing of Essays on literary, historical and social subjects; by Lectures on physical and chemical science, accompanied by experiments; and by the publication of a cheap monthly periodical literature, suited to the requirements and tastes of the people.”124 At the second annual meeting of the society in August 1849, two essays were read: “The Duties of a Teacher,” by Dadabhai Naoroji; and “Female Education, Part II,” by Behramji Khurshedji. The subject of “female education” having “excited a considerable degree of attention,” the young men of the society threw themselves into putting words into action by renting schoolrooms, enlisting volunteers as teachers, and enrolling “little girls” from among families and friends.125 In the first fifteen months, six schools were reported to have been established with a total of 308

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girls, largely Parsi alongside 105 Hindus. By 1856, these schools “had 1,087 children of both sexes, of whom 740 are girls,” the emphasis placed in the report marking the novelty of the whole enterprise— as well as a sense of heroic achievement in the face of considerable opposition, especially from fellow elites. The curriculum in these schools, delivered primarily through Marathi and Gujarati (by male teachers), focused on “reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, geography, history, popular science, domestic industry, and morality.”126 A report of 1856 noted that while all poor children received a free education, those parents who could afford to do so, paid a nominal amount. The society itself “most cheerfully” provided general supervision of this network of institutions, and also gave “an occasional present of books, maps, and schoolpictures” for “the general elevation of the masses.”127 Jagannath Shankarseth (1803– 65)— the Brahman trader and banker after whom one of the SLSS schools photographed in 1871 is named— was “the first native friend of the cause unconnected with the Society,” and had generously donated “a beautiful little cottage in his own compound to be used as schoolhouse . . . rent free.”128 He also set an example for other natives to follow, such as Maganbhai in the neighboring city of Ahmedabad who we have already encountered. Unlike Maganbhai, though, I have not seen any accounts of Jagannath making a gift of globes to these schools. At the time of the photographing around 1871 of the Jugannath Shankarset Girls and Bhagwandas Purushottum Girls with their maps, the SLSS was presided over by one of the most eminent of Bombay’s new big men, Dr. Bhau Daji Lad (ca. 1821– 74), formerly an assistant teacher at Elphinstone in the 1840s, later a prominent medical doctor, and a member of the society from 1851 (actually helping to revive it in the late 1860s as its first Indian president).129 He was as well a member of the Bombay Geographical Society— the recipient in 1851, as we have seen, of the large Malby globes— and among the earliest native members of the BBRAS (to whose library the Malby globes were eventually moved), whose first Indian vice-president he became in 1864. Interestingly, he was also a member of the Bombay Photographic Society on whose Council he served, and a member of the local committee set up to assemble materials for the London International Exhibition in 1871. His brother Dr. Narayan Daji (1830?– 75), the first Indian to teach at Grant Medical College and a member as well of the SLSS from 1852, was a pioneering photographer whose work was displayed at the exhibition of the Photographic Society of Bengal held in 1855.130 Given all these connections, it is tempting to speculate that Narayan (or his associates, like H. Chintaman) might have even been the photographer(s) recruited to take the school images put on display in the 1871 and 1873

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fiG. 4.14. School for Mahratta Brahmin Girls, Bombay, 1865. Watercolor by William Simpson. Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1168– 1869.

international exhibitions, including of the Alexandra Girls posing with their beautiful terrestrial globe.131 In 1861, Bhau Daji’s life briefly intersected with that of William “Crimean” Simpson (1823– 99), a prominent English watercolor painter-cum-journalist who traveled around India between October 1859 and early February 1862 (covering 22, 570 miles in his estimation), and produced numerous art works, among them some fascinating impressions of schoolrooms and acts of learning.132 Of these, the most interesting for the purposes of this chapter is a watercolor that Simpson himself captioned (neatly, next to the floor mat) School for Mahratta Brahmin Girls, Bombay, and dated to 1865 (see fig. 4.14).133 The watercolor shows girls and young women of varying ages, dressed variously in long skirts and saris, standing or seated in a large pleasant room, holding books, reading, and/or conversing with each other. Most importantly for the arguments of this chapter are the large wall maps variously displayed around the room, in fact the only instructional aids on display.134 In the lithographed

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fiG. 4.15. Bombay Girls School, 1867. Lithograph published in London based on William Simpson’s School for Mahratta Brahmin Girls, Bombay. London: Day and Sons.

version of this painting, retitled Bombay Girls School, and published by Day and Son in 1867 in a book tellingly titled India: Ancient and Modern, the outlines maps are more clearly drawn and painted than in the 1865 watercolor, although only one is clearly identified as “India” (see fig. 4.15). Accompanying the lithograph is a “descriptive essay” penned by John William Kaye (then Secretary of the Foreign Department of the India Office in London), which begins with the revealing observation that while India “seems to swarm with women, there is a total absence of ladies.” The difference between “woman” and “lady” is then blamed on the poor state of “native female education” that had prevailed for so long. All this, however, was beginning to change with the SLSS’s schools, which, although clearly admirable, however, lacked female teachers.135 As visual proof of this situation, Simpson’s lithograph showed male teachers of the Mahratta Brahmin/Bombay girls. It is possible that Simpson’s watercolor accurately captures a classroom in the girls school that Bhau Daji funded and was managed by the SLSS: Simpson met

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the Bombay doctor (whose command of the English language he specifically references) on his arrival in the city in December 1861, and visited with him many places including the homes of rich Hindus and Parsis as well as the nearby Elephanta Caves.136 Although his memoirs do not specifically mention visiting a school in the course of his stay, the watercolor is testimony that Simpson indeed did this and was taken enough by his experience to sketch it.137 Given the SLSS’s investment in education in local languages, and given that by the early 1860s, maps in Marathi and Gujarati were available for purchase, it is surprising to see English maps on display on the classroom walls. It is possible that Simpson “visually” converted maps in Marathi that might well have been hanging in the Bombay schoolroom into “English” maps that worlded the native girl child in a manner that connected her location in “India” to “Great Britain,” the colonial master, and put her in her proper place in “the World.” It is also possible that he later inserted the maps into the picture when he converted his roughly drawn sketches into the finished work after returning to England in 1862, thus visually reaffirming the useful European knowledge being transmitted in distant schools under the benevolent rule of the British.138 In either case in so doing, Simpson confirms the Victorian aspiration that girls and women too need and deserve a geographic education that delivers the (spherical) world to them, and in the course of which they get properly worlded. John William Kaye’s descriptive essay that accompanied the publication of Simpson’s picturing of girls in Bombay getting a modern (cartographic) education but from native men fed into a gathering discourse— spearheaded by the indomitable Mary Carpenter (1807– 77)— regarding the need for female teachers in India who would in turn help get more girls into the schoolroom. On her first visit to the subcontinent in 1866 for six months, Carpenter visited several Bombay schools, one of which was painted in 1862 by Simpson and three of which were photographed circa 1871: the Dr. Bhau Daji Girls’ School, the Jagannath Shankarshet Girls School, and the Bhagwandas Purshottam Girls’ School. She noted with approval that “sound knowledge was introduced in the schools [and] Geography, Astronomy, and the higher branches of arithmetic were taught,” but she was also quick to point out their many “defects.”139 These defects included poorly built classrooms, lack of instructional aids such as maps or other teaching aids— with the occasional exception, such as a mission institution she visited in Ahmedabad, or a school for useful arts near Calcutta— and most importantly, the absence of adequately-trained female teachers, especially native women, an absence that kept girls, especially from the respectable classes, out of school. She also reported that not just in Bombay but in other parts of India, many “enlightened Native gentlemen” were most anxious for

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the establishment of Normal Schools for the training of female teachers, and at her instigation, thirty or so “enlightened Bombay gentlemen” settled in England petitioned the Secretary of State for India in London in January 1868 to set up such an institute in Bombay and Ahmedabad. In October 1868, Mary Carpenter returned to India, “having made arrangements for some English ladies, qualified as instructresses to follow her.” The goal was for these women to begin seeding a project that would result in the establishment of schools for training native female teachers. When that came to fruition, Kaye observed, “the state of things represented in Mr. Simpson’s picture [fig. 4.15], which shows a class of young native girls before male instructors, will become a record of the past.”140 The work of the SLSS, worthy enough to be noticed and noted, should not, however, mistake us into believing it was influential native men who took the lead in educating the girl child, in Bombay or elsewhere in colonial India; on the contrary. As with the education of underprivileged castes, in the realm of girls’ education as well, European and American missionaries led the way while Indian big men were still debating the pros and cons, and the colonial state, strategically using the latter’s reluctance, stayed largely aloof until the later nineteenth century. These mission schools were often located in rural and remoter parts of the subcontinent, away from the hubbub of the emerging colonial metropolises, the scene of elite native action. Humble enterprises though they were, especially in the early days, from the start geography was taught to young girls (typically of the underprivileged castes), almost without debate and certainly with the hope that it would show up (Hindu) idolatry.141 Paradoxically, therefore, because these schools mostly drew girls from the lower castes into the fold, they received an earlier exposure to Modern Earth through instruments such as the geography textbook, the map, and the terrestrial globe than the typical “respectable” Brahman or upper-caste young woman.142 In the early 1820s, missionaries in Bengal, who were at the forefront of such efforts in that region, reported that girls who lasted past their early three or so years in school were taught texts such as Pearce’s Geography, the use of the globes, and “map pointing,” indeed more or less the same curriculum (with the addition of needlework) that was also taught to boys in these schools.143 Annual public examinations were conducted— with maps at first, and then with globes from the 1830s as these began to appear here and there in schools— in which it was proudly reported that these young girls demonstrated great accomplishment, seemingly unfazed by the presence of all manner of grandees, mostly European but some natives as well, even responding with aplomb when questioned by lofty personages such as the Lord Bishop, the governor-general’s

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wife, and so on.144 To quote from just one among numerous such reports which remind us of the essentially paternalistic and gendered environment in which these novel pedagogic performances were enacted: An Examination took place on Saturday, the 23rd December, 1826, according to advertisement, at the Episcopal Residence, Chowringhee, of the scholars under the patronage of the Ladies’ Society. Mrs. Heber, Mrs. Harrington, Lady Franks, and about 200 other Ladies of the settlement, honoured the Examination with their presence. There were but few native gentlemen. . . . Of about 400 girls, who are in daily attendance in the different schools, 200 were examined. They are taught generally in the elementary books supplied by the School Book Society: some of them were examined in the little work on Geography, and pointed out, on the beautiful map now bound up with that work, the countries and places respecting which they were questioned.145

At their annual exam held in 1826, when seventy-five girls enrolled in schools run by the Christian School Society in Calcutta and its environs answered with great “decorum” and “readiness” the “unexpected questions” put to them about “the situation of different places in the map of the globe which they produced,” this “excited astonishment and delight” from the exalted visitors.146 Similarly, in December 1834, at the annual examination at the Baptist Mission School in neighboring Chitpur, the girls in the most senior class were able to identify with ease the geographical positions of places mentioned in their texts, “which they pointed out on the globe.” The report added— and here we receive confirmation that the missionary interest in female education was also tied to the project of new domesticity: “In short, these girls bid fair to become suitable companions for educated youths, and capable of imparting the rudiments of knowledge to their offspring in future years.”147 That such examinations were not limited to mission-run schools for girls (attended mostly by those from the under castes and under classes) is apparent from a fascinating report of the short-lived but entirely native-managed Royapettah Hindoo Female School (set up in a Madras neighborhood around 1852) where “the jeweled daughters of India” exhibited in “their own mellifluous Telugu” their knowledge of grammar, history, and geography. In early 1856, at the city’s newly opened Pachaiyappa’s Hall, sixty “fine-looking” highcaste girls assembled for the annual public examination. Although they were apparently weighed down by their expensive jewelry, the Madras Native Herald was pleased to report that they gave a good accounting of themselves in geography— watched by a large audience of both respectable native gentlemen,

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fiG. 4.16. Geography Lesson, print, wood engraving, or line block dated from before 1905. Basel Mission of Mangalore. Historical Photographs of the Basel Mission, QC-30.001.0470.

and also by “ten little maidens, the pupils of another school, [who] had come to witness and to listen to what their sisters here had accomplished”— as, under the questioning of Rev. D. Ewart from Calcutta, they “pointed out at once the various places in India which they were asked to shew.”148 That such public demonstrations of female cartographic knowledge were visible not just in the big city but in remote parts of the Presidency is evident from the report of a public examination in the hamlet of Kadatchapuram (in the Tirunelveli district) where in 1847, young women attending the Female Normal School run by the Tinnevelly Mission of the CMS showed great command of “maps of the world and Asia, with a focus on the countries and towns in Asia and in the four quarters of the World.”149 Indeed, from a charming print— possibly dated to the later nineteenth century, of a mission school run by the Basel Missionaries of Mangalore— we get a likely sense of such public demonstrations of expertise in this novel subject, as a young girl dressed in a long skirt and short blouse stands in front of a map of India, a baton poised to show the places she had knowledge of, as she possibly waits for her examiners (generally male and European) to quiz her (see fig. 4.16). In Bombay and adjacent areas, where the AMM set up operations in 1813

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followed soon after by the London, Church, and Scottish Missionary Societies, schools for girls were started in the early 1820s, and geography books published in Marathi were used in the curriculum (to recall, even before the BNES published theirs). In the domain of what I am calling cartographic evangelism, the figure who looms large, comparable to missionaries like John Murdoch in Madras or Alexander Duff in Calcutta, is John Wilson (b. 1804), resident in Bombay from 1829 off and on until his death there in 1875. Richard Fox Young has documented his contentious debates with the orthodox Brahman pandits of Poona on the relative merits of European and Hindu astronomy, among other things. The first of these debates took place over six consecutive nights in February 1831, and as Young notes, were avidly and attended by numerous Brahmans and “respectable” men alike.150 These were indeed spectacular public performances in which Wilson willingly participated, certain as he was that Western science would show up Brahmanical faith as “essentially distinguished by exaggeration, confusion, contradiction, puerility, and immorality. Imagination itself cannot form a fabric out of its discordant materials.”151 Thus: The discoveries of science, and the revelations of the Puranas are completely opposed to one another. Let a few examples be taken into consideration. The earth, which is globular, is described in the Puranas as possessed of the shape of a lotus, and as nearly level. From science, it is learned that the earth is suspended in space according to the will of God; but it is described in some Puranas as resting on the back of a tortoise and in others as resting on the serpent Ananta. . . . It is impossible to enumerate the contradictions of this kind, and the absurd fictions contained in the Puranas about the egg of Brahma and other matters of a like nature. The Veda even contains blunders as great as those alluded to,— as, for instance, it says that rain comes from the moon. Verily in the word of God no such errors could ever occur.— True learning is doing much to overturn the Hindu religion.152

Convinced that the spread of European science in India would lead to the unseating of Hinduism, Wilson (like numerous other missionaries) underscored a fundamental contradiction in the state’s education policy, which consciously abstained from the teaching of Christian truth in schools out of fear of “interfering with the religious belief of the natives.” And yet, as he noted, “they deliberately teach the elements of Geography and Astronomy, which will inevitably prove its destruction.”153 In his own schools, especially the prestigious General Assembly’s Institution (founded as the English School in Ambrolie in 1832 and renamed as such in 1838), Wilson and his staff did not hesitate to teach

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both the Bible and geography and astronomy, with nary a sense of the contradiction entailed there!154 Wilson’s cartographic evangelism also found expression in furnishing his schools with maps and globes, making no distinction between geographic education for boys and girls. Indeed, in 1845, on one of his furloughs, he dispatched “two gigantic globes” from Edinburgh, with specific instructions to “put one of the globes in the Institution, and keep the other at Ambrolie for native visitors and the female schools.”155 Some of these “female schools” had been founded by Wilson’s wife, Margaret (1795– 1835), whose journals and letters give us glimpses of an explicitly missionary version— perhaps the most common— of the type that I have earlier identified in my discussion of Mary Martha Sherwood as Colonial Scientific Mother. Soon after her arrival in Bombay in 1829 with her husband, Margaret set up a school for girls in the compound of the Scottish Mission at Ambrolie (in South Bombay), with six more to follow in quick succession. In these schools, she herself instructed the girls of the senior class “orally in Geography, and the parts of astronomy connected with it; and they manifest a considerable aptitude in understanding what they are taught.”156 As was the case with Mary Somerville, Margaret was as well was “completely fascinated” by the “the charms of science and literature,” and her journal entries and letters are sprinkled with allusions to the glories of science which reminded her anew of “the might and majesty of that glorious and incomprehensible Being.”157 Not surprisingly, like her husband, Margaret too was convinced that application of European scientific rationality would open the native “to the absurdities of the Hindu sacred books,” and wean them away from that “awful” idolatry.158 A slightly different trajectory for a Colonial Scientific Mother is visible in the life story of Mary Bird (1787– 1834) who arrived in India in 1823 to join her brother, a member of the Bengal Civil Service, stationed at Gorakhpur in the eastern Gangetic plain. Under the influence of missionaries posted there, she started working in schools established for boys in the area, but her real goal was native female education. With this in mind, she started learning Hindustani (Urdu), and started a girls’ school in her own home. In 1830, she moved to Calcutta and continued to instruct girls, but also to teach geography in Hindustani at a boys’ school. Possibly drawing from this experience she wrote a small book on geography and translated it into Hindustani, and also translated James Ferguson’s well-known work on astronomy. These books were available for sale in Calcutta in at least one bookstore which advertised them in 1835, even Wilkinson using them in Sehore, and they were prescribed reading in the network of vernacular schools that was established by the Bengal Government in 1844. Not surprisingly, the CSBS continued to issue them, with print runs of over a

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thousand well into the 1850s.159 Her books are a reminder of another manner in which the teaching of terrestrial lessons was not particularly gendered in colonial India: books by women, such as E. R.’s Geography and History Selected by a Lady and Mrs. Somerville’s Physical Geography, were sought after or prescribed for boys despite their authorship by a woman. If the East was a career for so many British men who got involved in the colonial enterprise, it thus also offered an opportunity for their women, especially the wives who dutifully trailed behind their husbands like Mary Martha Sherwood and Margaret Wilson, or sisters, like Mary Bird, who followed their brothers, or future partners like Mary Ann Cooke (who arrived in 1821 in Calcutta as a single woman and went on to marry the CMS’s Issac Wilson). In the far reaches of India, race and colonial privilege helped to leaven these women’s gendered subordination at home. The typical opportunity that presented itself was the dissemination of the useful knowledge of the West, which most of these women, even those who were not formally missionaries, pursued with evangelical zeal, convinced of its capacity to enlighten, ameliorate, and uplift. Usually the first step was to either constitute or join a Ladies Committee or Society for Native Female Education (or an equivalent), a fixture in the early nineteenth-century colonial landscape in many cities and larger outposts, and to begin establishing schools and either officiate as patron or even serve as teacher. In this process, many a nobody became a somebody, as we have already seen in the case of Mary Martha Sherwood in her travels up the Gangetic valley leading up to Meerut, in the company of her soldier spouse. Two decades after Mary Martha in Meerut, we encounter Julia Thomas (1808– 64), who arrived in Madras in December 1836 as the wife of EIC employee James Thomas, whose career with the Company began humbly as a writer and ended gloriously— before his early death— as judge. Within a month of her arrival, Julia visited a “native school of Caste boys— not Christians, but they learn to read the Bible for the sake of the education in other respects. They looked very intelligent, and very picturesque in their turbans and jewels. They answered extremely well, in English, questions on Scripture, on geography and history.”160 To her credit, Julia bothered to learn Tamil (which she began on board the ship from England), although she appears to have treated her teacher (who she mentions was the president of a Hindoo Literary Society) not any differently from her servants. This is not surprising because although there are sympathetic comments that sprinkle her letters home to her family, in general the natives come off very poorly, as “ignorant,” but also “lazy,” “servile,” “cheats”, and revealingly, “like babies.” Thus, just a little over a month after her

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arrival, she concluded, “At home we talk of ignorance and heathenism, but we have no idea of what the ignorance of heathenism really is. They think it a most marvelous piece of learning for a boy to be able to find Europe on a map of the world, and they are almost as ignorant of the history of their own country as of ours.”161 Given such a situation, schooling was the key: “If schools were set up all over the country, it would go far towards shaking their Heathenism, by putting truth into their heads, at any rate, instead of falsehood.”162 Although not a professional missionary or a missionary wife, she too was convinced that the natives were in the thrall of their idolatrous religion, which could be unseated by the spread of European science and Christian faith. Accordingly, soon after her husband was posted as criminal judge in August 1837 in Rajahmundry, north of Madras, she set up a school, although with numerous constraints such as the lack of appropriate books or other teaching aids. No maps or globes are mentioned as being used in the school, although we know by then that these were beginning to circulate in the region. Nonetheless, in a December 1837 letter, she was happy to report, “Our school is very pretty and satisfactory, the numbers daily increasing, and no object made to the use of our books, which in itself is a great thing. Our boys learn such parts of the Bible as have been translated, and sensible lesson-books, instead of the rubbish they are taught in their schools.”163 In contrast to Margaret Wilson who grew up loving and learning science, Julia confessed that she was pretty much a “dunce” herself in astronomy, but that did not stop her from introducing Modern Sky to the children in her school, given that they greatly needed “some baby lectures in astronomy.”164 Outside the school, she, like so many other British women in the colonies, acted as a female emissary of modern science, which she deployed to show up heathenism. Thus, she writes of an encounter with a Brahmin, “gave him a touch of astronomy,” and “told him what astronomers could see with their telescopes, so to know for certain that the astronomical legends in the Vedas are not true.” On another occasion when their Brahmin postmaster came to visit the Thomases, worrying over an impending eclipse whose potential calamity his fellow natives were trying to ward off by preparing their “drums to frighten the giant, for who knows whether he may not eat up the moon entirely,” she writes that husband James brought out some oranges and limes, which served him— as they did so many others in similar situations— as proxies for the moon and Earth, to demonstrate how and why eclipses “really” occurred.165 So empowered did Julia get from all these pedagogic experiences, she summoned up the courage to write an opinion piece that was published in the Madras paper Spectator under the pseudonym “Matter of Fact” in which she insisted:

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Among some persons who are favourable in a general way to the establishment of schools, there still prevails the strange fallacy that we may venture to teach the natives truth on subjects of science, history, etc. but that we must use their own religious books in our schools, and in fact, teach nothing but falsehood on matters connected with religion. Such arguers forget, or do not know, that what is physical science to us is religious doctrine with the Hindoos. We cannot teach them the most common known fact— such, for instance, as that the earth is suspended in space, instead of being perched upon an elephant, or that an eclipse is caused by a shadow instead of a snake— without overturning two or three dozen of their religious tenets: therefore, if we are to teach them nothing contrary to their own notions of religion, we must just leave them where they are on all other subjects; which procedure, or rather non-procedure, I believe few persons are quite prepared to advocate.166

Like Julia Thomas, who felt compelled to adopt the pseudonym of Matter of Fact in order to insert her feminine voice into the emerging “public” discourse (dominated by men, and almost all European) on the course of native female education, Charlotte Tucker (1821– 93) assumed the acronym A.L.O.E. (A Lady of England) when she began authoring tales and tracts “in allegorical form, with an obtrusive moral, which sold more widely in India (in English) than any other Christian literature.”167 A daughter of a former chairman of the EIC, Charlotte was seized— like her brother Henry Tucker (the first Officiating Secretary for the CVES)— with evangelical zeal in the late 1840s and traveled to northwestern India when she was in her fifties, settling near Amritsar where she remained involved in the cause of native female education until her death there in 1893.168 Her experience with teaching useful knowledge to women in the seclusion of their homes (zenana) in Punjab might have influenced her Zenana Reader (1880), which is set up as a series of dialogues between the missionary Miss Ada and her student Sukara Bibi. Given her connection to CVES (and correspondence with John Murdoch), it is not surprising that Modern Earth and Modern Sky are featured in the book. One lesson is dedicated to breaking down the native logic for the formation of eclipses— a favorite topic of colonial pedagogy— for which Miss Ada offers demonstrations using lamps and balls (in the absence of globes and orreries in the classroom). Another lesson is titled “The Planets” in which Miss Ada explains to Sukara Bibi the Copernican world system in which it “is really we, on our big ball the Earth,” that move around the sun. When Sukara Bibi pretended not to understand this foundational fact, Miss Ada— like Mary Martha Sherwood— fashions a makeshift

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globe, drawing skillfully upon feminine objects of domesticity, and proceeds to provide a lesson on the formation of night and day: Let me call this ball of cotton the earth; I will stick my knitting needle through it so that I can turn it round and round with my finger. There is a spot on the ball, which we will call India. The half of the ball on which the spot is, is now turned to the light; that represents day in India.169

Like Anand Masih and some other natives who, when provided such material and ocular proof of terrestrial sphericity and heliocentric motion, were converted to modern planetary consciousness, sometimes to the point of giving up their ancestral faiths, the fictional Sukara Bibi is stunned: “I understand this a little, but it is hard to believe that it is the earth and not the sun that is moving. I never thought that the earth had any motion. . . . You quite amaze me! If I did not know that you always speak the truth, I could not believe it. . . . I am lost in wonder! I can hardly fancy that this solid earth stirs at all, but to think of it with all the cities and mountains upon it, whirling round and round, and darting forward much faster than the ball from a cannon, while it does not seem to move one inch, this is indeed amazing!”170 The hope of course was that Sukara Bibi— and millions of young girls like her going to colonial schools in real life— would cross the threshold into enlightened scientific modernity anchored in terrestrial sphericity, seduced by such “amazing” facts. For the purposes of the argument I am developing here, perhaps the most stunning demonstration of the performance of Colonial Scientific Motherhood— and Englishness— is offered by that enigmatic figure Anna Leonowens (1831– 1915), rendered world-famous through the filmic interventions of Hollywood. In her 1873 memoir The Romance of the Harem, Anna provides a striking illustration of her role as a female emissary of science in the Siamese royal court of King Mongkut, and in the school that she set up for members of the royal family. “The studies that took the most absolute possession of the fervid Eastern imaginations of my pupils were geography and astronomy. But each had his or her own idea about the form of the earth, and it needed no small amount of patient repetition to convince them that it was neither flat nor square, but round.” Having persuaded Mongkut to acquire “a large English map” to replace the faulty old map that showed Siam as the center of the world, and also a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes, Anna set out to inculcate modern planetary consciousness in Mongkut’s wives and children (including the future king Chulalongkorn), a lesson which literally put the Siamese in their proper place:

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When a large English map and globes of the celestial and terrestrial sphere arrived, they created quite a sensation in the ancient temple of the “Mothers of the Free.” His Majesty caused the map to be set in a massive gold frame, and placed it with the globes on ponderously gilt supporters in the very middle of the temple, and for nine days crowds of women came to be instructed in the sciences of geography and astronomy, so that I found my hands quite full. It was hard for them to see Siam reduced to a mere speck on the great globe, but there was some consolation in the fact that England occupied even a smaller space.171

In her memoirs— and in the numerous iterations of her life that have followed since their publication in the 1870s and 1880s— Anna scrupulously performed her gendered role as a Victorian lady, mother, and ambassador for the British Empire in its distant reaches. Yet, scholarly research clearly shows that Anna was neither born nor raised in England, but in its most important Victorian colony, India, and in and near Bombay at that. Even more interestingly, her maternal grandmother was not English at all, but quite possibly an unknown native woman! So much so that a recent biography of her even describes her as “Bombay Anna,” and as a “mixed race, lower-class Indian army brat.”172 As such, she surely received her terrestrial lessons not “at home” in England, but in western India, in schools— in places like Deesa and Poona— not unlike the ones I have discussed in this chapter. A reverse case— of a woman who sought her best to mask her whiteness and instead identify wholeheartedly with the natives to the point of going native— is provided in the biography of Ireland-born Margaret Noble (1867– 1911), better known to Indians as Sister Nivedita.173 Much of the existing scholarship, including feminist writings, on this fascinating woman has focused on her involvement in nationalist politics from her base in Bengal, but my concern here is with Nivedita’s views on the subject of “native female education,” on which she also wrote prolifically, possibly based on her own experience of running a school for girls which she opened in her home in north Calcutta (reportedly from her own savings) around 1903. The education of native women, for Nivedita, was part and parcel of her larger concern with the pedagogical project of “national education” that she shared with a number of her (elite) Bengali friends. Emphatically, “national education” included the study of geography, beginning with “the ideas of India”: But they must not stop there. A knowledge of Geography would be singularly rustic, if it did not include a clear concept of the world, as a whole. And

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even this is not sufficient. There must, in a complete education, be a release of the geographical faculty, an initiation into geographical enquiry, an inception of geographical research.174

Convinced of “the necessity of geographical knowledge,” which would allow Indians to see themselves in relation “to other nations,” she proposed: “It is the national sense in the world-sense that we have to achieve.” Such a planetary consciousness was as essential for the girl child as for the young man, possibly even more important because— like many other figures of her time— Nivedita saw the Indian woman as incarnate of the earth goddess, Bhumya Devi, indeed Mother India herself. At the same time, “a great part of the glory and dignity of the ideally modern woman lies in her knowledge that her house is but a tent pitched for a night on the star-lit world plane.”175 In contrast to colonial and indeed metropolitan pedagogy, Nivedita’s terrestrial lessons were child-centric, rather than top down, and based on imagination rather than dry empiricism that was such a hallmark of the nineteenthcentury learning enterprise. Asking “how can we bring geographical ideas to a level where they come within the range of the play of a child,” she advocated a four-stage program which began with “the making of maps of the schoolroom, the school garden, the rooms in the school-house, the streets and lanes and houses and gardens in the neighbourhood.” In the second stage, the child would go a little further afield and learn— from everyday apprehension of what she perceived around her— the larger features of the landscape around her such as rivers, mountains and so, which she should attempt to materialize in the form of a relief map made in clay. It is only after this in stage three that the child should be “led to consider the world as a whole, the world we live in.” Even here, the child has to learn by her own effort, proceeding from known to unknown. “Gradually, reasoning from what he has not experienced, he builds up the great idea of the world as a globe, with snow-caps, north and south, and a hot belt midway.” Given that “he has puzzled out by himself ” this idea of the world as a globe, the “roundness of the world” will be realized and remembered. Reversing the terms of colonial pedagogy and pedagogic modernity, she proposed, “Until this has been gone through, he ought never to see a globe. The symbol, the picture, or the story ought always to come as the reward of effort made.”176 Although Nivedita’s approach to terrestrial lessons turned on its head more than two centuries of thinking and writing on the subject, nonetheless, she too was committed to driving home the foundational truth of terrestrial sphericity, at the end of which the child would be “rewarded” with the material object that served as stand in for Earth, the school globe.

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fiG. 4.17. Lesson on World History and Geography, Lucy Perry Noble Bible School, Madura, ca. 1899. UTC Archives, Bangalore, AMM 14d, p. 31a.

By the time, Nivedita had opened her school and started to write about the cause of native female education, the contours of this nineteenth-century colonial preoccupation had somewhat changed, especially because of the small but growing presence of native female teachers. Consider a photograph of a classroom from the Lucy Perry Noble Bible School, Madurai, circa 1899, in which a lesson on “World History and Geography” is in progress (see fig. 4.17).177 Sari-clad women are seated around a table on which are stacked books and papers. In contrast to the young girls we have seen in some other photographs where they are looking at the camera (and us), these pupils are focused instead on the lesson in progress in which they are clearly learning about Modern Earth. Like so many similar photographs, this particular one was also taken for the sake of “exhibiting” the progress of native education to a distant metropolitan audience, in this case, the Ecumenical Conference in New York City, April 21– May 1, 1900, organized by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.178 Possibly because of this context, the topic of the lesson in progress is clearly announced in English, although the actual diagram on the blackboard uses Tamil labels. There is of course the remarkable fact that “Bible

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fiG. 4.18. Blackboard Exercises— Normal Students, Girls’ Training School, Madura. UTC Archives, Bangalore, AMM 14d, p. 30.

women” are displayed in the process of learning modern and scientific terrestrial lessons grounded in Modern Earth, notwithstanding the curriculum’s emphasis on Biblical rather than profane geography.179 Equally remarkable is the fact that they appear to be learning from a native woman who stands next to the blackboard, explaining the diagram to students not much younger than her. The same album also includes a photograph of a classroom in the Girls’ Training School, Madura, where future teachers— under the watchful eyes of a white patriarch— are shown in front of blackboards, one of whom has just finished drawing the outline map of India and labeling it in Tamil (see fig. 4.18). Similarly, a picture postcard based obviously on a photograph of a Marwaree Girls School (somewhere in northern India) shows young women, seated in rows, in a classroom whose walls prominently display maps (including one of India), with a native female teacher supervising the learning, while one of her

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fiG. 4.19. Marwaree Girls School . . . barakbad, late nineteenth/early twentieth century (?). Picture Postcard. Collection: Jutta & Jyotindra Jain. Image courtesy of CIViC: Centre for Indian Visual Culture, New Delhi.

students (?) stands next to a blackboard, possibly reading from it to her peers (see fig. 4.19). Also worth recalling is the photograph that I earlier discussed, Khasi Girls at School, in which a group of young women listen to a terrestrial lesson delivered with the help of a map of India by a native female teacher who looks herself only a few years older (see fig. 4.11). Like these rare images, the figure of the native female teacher was a rarity indeed for much of the colonial period, and yet a much-desired aspirational goal of imperial pedagogy (see also figs. 4.2 and 4.3). If the feminization of the teaching profession is one of the hallmarks of the later twentieth century, the near absence of the native woman teacher in the classroom was identified from at least the 1860s as one of the most important stumbling blocks in the progress of female education, and remained so until the very end of the colonial era. Missionaries were once again at the forefront of training women teachers, and small normal institutions began to be established in Madras as early as 1840s and in Bengal by 1851. After the Government of India in August 1868 stepped in, under pressure from many quarters, and set aside an annual sum of Rs. 12,000

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for five years, many Normal Female Schools began to be established across colonial India, including in the Bombay Presidency (at Bombay, Poona, and Ahmedabad).180 It is important to underscore that the curriculum in these institutions always included instruction in geography, map drawing, and the use of the globes, given that when the trainees graduated, they would have to teach their future female wards foundational lessons on Modern Earth. The long-term effects of the setting up of all such schools, we can speculate, resulted in women like Miss P. S. Darling and Miss Devasahayam who went to become geography teachers in their own right, even authoring textbooks that came to be adopted for classroom use: these women were later-day native iterations of (European) Scientific Mothers like Mary Somerville and Mary Bird whose books were adopted for classroom use in colonial schools, their origins in a feminine pen notwithstanding. The immediate years following the setting up of the Normal Female School in Bombay may have produced some of the female teachers who appear in the Bombay school photographs with the terrestrial globe in the background, with which I began this chapter (see figs. 4.2 and 4.3): if these young women were indeed genuine teachers— and not props brought in for a photo opportunity— we get our first glimpse of pioneering native women in the field of geographic and cartographic education in British India.

DELIVERING THE WORLD TO DAUGHTERS AND WIVES

Armed with the discussion of these pages, I return finally to the questions I posed at the very beginning of this chapter to see what we can say about the girls shown with the beautiful terrestrial globe in the photograph of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution, Bombay, and why indeed they are depicted in its company (fig. 4.1). The young women in the photograph were beneficiaries of a social experiment that can be traced back a decade earlier to 1863, with a prehistory that went back even further. Around 1842, Manockjee Cursetjee Shroff (1808– 1887), a Parsi social reformer who served in various capacities on the Bombay Bench, returned from a trip to Europe and decided to introduce his daughter Kooverbai to “a thoroughly English education.”181 As he wrote in November 1843 to former Governor Elphinstone— still perceived years later by many in Bombay to be the father of “native education” in the Presidency— he had hired “Miss Burton, a lady of great talent, whose services have been engaged as governess, to teach my daughter English, geography, etc.— and instructs also the daughter of our friend Sir Jamsetjee.”182 Historian Jesse Palsetia suggests that Cursetjee’s pedagogic experiment— which he also refers to as a

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“little personal adventure,” in a letter dated August 3, 1849, to John Drinkwater Bethune, another patron of native female education, based in Calcutta where he was president of the Council of Education (1848– 51)— might have been inspired by the example of his cousin Meheribai Hormusjee Cursetjee who in 1842 sent her daughter Dosabai to an English school run by one Mrs. Ward. Manockjee himself mentions an inspiring meeting in Rome with the “inestimable” Mary Somerville, who “though an anomaly among women, is proof enough that it is quite possible to unite the highest intellectual attainments with all the most feminine and domestic graces.”183 Given Mrs. Somerville’s authorship of books on geography— some of which were read in colonial schools, as I have already noted— it is perhaps not surprising that Kooverbai too received a European education that included terrestrial lessons. As Cursetjee declared proudly in a letter to Bethune in August 1849, “My eldest daughter is, I believe, the only young lady among us, however solitary and singular the instance, who can read, write and converse with ease and precision in the language of your country,” although he regretted that “this example has not yet been copied by any other of my countrymen.”184 Undeterred by example not leading to imitation, he followed up his “little personal adventure” with his eldest daughter with an experimental school called “The Young Ladies’ Institute” based in his own home (“the Villa Byculla”) in 1860. The institute had five classes, beginning with reading, writing, arithmetic and grammar, followed by plain needlework, knitting, and embroidery. In class 3, the young ladies studied “Geography and Popular Science,” followed by music and drawing.185 By the early 1860s, as we know from the discussion earlier in the chapter, the SLSS was already attempting to get girls, especially from the Parsi community, into schools that it sought to establish in Bombay, albeit with mixed results even though the education was conducted through the (updated) “vernaculars.” Cursetsjee faced greater odds, because he dared to dream of delivering a modern education to native girls through the alien English language: “So formidable was the opposition then amongst the orthodox and influential natives to their wives and daughters being taught any foreign language, or introduced into foreign arts, that during two years in which this experimental school was in existence, the number of girls attending it never exceeded six.”186 Undeterred, the judge went on to launch the Alexandra Native Girls’ English Institution on June 30, 1863, in a twin act of mourning (for his eldest son Heeraji who had died three days earlier on June 28) and celebration (a couple months earlier in March of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark). The institution formally opened its door on September 1, with thirteen young women showing up for their first classes.

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Their teachers were two “lady governesses” from England who were ably assisted by Cursetjee’s younger daughters Aimai (“Amy”) and Shirinbai (“Serene”) who, in contrast to Kooverbai who had been educated by an English governess at home, had been sent to an English school in the city run by two “accomplished” Irish women.187 Within a couple years, the numbers enrolled climbed to thirty-eight in 1865, from ages ranging from seven to twenty, with two married women on the books.188 By 1871, a report noted, “The total number admitted [up to the present] has been 161 the number that left during the same period was 89; and the number now on the books is 72. The majority of those who have withdrawn have done so after being in the school for a brief period without completing even an elementary course.” The high dropout rate was chalked up to “the peculiarities of native ideas, prejudices of caste, and customs of the country— prominent among the latter being the still almost universal custom of early or baby marriages and betrothals.”189 Given these sobering conclusions— not at all unique to the Alexandra Institution as we know from work on other such institutions, such as the more well-known Calcutta Female (Bethune’s) School that had opened in May 1849 in Calcutta— it is likely that a large number of the young women, especially the older ones, we see proudly placed on display in the 1873 photograph were likely not destined to be in school for long. All the same by 1871, the managers of the institution were proud to note that one of the students who had joined the Alexandra Institution at its very inception was currently the recipient of the Ranee Sitabai Scholarship and also served as “head native assistant teacher.” It is tempting to see her in the slightly older woman in the 1873 photograph standing at the back of the classroom, or even perhaps sitting in the chair next to the large globe in front of her, playing the role of the head native assistant teacher.190 It is worth noting that although the Alexandra Institution had European female teachers from its inception for several years, they are nowhere visible within the frame of the photograph. The creators of this image were likely interested in conveying the important truth— to a metropolitan audience for whom this photograph was primarily intended— that the pursuit of modern terrestrial lessons was an authentic and genuine native enterprise and desire. We can also state with certainty of the young women in the photograph that they were from the “the most respectable families, or of those otherwise distinguished for their intellectual and moral worth,” for those were the founder’s clearly stated intention.191 Indeed, Alexandra Girls (or Alexandrians as a later report calls them) in these years were generally daughters of the Parsi and Hindu elite of the city. This emphasis on privilege, distinction, and respectability set

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apart the typical Alexandra Girl from other girls who were going to school at this point, especially to those run by Protestant missions across colonial India, including Bombay. On important occasions, the Alexandra Girl generally showed up at school wearing her hair “done up in English style,” and although she was “blazing with jewels or gold spangles,” her attire had “still some similarity to the dress of an English girl.”192 The founder of the institution might have taken some pride in these “mimic women,” but it is to be noted that there is virtually no trace of their putative English-ness in the photograph put on display, circa 1873. For that novel occasion, the young women had taken great pains to be dressed “authentically,” in elaborately embroidered and sequined “garo” saris and modest long-sleeved blouses, with the Parsi girls sporting a single ear ornament and the mathubhanu (head scarf ).193 Almost from the start, the Alexandra Institution— as merited an establishment that had been strategically named after a member of the British royal family— attracted the attention of local and visiting dignitaries, including HRH the Duke of Edinburgh in 1870. In fact, within a couple years of its establishment, Mary Carpenter graced its premises in February 1867 and noted, “Young Parsi girls, and a few Hindoos, receive an English education from lady teachers, and the short examination I gave them in various branches of knowledge, sufficiently proved their capabilities for instruction, as do also the neatly written English notes, which I have received from them. This school is the first of its kind in the empire.”194 Indeed, in the annual examination held a month later, the girls of the first class “shewed a good general knowledge of the Geography of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The first eight pupils (out of twelve) answered with intelligence and accuracy. Some Maps drawn by them were exhibited and in two cases the work was highly creditable.” The highest scorers in the geography exam were specifically mentioned as Sonabai, Dinbai, Ratanbai, and Mankubai.195 In 1867, the senior class’s knowledge “of the outlines of Geography of Europe and Asia was fair. They pointed with readiness the principal countries, cities, mountains, rivers and seas, and were able to make neat copies of maps.” Perzobai Colah was awarded a prize for her success.196 As with Kooverbai, the curriculum of the institute included geography as a subject from the start. In 1873, the very year that the Alexandra Girls were shown in distant Vienna posing with the globe, back in Bombay at the annual exam, the seniormost class “acquitted itself . . . in the geography of Africa and America— that of Europe and Asia having been gone through in the lower class— very correctly.” Two years later, the students of the second class— the most senior but one— “were pretty well up in the Geography of India, and the map-drawing of some of the girls was much approved by the examiners,” and the senior most

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girls “very well acquainted with the Geography of Europe and America, and showed some excellent maps drawn by themselves.”197 Almost certainly, the young women we see in the 1873 photograph were the first in their families to go to school and get an “English” education. This must have surely produced all manner of ruptures in the natal family, including between mothers and daughters, as we learn from contemporary accounts. Thus, a 1855 essay titled “Saguna and Parvatibai,” printed in the Marathi women’s magazine Sumitra (published by the SLSS), recounts a conversation between an uneducated mother Parvatibai, and her school-going daughter Saguna, in which the latter recounts lessons learned in her geography class (bhugol vidya) from her (male) teacher ( pantoji). The very first lesson, not surprisingly, is about Earth’s sphericity, at which point the skeptical Parvatibai retorts, Have you seen the fact that the earth is round? [She] looks flat to all of us. And the other day the old Brahman verses in the Puranas told us that the earth is flat like the leaves of the holy fig tree and that around it are the seven seas. And now these English (men) have turned it into a globe!

The newly worlded Saguna does not back down in the face of her mother’s skepticism, and goes on to enumerate the various “proofs” that she has learned in her bhugol vidya class on Earth’s sphericity, including the shape of the ship as it approaches land (which the magazine’s publishers also helpfully illustrated with a diagram). By the end of the essay lesson, poor Parvatibai is forced to conclude, “If it is so, [Earth] must indeed be round.”198 The customary roles are here flipped as the “enlightened” child becomes the teacher of the mother, whose own inherited wisdom is shamed and cast aside. It is not entirely clear if all patrons— native and European— of the Alexandra Institution necessarily saw education for its own sake as the goal of their project, although its founder Cursetjee seems to have. What is certain, though, is that they did think that what they learned in school would make these young women, as one report noted, “powers for good in the respective families to which they belong.”199 If this was the expectation among some of the patrons of schools like the Alexandra Institution, what did the young women themselves make of the education they received within their portals, especially the exposure to terrestrial lessons? Unfortunately, the existing archives are largely silent on this question, although it is to be noted that the “power for good” that was expected of them might have been used in a very different manner by at least one Alexandra Girl, the truly singular Bhikaiji Cama neè Patel (1861– 1936).200 Given her age, Bhikhaiji might well have been a contemporary of the young

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women photographed in 1873, and studied geography lessons in the classroom— perhaps even around the very globe that is in the photograph (if it was not a mere prop)— and given a good accounting of herself at various public examinations, including in “map drawing.” I mention this because many years later— after she had gotten married, parted company with her estranged husband Rustomji Cama (the son of one of the original subscribers to the Alexandra Institution in 1863), and moved abroad to lead a peripatetic life in Europe— Bhikhaiji’s life took a dramatically different turn toward fiery anticolonial politics, including a leading role she played in founding (in Geneva in 1909) an expatriate newspaper titled The Bande Mataram: Monthly Organ of Indian Independence. The March 1913 issue of the paper carried one of the earliest visual iterations of a new national symbol: an outline map of India occupied by the figure of Mother India, sword in hand, lion by her side, all primed to do battle as she faces west.201 Bhikhaiji is hailed as a patriot by her fellow Indians today, and her alma mater also proudly claims her as one of its glorious former students. It has to be remembered, though, that the colonial state became anxious enough of her activities to maintain a “history sheet” on her, and her advocacy of (feminized) militancy did not necessarily appeal then to many of her fellow (male) nationalists. Without a doubt the uses to which she put her education and her terrestrial lessons did not conform to prevailing expectations of demure domesticity. The teaching of terrestrial lessons with the help of maps was from the start— and without question— part of the curriculum of the Alexandra Institution, critical in fact to the fashioning of these young women in the image of “English young ladies.” Also, it has to be recalled that the subject entered the largely gendered post-primary curriculum of native schools without any contestation from the very start in Bombay and elsewhere. Nonetheless, what remains surprising is that in none of the reports proudly published by the Alexandra Institute about its activities that I have seen from this early period suggests the presence of a large floor globe in the classroom around which terrestrial lessons were conducted. Indeed, the surprising thing about the photograph in figure 4.1 is not that it was staged: this is no longer news, as the robust analyses of historians of photography over the past couple decades have so clearly demonstrated.202 Nor is it the presence of native women. As Suryanandini Sinha among others have recently reminded us, Indian women were subjects of studio photography from the very arrival of the new technology into India from the 1850s on. They occupied “a space of scrutiny and classification, but beyond the documentary function, they also came to be photographed for voyeuristic interests.”203 The

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fiG. 4.20. Alexandra English Institution for Girls in Bombay from the Album of Photographs of the Pupils of the Alexandra Native Girls. Photographer unknown. Albumen print, 1874, ACP 95.0036 (03).

surprising, indeed novel, element instead about the photograph in figure 4.1 is the large floor globe that occupies its center, and of two others that possibly were not put on display in Vienna in 1873, although they were most likely taken around the same time, perhaps even by the same photographer (see figs. 4.20 and 4.21). The photograph in figure 4.20 shows two sari-clad women posing with eight girls young enough to not have to wear saris, hence perhaps enrolled in elementary classes and learning only the most basic of terrestrial lessons in their introductory geography class. Five of the eight girls look at the camera— and at us; two others have their eyes directed toward the floor globe, while one is quite absorbed in studying it, as she lightly touches it with her hand resting on

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fiG. 4.21. Alexandra English Institution for Girls in Bombay from the Album of Photographs of the Pupils of the Alexandra Native Girls. Photographer unknown. Albumen print, 1874, ACP 95.0036 (09).

the horizon ring. The two older women from this photograph reappear in another photograph in the company of four other sari-clad students who would certainly have been receiving advanced terrestrial lessons (see fig. 4.21). In this latter photograph, while three of them look at each other, two others study the globe, and one of them rests her hand on its horizon ring. In all three photographs of the institution discussed in this chapter, the center of the composition is occupied by the terrestrial globe, the light shining on its highly polished surface only adding to its potency as a larger-than-life object. Why is it that when its written reports don’t even mention a terrestrial globe on its premises did the Alexandra Institution choose to present its female pupils in

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this manner in 1873? In turn, what do these photographs suggest about gender and the teaching of terrestrial lessons more generally in colonial India? Anthropologist Christopher Pinney has identified two emergent idioms in nineteenth-century colonial photography, what he calls “the detective” modality, in which all manner of natives, especially those deemed “criminal” and “lawless,” were photographed for surveillance purposes, and the “salvage” mode in which the vanishing and disappearing native subject was captured on film. In contrast, the photographs of the Alexandra Native Girls are exemplary of another productive colonial modality that we might call “ameliorative” in which the focus is on the improving subject on the verge of morphing into the enlightened civilized native.204 The project of amelioration was never carried out without a gendered inflexion in colonial India in a century when the Woman Question dominated the civilizing mission. The rescue of the native woman— “uplifting” her from centuries of oppression— necessarily also meant liberating her from centuries of ignorance to which she had been confined by exposing her to a good measure of useful knowledge. The imperative to liberate and improve, however, is always already a project of worlding the woman, putting her in her place properly, in her home as companionate wife, dutiful daughter-in-law, and educated mother of future generations (and increasingly, for native patriots, of the nation). I have suggested that the teaching of geography to girls and young women was not particularly contested. Neither, however, was it especially emphasized in colonial India: there is a certain matter-of-fact, down-to-earth quality to it in the various pedagogical discourses of the period. And yet, the young woman had to be taught to learn her place in the world, and this inevitably meant that the woman’s understanding of that world— which she would undoubtedly transmit to her young, what the managers of the Alexandra Institution called “powers for the good”— ought to be proper and correct, namely, that our Earth is spherical and freely floating in the universe and moving through space and around the sun, rather than flat, stationary, and resting on a tortoise’s back. In other words, to recall an earlier example, the Sagunas of India had to necessarily replace the Parvatibais, as indeed the earnest young women in figures 4.1, 4.20, and 4.21, their uneducated mothers at home who never went to school or learned among other things, about Modern Earth and Modern Sky. The globe as a prop in the Alexandra Institution photographs materializes the aspirational intentions of such a worlding project, even while ironically as it comes to occupy center stage, it threatens, almost, to displace the viewers’ gaze from what should be the focus of their attention— namely, the enlightened native female seemingly transformed by the close and intent attention paid to the spherical object.

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“SOLITARY AND SINGULAR”: ANANDI’S TALE

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Around the same time that the Alexandra Girls were going to school in Bombay and being photographed in the company of the globe, a Brahman girl named Yamuna was coming of age in Kalyan, a small town some twenty-five miles to the south. Married off around 1874 when she turned nine to a postal clerk called Gopalrao Vinayak Joshi, older than her perhaps by as much as twenty years, she was renamed, as was customary at that time. As Anandibai Joshi (1865– 1887), she has become well known to a literate public in India, as the first woman to get a medical degree from the West and qualify to become a doctor. Among feminist scholars, her life has also become exemplary of a new impulse that emerged in the later nineteenth century among elite men who sought to educate their (young) wives, teaching them to write and encouraging them to read modern books on the quiet— in the bedroom, even— against the forces of orthodoxy as especially embodied in the dreaded figure of the (uneducated) mother-in-law or sister-in-law. This paternalistic enterprise has been seen as part and parcel of a redefinition of marriage that accompanied the rise of the new man who needed a companionate wife, the educated “new woman” who would preside over his home and raise his children as educated individuals in a nuclear family.206 By all accounts, Gopalrao was one such new man. Albeit of a fairly humble background himself in contrast to some of the more elite men whose biographies in this regard have been documented, he nevertheless sought to educate his child bride and had high aspirations for her success as she turned into a teenager, including planting in her the idea that she ought to get a medical degree in the United States and working quite hard to secure for her this opportunity. In 1883, when she turned eighteen and with the help of some American missionaries and patrons, Anandibai enrolled in the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, and graduated with the class of 1886. Upon graduation, she was appointed Resident Physician in the western Indian town of Kolhapur, not far from Bombay. Unfortunately, on her return to India and before she could assume her new position, she died in 1887 when she was only twenty-two, having contracted tuberculosis of the lung in the course of her travels— but not before securing for herself the honor of India’s first female doctor with a Western degree. My interest in Anandi’s story emerges from an award-winning novel in Marathi published in Bombay in 1968 in which her life intersects with the itineraries of the terrestrial globe that I am charting in these pages. Written by

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the Poona-based Shrikrishna Janardan Joshi (1915– 89), Anandi Gopala narrates the relationship between the young Anandibai and Gopalrao in a manner that forefronts the paternalistic and pedagogic.207 As we learn at one point from the narrative, “Their life together was extremely unconventional. He was the giver of knowledge and she, the receiver, that and nothing else framed the relationship. It was a student-teacher relationship, not merely a husband and wife one.” An enthusiastic tutor, a bully even, he set out to educate his bride as she grows from child to teenager, plying her with books and compelling her to study, sometimes to the point of depriving her of sleep and other simple pleasures of life. “Her guru sucked such all such cravings from her; she became an instrument of knowledge.”208 Again and again, in the course of the first part of the narrative, Gopalrao stuns her into submitting to the knowledges he was intent on imparting to her— and in turn, to him. As she advanced under his tutelage (both pedagogical and at times, sexual, in the narration), young Anandi grows increasingly interested in her studies. “Gopalrao taught her basic geography . . . the lessons in geography and the informative lessons in history she read avidly. . . . She asked him about Greece, Rome, England. She was curious about their geographical position, their people, the colours of their skin, their occupations, their languages. . . . In the context Gopalrao emphasized that the world was vast and boundless and many different kinds of people inhabited it. Towns like Alibaug, Poona, or Kalyan were very tiny indeed. Those were the happy days.”209 The terrestrial lessons he taught at this point were not just based on books, but on everyday experiences. For instance, when Gopal was posted in the course of his work to Alibaug and Anandi gets to see the ocean for the first time, she is awestruck and enchanted. He takes it upon himself to educate her on the distribution of land and water (“Beyond that land, there is the sea again. Sitting here we think that the sea is spread only up to the horizon, but is that right?”), insisting to her, “Knowledge is like this vast ocean. It never ends, even if you spend year in and year out studying. Like this sea there is no end to it.”210 At the core of Gopalrao’s tutoring is his faith and belief in the imperial language, and he seeks to convince his young wife of its importance and power. The Marathi narrative breaks into English at one point, as he tells Anandi, “English is the language of the rulers of this country. . . . Anyone who wishes to gain a knowledge of Science or History, cannot learn more than the rudiments of that knowledge through an Indian Language.”211 In particular, even though a Brahman himself, he insists that Anandi must give up studying Sanskrit, which has “practically no books on History and Geography (bhugol). . . .

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There are no books on Geography. Where is Russia? Where is Arabia? What are the boundaries of India? There is no mention of any of these things in Sanskrit. . . . When Sanskrit scholars talk about the earth and the sea, they exhibit such poor knowledge that it can be compared only with the blabber of mad men from lunatic asylums.”212 Like other cartographic evangelists we have met in this book, Gopal turns to maps and globes to convert Anandi to a planetary consciousness centered on Modern Earth and to rescue her from the “lunatic asylum” to which she would have been confined if she had remained rooted in ancestral knowledges transmitted through Sanskrit. On one occasion, [he] ordered a map (naksha) of Bombay State from Bombay. He showed his wife what a map looked like. He taught her how to study the map, what was the meaning of the word “scale,” and what the different colours signified and what the different symbols stood for. She could locate Kalyan, Alibaug, and Poona, and she saw how the vast sea edged the western coast. That opened another vista: on the big map Alibaug was not mentioned by name, and Kalyan was a tiny dot. What she called the whole world was but an ordinary small town.213

Since the beginning of colonial pedagogy, as we have seen, modern terrestrial lessons had taught the native student— and shown them, on maps and globes— that their country “is only a small one among many others.” School geographies put young Indians in their place, literally, worlding them in a manner that made them realize that places that they had thought all along were the whole world were in fact mere “dots” on map. After showing Anandi a map of Bombay that put her in her place thus, Gopal next showed her a map of India: What a big map that was! He spread it out like a tiger skin. It was too big even for their large table, it spilled over from all the sides. There were several provinces, several towns, mountains and rivers. The foaming sea surrounded it on three sides. The Himalayas wore a crown of snow. Was it the same sea that they had heard from their house in Alibaug? There are many such seas which roar and crash on the three sides of India.214

Having introduced her thus to “India” and its peninsular form as laid out on the map, Gopalrao next “showed her other maps, of England, of America. After crossing miles and miles of seas, you could reach these countries, he ex-

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plained.” The world was so vast, and we make such a fuss about ourselves, he tells her. “She was stunned by the vastness of the world.”215 Soon after thus cartographically introducing her to “India,” Gopal visited Bombay and returned home, filled with enthusiasm, shouting out to her, “I have brought a fun thing!” Opening his bag, he pulled out a big multicolored ball on a wooden stand, suspended from a hook. “She was too old to get very excited about a ball. She asked with amazement, ‘What kind of ball is this. Where am I supposed to bounce it now?’ Gopalrao laughed very loudly. ‘Take a good look at it.’ He brought the ball close to her. And he spun/whirled it around.’ She did not understand. . . . She thought her husband had gone crazy.” After this initial moment of merriment, Gopalrao proceeds to deliver a small lecture on terrestrial sphericity to his young wife-pupil: This is the globe (gol) of the earth. . . . The globe of the earth . . . Hindustan [India], England, America— many other lands, many hills, many oceans, red and yellow, Arabian and Indian (Hindi), on a small little globe. The globe is spinning. Delighted, she began to look at it. Where is Hindustan? Where is great big Mumbai in it? Kalyan and Alibag. Suddenly she started laughing. What (How could there be?) Kalyan, and what Alibag? It was as if she had gotten a new toy. Picking up the globe of the earth, she spun it around. The two of them were elated.

As terrestrial sphericity enters into the intimate sphere of interactions between husband and wife, it produces a rare moment of delight and laughter, even joy, in Gopalrao and in Anandi, hitherto portrayed in the novel as locked in a grim struggle for dominance by him, and fear and submission on her part. Filled thus with joy, he proposed they go for a walk by the ocean. Delighted with her “new toy,” she agrees. “Come on. But let’s take this globe with us.” “Not the globe. . . . My dear, we are on that globe. How can we take it with us!” Gopalrao laughed. And the two of them went out.

As they walk along the road to the ocean, Gopalrao gives Anandi a lesson in Earth’s sphericity, not dissimilar to what she would have learned if she had enrolled in a colonial school and began studying her elementary geography textbook:

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He explained to her how the earth is a globe. With great excitement he said that people used to think that it was flat, but a scientist named Galileo [sic] discovered that it is round and that it revolves around the sun.216

Their joy in each other— and in the terrestrial lessons that connected them to each other— is then rudely interrupted when one neighbor empties his garbage can on their heads, and another laughs at them, ridiculing the enthusiastic tutor husband and his young companionate student wife. Undeterred, Anandi continues with her lessons, and a little later in the novel, we learn that “she developed a fascination for maps. She located different cities and places of interest on the world map with the accuracy of a blind man’s familiarity with the objects around him.”217 And yet, being worlded thus takes its psychic toll on the teenager. As Gopalrao announces to her his wish to send her to the United States to pursue a medical degree, Anandi has a troubled night tossing and turning. She has an inauspicious vision of herself as a widow, and then, interestingly and revealingly, the globe that she had taken such delight in and twirled about to learn the shape of her planet, the distribution of lands and ocean, and her own place amid all this, returns to haunt her as nightmare: The globe was spinning, spinning fast at a tremendous speed. She saw the boundless oceans and mountains reaching the skies. The big steamship was sailing over the deep blue-black ocean, on and on and on with no end in sight.218

In the scholarship on Anandibai Joshi, this novel is frequently invoked (in a footnote) but rarely discussed. The one scholar who has analyzed it, the noted historian Meera Kosambi, dismisses it as a patriarchal fantasy that has nothing to do with the historical reality of Anandibai’s life and times. I am less interested in whether the novel offers a historically true portrayal of the relationship between Gopalrao and Anandibai than in the fact that an award-winning novel written in postcolonial India— and a play based on the novel— gave that relationship such an interesting cartographic twist. In this coming of age story (a bildungsroman even) of a girl child growing into a young woman, terrestrial lessons are a source of anxiety first, followed by joy, delight, and enthusiastic learning. The husband in the native home becomes the proxy for the European colonial teacher, introducing his wife-cum-pupil to the foundational truth of Earth’s sphericity, and injecting her with modern planetary consciousness. In that process, his early dismay with her state of ignorance turns into delight,

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and she in turn is transformed into his companionate wife, her own early fear of him turning into pleasure, perhaps even love. And yet, this is a story that ends in tragedy, as young Anandi is propelled into a journey that takes her to distant America and to a medical degree— but also a death that cuts short her life. Could they, then, have been right all along, those skeptics and naysayers— like the neighbor who dumped his garbage on Gopalrao and Anandi as they eagerly walked to the ocean, discussing Earth’s sphericity— who insisted that a woman’s place is at home and not in the (spherical) world? Is death the price she has to pay for having been shown the world— literally, a multi-hued ball on a stand— and cajoled into making a place for herself in that world? Or is Anandi Gopala offering a postcolonial commentary on colonial worlding practices, published as it was at a time when independent (“new”) India was seemingly mesmerized by anything and everything scientific? To provide some answers to these questions, I turn to another coming-ofage story featuring a young man who too is introduced to the terrestrial globe and the lessons it has to teach, but who puts these to a very different use that results in an alternative outcome for his life.

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CHAPTER FIVE

“IT’S CALLED A GLOBE. IT IS THE EARTH. OUR EARTH.”

And so, we finally arrive in Bengal, the province of British India that has received much scholarly attention in our time so as to at times stand in for the entire subcontinent’s experience of colonial subjugation. What does Bengal’s encounter and entanglement with pedagogic modernity look like if we follow the travels of the terrestrial globe as it makes its way around this populous part of India, and in turn what do we learn about the itineraries of the globe when we add Bengali experiences into the mix?1 The earliest terrestrial globes might well have arrived in the region in the 1650s as a consequence of a request from an EIC factor who thought they would make worthy gifts for the Mughal prince in power (Shah Shuja) and for governors of towns. A century later, from the 1780s, in Calcutta and its immediate environs, the teaching of Modern Earth with the help of globes, orreries and maps was slowly under way, as we will see. This is not surprising given that this part of Bengal served as the bridgehead for British expansion, and correspondingly also experienced cartographic evangelism from early on. As already apparent from the preceding chapters, Bengal came to be considered across the subcontinent in the early

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decades of the nineteenth century as the leader in delivering terrestrial lessons to its youth, with native enthusiasm for Modern Earth keeping pace, almost, with British cartographic evangelists. Even the Bengal government at times showed a keenness in this regard not readily apparent in its counterparts elsewhere. As a consequence of such precociousness, how did the terrestrial globe fare in this part of India? How did it enter Bengali life-worlds, and imaginations and imaginaries? To answer questions such as these, I take the help of a young boy named Apurba Roy, more simply known as Apu (or “Opu” in the Bengali enunciation of the name) to millions of cinemagoers in India and also across the world who are fans of the famed director, Satyajit Ray (1921– 92).2

APU’S GLOBAL TRYST

October 1956— just shy of a decade after Indian independence from British rule, and about twelve years before the publication of Anandi Gopala— saw the screening in the nine-hundred-seater New Empire Theater in Calcutta of a much-awaited film, the sequel to the widely-acclaimed Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), which some eight months earlier had garnered for its director a special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Titled Aparajito (the Unvanquished), the film was the second in a series that concluded three years later with the release of Apur Sansar (The World of Apu). Taken together, the Apu Trilogy (1955– 59) follows the story of Apu from his birth in an impoverished but genteel family in rural Bengal to his passage into adulthood, marriage, and parenthood in Calcutta.3 Of particular import for my argument are two scenes in the first half of Aparajito when Apu, about age ten, first goes to a proper school in the village of Mansapota and comes to the attention of an enlightened (and generous) headmaster who lends him numerous books in which science is “made simple,” and then six years later, secures him a scholarship to study in the big city, Calcutta. The principal protagonists of these two scenes— which oscillate between modern school and impoverished home— are the un-named headmaster (the discreetly-dangling cross on his watch chain adorning his black coat marking him as Christian), Apu’s widowed mother, Sarbojaya, and Apu himself as he transits from wide-eyed child to a worldly teenager. In addition to these three human beings, a single object flickers across these scenes. We first get a glimpse of it when Apu is summoned to the office of the headmaster after having given a good accounting of himself to a visiting school inspector. The headmaster is seated at his desk on which is placed a large

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fiG. 5.1. Apu and his teacher are summoned to meet the school headmaster, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen.

terrestrial globe that moves in and out of the camera’s vision as he talks to the precocious student about the importance of books, especially those dealing with science (see fig. 5.1). HEADMASTER · Do you like reading? I am not talking of textbooks. Things like travelogues, lives of great men, books on science, written in a simple style. If I give you such books, will you read them? (Apu nods).

The headmaster is pleased and turns to a large cupboard— the only other furniture in his office— and begins pulling out several “dusty volumes.” Apparently having imbibed the lessons of a century and more of colonial pedagogy, he tells young Apu, “We may live in a remote corner of Bengal, but that does not mean our outlook should be narrow.”

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Now, this book is about the North Pole. If someone wants to know what the aurora borealis is, how the Eskimos live, he can learn all about it from this book. This is about Livingstone’s travels. You can learn about Africa from this one. This is the story of inventions. This contains biographies of famous scientists: Galileo, Archimedes, Newton, Faraday.4

With this scene we come full circle to where I began this book in chapter 2 with the “enlightened” exchange between the German pastor Christian Friedrich Schwartz and the young Maratha prince Serfoji in Madras in the summer of 1794 when the former urged his royal protégé to study geography to expand his mind on receiving the gift of a terrestrial globe. The words of the Bengali headmaster— Christian but native— are resonant with Schwartz’s advice more than a century earlier, “As you live in the world you ought to know something of the world.” Indeed, writing to the Calcutta Christian Observer in 1834, another colonial predecessor to Ray’s headmaster offered similar advice to schoolmasters in “the mufassil” (hinterlands), recommending that “a pair of globes,” even secondhand, be on hand to do the trick: Geography also should be introduced as early as practicable. There is no other study so easy, and at the same time so well fitted to enlarge a narrow mind. To a native, therefore, it is singularly beneficial. It proves some opinions, which he never before dreamed of questioning, directly false; and this so clearly, that his confidence in others, resting, like the former, on the most unreflecting use of the senses, becomes greatly shaken, and prepared to yield before the first breath of attack. This science also furnishes the boys with themes for discussion at home.5

The scene that follows in Aparajito offers proof of the success of such a strategy. Apu, a new and excited convert to modern science, is shown at home trying out various experiments, including one in which he shows Sarbojaya— poor, uneducated, widowed, and quite disinterested— why and how eclipses happen (see fig. 5.2). Like many a colonial educator we have met so far who had to make do in materially impoverished classrooms, young Apu as well takes recourse to round fruits which stand in as surrogates for the spherical Earth and Moon, a humble lantern a proxy for the mighty Sun: APU

· This is the sun. This is the earth and this is the moon. Now,

the moon goes round the earth. When it comes to this point in its

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fiG. 5.2. Apu demonstrating celestial mechanics to his mother, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen.

rounds, the shadow of this one falls here. And that is how an eclipse takes place.6 In the extensive scholarship on the Apu Trilogy, this scene of science getting “vernacularized” and domesticated in this manner has gone quite unremarked, Ray himself also not saying anything particularly acute about it in his published reminiscences or interviews. Yet, for the arguments I develop in this book, it is profoundly revelatory of the gatekeeping lessons conducted around the humble school globe, cinematically echoing in the inaugural decade of postcolonial India similar enactments in colonial classrooms across the subcontinent for well over a century. To connect back to some of the discussion at the end of the previous chapter, this scene and the one that follows

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fiG. 5.3. The school headmaster’s office, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen.

demonstrates how the worlding of Self proceeds not only within the public spaces of a modern schoolroom but also in the intimate confines of the native home, the husband-wife coupling of Anandi Gopala anticipated by the motherson dyad of Aparajito.

THE WORLD IN THE HOME

It is six years after this first encounter between young Apu and modern terrestrial lessons, and he has grown into a “thin, loose-limbed, fine-featured” sixteen-year old.7 The camera captures the large globe, still the only pedagogic object on the latter’s desk, as he enters the headmaster’s office (see fig. 5.3). Apu has been summoned to meet his mentor who tells him that he had secured a scholarship for him to continue his studies further in Calcutta. “Arts or science?”

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asks the headmaster. Without a doubt, young Apu responds (and in English), “Science.” In the next scene, we follow an excited Apu back home to Sarbojaya, now clutching in his hand a portable school globe (on its stand), gifted to him by the headmaster-mentor. He announces to her that he was going to Calcutta to study. “She looks away from Apu, hurt and upset.” His response to this anxious act is revealing, as Ray shows us: · Can you tell me what this is, Mother? He holds the globe up, near her face. But Sarbojaya does not answer. She frowns and rises, moving away from Apu. Apu suddenly looks lost and uncomfortable. Sarbojaya goes into the room. In the light of the lantern her face has a thoughtful, sad look.8

APU

A few minutes later into the film after a good deal of argument between mother and son, she assents to his wishes (see fig. 5.4). Surprised and delighted, Apu jumps off the bed and comes out on the veranda. He leaps into the courtyard, shouting “Hurrah!”, then turns and runs up the steps of the veranda, picks up his globe and rushes into the room once more. . . . Apu comes and squats in front of her. · The Headmaster gave it to me. SARBOJAYA · What is it? APU · It’s called a globe [using the English word]. It is the earth. Our earth. And can you see these marks? These are the countries. And this blue, all this is the sea. Do you know where Calcutta is, Mother? Here. APU

Sarbojaya does not really look at the globe. She smiles lovingly at her son in the glow of the lantern.9

In a reversal of many such scenes across colonial India where an educated adult (at first European, but also by the later part of the nineteenth century, the native male) introduces the spherical world— as materialized in the form of the terrestrial globe— to the child, now the uneducated mother is at the receiving end of this most foundational of terrestrial lessons from her young son, delight and uncertainty alternating on her face. The science delivered to Apu through the intervention of the enlightened Christian male teacher has not only imbued the young man with planetary consciousness centered on Modern Earth,

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fiG. 5.4. Apu explains his portable globe to his mother, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen.

but has also produced a new divide between mother and son, a divide impossible to cross once it has been opened up. So much so that in the next scene when his mother lovingly packs his little suitcase with all manner of domestic things— little bits of herself ?— she wants to send along with her son to the big city, all Apu appears to care about is his globe: · My globe [in English]? (He goes into the room) SARBOJAYA · You can carry that in your hand. It won’t fit into this [the suitcase]. Apu comes out of the room with the globe.10 APU

Suitcase and bedding in hand, and clutching his tiny globe, Apu is shown walking away from his mother’s home— without turning back to even look at her. Moinik Biswas suggests that even while “using one of the most sentimen-

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talized themes in Indian cinema— the mother-son relationship,” Ray shuns “sentimentality emphatically” at this moment.11 By this point in the unfolding of the narrative, however, Sarbojaya has become an immensely tragic figure that invites our compassion as her only child seemingly abandons her, under the tutelage of the patriarchal Christian headmaster, to become an urban modern. “Education divides Apu from his mother,” Andrew Robinson writes, and I concur.12 In this regard, Apu appears much like Saguna, another teenager from across the subcontinent, who we briefly encountered in chapter 4 and who, too, came to be estranged from a mother unable to comprehend the foundational truth of terrestrial sphericity. He is also like young Anandi who drifts away from her uneducated mother, although in her case, she also finds joy and intimacy with her husband in the process of learning the (spherical) world. We know from Ray’s memoirs and interviews that he made Aparajito precisely because it allowed him to cinematically explore “the profound truth of the relationship between the widowed mother and the son who grows away from her. The whole raison d’être of the scenario, as, indeed, of the film was this particular poignant conflict.”13 The portable school globe gifted by the headmaster is the humble but luminous object around which this “poignant conflict” is staged in Ray’s cinematic imagination. To return to the unfolding of Apu’s story in Aparajito, in the very next scene after this wrenching parting (wrenching, that is, for the mother who is left behind), we see him riding a crowded train. Amid the chaos and noise of a typical Indian rail journey, the camera shows him focused on his globe, twirling it on its stand, studying the lay of the land on it, and placing his fingers gently on it as he finds his place (see fig. 5.5). He is clutching it tightly when he steps off the train at the crowded station in Calcutta, and he is still holding it at the end of this particular scene as he looks for his new home in the big city, a place that fills him with awe and terror at the same time (see fig. 5.6). At the very beginning of the next scene, we see him lying on the floor writing a letter to his mother. “His globe is placed neatly on the window sill” (see fig. 5.7).14 Modern and scientific education is condensed in this spherical object that Apu clings to as he transits from one life stage to another. It is however not just an object of science or pedagogy as he leaves behind his childhood home and his uneducated poor widowed mother in their village: it is transformed into a trusted companion that guides him on his journey into urban modernity as “an inhabitant of the universe,” anchoring him on his trip and providing comfort and solace.15 So much so that when the US-based Criterion Collection reissued the film in 2015, it chose to show Apu clutching his school globe for the cover

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fiG. 5.5. Apu studies the globe on the train to Calcutta, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen.

of its DVD (see fig. 5.6). It continues to flicker in and out of the frame for the rest of the film, clutched in his hand on his return home during the holidays to see his mother in the village, and most touchingly, in the very last moments of the movie when, after the death of his mother, the young Apu bundles up all remaining meager possessions of his childhood and returns to Calcutta, truly an orphan now and a young man instead of the world.16 Science and school— and the Christian headmaster and the terrestrial globe— do not merely sever Apu from his village life and his uneducated mother, but equally critically, they also move him away from his hereditary profession, namely, Hindu priesthood. In fact, at the height of the angry exchange between mother and son when she tells him he could not leave her behind and go off to Calcutta, he says, “Does that mean that I can’t study? I must carry on being just a priest?

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fiG. 5.6. DVD cover of Criterion Collection edition of Aparajito, 2015.

fiG. 5.7. Apu writing a letter home to his mother on his arrival in Calcutta, Aparajito, 1956. Still from Criterion Collection version of the film, 2015. Photograph courtesy of Lee Sorensen

· What’s wrong with that? You are the son of a priest. If you won’t be a priest, what do you think you’ll be? A governor? APU (defiant) · Yes, That’s what I’ll be. SARBOJAYA · Shut up! . . . . APU (shouts) · No! Angry and hurt, Sarbojaya slaps him.17 SARBOJAYA

This scene ends with an angry Apu storming out of his home, leaving behind his small globe on the floor, a lighted lantern placed next to it. A distressed Sarbojaya steps out of the darkened doorway and momentarily looks at it, anguish and doubt flickering across her face, as she obviously makes a decision to reconcile with her son’s wishes. On the one hand, armed with his globe— and the new knowledge that its study has bestowed upon him— the recently enlightened young Apu aspires to become a lordly governor. On the other hand, this aspiration comes at a price: his alienation from the profession of his ancestors, and of his father. Both mother and father stand now outside the circle occupied by the colonized but enlightened young man as he makes his way to the big city, armed with his portable globe. Apu’s fictional and cinematic life at this point also recalls a historical figure from an earlier century who I discussed at great length in chapter 3, Parmanand, a young Brahman like him, albeit a good bit older. As we saw, Parmanand too suffers an estrangement from his ancestral profession of priesthood and

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lifelong tutelage to Brahmanical rituals on being confronted with the Gospel of Modern Earth. However, where Paramanand’s entanglement with Mrs. Sherwood’s “balls of silk” apparently led him “to become, not only almost, but altogether a Christian,” Apu’s encounter with his portable school globe does not precipitate a conversion of faith. But it does produce the next best result (the next best, that is, in the view of many a cartographic evangelist): a youthful rebellion against his father’s priestly vocation that propels him on his journey into urban secular modernity. As he matures into a young adult and fatherhood, he never does return to his ancestral profession, and in this regard, is the very embodiment of the dream of every colonial pedagogue who unleashed geography on the hapless native with a view toward unseating the hold of (Hindu) idolatry. Although a film produced and released in postcolonial— and independent— India, Ray’s Aparajito was largely adapted from two colonial novels to which the filmmaker made some critical changes, including in the manner in which science comes to displace the arts in young Apu’s life.18 That this displacement is most visibly manifest around the figure of the humble school globe is one of the many reasons that this film is highly revelatory of yet another turn in the itineraries of this spherical object as it moves across the threshold from colonial India to a new nation-state whose governing elites bowed deeply at “the temples of science built for the service of our motherland.”19 I will return at the end of this chapter to Ray and a new India dominated by the “Nehruvian” enchantment with modern science, but now, I first go back three decades earlier and across the colonial threshold, when young Apu first made his appearance in the late 1920s in the imagination of a rural school teacher-turned-novelist.

BRINGING THE WORLD TO RUR AL BENGAL

His name was Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1894– 1950), son of a poor Brahman village priest and itinerant storyteller. Born in a village called Muratipur (about hundred miles north of the bustling colonial metropolis of Calcutta), and spending a good part of his life in rural Bengal in contexts fairly resonant with those he sketched out in his novels, Bandopadhyay was a school teacher by profession for much of his adult life. That he studied and taught in village schools not unlike the ones he described in his novels is also what makes them important for this chapter in which I shift the focus briefly away from the big cities, like Madras and Bombay— or even smaller towns, like Tanjavur, Meerut, and Sehore— to consider with the help of fiction and archival sources

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the contours of the teaching of terrestrial lessons in rural India where the vast majority of natives lived. He also pursued a literary career, his first short story appearing in 1922.20 Before Aparajito appeared as a book in 1932, Bandopadhyay wrote the luminous Pather Panchali (Song of the Road), serialized at first in a Calcutta journal in 1928– 29 and then published as a book in 1929, in which he introduced the Bengali reading world to Apu, his parents, Harihar and Sarbojaya, and his beloved older sister, Durga, as they eked of a life of genteel penury in Nischindipur, a fictional place that could be any village in India, but is also, quintessentially, a Bengali village of its time. From Harihar (a priest and narrator of Puranic stories to rural audiences, not unlike Bandopadhyay’s own father), the young Apu acquires his love for printed books— their look, their smell, and their pictures, even when he could not really read them— as several magical episodes in the novel show us.21 For instance, we learn of his fascination with “a very old book” by Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar titled Jivancarit (Biographies): He used to dip into it from time to time, and whenever he did so he was possessed by longing to grow up like the people whose lives it described. . . . There was the poor shepherd boy, Duval. He was always out with his sheep, and when he reached the grazing ground he let them wander at will while he sat under a tree poring over maps. Apu wanted to be like [him]. . . . He wanted to sit under a lonely tree in a forest in the shade of a hedgerow and spread out his maps, whatever maps were. He made up his mind that he was going to read big books and become a scholar like the men who wrote them. But where was he going to get the big books from? Where could he find maps?22

The want of big books, maps, and such are driven home to Apu a little later in the novel when an affluent older kinsman Shuresh visits the village. In contrast to our hero, Shuresh studied in an English school in Calcutta, which empowered him to lord it over the hapless Apu: “Tell me what the boundaries of India are.” (He used the English word “boundaries”). “That’s geography, you know,” he continued, using the English word “geography.” “Have you done geography?”

Never having been to an English school (or to any proper school for that matter), our youthful protagonist is clueless about “boundaries” and “geography,” although in his father’s tin box, Apu had once chanced upon a book called Prakritik Bhugol (Physical Geography). Only, “[Apu] did not know that

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bhugol was the Bengali for geography.”23 Here, the estrangement between citybred know-it-all and an unschooled village child is caused not only by the new knowledge system, but also by the use of the English words “geography,” and “boundaries.” Indeed, in Bandopadhyay’s Aparajito, published a couple years later, the adult Apu, now living in Calcutta and going to college, reminisces about this moment in the following fashion: When I was a child . . . I had an old, torn book called Geography. It spoke of stars that are so distant that their light has not reached the earth, even today. I used to lie in a boat on the river in the evenings, and wonder about it. Then, before my eyes, the evening star would rise over a tall tree. Looking at it, I used to feel . . . I can’t quiet describe that feeling to you . . . it used to give me a sense of upliftment. I was too small then to realize its implications, but even after growing up, whenever I have felt sad or depressed, I have looked at the stars in the sky, and each time, there has been that surge of joy. You know, an almost transcendent feeling.24

Thus, it was not from attending school— such as it was— but from reading books, magazines, and newspapers that his impoverished father collected for him, old, torn, outdated though they all may be, that the young Apu was “uplifted” and transported to other worlds, other places: “Then there was the story of how Christopher Columbus crossed an unknown sea and discovered America. . . . He knew all these people so well. If he had met any of them he would have recognized them.” Or, “Apu’s mind is full of a wonderful story he had read in the Bangabashi . . . it was about a country called France. He knew where France was. He knew because he had seen it in an English atlas of Shuresh’s. It was at one end of a sea called Mediterranean, which meant ‘seain-the-middle-of-the-land.’”25 Apu’s introduction to magical Elsewheres through Harihar rather than with the help of a schoolteacher is especially poignant, both because of the young man’s subsequent rejection of his father’s ways as he grows into an adult, but also because it provides a telling commentary on the state of rural schools in late colonial rural Bengal, a hundred years after the British so proudly launched their pedagogical project for educating the native and imparting useful knowledge, and fifty or so years after they attempted to modernize and regulate that venerable village institution called patshala. Indeed, “the school” in Nischindipur as described by Bandopadhyay was nothing more than an extension of a grocer’s shop, without benches or a blackboard, let alone maps and globes (even second-hand or make-shift), the grocer Proshonno doubling up as schoolmas-

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ter, teaching on the side while doling out spices, gossiping with neighbors, and conducting other business. Undoubtedly drawing upon his experience as student and teacher in rural Bengal schools, Bandopadhyay describes Proshonno’s schooling practice in exquisite terms as dependent less on imparting of knowledge and more on the efficacy of the cane.26 At the start of his Aparajito, Bandopadhyay describes another village school scene, with yet another rural teacher offering a lesson on Modern Earth to his unruly wards: The geography teacher was having a smoke. The soft gurgles of his hookah ceased abruptly and his voice rose above the general noise in his class: “You all know what an orange looks like, don’t you? Our earth is shaped like an orange. Moti, do be quiet. Our earth, boys, is shaped— Haren, stop that at once,— shaped like an orange, and therefore.”27

Like so many others who taught in the non-fictional schools of colonial India, this geography teacher as well made do with a round fruit to teach his students Earth’s form, “shaped like an orange.” That he bothered at all to deliver this lesson— even while smoking his hookah!— underscores a critical thesis I have been developing in these pages about the gatekeeping quality of this most foundational of modern pedagogical acts. That an author who was a schoolteacher himself bothered to include this moment in his wondrous coming of age story reminds us again of the fact that terrestrial lessons were often conducted in classrooms across colonial India in the humblest of ways, frequently without the help of its principal instrument of knowing and learning, the school globe.28 The appearance at this juncture in my book of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay— and his filmic counterpart in the unnamed (Christian) headmaster in Ray’s Aparajito— introduces us to the figure of the colonized but enlightened native teacher as a foot soldier in the Empire of Geography. Parna Sengupta has recently written with insight on the adaptation of evangelical pedagogic models for the (re)training of the village schoolmaster ( gurumohashoy), especially through the agency of Normal Schools (for men) that began to be set up in Bengal from the early decades of the nineteenth century.29 Before he could proceed to world the child, the gurumohashoy himself had to be worlded appropriately, learning among other subjects from the 1850s, “Geography— Indian, General, and Physical, with an ability to draw maps on the blackboard.” The teacher-in-training at the Hooghly Normal Vernacular School (established in 1856 under the stewardship of Bhudev Mukhopadhyay,

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1827– 1894) was required to prepare “a series of simple and popular ‘lectures’ on Astronomy, Geography, and Natural Philosophy, illustrated as much as possible by Experiments, Objects, Drawings, Maps, and Orreries.”30 By the mid1860s, a Normal School Examinee was expected to: 1 · Draw a map of [the] district, giving the names of the several thanahs [units] into which the district is divided, and the courses of the several streams, and the Railway which goes through it. 2 · Name the principal rivers of India, and the parts of the country through which they flow 3 · Give all the proofs that the Earth is a round body.31

In the years to come, in Normal Schools and teacher training institutes across British India, the apprentice teacher was also taught how to fashion makeshift globes to compensate for the absence of the real thing in the future classroom. The goal was to “awaken” the mind of village teachers so that in turn they would help their pupils develop their “powers of observation, constructiveness, reflection, and to awaken interest in the laws which regulate the world around them.”32 The typical gurumohashoy’s sphere of operation was the elementary village school. By the early decades of the twentieth century when Bandopadhyay wrote Pather Panchali and Aparajito, the Bengal countryside— which he reveals to us so eloquently and Ray’s camera captures so bleakly three decades later— was “most thickly scattered” by primary schools, most of them privately managed, one education report even noting “on an average, boys in Bengal have not to go more than a mile to reach a school.”33 Yet the quality of these village schools varied tremendously, even within the province, not to mention across British India. In the early twentieth century— in contrast to a good part of the nineteenth— the curriculum had broadened to include some formal science education. For example, in Bengal, children of the Lower Primary learned “object lessons on the sky and air and the subjects in science” from elementary science primers, and were prescribed a Geographical Reader in the Upper Primary level. At a comparable stage, Madras schools began with an optional course in the geography of the village and of the district at the Lower Primary level, and by the time the child entered Upper Primary, geography was a compulsory subject and included a study of “Madras Presidency and adjoining provinces, the physical features of India, oceans and continents, and shape, size and motions of the earth.” In Bombay, the student even at the Lower Primary Stage was introduced to “the study of a map, the four cardinal points, notion

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of the relative position of objects with reference to space; plan of the school house, and map of the taluka [subdistrict].”34 Yet, it is telling that often such lessons could and did proceed without maps and globes at hand. Reporting for the quinquennium ending in 1902, one government survey noted, “The lower primary school of Bengal has, generally speaking, no furniture whatever. A typical upper primary school has benches for the boys, stools or chairs for the masters, blackboards, and a few wall maps.” Although the same report noted, “In no province [of British India] has the ordinary primary school anything but very simple equipment,” it was also clear that the schools of Bombay, the Punjab and the Central Provinces, which were managed by public funds, were “far better off than the privately managed schools of Bengal and Assam.”35 In fact, in this regard, the Central Provinces were clearly an outlier, with its Inspector of Schools Henry Sharp providing the following description of “the typical rural school-room,” which I quote precisely because this was an exception, rather than the rule in most of rural India: The room is whitewashed, and the walls are tarred for some three feet from the ground. Above this are hung the maps— the school plan, the village area, the district, the Central Provinces, India, the world. . . . On a shelf is a series of clay pots, containing specimens of all the soils found on the village area. . . . On the table is the globe— and a very fair one, manufactured entirely by the master while under training— and several vases of flowers.36

Another report that documented “the progress of education” in the quinquennium ending in 1912 published some intriguing black-and white photographs of schoolrooms across British India, including one titled “Primary School at Work” which shows a rural teacher standing at a blackboard on which he has drawn an outline map of India that he is in the process of teaching to his students. A printed map in Hindi titled Hindustan ka Naksha (Map of India) hangs on the wall, while a globe on its stand, clearly of European manufacture and quite likely British in origin, sits on the classroom floor (see fig. 5.8). 37 The discursive sections of this report however suggests that such a school was far from typical, since few had manufactured globes on their premises— even the Central Provinces schoolmaster fashioning his own, as Sharp noted— and most would have had to resort to oranges and lemons to deliver terrestrial lessons, some (like the teacher in Apu’s school in Bandopadhyay’s Aparajito) even conjuring up the image of a round fruit to stand in for the globe that serves as proxy for our Earth.38 A typical village school in Bengal— as indeed most such places across colonial

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fiG. 5.8. Primary School at Work, ca. 1912. Photograph by Photo-Mechanical Department, Thomason Engineering College, Roorkee.

India— would have had one teacher (the aforementioned gurumohashoy), and that teacher would have been a villager, perhaps even a neighbor. Even in a relatively “well-conducted school,” the under-staffed situation resulted in multitasking pedagogy, as Henry Sharp notes in a description of a Central Provinces school in which the master simultaneously attends to the writing work of one class, multiplication tables in another, and while one class “writes copies, he is explaining the globe to [another], or questioning them in the lesson they have prepared overnight at home.” The norm was for terrestrial lessons to be “illustrated by a walk to the tank or the river, and the discovery of miniature islands, capes and gulfs,” and “the constant use of the black board, the map, and the picture.” Few village teachers, however, at least in the government’s reckoning, conformed to such rules, since they were “often wedded to ways that result from centuries of pundit-lore,” and performed “a menial service in the spirit of a menial.”39 For early twentieth-century bureaucrats preparing such reports, such bleak

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conclusions ought not to have come as a surprise if they had been perusing the copious documents generated by the DPI and related government bodies concerned with “mass” education across rural Bengal over the past century. The general hostility that prevailed in the 1820s and 1830s to educate anyone beyond the urban elites and middle class in order to prepare them for petty clerical labor (as witnessed for example in the GCPI’s negative reaction to the much-quoted reports of William Adam which advocated the teaching of geography, astronomy and elementary natural philosophy in rural schools), cautiously gave way in 1844 when limited funds were sanctioned for one hundred and one “Vernacular Schools”— the so-called Hardinge schools, named after the governor— in which were appointed trained masters “capable of giving instruction in Vernacular Reading and Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, Histories of India and Bengal.” By the time, the young pupils reached year five (the last class in this system), they were assigned to read Pearce’s Geography (in Bengali) or Miss Bird’s Geography (in Hindustani). In 1851, the young men of the senior most class (age range from eighteen to twenty) who attended the Hardinge school in Hatempore (Beerbhom district) were found “inefficient when examined in the map of Hindustan or even of Bengal.” In his historical study of this network, N. L. Basak concludes that while the pupils got a good education in reading, writing, and arithmetic, “their achievements in History and Geography were not satisfactory.”40 Faced with such challenges, Bengal’s education officers in the 1850s looked with some envy at what had been accomplished in the NWP which had attained formal autonomy from Fort William in April 1843 and under the enterprising Lieutenant Governor James Thomason (in office 1843– 53) had inaugurated around 1851 a vigorous policy of rural education in local languages (called the halkabandi system), the results of which a few years later were apparent in a glowing report filed by F. J. Mouat, Secretary to the Committee of Public Education (Bengal) in 1853: My first contact with a Tehseelee School [rural vernacular school] occurred in the village of Roorkee. . . . The School is held in a neat, open, small puckah building, the pupils sitting upon mats on the floor. The walls were hung with maps in the Hindee and Persian characters, and a black board was at one end of the apartment. . . . The ages of the scholars, as might have been expected, varied considerably, as did their attainments, but there was an order, regularity, and earnestness about then not to be seen in the old indigenous Schools. . . . The pupils exhibited in examination a fair elementary knowledge of Arithmetic and Geography; were able to trace the course of rivers on maps, and to indicate the most important towns situated on them.41

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I have quoted this passage at some length to draw attention to the fact that again and again, “progress” and “advance” in schools across colonial India was measured in terms of the capacity of students to demonstrate their skills not just in the three Rs (which is to be expected), but also in “elementary” terrestrial lessons of which they offered proof by pointing out on a wall map their place in the world into which they had been appropriately worlded, or as we have seen in earlier examples, in demonstrating their knowledge of the proofs that confirmed Earth’s rotundity. Thus, soon after in 1863, W. S. Atkinson, Director of Public Instruction in Bengal wrote to S. W. Fallon, Inspector of Schools, North West Division, “You will be good enough to pay particular attention to the manner in which geography is taught in the several classes of the schools visited by you. . . . Wherever maps are wanted I shall be always ready to sanction grants for the purchase of them.”42 And about three decades earlier, an examiner of the senior class of the Dacca English Seminary reported with satisfaction, “In Geography, they have traversed the whole of the Eastern hemisphere, particularly over Europe, and Asia, on a skeleton Map, and can readily describe any part, giving a thorough explanation of every term used by application on the Map without having learnt a single lesson out of any book [sic].”43 It is through such small but significant steps that the Dominion of Modern Earth extended its roots deep into the Indian countryside. Of course, in rural parts of Bengal— as in most other provinces of British India— it was missionaries and their allies who led the way in establishing schools (from around 1814 when Robert May of the LMS founded the first of many schools in and around Chinsurah), and in introducing maps and globes and the first modern terrestrial lessons to the native child, especially boys and girls from among the underprivileged castes and classes who typically attended the mission school.44 Sometimes, the agenda was quite obvious, as we see from a report filed by School Inspector Bhudev Mukhopadhyay in 1866 about missionaries in Jessore (about seventy-five miles northeast of Calcutta) who “offered to pay monthly stipends to some of the certified teachers of the Patshalas [schools] in that district and also to supply them with globes, maps, etc. on condition that they would introduce the Bible into their Schools.” The teachers apparently accepted the offer with alacrity, the irony here of course that Biblical conception of Earth’s form was at odds with the spherical shape of the manufactured globe that the missionaries sought to introduce to wean Hindus away from their Puranic ways and notions.45 At other times, as we learn from the work of the famous— albeit controversial— James Long, in a large majority of schools, the missionary teacher did not have manufactured globes to hand out, and had to make do

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with substitutes with materials on hand.46 Ordained by the Church of England in 1839, Long arrived in Bengal the year after to start his missionary career at the CMS Anglo-Vernacular School in Mirzapore (then on the outskirts of Calcutta), where geography and the use of the globes were on the curriculum since at least 1825.47 His fame as “friend of the peasantry” especially advanced from the 1850s when, while based in the village of Thakurpukur (then about ten miles south of Calcutta), he chose to use Bengali rather than English for classroom instruction, and “to build on the Native System, not to supersede it. By this means I am able to enlist the Gooroomohashoy as my object.” His teaching of geography, however, would have no truck with Puranic worldviews, and his terrestrial lessons were firmly grounded in modern science, although the mode of delivery was different. Reporting on his school (which in February 1854 had one hundred boys, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian) to the Council of Education, he noted, “At five years old, the boys are beginning to learn the outlines of the Map of the World or of Bengal, by the eye, next to draw an outline on the black-board, then to study a skeleton map, next to draw maps and finally to read a work on physical Geography.”48 Making use of naturally available materials on hand, Long fashioned make-shift globes with the help of cocoanut shells, and also taught his students to make such objects, as we learn from CVES missionary John Murdoch who saw on one of his visits to Bengal one such “neat little globe,” with paper pasted over on it (presumably to show the distribution of land and sea).49 Murdoch was so impressed with this kind of expedient making-do that he invoked it in many of his subsequent narratives, even recommending in one work specifically aimed at rural and vernacular schools that the teacher “should, if necessary, make a globe out of a cocoa-nut shell, rubbing the two ends that it may more closely resemble the shape of the earth.”50 The faux globe was deemed ingenious enough to put on display in 1871 at the London International Exhibition (and priced at 1s 6d), and also in Vienna at the Universal Exhibition of 1873. It was shipped back to London after these displays and shows up in the inventory of objects transferred to the India Museum, as I discussed in chapter 1.51 Although the Government of India worried about the “rude imitations” of European teaching aids that it sent for display to Europe in 1871, certainly Long’s coconut globe was deemed worthy enough to become part of one of the leading museums of its time. The CVES— whose publication program I wrote about in chapter 2— also set up operations in rural Bengal from the 1860s, for the province’s “heathen village schools . . . seemed to afford . . . the very opportunity required for carrying out their grand design of spreading in the vernacular knowledge of Christ amongst the people.”52 Given the nexus between Christian evangelism

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and cartographic evangelism that animated the CVES, it is not surprising that its missionaries resorted to terrestrial lessons alongside (and as a means of ) spreading knowledge of Christ. Thus, as one such report noted in 1875, in a manner similar to Mouat’s report on the state of pedagogy in the NWP from a couple decades earlier: Printed books, maps, slates, etc. have taken the place of the former want of school apparatus, and the boys are now really taught to read and write, and also get some knowledge of geography etc. . . . It is a real pleasure to [now] visit these village schools. The report that the Sahib [white man] is coming brings together all the children who can come. . . . As we enter we are saluted by all the boys, standing, and then the examination commences. Reading, writing, geography, etc. are gone through, the eagerness to answer being most marked.53

All the same, as an internal CMS report from 1872 suggests, many missionaries in Bengal were also worried about adopting CVES’s schoolbooks with their transparent— rather than veiled— exposition of Christian truths, even in their exposition of terrestrial lessons.54 Even CVES missionaries worried about an overzealous Murdoch’s diatribe against schoolbooks published by the government and “from which every Christian allusion was carefully & designedly omitted,” in use in their schools.55 Of course, the most spectacular and systematic missionary attempt at disseminating the Gospel of Modern Earth in rural Bengal in the early decades of the nineteenth century was carried out by British Baptists from their base in Serampore (Srirampur, then a village about fifteen miles north of Calcutta and under Danish control). There is much scholarship on these men as “translators, printers, teachers, preachers,” but their cartographic evangelism, another expression of “their Calvinist engagement with the power of print,” has been less systematically documented.56 The Serampore Mission’s cartographic enthusiasm is anticipated in the early life of its inspiring leader, William Carey (1761– 1834), a shoemaker-turnedminister on whose literary, linguistic, and missionary activities there is much scholarship, although little on his fascination with maps. Consider this account by a fellow missionary that charts the early onset of his evangelical impulse in explicitly cartographic terms: With the earliest dawn of missionary purpose in Carey’s mind, was associated the study of history and geography. Whether the moral sympathy led to the

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geographical investigation, or the investigation prompted the sympathy, it may not be easy, and is not important, to determine. They existed together, and were wrought into the habitudes of his mind. He addicted himself to the construction of the maps of the world. In sketching the outlines of various countries, and noting the chief places and their population, he reflected much on their spiritual destitution. One thought generated another, thought associated with feeling, and feeling with purpose and plan.57

The young William’s conviction regarding the (sacred) mission of maps is also recalled in this manner in another missionary account that points to the underlying geo-religious triumphalist imperative at work here: When he was a little six year old, his father was made village school-master, and the school yard was his play-ground and there were ever so many flowers which little William loved. Take a peep into his room and you may think you are out of doors still, for there are specimens all around of plans and birds and insects. . . . Years later, if you had gone into his room you would have found something else on his walls— a great big map of sheets of paper pasted together. It wasn’t like any map you ever saw. He had drawn an outline of the whole world, but filled it in with the religions of the people, the numbers of them etc. What did he do this for? He had gotten hold of a pamphlet telling of the Gospel which all had to accept. “Well,” he thought, “if all ought to believe it, we Christians ought to let the people know about it,” so he began to think of the whole world, and he kept talking about forming a society for sending missionaries out into the world, until at last a society was formed, and of course they sent him right out, first of all, and he went to India.58

Given such cartographic predilections, even “addiction,” when William reached Bengal in late 1793, and settled at first in Malda (where he was placed in charge of an indigo estate), he started a small school where he sought to introduce “some branches of useful knowledge of which the Hindus are yet ignorant,” including geography.59 In 1799, he moved to Danish Serampore, where soon after he was joined by journalist and printer William Ward (1769– 1823), and part-time weaver and schoolmaster Joshua Marshman (1768– 1837). Beginning in May 1800 and the founding of the Serampore Native Institution, the trio began to set up (with the assistance of their wives) numerous rural schools where terrestrial lessons were critical to the curriculum, undoubtedly sparked by their conviction that the idolatrous native youth

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have no just idea of the objects of nature so constantly before them, of the sun, moon and stars— the clouds, the winds, the rain;— the earth on which they dwell,— the groves, trees and plants which surround them— the domestic animals which they nourish; nor, in a word, of the flowing stream, the buzzing insect, or of the plant which creeps over their lowly shed. To them the sun retires behind a mountain, the rain from heaven is given by a god they are in the habit of despising and vilifying [Indra], the rainbow is the bow of Rama, the river is a deity, the birds, the beasts, and even the reptiles around them are animated by the souls of their deceased relatives . . . while ablution in the waters of a river is deemed a due atonement for almost every breach of morality.60

Schooling in Modern Earth and Modern Sky was deemed a sure remedy for such idolatrous follies, and such schooling, the growing number of mostly indigent children in their various rural institutions did begin to receive. Their crowning educational achievement however was the famed Serampore College, founded in 1818 (and in existence to this day), in which institution, the teaching of geography and astronomy was high on the list of priorities. Like their later-day interlocutor Lancelot Wilkinson (who I discussed at such length in chapter 3), the Serampore missionaries also had considerable respect for Hindu astronomy, which they enlisted as a strategic ally (to be eventually transcended, of course) in their quest to teach “the first principles” of European science in Bengali (and Sanskrit, in their college). However, in contrast to the ancient Hindu astronomical works which “though mixed with the most extravagant fancies, will long remain splendid monuments of the highest powers of intellect,” the “Geography of the pooranus [Puranas] is utterly contemptible.” Although one could rejoice that these “contemptible” texts— and the world maps that the Hindus “amused themselves by forming, according to the pooranus”— were not taught in existing schools, still the entire “monstrous” and “superstitious” edifice of Hinduism was built on these fundaments, and hence had to be undermined and undone.61 Not surprisingly, the earliest plan produced around 1814 to systematize the curriculum for their network of schools emphasized the teaching of: A concise System of Geography. Of geography the Hindoos are completely ignorant; and on this ignorance is their whole religious system built, or interwoven therewith. Soomeroo, their sacred mountain, the seat, to its almost topless summit, of a multitude of their heavens, is the centre of seven continents,

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separated by a like number of seas, which seas and continents surround the mountain like the integuments of an onion or a tulip root! A concise treatise on Geography would therefore impart knowledge almost welcome to the inquiring mind, and most salutary in its effects.62

Given this agenda, over the next few years, the Mission published a series of geographical works for use in its schools, and around which works, annual public examinations were conducted, frequently to some fanfare. Thus, by 1819, its Treatise on Geography (two hundred octavo pages in length and “comprising every fact in simple axiomatic sentences”) had entered its second edition, its intention “to correct the errors which exist in their system, and to give them an opportunity of acquiring a complete knowledge of the science as founded on just principles.”63 Also by this date, a more advanced work on the geography of the known world (with a map) was in press whose Euro-centrism and Anglo-centrism was quite apparent in its intent “to do justice to Europe relative to its present superiority in the earth; and to assign Britain her due place amongst the nations.”64 Originally published in Bengali, such texts were soon translated into Hindi (in the Devanagari script) and by 1821 were being disseminated in the upper Gangetic valley by the likes of J. T. Thompson, who we encountered in chapter 3.65 Indeed, in these early decades, these treatises (either as such, or as their ideas came to be packaged in the Dig Durshan, Or Magazine for Indian Youth, a monthly magazine on “truths and facts” started by the missionaries in 1818 and with a great deal of emphasis on the physical sciences and natural theology) laid the foundation for geographical pedagogy across colonial India, copies even sent as far south as Madras.66 Through the agency of an “Old Boy,” C. C. Fink, Serampore’s terrestrial lessons also reached the newly annexed Burmese territory of Arakan where in 1836, he dutifully reported back to the Mission on his ingenuity in the face of the want of the material artifact of the terrestrial globe: Almost immediately on my arrival here I opened the school [Akyab Benevolent School] with only ten boys. . . . I shall now proceed to give a report of the progress of the boys. The first class, consisting of six, read the Dialogues in the Introduction to Reading, and have just entered upon the study of Grammar and Geography. Their Geographical lessons are more amusements to them than tasks. The doctrines of attraction, of the rotundity of the earth, and its elliptical motions they could not be persuaded to believe, until the

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former was exemplified by the fall of a stone to the earth, and the latter by the whirling of an orange round a pin.67

Most innovative in terms of pedagogic practice was the introduction around 1819 of “regular and repeated copying” of ideas that were “desirable to convey.” This practice took the material form of the Scientific Copy Book in which students diligently copied over and again critical statements from the various astronomical and geographical primers, such as The Introduction to the Solar System.68 The third report of the Mission published in 1821 provided the following recommended questions and accompanying answers from the First Scientific Copy Book (that students were expected to write out, three times, and then commit to memory on which they were to be publicly examined at the end of it all): Q A Q A Q A

· · · · · ·

How long is it since the earth was created? Nearly six thousand years. Out of what was the earth created? God created the earth and all things out of nothing. What is the form or figure of the earth? The earth is in form like a ball.69

In the event the young student had missed getting the point on the gatekeeping principle of earth’s rotundity, the Copy Book ended with the following two questions, again: · · . . . Q · A · Q A

Of what form is the earth? Globular, like the kudumba flower On what is the earth supported? God hath established the earth upon nothing.70

The “desirable ideas” to be conveyed thus were not limited to the form, motion, and disposition of Earth, valuable though these were, given that these had to be imprinted on the native youth’s mind otherwise enslaved to “monstrous” ideas of the Puranas, but also included key terrestrial lessons such as, “The two most powerful nations on earth are England and Russia, and these are in alliance with each other,” and “England possesses a thousand ships of war.”71 Thus, the very rationale of the Scientific Copy Book mandated repetition

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and memorization, even while the colonial knowledge system that promoted the new learning disparaged earlier forms of local pedagogy based on the arts of memory as “rote-learning” that produced mindless “parrots.”72 Repetition, it seems, when performed under the firm hand of the Christian schoolmaster, would “lead the minds of youth to truths of the first importance: Those [ideas] which express the unity, the power, the omniscience, the goodness, the purity and justice of God, may one day lead them to reflect on the sin and folly of idolatry;— the account given of mankind’s being created all of one blood, and descended from one stock, may by degrees rectify their ideas respecting cast[e];— the age of the world, the size of the globe, and the number of its inhabitants, naturally militate against their monstrous ideas of chronology and geography; even the exact height of the highest mountains on earth laid up in mind [sic] may enable them to judge accurately respecting the existence of Mount Kylas, and Mount Soomeroo, with its fourteen heavens in succession.73

So impressed were the missionaries with their Scientific Copybooks that their second annual report to their current (and future) subscribers noted— with palpable excitement— that “debates have been overheard among the children themselves, respecting things so different from what they formerly heard of the size and figure of the earth, the solar system and other subjects.” Even a servant employed to carry Serampore publications had been overhead discussing scientific matters with his peers, “which must have been suggested by what he had heard from the children in visiting the Schools. This would not be mentioned were it not for the hope it excites, that the ideas contained in the treatises they copy, being thus made the subject of conversation, will be gradually diffused among them.”74 Not least, the Serampore missionaries also resorted to cartographic instruments like the terrestrial globe and the map, command over which was required by students they educated. Thus— at the annual public examination of students of the college in 1822, whose desire for knowledge was “little inferior to that evinced in the European world”— on a map containing the various countries and islands of Asia without their names, they readily name any country or island pointed out to them, and also point out without hesitation such countries as are mentioned to them: and certain specimens of maps drawn by themselves in the last three months, would do credit even to English youths. This proficiency in a study of which

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the natives of India have hitherto been almost wholly ignorant, and which, duly cultivated, must shake the credit of a religious system productive of incalculable misery, and built on the grossest mistakes in geography and astronomy, cannot fail to excite a pleasing hope relative to the future effects of the Institution on the illumination of India.75

The annual report for 1828 reported with satisfaction that some senior students had conducted themselves well on “the globes.”76 Such demonstrations were not limited to the elite college— with its largely upper-caste male student body— but also to the growing number of schools for boys and girls from underprivileged sections of Bengali society that were established in the environs of Serampore. Thus, in 1827, the girls in the Mission’s schools were subjected to a public examination in College Hall, and “a class of fifteen was examined in Geography, and besides exhibiting their acquaintance with the most prominent features of the globe, by the ready use of the map, they repeated from memory the Geographical definitions, and descriptions of the various countries of Asia.”77 Although the reports do not explicitly mention this, it is quite possible that the artifact used in these public examinations was one of a pair of eighteen-inch globes presented around 1821 by Colonel James Young and that were placed in the library.78 By 1823, the college had also acquired an array of Philosophical Apparatus by J. Douglas, Esq., of Edinburgh, and from W. Allen of London to supplement “the considerable quantity of Dr. Dinwiddie’s apparatus who formerly gave Lectures in Calcutta; among which are several Electrical Machines with apparatus, a Planetarium in pretty good order, an excellent Telescope, its highest power about 190 etc.”79 These were not the earliest globes to arrive at the college: a pair of expensive twenty-one-inch globes had been destroyed in the historic fire of March 1812, although they had been replaced soon after by another pair, purchased from England (whose dimensions unfortunately are not known).80 Men of cloth though they may be, these evangelizing missionaries were not at all averse to resorting to man-made philosophical instruments to demonstrate “the wonderful power, order, and regularity of the works of God” to natives who had to be weaned away from attachment to their “hideous” and “monstrous” idols. Such instruments were “the grand foes of idolatry in any country and in every age: If we surprise the Natives, as we do, with simple problems on the Globes, what may we not expect, if we could bring a whole philosophical apparatus

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into action? We know that the excellency of the power is of God, and that He alone can convert their souls; but, if we put folly, superstition, and ignorance to flight, we have so far prepared the way for speaking to them as reasonable beings.81

Hence also the importance of public examination where the learning child, appropriately worlded into the Domain of Modern Earth through the means of terrestrial lessons, could be put on show in the presence of respectable older natives to “surprise” and awe them with displays of useful knowledge that would put flight to their “folly, superstition, and ignorance.” As one mission report noted as early as 1822 (when this new secular ritual was just beginning to be instituted in colonial schools), “It must be remembered that the Answers to these Questions entirely overthrow the absurd notions of the Hindoo Books; and, while they enlarge, therefore, the minds of the Scholars, cannot fail to weaken the hold which those writings have had upon the Native Mind: What form has the Earth? Is it true (as the Pooranas say) that the earth is three-cornered, and like a looking-glass? Or what proof is there to the contrary in other writings? Is there any proof that the form of the Earth is like a globe? . . . . Do the Earth and the Planets move round the Sun, or does it move round them? . . . . What keeps the Earth in her right position?

To recall the argument that I have been pursuing in these pages, even as the child learned Modern Earth— spherical and gridded, heliocentric, and freely suspended in the universe— he was also worlded into his proper (racialized) place in the emergent global British Empire so that he had to know the answers to questions previously not relevant or necessary at all, such as: How many degrees is London west from Calcutta? When it is noon day in Bengal, what time is it in England?82

In this process, geography itself took on the mantle of the sacred, as Alexander Duff— on whom more later in the chapter— was perceptive enough to recognize:

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[I]t now seemed as if geography, general history, and natural philosophy— from their direct effect in destroying Hinduism— had been divested of their secularity, and stamped with an impress of sacredness. In this view of the case, the teaching of these branches seemed no longer an indirect, secondary, ambiguous part of missionary labour,— but, in one sense, as direct, primary and indubitable as the teaching of religion itself.83

All this does not mean that the Empire of Geography had an easy time, especially in the early decades of its roll out across rural Bengal. In fact, in 1825, an LMS missionary lamented, “A Bengalee School Boy cannot see what advantage is to be derived from a knowledge of the shape of the Earth, its dimensions, revolutions, etc.” His colleague in CMS declared that publications on geography and astronomy were deemed by the natives “very offensive . . . because this proves so vissibly [sic] the falsehood of their Shastries [sic].”84 The missionaries’ persistence in spreading the Gospel of Modern Earth in the face of such apathy and resistance received a boost, however, when the Bengal government stepped in, adding its considerable financial clout to advance the Empire of Geography.

GOVERNMENT’S GLOBAL LABORS

It has become a truism in Indian studies to insist that until 1813, the Company was opposed to missionaries, and that when Parliament reinserted the “pious clause” into the EIC’s new charter, India was “opened” to fervent evangelization. Recent scholarship however demonstrates quite convincingly that even before 1813, Protestant missions managed to secure the support of local officials for their activities, both pedagogic and ecclesiastical. Further, even after 1813, the Company did not cede its authority to regulate who could operate in its territories until 1833 when missionaries no longer needed formal licenses to work in India. Not least, the pious clause notwithstanding, officially and throughout its tenure in the subcontinent, the EIC remained wary of missionaries and particularly of the ardent Evangelicals among them. At the same time, realities on the ground as well as the specific persuasions of local administrators meant that there was no consistency to the avowed policy of religious neutrality and “non-interference.”85 Especially in the matter of the teaching of terrestrial lessons, as we have seen, from the very beginning of colonial pedagogy, various provincial governments as well as individual administrators stepped in

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to help missionary schooling initiatives, even in Bengal. In turn, textbooks on geography, astronomy, natural philosophy and related subjects written by missionary authors were frequently used in schools supported by public funds. Indeed, it is even possible to suggest, picking our cue from the afore-quoted Alexander Duff that terrestrial lessons were not merely an “indirect, secondary, ambiguous” part of government’s labor, but “direct, primary, and indubitable” to colonial governance. All the same, the colonial state was not always an enthusiastic participant in this regard, preferring to leave the business of geographic and cartographic evangelism to others, including its own civil servants such as Lancelot Wilkinson, or (former) soldiers such as James Paton who more often than not, as we have seen, collaborated with chaplains and missionaries. Yet, for a brief few years in the 1820s and 1830s, the colonial state seemed as well to be caught up in the excitement and enthusiasm surrounding the spread of the Dominion of Modern Earth, adding the leaven of state funds to the general ferment of modern pedagogy. That this happened in and from Bengal— the heartland of the growing British Indian Empire— is both illuminating and consequential for the itineraries of the terrestrial globe that I narrate in these pages. The chief instrument for this statist geographical enthusiasm was a body called the General Committee for Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal (GCPI), in existence for about nineteen years from July 1823 till the end of 1841 when it was dissolved to create the Council of Education, founded in January 1842. Convened nearly ten years after the Parliamentary command in 1813 to the EIC to direct a (small) portion of its surplus earnings toward educating the native, the GCPI forged ahead with great vigor, limited though the funds at its disposal were in relationship to the scale of the problem to be tackled, and hobbled though it was by the Court of Directors’ everpragmatic cautionary stance vis-à-vis native sentiments. As the work of many scholars has shown, the GCPI was also Ground Zero for the waging of turf battles between the so-called Orientalists (with their cautious willingness to “graft” Western science and literature onto Indic knowledges and languages), the Vernacularists (who favored useful knowledge delivered through the agency of spoken Indian languages, rather than English, Sanskrit, or Persian), and especially the Anglicists who stridently pursued their vision of shooting “the light” of useful knowledge into Indian “darkness” through the medium of English.86 Thus, in 1829, while an internal memo to Governor-General Bentinck insisted, “The ultimate introduction of the study of the English language & European science into every part of India is an object which we ever keep in view,” the Committee hastened to add, “we have been reluctant to press it pre-

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maturely upon the taste or feelings of the people and thus render them averse to its cultivation.”87 By 1832, the tone had shifted, as the Committee noted in its annual report: “Without offering therefore any violence to Native prejudices, and whilst giving liberal encouragement to purely Native education, the principle of connecting it with the introduction of real knowledge has never been lost sight of.”88 And by 1835, as has been well documented, there was an overt embrace of a European-style education through the primary vehicle of the English language. The GCPI’s voluminous correspondence is also revelatory of the death struggle between European science (as exemplified at this time mostly by the teaching of terrestrial lessons variously delivered through subjects such geography and astronomy, and to a lesser extent, natural philosophy and natural history) and Hindu “Shaster,” especially the worldview embedded in the Sanskrit Puranas.89 While hostility to the much-maligned Puranas was quite universal across the Committee and over the years of its existence, there was less consensus around the wisdom of harnessing Hindu astronomy ( jyotisastra) for colonial pedagogy, with supporters of “vernacularists” like Lancelot Wilkinson and even the Serampore Trio ranged against the Anglicists with their utter contempt for anything that smacked of the native. Not least, as the GCPI pushed ahead with the colonial pedagogic project, it faced varying responses from across the vast region over which its mandate extended by 1841 from Ajmer in the west to Assam and Arakan in the east. Thus, on the one hand, the Committee heard that students of the Arabic Department of the Hooghly (or Mahomed Mohsin) College, which opened its doors in August 1836, embraced with great “zeal and industry” the study of astronomy, geography, and the use of the globes.90 On the other hand, and in that very year— 1837— they were also informed that in Azamgarh in the Allahabad Division where a school had recently opened with emphasis placed on teaching in Hindustani (in spite of the GCPI’s own emphasis by then on English as medium of instruction for science), the senior class with seven students had been reading Clift’s Geography. These young boys, however, were unwilling “to receive Geographical Instruction according to the English books from an idea that the Christian, as well as the Hindu Religions had certain peculiar Geographical tenets.” The GCPI was forced to recommend “caution until the jealousy should subside,” and advised “that Geographical instruction should be given orally with aid of Maps.”91 It is likely that this strategy worked because two years later in 1839, the GCPI heard from the Local Committee that the senior class at the same school had given a good showing of itself in the annual examination, and observed, “The desire of the pupils to gain a knowledge of Geography affords

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a gratifying proof that a taste for that useful branch of study, according to the English system, exists; a large Map of Hindoostan [India], drawn with much accuracy and neatness, by one of the students of the School, was sent to Calcutta for our inspection. It was much admired, and after being properly mounted, was returned to be used as a School Map.”92 Under these circumstances, the trajectory of Modern Earth as it was drawn into the government’s pedagogic labors conducted around terrestrial lessons, was neither straightforward nor free of its share of troubles. As the Company’s Empire advanced up the Gangetic valley and beyond from Bengal, the Empire of Geography also began to put down its roots, fertilized by the evangelical zeal of missionaries but also of (former) soldiers like Henry Sherwood in Meerut, James Paton in Oudh, and James Stewart in Burdwan, a large town about fifty miles north of Calcutta.93 Geography’s Empire was nourished as well, as we will see, by native enthusiasm. Compared to these efforts, the government’s were much more modest, and could not have proceeded without civilian collaboration. Thus, in the mid-1830s, the GCPI confessed that it was unable to cope with the heavy demand pouring in for books and other supplies, and called upon those who could afford to do so to make donations so that schools could purchase “maps, globes, orreries and other scientific apparatus.”94 Several native grandees responded. Thus, “Maha Raja Chuttoderry Sahee, Bahadoor, of Patna, has lately given the magnificent donation of fifty thousand rupees to be added to the Education fund. Baboo Dunonath Dutt has also contributed a pair of 20-inch globes (of 1834) elegantly and completely mounted.”95 The latter found their way to the Hooghly (or Mahomed Mohsin) College, which, a later historian of the institution notes, “had an admirable collection of globes, orreries and maps— there were about a hundred maps alone.”96 In 1823, when it was first constituted, the GCPI’s supervision began with a few schools in Chinsurah in Bengal, Bhagalpore in Bihar, and Ajmer in western India. By 1826, its mandate had extended to cover several post-preparatory schools (then called colleges) in Calcutta, Benares, Agra, and Delhi, and in 1840, on the eve of its dissolution, the institutions under its charge included “eight Colleges, thirty-six Preparatory Schools, and six Probational Schools” serving a total of 6,550 students, all male.97 By then, significantly, no boy over twelve years of age could be admitted to its institutions or be eligible for a scholarship unless he demonstrated knowledge of “the form of the Earth; its great divisions; and their sub-divisions into countries; the names of the capitals and principal cities of each country, and of the principal mountains and rivers.” 98 A uniform plan of study had evolved which included in the second year of

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schooling in the Junior Department, the study of Clift’s book on geography (published in 1836 by CSBS), and in the following couple years, continued study of the subject with reference to globes and maps. To meet such curricular needs, and with the limited funds at its disposal, the GCPI sought to provide instructional support, especially until the mid-1830s when bookstores and depositories for purchase and distribution of these were few and far between, and the price of books still beyond the reach of the average student. The Committee acquired and distributed Keith’s Use of the Globes, Molineux’s work on the same subject, geography titles published by the CSBS as well as works such as Guy’s School Geography and Goldsmith’s from England. The Committee also made an effort to disseminate maps and atlases. Thus, in 1830– 31, 196 copies of a “Map of Hindoostan” were supplied to schools under its jurisdiction, as were forty-three copies of a “Map of the World in Persian,” and thirty-seven copies of “Map of the World in Nagaree.”99 Over the course of 1831, as per a report it provided to the government, the Committee’s depository in Calcutta sold one copy of a map of Europe (priced at Rs. 1, 4 annas); one copy each of the “Map of the World in Debnagari, in Persian, and in Bengali, Map of Europe in English, Map of the Eastern Hemisphere, Map of the Western Hemisphere, Map of Asia, and Map of Africa,” all priced at Rs. 8; one copy of “Bengali Map” also priced at Rs. 8; and one copy of “Map of Europe in English, and in Hindoostani.” That even in Calcutta, the capital of British India, there was not yet a brisk market at this time for such artifacts is worth noting.100 In March 1832, a statement of books and maps in its depository according to an internal memo included: Persian Map of the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Nagree map of the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 Bengali map of the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41 Map of Hindustan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Outlines of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47101

The report for 1832 also noted that the Committee had acquired for disseminating to its schools one copy of a General Atlas, priced at Rs. 150, and Butler’s Ancient Atlas and Modern Atlas at Rs. 12 each, alongside one hundred copies of the Persian map of the world, fifty copies each of the Bengali and Nagari map of the world, and thirty copies of a Persian map of India.102 Less frequently, the GCPI’s correspondence and reports include references to the acquisition, distribution, or sale of globes. The published report for 1831 notes the purchase of a pair of globes, presumably from a local source, for a

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cost of Rs. 231.103 In March 1837, the Committee submitted a fairly lengthy list of instruments and books for purchase from England for a total sum of £932 and 2 shillings, of which amount £80.00 were meant for four pairs of globes at £20.00 each.104 Typically, the Committee acquired such objects in response to demand from the local committees, as in 1827 when the managers of Agra College wrote to the Committee for a pair of globes, maps and other instruments (that I discussed in chapter 3), or in 1838 when the Midnapore School in Bengal did the same.105 Of course, the arrival of globes in and of themselves did not mean that they were completely legible to their potential users, or even put into use, even though use of the globes had become a consistent part of the curriculum by the 1840s. A report for the academic year ending in 1844, for instance, with regard to the Gorukhpur School, notes “No one uses the books in the Library, or is competent to understand the Globes here.”106 Misrecognitions and non-comprehension are also very much part of the fate of objects on the move, such as the terrestrial globe! By 1836, flooded as it was by correspondence that “constantly takes places on the subject of books,” the GCPI delegated the task of procurement of books and supplies to the various local committees, and decided to not admit students “who do not agree to pay for the books and other things used by them in school.” An exception, however, was made with regard to “the library books, the maps, the globes, and other scientific apparatus which must always belong to the Institution.”107 The GCPI’s “global” labors received a boost when it came under the stewardship of a man whose work as historian, essayist, poet, Parliamentarian, and part-time colonial administrator has received much scholarly attention, but whose cartographic evangelism has hardly been documented.108 In September 1834, Thomas Babington Macaulay arrived in Calcutta where his tenure was for less than four years but whose impact was long reaching. As Law Member of the newly created Supreme Council for India, he helped draft an important penal code in 1837, but more relevant for the itineraries of the terrestrial globe that I chart in these pages, is the fact that he also produced the much-invoked “Minute” of 2 February 1835, in which among other things he famously ridiculed Indian astronomical and geographical knowledges as reducing English schoolgirls to laughter, as I have already noted in chapter 1. Also serving at the same time on the Committee was his brother-in-law (and member of the Bengal Civil Service since 1826), Charles Edward Trevelyan (1807– 86), who clearly played a crucial role in shaping Macaulay’s stance in the ongoing debate raging between Orientalists and Anglicists in colonial administrative circles, and who certainly influenced his caustic pronouncements on Puranic geog-

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raphy. Trevelyan’s prejudice was completely transparent, as laid out in a tract published a couple years later and aimed predominantly at a British readership: A revolution has already taken place in men’s minds. . . . The people are greedy for European knowledge, and crowd to our seminaries in greater numbers than we can teach them. What more do we want? Where would have been the wisdom of entertaining the 1,200 English students who besieged the doors of the Hooghly College with lectures on the absurdities of the Pooranic system of the earth? They already fully admitted the superiority of our system, and came on purpose to be instructed in it.109

Indeed, in the same work, Trevelyan dismissed more than two thousand years of Indic intellectual endeavor in words that echoed his influential brother-inlaw’s reflections from a couple years earlier: “[Its] history is made up of fables, in which the learned in vain endeavor to trace the thread of authentic narrative; its medicine is quackery; its geography and astronomy are monstrous absurdity . . . its religion is idolatry.”110 Under the sway of such opinions, the Bengal government replaced its hedged support for European useful knowledge— as we witnessed in the cautious endorsement of Wilkinson’s efforts in Sehore, or the dispatch of globes and such to Kotah— with outright embrace (albeit not without some pushback in the long run). In turn, the Dominion of Modern Earth formally received the blessing of the colonial state. Macaulay’s role in its arrival is reflected as well in the unpublished notes, opinions, and marginalia penciled across some twenty volumes or so of GCPI’s correspondence.111 In one such unpublished note he observed, “The importance of Geography is very great indeed. I am not sure that it is not of all studies that which is most likely to open the mind of a native of India.”112 In another, responding to his (Orientalist) colleague H. Shakespear regarding the publication of a Siddhanta text rooted in Ptolemaic astronomy, he jotted down, “We have too little money to afford any merely for the purpose of paying compliments to grown up persons who find out that the sun does not go round the earth.”113 All the same, Macaulay’s geographical enthusiasm and cartographic evangelism were always tempered by Protestant frugality and the general penuriousness that seemed to seize those who worked for the colonial administration. Thus, in response to Trevelyan’s suggestion that the Committee import twenty pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes from England, he responded on March 25, 1835, that while he agreed in principle with procuring English globes, he did not think it was necessary to have celestial globes on hand (“a knowledge of the precise positions of the fixed stars is by no means indispensable even to a very liberal Euro-

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pean education. I know many most [sic] enlightened English gentlemen who do not know Aldebaran from Castor or Pollux”). Accordingly, he sanctioned purchase of only two celestial globes alongside the twenty terrestrial.114 In October 1835, he complained about the price— Rs. 260— for a pair of eighteeninch globes that a colleague had proposed for purchase.115 A few months earlier on May 6, 1835, he responded to his colleagues regarding a particularly ambitious indent in this manner: To lay out £ 324 at once in globes alone, useful as I acknowledge these articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about £3,000 a year for all purposes of English education. One 12-inch or 18-inch globe for each school is quite enough; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools. Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year’s salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary for us to defer the establishment of schools. I would order nothing at present that is not absolutely necessary. When our means become larger, we may indulge in the purchase of beautiful and accurate instruments. But for a year or two, I would resolutely abstain. A twelve-inch globe for each schoolroom, and a few small globes for prizes ought to suffice at present.116

A twelve-inch globe for each schoolroom: we have come quite a ways from the earlier decade when few if any globes were available in most schoolrooms under the GCPI’s management. While in reality, schoolrooms across British India never did meet this goal, the aspiration is important to register, as was the case when the Agra Bank offered to make a donation (of Rs. 500) for the cause of native public education. Macaulay’s response in April 1836 is telling: It seems to me that we should not act wisely [sic] in throwing a present of this sort, not large in amount, yet very handsomely given, into the general fund and employing it to pay School-masters at Dacca or to buy stationery for Ghazipore. I think that it should be laid out in procuring something which, while it is of use, may also continue for a considerable time, to remind people of the liberal conduct of the Agra Bank. Two handsome globes for the Agra College would do exceedingly well.117

Alongside his contemporary William Bentinck, the governor-general who dispatched globes and other cartographic objects to the Maharau of Kotah

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around the same time (that I detailed in chapter 2), and anticipating GovernorGeneral Auckland’s presentation of “global” inkstands to Sehore pandits a few years later that I discussed in chapter 3, Macaulay is perhaps the highest-ranking colonial official whose life— briefly but luminously— intersected with the pedagogic travels of the terrestrial globe in nineteenth-century India. No discussion of the GCPI can be complete without considering the jewel in its suite of schools and colleges, an institution whose founding (possibly on the instigation of the Scottish nonconformist David Hare) preceded its own creation by half a decade. This is “the Vidyalaya or Hindoo College of Calcutta,” a shining example of native enthusiasm for terrestrial lessons that preceded (and exceeded) the colonial state’s investment in this domain. As one contemporary report has it, “The Institution is remarkable, as being the first which has been formed for English Instruction, Projected, Superintended, and Supported by the Natives themselves.”118 At planning meetings held in May 1816, apparently in the Calcutta home of Sir Edward Hyde East (1764– 1847), it was decided by the native elites gathered that in addition to the teaching of Bengali, English and arithmetic, the subjects to be taught would be “History, Geography, Astronomy, Mathematics, and in time, as the fund increases, English Belles Lettres, Poetry, etc.”119 The rules of the college, an institution categorically intended for the “sons of respectable Hindoos,” were approved at a meeting on August 27 by the subscribers to the fund that underwrote it, and stated that it would be made of two parts: a School ( pathsal), to be set up immediately, and an Academy (maha pathsala), to be founded “as soon as may be practicable.” In the former, students were to be taught English and Bengali reading, writing, grammar and arithmetic, while in the Academy, “instruction shall be given in History, Geography, Chronology, Astronomy, Mathematics, Chemistry and other Sciences.” The same rules also proposed a College Fund to be used among other things to purchase “a philosophical apparatus” for the institution.120 The institution opened its doors on January 20, 1817, with an entering class of about twenty boys, which within three months jumped to sixty-nine.121 Over the next century and more, Hindu College— placed under the GCPI’s supervision from 1824, and reorganized in 1854 as Presidency College (a name that it retains to this day) when it was thrown open to non-Hindus as well— became one of British India’s premier educational institution known as much for its academic excellence, as for its routine production of English-educated babus who constituted the bureaucratic and clerical backbone of the colonial state, and for its schooling of radicals and intellectuals of the bhadralok (“gentlefolk”) class who spearheaded everything from the so-called Bengal Renaissance to early Indian nationalism. Not surprisingly, much has been written about

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this college and its influence on Indian social and culture life and politics over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on this scholarship, I focus on the itinerary of the globe as it intersected with the life of this institution, especially in its early years. Thus, in 1828, about a decade after its founding, seven young Bengalis were awarded pocket globes as a result of their academic performance, much like in the manner of the fictional Apu whose good showing of himself in school resulted in his headmaster gifting him with one in Ray’s Aparajito. We even have their names (mangled though they may in the colonial rendering of them): Casipersad Ghoshe; Atulachandra Gangoli; Rajkishore Bose; Harish Chunder Doss; Crishna Hari Nandi; Crishna Dhou Mitre, and Abhinchunder Gangoli, among the earliest of young Indians— like the Maratha prince Serfoji in 1794 in distant Madras— to hold this master object of pedagogic modernity in their hands.122 At the same event, Goldsmith’s Geography was given as a prize to three students: Narasinha Chandra, Radhanath Mittre and Brijundre Mukherjee, all of the 7th class; and Keith’s Use of the Globes to Digumber Dey of the 5th class.123 Such a recognition was perhaps not surprising given the glowing report that H. H. Wilson, the distinguished Visitor of the college (despite his Orientalist predilections), sent to the GCPI about the accomplishments of the students of the senior class who were declared “well-versed [in geography], and having a very accurate knowledge of the outline of the globe, and the relative positions of all the principal tracts in every part of it. The leading facts that are taught by the problems on both the terrestrial and celestial globes, are perfectly familiar to them.”124 The fact that the college (or Vidyalaya) took such terrestrial lessons seriously is also apparent from the request it sent early in 1828 for Goldsmith’s Geography . . . . . . . 36 copies @ 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rupees 108 Geography for children . . . . . . . 20 [copies] @ 1/8 . . . . . . . . . . . Rupees 30 2 sets of large Maps of the 4 quarters, and 2 sets of large Maps of the Globe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Rupees 240.00 1 pair of globes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rupees 275 Classical Atlas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Rupees 80.125

A couple years later, pocket globes were once again supplied to the college, supplementing pocket globes that had been received earlier in the decade as a gift from a London-based philanthropic organization, the British India Society.126 But how about desk or standing globes for classroom teaching and demon-

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strations? As I already indicated, at the very founding meeting of the college, its subscribers decided to acquire at the earliest possible moment a set of philosophical apparatus. It is possible that the distinguished natives assembled at the meeting had attended the scientific demonstrations given with the help of these instruments when James Dinwiddie (on whom who I write more in a bit) was based in the city of Calcutta a decade earlier.127 It is also likely that these men learned of the importance of such instruments from their colonial patrons and friends, several of whom gathered in July 1819 at the Freemasons’ Tavern in London to form an association to be denominated the British India Society. Seizing upon Parliament’s command in 1813 to the EIC to annually invest in the promotion of useful knowledge and the “religious and moral improvement” of its newly-acquired subjects, as well as by the native elites’ manifest enthusiasm for English education (as witnessed in the creation of institutions such as Hindu College), the gentlemen gathered in the London tavern resolved to assist “the education of the native youth of India in the English and Oriental languages, and in the literature and science of Europe and Asia.”128 After a follow up meeting in May 1821 at which the Serampore missionary William Ward also spoke, the society was incorporated with the goal of effecting “the intellectual and moral improvement of the native inhabitants of British India and parts adjacent.”129 One of the first steps taken toward initiating this “improvement,” possibly on the instigation of Edward Hyde East, was the dispatch as a gift of a comprehensive array of philosophical instruments supplied by the London firm of William and Samuel Jones to Hindu College, whose enthusiasm for European science caught its attention, with the hope that a competent lecturer would be appointed who could appropriately demonstrate their varied uses. This generous gift included among other things, “a best finished and complete Tellurian, Lunarium and Planetarium packed in mahogany case,” price: £37, 16; “an improved Equatorial in mahogany case,” price: £47, 5; and “a Selenographic 12-inch globe in deal case” priced at £2, 12, 6. Most pertinently, as was frequently the case with philosophical apparatus at this time, the set also included “A Terrestrial 18-inch Globe (New Discoveries) mounted in high mahogany carved and turned frames varnished,” and “a Celestial 18-inch Globe mounted as companion to [the terrestrial globe],” priced at £7, 7 each.130 The EIC provided free freight for this weighty gift dispatched in six cases, and the instruments reached the East India Warehouse by January 1823 to be dispatched to Calcutta in early February. They arrived at their destination without a mishap by late July 1823, and were placed the under the care of James Thomason of the

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Civil Service until the college was ready to receive them with the appointment of a lecturer in experimental philosophy.131 At the time of the arrival of the gift, official documents noted that there were twenty-seven Brahmins and sixty-seven Sudra students enrolled in the college and studying arithmetic, geography, astronomy, natural philosophy, history and chronology.132 Sadly, however, the college had run into financial problems by this time (on account of “some errors in the first appropriation of the money, and the reduction of interest on public securities”), and its native managers turned to the government for help, especially for constructing a lecture room to accommodate the British India Society’s generous— but possibly untimely— gift. When the GCPI assumed joint supervision alongside native managers, it decided that the college ought to share its bounty with the newly created Hindu Sanskrit College (formally opened in January 1824), so that the students of the latter could also benefit from the lectures of the newly appointed professorship of natural and experimental philosophy.133 Its decision to do so was part of the Bengal government’s emerging strategy of “engraftment,” viewed as “the gradual introduction of European science into that seminary in addition to the study of the more useful and practical parts of Sanscrit literature.” As was noted in a report to the Court of Directors in London, “The measure of so far combining the Government and Native Hindu Colleges as to give them jointly the benefit of Philosophical Instruction was warmly advocated by the Committee as calculated to produce advantages of the most important description, particularly to the former.” The GCPI in particular was hopeful that such an exercise in engraftment— in which “men of European and Hindu learning” were brought together thus— would be mutually “beneficial,” but also neutralize the scandal resulting from the introduction of European science to pandits expecting to study their own sastras.134 As we have seen repeatedly in this book, globes and other such pedagogical objects were instruments of “stealth” and “surprise” for pursuing the grand project of useful learning, even while weaning the native away from what the Court of Directors referred to in February 1824— in a change of heart from their earliest Orientalist admiration— as “a great deal of what was frivolous, not a little of what was purely mischievous” in Hindu and Islamic texts.135 The Bengal government was so pleased with these developments that it sanctioned the expenditure of the hefty sum of £750 in March 1825 for the purchase from England of “a Library of select books, both scientific and literary,” and additional philosophical apparatus for the use of the Vidyalaya,” alongside providing funds for the rent of suitable premises for housing the apparatus that arrived from England.136 I have seen no specific discussion of how the globes that formed part of the

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British India Society bounty were engaged with by students and faculty of the Vidyalaya in subsequent years.137 The report of the annual examination held at Town Hall in early 1825 soon after the arrival of the objects notes that the senior most class was examined “in the use of the Terrestrial Globe, and in the elements of Natural and Experimental Philosophy . . . [they] exhibited considerable familiarity with the use of the Globe and the purport of various geographical problems, and some insight into the elements of different branches of experimental science.”138 The reports from these early years demonstrate the faith placed in material objects and visual empiricism to deliver “glimpses of truth,” especially because the subjects beings taught were so “novel and obstruse.” Nevertheless, the faculties were being prepared by such encounters “for perfect vision hereafter.”139 In subsequent years as well, despite periodic hiccups and complains, the “global” education of its students proceeded apace with the help of apparatus and instruments, with annual reports of the college submitted to the GCPI optimistically noting that the students excelled in demonstrating their knowledge of terrestrial lessons, the use of the globes, projection of maps, and the fundamentals of natural philosophy. Perhaps the most interesting comment in this regard is offered in a report of the twenty-fourth year of the college’s existence, when it was noted: Whilst so many Natives around us have been bewildered and terrified by the recent Eclipses, we have before us the diagrams and calculations of the youths of the Hindoo College, explaining the causes of these celestial phenomena, and shewing the exactitude with the times of their occurrence, their duration, extent, and every remarkable circumstance connected with them many be ascertained previously to the event.

Given that their minds had been thus “enlarged” and “exalted,” the GCPI concluded that such youths had every opportunity of overcoming “defects of national character, to which, of one kind or another, the inhabitants of all countries are subject.”140 The hopes of the GCPI in this regard were well founded: alumni of the college such as K. M. Banerjea, Rajendralal Mitra, and Radhanath Sikdar went on to become geographical enthusiasts in their own right, publishing textbooks, atlases and maps in Bengali, even contributing to the development of geodesy. As visual proof of such progress, the GCPI’s report for 1835 proudly included “A New and Improved Map of India for the Committee of Public Instruction by Sreenauth Ghose,” printed at the Oriental Lithographic Press, Calcutta.

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“The positions of the different Seminaries will be seen by a reference to the accompanying Map, executed by Sree Nath Ghose, a Student of the Hindu College.”141 These men, like so many others we have already met in the other provinces of British India, were important native foot soldiers in the growing Empire of Geography and the Dominion of Modern Earth. To counter mounting criticism of what was perceived as an over-emphasis on English education at the college at the expense of teaching (in) the local language, the managers of the Vidyalaya also established a patshala in the city in 1840 with an entering class of more than four hundred students. Although they chose to name it with generic Bengali word for an “indigenous” school, this was a modern institution whose curriculum included geography as a subject in the two senior classes.142 On the GCPI’s request, the managers also generated a set of recommendations in 1841 for a comprehensive curriculum for “Bengali Vernacular Elementary Education,” which included the mandatory reading of a geography text titled Bhogole Sutra and an elementary work in astronomy. They also deemed as necessary “a complete copy of School Atlas,” and “a pair of Globes.”143 The fact these cartographic objects became part of the aspirational horizon for vernacular education in Bengal by the middle of the nineteenth century is important to flag, although as we will see, globes with Bengali labels had to wait a couple more decades before being available for sale through the CSBS.144 At a public examination held in 1843, the boys of the senior most class of the patshala were probed, predictably, by a teacher from the Vidyalaya on their mastery of geography, and their responses were deemed “creditable except in the case of a few youths of mature age who could not explain the shape of the earth.”145 What such glowing official reports did not dwell upon at this stage is that the “enlargement” and “exaltation” experienced by these early generations of Hindu College students in the classroom also fueled in the extracurricular realm the fiery iconoclasm of a beef-eating and beer-embracing movement called Young Bengal with its dislike of Christianity— which worried missionary pedagogues— but equally categorical dismissal of all things that smacked of Puranic idolatry and Hindu orthodoxy, the latter causing considerable consternation among the most respectable of families in the city where the Vidyalaya was located. Instead, the GCPI put a good spin on such developments, even while congratulating itself for its stewardship of this elite institution: The consequence has surpassed expectation— a command of the English language, and a familiarity with its literature and science, have been acquired to an extent rarely equaled by any Schools in Europe. . . . Another generation

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will, probably, witness a very material alteration in the notions and feelings of the educated classes of the Hindu Community of Calcutta.146

GLOBAL CALCUTTA

Not least of the reasons for the importance of the Vidyalaya was because of the college’s presence in Calcutta, already nominated in 1781 by Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India (and Bengal), as “the seat of a great empire.”147 As capital of the Raj, it became over the course of the nineteenth century a city important next only to London in the globalizing British imperium. It was also a city peppered with all manner of schools, colleges, and academic institutions from the earliest moments of Company rule. No wonder it is the place to which young Apu heads, portable globe in hand, when he boards the train to become an urban modern in Ray’s Aparajito.148 At the very start of the colonial period with the growing British presence in and around Calcutta from the 1780s, globes were advertised in the earliest Anglo-Indian newspapers for the growing expatriate community but also likely targeting an elite native population that had grown in tandem with the EIC’s looming presence. Thus, Hicky’s Bengal Gazette advertised globes, telescopes, and microscopes among the other household effects of Johannes Matthias Ross to be auctioned off in Chinsurah on January 7, 1781.149 A decade or so later, the auction house of Burrell, Dring, and Forster advertised the availability of a pair of globes and orrery that belonged to one Captain Turner for sale in January 1791.150 A couple years after, another auction house in the city, Dring, Cleland and Co., advertised “a pair of very handsome large globes, upon Stands, by Adams,” although the price is not unfortunately mentioned nor is the size.151 Around 1812, the portrait artist Robert Home (1752– 1834) painted the Governor-General Lord Minto (in office, 1807– 13) seated at his desk in Calcutta and seemingly lost in thought as he holds what might well be a map. On the desk beside him, a terrestrial globe looms large against a window through which are visible a soaring pillar, palm trees, and the Hooghly River.152 Indeed, one of the most reproduced paintings from this period (attributed to Thomas Hickey (1741– 1824) and dated to circa 1790) shows John Mowbray of the Calcutta firm of Graham, Mowbray and Skirrow, also similarly seated at a desk littered with what look like accountant books and in conversation with his banian or native agent, while on the wall behind them hangs a large map on which the words “Bihar” and “Tibet” are visible, perhaps of significance to the firm’s business.153 By the early years of the nineteenth century thus, colonial

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workspaces and even elite home interiors began to be furnished with such cartographic objects, the very same ones that many Anglo-Indians disposed of on their return home to England, or on their deaths. Globes also became visible both materially and discursively through public lectures and demonstrations in these decades, adding to the desire value of such objects. The most famous of such lecturers who came through Calcutta was the Scotsman James Dinwiddie on whom a recent collective of scholars has recently produced a stellar study. From late 1794 to his departure from India in 1806, Dinwiddie was possibly the city’s first expositor of what Savithiri Preetha Nair calls “public science,” a role enhanced by his appointment in 1801 at the College of Fort William as its first Professor of Mathematical and Experimental Natural Philosophy.154 Dinwiddie also provided private lessons to select native elite, and one of them in the employ of the Raja of Nepal even sought proof from him for his claim “that it took twenty-four hours for the earth to turn around its axis,” a proof that the Scotsman might well have demonstrated by resorting to an orrery in his possession.155 In Dinwiddie’s wake, others also capitalized on his success in combining scientific learning with public entertainment. So, around June 1808, one Mr. Lathrop offered a lecture in astronomy on topics which included “Motion of the Earth; Objections to the Earth’s motion removed; Direct Proofs of its Motion; Phenomena explained; Vicissitude of Day and Night, and of Seasons; Great and small circle on the Globes; Longitude, Latitude, etc. Phases of the Moon; Lunar and Solar Eclipses, illustrated by the Lunarium . . . Structure of the Globe and its constituent Materials.”156 Although not specifically noted, a pair of globes was probably on hand for Mr. Lathrop to illustrate his lectures. Again, such lectures— held in this case in the private rooms of one Mr. Moore— were typically attended by Europeans of the city, but likely also attracted elite native men in their circle of acquaintances. Or, a couple decades later, the Bengal Hurkaru reported on Mr. Middleton’s public lecture on astronomy on June 10, 1834, which began with a discussion of “the figure of the earth,” in the course of which “the terrestrial Globe and the Orrery was then shewn to us, and we were informed, that the former was the figure of the earth and the latter an attempted representation of the planatory [sic] system.”157 Such early attempts to popularize science in the city anticipated the public lectures offered from the 1860s by the Belgian Jesuit priest Eugene Lafont (1837– 1908) and his colleagues at the St Xavier’s College.158 As in Madras and Bombay, as we have already seen, expatriates settled in Calcutta were among the first to introduce globes into school-like institutions, typically for European or mixed-race boys, that began to mushroom across the

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city from the closing decades of the eighteenth century.159 Thus, Hope and Masquerier’s Academy offered in 1789 a course in the use of the globes, alongside language instruction in English, Latin, French, and Persian, and practical training in navigation and merchant accounts.160 In 1811, Mr. Wallace’s Academy demonstrated the training students received in “the Classics, ancient and modern, Book-keeping, Geography, and the use of the Globes, Elocution, and History.”161 Similarly, the Dhurramtollah Academy, located in Dharamtala and famous in Bengali circles for having graduated the radical thinker and poet Henry Derozio (1809– 31), also included in its curriculum the use of the globes, although the claim of its most famous teacher, the Scottish nonconformist David Drummond (ca. 1787– 1843) that he was the first to offer the subject in Calcutta may not be quite accurate.162 The report of a public examination held at Sinclair and Halifax’s Academy in 1821 suggests the material presence of a pair of globes on which the pupils were tested— and thoroughly: Geography and Astronomy.— In this branch of learning were included two classes. The first of these undertook to describe the situation of any place required on the maps, and to solve any given problem on the terrestrial and celestial globes. They evinced an uncommon degree of aptitude in performing various feats on the maps, and also in explaining the definitions connected with the subject. Their geographical and astronomical performance on the globes, too, were such as to elicit general approbation. The work of the second class was confined to geographical definitions and solutions of problems on the terrestrial globe; and they certainly performed their part with equal credit to themselves. The problems were solved with all the confidence and readiness peculiar to long familiarity with a subject; and among these were some proposed by gentlemen who were present.163

By the 1820s, the use of the globes had become a standard part of the curriculum of other institutions catering specifically to European and mixed-race Eurasian boys such as the Parental Academic Institution and the Calcutta Academy.164 In Kidderpore, a Calcutta neighborhood which hosted the Bengal Upper Military Orphan School, the curriculum made them eligible for employment in the Surveyor General’s office and thus included the study of English, mensuration, trigonometry, modern and ancient geography, and the use of the globes; in 1822, a pair of eighteen-inch globes intended for the Surveyor General’s Office and for this school was estimated to cost about Rs. 300, not a mean sum in those days, but deemed necessary for “the instruction of the young men as for reference in certain Astronomical and many general questions.”165 And

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in 1841, the Loreto nuns from Ireland opened what would eventually become one of the city’s most prestigious pedagogical addresses, but catering in these early years to European and Anglo-Indian Catholic girls who were offered instruction in a curriculum not all that different from that for boys in “writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, with the use of the globes, chronology, history, French and plain and fancy needlework.”166 By the mid-1820s, schools in Calcutta established for the children of the indigent poor (both boys and girls) by organizations like the Calcutta School Society (founded in 1818 and in existence till around 1833) also provide terrestrial lessons including instructions in maps and the use of the globes, although most likely without the material presence of the objects themselves.167 To cite a couple examples, in January 1826, at the annual examination of the schools in and around Calcutta and whose student body included Hindu and Muslim girls, the senior class read from Pearce’s Geography, “and “readily pointed out places on the Map of the World.”168 Similarly, in 1827, at the annual examination of the Benevolent Institution— established a couple decades earlier around 1810, with a view toward providing elementary education for indigent Christian children— “nearly 180 boys, of many different nations [sic], were assembled in the school-room to be examined. The first class was examined in Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, and the use of the Globes, and the progress was such as to reflect great credit on the Master.”169 A year later, “the children amounting to 190 boys and 80 girls, were examined by Rev. J. Mack in the presence of a respectable company of Ladies and Gentlemen . . . in Geography, from Guy’s Geography, the Globes and Maps.”170 To liven the classes for his two hundred and more students at the Bhowanipore Institution, missionary John Campbell wrote off to London in 1838 “with an urgent request for maps of the world, globes, an air pump, telescope, microscope and a Magic Lantern with illustrations of natural history.”171 Rivaling the Bhowanipore Institution as a mission-run English school in the city was the General Assembly’s Institution, which opened in 1830 under the stewardship of the firebrand Alexander Duff (1806– 78), one of the most well known names in Bengal missionary circles in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and the third Scotsman (after David Hare and David Drummond) whose life and career gets entangled with Calcutta’s pedagogical life.172 From the start the school’s curriculum, rooted in English (unlike many other mission operations) and aimed very consciously at the sons of the Bengali elite, included courses in geography for both its preparatory and advanced students, premised on Duff ’s conviction that, “as the Hindoos possess stupendous systems of learning on all subjects— geographies, metaphysics, astronomies, etc.

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as well as marvelous theologies— all abounding with the grossest imaginable errors, and yet all claiming the same divine origin, and asserting the same title to infallibility— it follows that the inculcation and apprehension of any branch of useful knowledge must tend to shake their confidence in the truth of their own systems generally.”173 In a series titled The English Instructor that he authored and that was used in the institution— and that remained in print well into the 1860s and also circulated in Madras— Duff set out to “shake their confidence” by delivering terrestrial lessons which hooked the Empire of Geography to the Empire of Christ.174 Thus, the English Instructor III included an extended introduction to Modern Earth— using no less than the Puranic stronghold of Benares as the context— reaffirming that our planet was a globe and that “it does not stand upon anything.”175 By 1836, the boys of the senior class of his school were able to give a good accounting of themselves in front of a large assembly of respectable visitors, including Emily Eden, the governor-general’s sister (who we briefly encountered already in chapter 3), undauntedly tracing “the course of the great Gulf Stream on the terrestrial globe, and account[ing] for the change of its direction at difference places.” One commentator noted that this “was one of the most interesting exhibitions of the kind I ever experienced.”176 A decade later— years in which Duff ’s professional and personal life went through considerable tumult— one of his students (“entirely educated” in his institution) had mastered the lessons regarding Modern Earth well enough to have his essay anonymously published in 1849 in The Calcutta Review (also founded by Duff ). Titled “Physical Errors of Hinduism,” the author offered an indictment of his ancestral religion in a manner that would have done his mentor proud, relentlessly ridiculing in no uncertain terms every feature of the Puranic conception of Earth— its location on the head of a serpent; the distribution of continents and oceans on its (flat) surface, its reasoning for the occurrence of earthquakes and eclipses— and not sparing even the Siddhantic system of astronomy which had founded so many European admirers. The essay, however, saves it most pungent comments for Puranic conceptions on Earth’s shape. Basing its critique on interviews that its author apparently conducted among Brahman pandits and teachers in Calcutta, it noted the contradictory views regarding Earth’s form in the Indic tradition, and asks: But what can be plainer, than that the same thing cannot both be triangular and circular at the same time? The absurdity of upholding two such opposing theories seems to be felt by many a Brahman of the present day. . . . Need we here add, considering the wide diffusion of sound European knowledge

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among the Hindus, that both these suppositions, respecting the form of the earth, are utterly false; and that its real shape, as found by actual and accurate observations, is nearly that of a sphere, or globe?177

In and of itself, the critique is not new at all: it represents half a century and more of familiar colonial, especially missionary, polemics directed against Puranic thought. What is important though is that it shows how at least one “young native gentleman,” having received the terrestrial lessons delivered in a Calcutta mission school, subjected his own ancestral faith to this searing critique, based on his amateur ethnography: The sun of knowledge has begun to shine over the night-brooding soil of Hindustan. Light has begun to enter into the minds of her children. Neither the Brahmans nor their Shastras are now held peculiarly sacred. Men have begun to ask for evidence. What is then to become of its defenders— of the Hindu religion itself ?178

Duff must have been mightily pleased with his protégé, for he personally awarded him a prize “for the best account of the physical errors of Hinduism,” noting that these “errors” were elicited “from the lips of learned and intelligent Pandits in Calcutta; and it may be relied on as a faithful and present accurate account of the present state of science amongst them.” The author was in turned recruited by General Assembly’s Institution to teach another generation of young learners the new truths of terrestrial sphericity, among other modern lessons. What is not clear is whether he too— like Anand Masih— formally converted and turned his back on his ancestral faith, a likely outcome given the life trajectory of so many of Duff ’s protégés. Alexander Duff— and indeed other Anglicists in these early years— might well have been further empowered in his pursuit of cartographic and geographic evangelism because of the support that he received soon after his arrival in Calcutta from one of the most important intellectuals of colonial Bengal, Rammohun Roy (1772– 1833), also one of the most notable residents of the city from around 1815 until his departure for England in 1830. In his much-invoked letter of December 11, 1823, to Governor-General Lord Amherst, Roy called for “a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, with other useful sciences, which may be accomplished with the sums proposed by employing a few gentlemen of talent and learning, educated in Europe, and providing a college with nec-

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essary books, instruments, and other apparatus.”179 It is hard to believe, given the range of his interests and intellect and despite efforts by the donors and managers of Hindu College to distance him from their institution, that Roy would not have taken a look at the philosophical apparatus, including the pair of eighteen-inch globes, which arrived in Calcutta a few months before his impassioned appeal. It is quite likely that he himself possessed a pair in his house “furnished in English style” in the Maniktala neighborhood of Calcutta, although I have yet to find documented evidence of such an acquisition.180 In September 1821, the CSBS listed two thousand copies of “Ram Mohun Roy’s Geography” in the list of Bengali works, “more or less ready for press.”181 Even if this work did not eventually get published or used in Bengali schools, it might well represent the first native attempt at a textbook on this subject in colonial India (if we do not count Serfoji’s Devendra Kuravanji, the Marathi poem that I discussed at some length in chapter 2). This, then, takes me to the venerable Calcutta institution whose name has flickered across the pages of this book, and which arguably ensured the city’s preeminence in the growing Dominion of Modern Earth: the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS). Founded in 1817, the society remained unusual even after it spawned imitators, as we have seen, in other colonial cities (Madras, Bombay, Agra, even Penang), which struggled to survive after a few decades, or were absorbed by other bodies.182 Part of the reason for its endurance was that the CSBS drew on the financial support of evangelizing missionaries and modernizing natives (and not just Bengali, despite the society’s location in Calcutta), and also because of the financial support and patronage it received from 1821 from the government (several of whose employees served on its managing committee over the years) and the collaboration of metropolitan institutions such as the British India Society and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) which supplied it with books and other pedagogic aids.183 Early in its career, the society was also endorsed by twenty-nine pandits of Bengal who praised it as “a compact and glorious luminary,” which “by the Bhugol Britant, Digdurshan, Obhidhān, and other correct and instructive copy books, as by so many glorious rays, is gradually destroying the darkness of ignorance and introducing the light of knowledge.”184 Its works were produced in many different languages (in use in “the provinces subject to the Presidency of Fort William”)— Bengali of course, and English, but also Hindustani, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Oriya— and also procured for translation in other parts of British India, as we have seen. Its founding charter prohibited the publication or even “furnishing” of religious works, but it did not preclude “the supply

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of books of moral tendency, which, without interfering with the religious sentiments of any person, may be calculated to enlarge the understanding, and improve the character.”185 In other words: conversion by other means. Of course, as its name suggests, the CSBS’s primary interest lay in producing what was a novel artifact at first, the humble school textbook, a “sacred icon” of pedagogic modernity.186 Given the importance of terrestrial lessons in the emerging curriculum of schools in colonial Bengal but also over time elsewhere in British India, among the society’s earliest publications were books pertaining to geography (introducing in that process that novel word into the pedagogical lexicon of India).187 Indeed, the most influential books in this area for a good part of the nineteenth century were published by the CSBS whose network of agencies spread all the way from Peshawar in northwest India to Mangalore in southwest India to Burma and Penang in the east.188 These included works authored originally in Bengali by missionaries W. H. Pearce in 1819189 and J. D. Pearson in 1824,190 and prescribed in many schools across Bengal for several decades. These works and others published by CSBS over the decades resolutely advanced the cause of Modern Earth— and its twin, the Modern Sky— but as I have already noted in my earlier discussion, Modern Earth often rode into the colonies on the back of the Christian God, sometimes transparently so. For instance, consider Dialogue IV in (former Serampore missionary) Reverend William Yates’s bilingual schoolbook (in English and Bengali) first published by the CSBS in 1825: [ ] · For what purpose was the earth created? [ ] · To be inhabited; and millions of living creatures are rendered happy, in and every part of it. PUP · On what do you suppose the earth to stand? TUT · It does not stand upon anything— if it did, how could it move? Hear the poetical language of the ancients: ‘He hangeth the earth upon nothing.’ PUP · Does this globe, then, which we inhabit, continually hang, and move in space? TUT · Certainly it does, as well as the other planets. PUP · What an amazing power must it be which created them, which first set them in motion, and which still keeps them in their orbits! TUT · ‘God made the earth by his power— he established the world by his wisdom— and stretched out the heavens.’ PUP · Of what does the earth consist? TUT · Of land and water. PUP IL

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· Would not the earth be more beautiful if it was one smooth, extended plain, without hills and mountains. Do not the mountains disfigure it? TUT · By no means. Do you think the small particles of dust that fall upon common globes disfigure them? The mountains are no greater in comparison with the whole earth, than the dust to the globes; or the roughness of an orange.191 PUP

Invariably, in these early works, the very opening lesson is an introduction to terrestrial sphericity, sometimes explicitly denying the Puranic and the Ptolemaic (as in Yates’s text above), at other times more subtly as in this excerpt from Pearson’s work, also set in the form of a dialogue, a key pedagogic device that resonated with both European and Indic modes of learning: Lesson 1 Of the Shape and Size of the Earth Nityo-anundo [NA], addressing Porum-anundo [PA], inquires thus: O brother Porum-anundo, I have a great desire to learn from you some particulars respecting the earth: as far as you are able, therefore, be pleased to inform me. And first of all, I would ask, Of what shape is the earth? PA · I will tell you: the shape of the earth is globular, that is to say, round; yet not exactly so, since in those parts which lie north and south, it is a little flat, or indented. We may compare it to an orange. An orange, you know, at both ends is a little flat; so is the shape of the earth. NA · Well, you say the earth is round, what is the proof of this?

Porum-anundo goes on to provide the four standard proofs that were offered in Enlightenment geography for Earth’s sphericity, the lesson ending with reiterating these truths.192 Such works, when used in schools across the region (regardless of their affiliation) helped erode native attachment to the ancestral and the inherited, in the conviction of many a cartographic evangelist.193 Given that the Presidency administered from Fort William extended up the Gangetic valley into the former Mughal heartland, the CSBS also soon began to produce books in Hindi and Urdu. These included the bilingual A Compendium of Geography, Hindoostanee and English (1824), the adaptation in 1825 into Hindi of Pearce’s work, and the publication in Urdu in 1839 of Geography in Question and Answer: Mir’at al-aqalim. Alongside such textbooks, the society also printed geographical copybooks of which numerous copies were published in the early

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years. As the Serampore missionaries had discovered, it was not enough to present Modern Earth, and ask the native pupil to respond to questions such as “What is the shape of Earth?” “On what support does it rest?” and so on. To drive home such truths and ensure that they stuck, the child had to write and rewrite such foundational truths, only then could the teacher be sure that modern planetary consciousness had taken root.194 From early on, the CSBS also reprinted (in an adapted form “for the native”) key English works such as Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues which was translated in 1819 with eight plates engraved by Cashee Nath, and also dispatched to distant Madras to serve as a model for the MSBS’s Tamil translation (albeit unsatisfactory) undertaken by Caumayappa Mudaliar, as I noted in chapter 2. Indeed, from the 1830s, with the growing emphasis on English as medium of instruction, the market for works in that language also exponentially increased, and the society published geography titles, which endured for many decades— and were also translated into several Indian languages— by authors such as Horace Clift, M. W. Woollaston, and George Nicholls. The CSBS also provided an opportunity for native enthusiasts of Modern Earth, such as Krishna Mohan Vandopadhyay and Rajendralal Mitra, to write geography books, which historian Subho Basu has recently analyzed to show how they negotiated “the unsystematic racialist assertions” of the European prototypes that served as their model, even as they perpetuated a Hindu worldview.195 Even after the emergence of numerous other textbooks publishers across colonial India, CSBS publications continued to exercise enormous influence, as witnessed for instance by the geography works authored in the 1870s by Heinrich Ferdinand Blochmann, a professor in the Calcutta Madrasa. The CSBS’s cartographic evangelism also found expression in the publication and distribution of maps, atlases, and geographical charts, despite paucity of funds to do so in the early years.196 In 1821, it published two plates (five hundred copies each) of the first Bengali school maps. One of these showed the world in two hemispheres. Titled Bhugola No. 2, it was drawn by E. S. Montague (CSBS secretary), and engraved by Kasinath, “Casenath” (see fig. 5.9).197 As such, it was also the first such world map engraved in an Indian language and published in India, and served as a predecessor to similar maps that were published in the following decade in Tamil (1835) and Hindustani (1836), as noted in earlier chapters. The first thousand copies (of both plates) were sold out, almost immediately as per the society’s reports.198 Bhugola No. 2 was also appended to the second edition of Pearce’s geography primer Bhugola Brttanta and to J. D. Pearson’s Dialogues on Geography, Astronomy, etc, and there was steady demand for it over the next couple decades as a stand alone object as well.199 In the

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fiG. 5.9. Bhugola No. 2. E. S. Montague del, Casenath, Sc. Calcutta School Book Society, Calcutta, 1821.

words of one missionary teacher who used the version attached to Pearson’s schoolbook, he found the map useful precisely because it allowed him to point out to the children “the form of the earth, and the most important portions of the globe.”200 Indeed, in the absence of the material object in the form of the terrestrial globe in most Bengali rural schools at this time, this map— and another one printed by the CSBS in 1823 titled Bhugoler Chinha, “Geographical Signs,” also drawn by E. S. Montague and engraved by Kasinath (see fig. 5.10)— offered visual images of Earth’s sphericity.201 Bhugoler Chinha was appended to Pearce’s widely prescribed geography primer, and showed little ships on the surface of a spherical Earth, allowing the teacher in the classroom to illustrate one of the fundamental empirical proofs for the fact that our world is not flat. Such images came to be drawn in colonial geography books later in the century, as we have already seen, but the CSBS illustration appears to have been the first such printed in India. Not long after these pioneering publications, the CSBS printed in 1824 its Compendium of Geography, Hindoostanee and English, which concluded with a chapter titled “Questions for the Map of Asia,” and published seven hundred and fifty copies in 1827 of a world map in Persian prepared by James Thomason

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fiG. 5.10. Bhugoler Chinha. E. S. Montague del, Casenath, Sc. Calcutta School Book Society, Calcutta, 1823.

of the Civil Service.202 Over the next several decades, the society’s reports provided detailed inventories of wall maps and sheet maps published in Britain and the United States— of India (and its various provinces), England, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the world— that were available through its depository, as well as maps in Bengali, Persian, even Oriya, that it published. Reports of the 1860s also included special sections detailing various maps that had been commissioned and printed in Bengali and Oriya, several of them by Bengali mapmakers, especially for use in village schools.203 The society was undoubtedly the chief supplier of school maps for much of the nineteenth century— many imported from Britain as a 1874 report noted— although competitors like the Asian Lithographic Press, also based in Calcutta, had appeared on the scene by the 1820s.204

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The CSBS was also a pioneer in the supply and publication of the school atlas— an artifact that requires a deeper study than I am able to offer here— with the release of Tassin’s Atlas around 1836 which continued to be on its list well into the next decade.205 In the two-year period from January 1834 to December 1835, the society paid Rs. 1, 265.00 “in Lithographic and Copper-plate engravings for Atlases, Maps, etc.”206 In 1843, one hundred copies of the Cabinet Family Atlas were purchased from the United States, twenty-four of which were sold between 1845 and 1847.207 By the 1850s, its depository had sold several copies of Johnston’s School Physical Atlas and Chamber’s School Atlas.208 The society’s catalogue for 1865 included numerous maps and atlases, underscoring the growing educational market for such works, a market that the CSBS itself helped create and sustain.209 Indeed, as one CSBS author Blochmann observed in the 1870s in a “note to teachers”: Examiners have on several occasions made the remark that the acquirements of Native Students in Geography fall short of their acquirements in other subjects. . . . These short-comings arise from the way in which Geography is taught and learnt. The textbook is everything, and the atlas is neglected. But during Geographical lessons, the textbook is not at all required; each student should bring his atlas to school. A very fair atlas may now be had for Rs. 1– 4, and costs therefore less than the historical or mathematical textbooks required by the students. . . . The big wall maps are of great use, especially at the time of revising; but they can never replace the atlases. You might as well teach Arithmetic on the big board without giving boys slates. . . . This way of teaching Geography will ultimately save teachers and students a good deal of time. The immediate advantage gained is this, that it keeps the boys continually employed: they have no chance of listlessly staring, like so many dummies, at the big map, or of wasting time by having to go from their places, through crowded forms to the map in the farther corner of the class-room.210

Not of least significance— largely ignored by other scholars who have written about the CSBS— are the society’s “global” labors as it pursued its geographical enthusiasms under its founding charter’s promise of producing “materials useful in schools and seminaries of learning.”211 In April 1822, after having been contacted by the British India Society in 1821— the same London-based association which gifted the philosophical apparatus to Hindu College, including a pair of eighteen-inch globes, that arrived in Calcutta in July 1823— the CSBS put in a request for books, atlases and maps for its own library. The very first item on its wish list, however, was “a large packet of the smallest terres-

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trial globes, in common sealskin cases, on whose concave surfaces are depicted the stars of the celestial globe (Price 10 s to 14 s).” In January 1823, the society was informed that the requested articles had indeed been shipped out to Calcutta.212 The society thus was up to date with the new interest in pocket globes in England at this time, and also anticipated the supply of these by the GCPI to Hindu College later in the decade that I noted earlier in this chapter. The records of the government also indicate that the society was also experimenting with producing these objects in India, even daring to dispatch a locally made small orrery for the Directors’ edification in 1839. The orrery, we learn, was placed on display in the EIC’s library in London.213 In 1836, the CSBS annual report indicated that in the two-year period from January 1834 to December 1835, it had billed the Supreme Government Rs. 2, 538.00 in “the purchase of Globes, Philosophical Instruments and Books.”214 By this time, as I have already noted, thanks especially to Thomas Macaulay’s cartographic evangelism, the GCPI was a significant purchaser of these objects with which it sought to furnish the schools under its supervision and which were also acquired from Britain (when, to recall, the CSBS’s prices were deemed too high). Over the years, the annual reports of the society continued to show the presence of globes in its inventory. In its report ending in 1851, it advertised the availability of two pairs of “globes— handsome, 18-inch, mahogany high stands,” formerly priced at Rs. 250, now on offer for Rs. 150 cash for a pair.215 Even marked down, these continued to be on the inventory for several years.216 In 1856, despite the announcement of grants-in-aid to schools that sought to improve their stock of teaching apparatus in the wake of the educational dispatch of 1854, only one globe appears to have been sold although the society did a brisk business in the sale of geography text books as well as maps and atlases that very year.217 Undeterred by such poor sales, the CSBS annual report ending in 1863 announced— and this is a first for an Indian publisher, at a time when globes were still being imported from England— that it was supervising the manufacture of “English Globes, 12 inch in diameter, of teak wood with brass meridian and hour circle; Bengali Globes of similar dimensions and fittings.” Two year later, this project remained still in process.218 Despite this local initiative, in its report for 1864 and 1865, the society noted that it was continuing to purchase “Books, Maps, Atlases, Slates and Globes from Great Britain.”219 Over the course of the next two years, fourteen globes were further imported from England, as demand came in with sale of six globes in 1866 and eleven in 1867.220 In the 1870s, sales picked up further— possibly in response to the

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expansion of the education system in that decade— with the society recording further disposals of four globes in 1872 and twelve in 1873.221 Such poor showings were not for want of need (as we have already seen from the attempts made across Bengal to produce makeshift globes from materials ranging from coconut shell to cow dung), or enthusiasm. At the Calcutta International Exhibition— the grandest to date in British India with an estimated one million visitors— held in the city from December 4, 1883, through March 10, 1884, although education was not one of the priorities (despite the fact that organizers claimed that they were modeling themselves on the 1873 Vienna Universal Exhibition that I have discussed in the previous chapter), natives from different parts of India, especially Bengal and adjoining areas, did put on a good display of their pedagogic advancements with numerous geographical textbooks, maps, and atlases on show.222 I particularly note the display of “2 small terrestrial globes used in Bengali schools,” a terrestrial globe used in a zillah (or district) school from Gaya, and “a Bengali diagram to illustrate the diurnal and annual motions of the earth and the moon’s phases,” submitted by the Phulbati School, 24 Purgannahs.223 Not least, although there are no other details furnished, was a globe submitted from the village of Salgaria in Pabna district by one Soshimukhi Devi.224 This is quite likely the first time that a globe crafted by a female learner (or teacher) of terrestrial lessons in a rural context was deemed worthy enough of display in an international exhibition. Given Sarbojaya’s complete lack of enthusiasm for this proxy for our Earth as depicted in Ray’s Aparaijto with which I began this chapter, I think it is particularly fitting to bring to a close this discussion of Bengal’s place in the Empire of Geography and Dominion of Modern Earth with this singular achievement by a rural Bengali woman.

AFTERWORD: THE ENCHANTMENT WITH SCIENCE IN INDEPENDENT INDIA

In light of the foregoing, how then are we to rethink the “global” moments that punctuate Ray’s Aparajito in 1956, produced after Independence but directed by a man who was born, raised, and educated in colonial Bengal where he would have undoubtedly been a recipient of terrestrial lessons in his Calcutta school? Nothing in Ray’s extensively documented biography suggests an extraordinary enchantment with modern science in his early life, although he came of age in a city that was until the 1930s deemed “the capital of science in modern India.”225 On the contrary, he writes in his memoir of turning to the

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humanities after two years of science at Presidency College (a later incarnation of the Vidyalaya we encountered earlier in these pages), “barely surviving the onslaught of sines and cosines and the rude facts of physics and chemistry.”226 And yet the ten or so minutes of Aparajito in which young Apu’s life entangles with the itineraries of the terrestrial globe— a product entirely of Ray’s imagination with no precedent in the colonial novel that his film is based upon— surely pulsates with such enchantment. This “global” moment, I propose, is revelatory of a collective national unconscious in the decades leading up to and especially in the aftermath of Indian independence from British rule that came to privilege science in a manner that turned it into fetish, imbued with awesome powers and magical aura. Science, one distinguished nationalist insisted in 1937, is neither “a pleasant diversion and abstraction” but the “very texture of life.” Indeed, it was science alone that had the capacity to solve “problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, of a rich country inhabited by starving people.”227 These were the words uttered by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889– 1964) who soon after he became independent India’s first prime minister (in office, 1947– 64), launched a sustained program of commitment by the postcolonial state to science and technology in all sectors of society, indeed, life. Dams, steel plants, and atomic reactors became the new icons— idols, even— of the emerging nation-state, even as there was a dramatic escalation in “science education in schools and universities, the establishment of research institutes dedicated to specific areas of scientific and technological research, and the creation of state-funded elite institutions of scientific and technological education.”228 Many of Nehru’s fellow travelers and admirers shared in his belief that India’s fundamental problem was “lack of science.” This in turn meant that “the need for science” became “the most urgent and most palpable national need.”229 Thus, when the Christian headmaster in Ray’s Aparajito gifts science books to the young Apu who slightly later in the film as a gangly teenager without hesitation and unequivocally opts for “science,” it is quite symptomatic of such a Nehruvian sensibility. The Nehruvian statist vision was anticipated in his memoir of 1936 in which he wrote in words that have been frequently invoked: It is a futile task to consider the “ifs” and possibilities of history. I feel sure that it was a good thing for India to come in contact with the scientific and industrial West. Science was the great gift of the West; India lacked this, and without it she was doomed to decay. The manner of our contacts was unfor-

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tunate and yet, perhaps, only a succession of violent shocks could shake us out of our torpor.230

That a leading Indian nationalist would so readily concede that the West had an important, even necessary and indispensable, role to play in his country’s life, “shocking” it out of its supposed torpor with its precious “gift” of science, is ironical on many levels, but especially because it echoed a dominant colonial sentiment that hardened into ideology over the course of the nineteenth century. As Gayatri Spivak notes, this sense of lack on the one hand and plenitude on the other was at the root of the colonial episteme with its “planned representation of master and native (an opposition with a different nuance from the more familiar master-servant).” The Sahib (master) is always already the subject of science, yet it did not follow from this that the native is deemed a ready recipient. Indeed, as Spivak writes, “The manipulation of the pedagogy of this science is also in the ‘interest’ of creating what will come to be perceived as a ‘natural’ difference between ‘the master’ and the ‘native’— a difference in human or racial material.”231 Imperial pedagogy over the course of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth was punctuated by a racialized tug of war between the “needy” native— and his allies, frequently and ironically Christian missionaries— who demanded science, and a colonial administration which masked its reluctance in meeting this need by raising doubts about the capacity of its subjects (and their languages) for absorbing this all-powerful Western Thing. The enchantment of and with science in the subcontinent was born out of this charged contest between need and desire on the one hand, and denial and rejection on the other, which also accounts for what Shruti Kapila has recently referred to as science’s “soft landing” in independent India and “its usurpation in the service of an unapologetic national modernity.”232 Nehru had numerous nineteenth-century forbears— distinguished as well as less well known— who articulated a similar anxiety over “lack” and “need” going back to the earliest years of the nineteenth century. These included Raja Rammohun Roy who we met earlier in this chapter and whose letter to Governor-General Amherst in 1823 might well have been the earliest systematic articulation of this anxiety, an articulation that was also at the core of what comes to be called the Bengal Renaissance with its emphasis on scientific rationality as the key to overcoming lack and failure. These forebears also include men like Yesudas Ramachandra and his student Munshi Zakaullah who we briefly encountered in chapter 3 and whose participation in the Delhi Renaissance resulted in some of the earliest translations into Hindustani/ Urdu of

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scientific works in the middle decades of the nineteenth century; V. Krishnamachariar (who we met in passing in chapter 2) who produced Tamil science primers; and Dadoba Pandurang in Bombay whose cartographic labors I briefly discussed in chapter 4. Indeed, the conviction of all such “vernacular” popularizers of science— some of whom were also cartographic evangelists— across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth was that English alone was not the sole bearer of scientific knowledge and that Indian languages had the capacity to do so as well (admittedly after some revamping and retooling). As Syed Ahmad Khan— another distinguished science enthusiast— insisted in words that have become famous, “I should like to have this written in gigantic letters on the Himalayas for the remembrance of future generations.”233 One of the principal contentions of this book is that what I have broadly characterized as terrestrial lessons— a pedagogic introduction to Modern Earth (and its twin, the Modern Sky) delivered through cartographic objects such as the humble school globe— constituted the first exposure of the native child to modern science and scientific ways of thinking, what in Nehruvian vocabulary was referred to as “scientific temper.” Indeed, decades before distinctive subjects such as physics, chemistry or biology entered the colonial curriculum, the learning child acquired the first principles of scientific reasoning through lessons in the rotundity of Earth, its diurnal rotation on its own axis which accounts for the formation of night and day, its annual motion around the Sun which accounts for changes in seasons, and an introduction to the various known members of the solar system whose movements cause all manner of natural phenomena including the dreaded eclipse. These lessons were the essential foundation on which all knowledge was built once the learning child had proceeded beyond the three Rs, and it is through their learning that modern science entered the native classroom— for both boys and girls— in an uncontested manner at a time when the more reluctant and skeptical colonial educator hesitated over the risks of science education. Indeed, these terrestrial lessons constituted almost the only “science” the colonial school child who got past elementary studies— admittedly not a large percentage, given the high drop out rates— would have been exposed. These remain the primary means through which the Indian child who goes to school is fundamentally and irrevocably worlded to this day, and constitute also the foundational core of a good part of the curricula of what comes to be called people’s science movements in postcolonial India.234 And so, it is perhaps altogether not surprising that when it came to cinematically depict an image of a young Indian coming of age in national-historical time, that Ray resorted to the use of these foundational terrestrial lessons to world his protagonist on his journey toward the modern.235 This is the essential

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work performed by the terrestrial globe as it travels across the colonial threshold into the postcolonial moment: its very presence, if only for ten minutes or so on the silver screen, ensures and secures Apu’s status for the rest of the telling as a man of the world, even while and when he is not actively pursuing a career in science (in fact, on the contrary). That its very appearance in the film is one of the significant departures that Ray makes in a generally faithful adherence to Bibhutibhushan’s novel tells us what is at stake as India became a newly independent state and announces its arrival in the world as a nation committed to science and modernity. It may have been “lacking” in this regard in former times, but no more. The colonial educator, as we have seen, saw the terrestrial globe as an object of stealth, and also an artifact with which to surprise the native. In Ray’s postcolonial (Nehruvian) vision, it takes on yet another incarnation: as an instrument with which to shock his fellow Indian out of “torpor” and “decay” into the light of science.

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EPILOGUE

THE CONQUEST OF THE WORLD AS GLOBE

For if a flat Map be but pasted upon a round Globe, the farthest East and the farthest West meet, and are all one.1

In February 1995, a key research establishment in the nation’s capital, the National Institute of Science, Technology, and Development Studies (NISTADS), undertook an unusual socio-metric survey in order to evaluate the Indian public’s understanding of “science.” The survey was conducted across four areas of scientific knowledge including astronomy, cosmology, and geography. Of particular importance to the arguments I have developed over the course of the last few chapters is the fact that the survey began with ascertaining the public’s knowledge of Earth’s shape. This was the very first question posed to respondents, and their answers to this question also led the survey’s conclusions about the state of scientific temper prevailing in the nation. The published report declared that roughly three-fourths of Indians surveyed in 1995 “knew the correct shape of the earth,” and this “despite the absence of such notions in traditional structures.” Equally important, 100% of those surveyed from south-

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ern India said, “The earth is round,” and that 91.7% of students responded similarly. By contrast, only “49.3% of unskilled workers knew the correct shape of the earth,” as did 52.5% of “housewives,” or women who did not work outside the home. Not least, “a larger percentage of men [close to 80%] knew the correct shape of the earth as compared to women respondents [less than 60%],” and indeed 30% of women surveyed responded with “don’t know,” as compared to 10% of men. While the general conclusion of the survey was that “a high degree of exposure to the formal education system” increased the chances of getting the right answer (hence the high percentages registered by southern Indians, and by students), the role of mass media was important with 88.2% of newspaper readers, 85.6% of television viewers, and 81.2% of radio listeners coming in with the correct answer. In particular, the survey concluded that the state-run television network Doordarshan with its rotating globe logo played an important role in this regard.2 The year 1995 was not the first time that NISTADS conducted such a survey, nor the last. The range of questions included not just ascertaining people’s knowledge of our planet’s (correct) form, but others that followed from this gatekeeping question, including their understanding of its diurnal motion on its axis and its annual motion around the sun, the formation of eclipses, and so on. Such questions, I have argued, are foundational to the pedagogic formation of planetary consciousness centered on Modern Earth. The question regarding Earth’s shape, however, always led the surveys. Over the years— from 1989 to 2007— there was an incremental increase in the percentage of people polled who knew “the correct shape of the earth,” with 81.8% responding with the right answer in 2007, thus confirming the scientists’ theories about growing literacy rates and the role of mass media in consolidating the truth of terrestrial sphericity.3 These surveys were also part of a movement (traceable back to the Nehruvian period’s enchantment with science, but clearly with roots extending deep into the colonial past) called “people’s science,” itself by no means a homogeneous set of concerns but one that was at its core directed “to popularize scientific knowledge among the masses; to develop a scientific outlook among the masses; [and] to challenge the forces of supernaturalism, obscurantism, and superstition.”4 Versions of such a movement, variously inflected to reflect national needs and desires, have emerged in every part of the modern and modernizing world, including, of course, Britain.5 In concluding this book, which has been fundamentally about the colonial nineteenth century over the course of which a European preoccupation with our planet’s sphericity became an Indian concern as well, I invoke these NISTADS surveys from the closing decades of a subsequent century because they enable

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me to forefront several of my arguments and assertions. First and foremost, it is important to note that the very first question with which these surveys start is the familiar “What is the shape of Earth?” This question, I have argued, is a foundational gatekeeper of pedagogic modernity premised on knowledge of terrestrial sphericity ushered into India by a colonizing and globalizing empire. There is only one correct answer to this question. Getting it right allowed the responder in British India to cross over a key threshold with the status of a knowing modern. And so it remains as well in independent India, even after the formalities of British rule have been shed and when the state has invested more than its colonial predecessor in the education of its citizenry. Over the course of the last few decades, for well-meaning enthusiasts of and for people’s science in and outside the government, the state of the nation apparently improves in tandem with the improvement in the percentage of its citizens who know that “the correct shape of the earth is rotund.” There is no interrogation of why this question is necessary, nor with the endless pursuit of the correct answer: it just is.6 Such is the foundational nature of the question. So much so, as I underscored earlier, in India’s numerous languages, the subject and discipline that is called geography (or some variant) in most European languages, “Earth writing,” is translated as bhugol, “Earth sphere.” As this paradigmatic useful knowledge is swept in from the colonizing West, its very name seeks to underscore Earth’s sphericity as the foundational terrestrial lesson to be drilled into the native and Indian mind. Second, the NISTADS surveys did not merely collect people’s knowledge but placed a value judgment on this. Thus, responses which read, “Round like an orange, slightly flat at the poles, like a ball, egg, lime, apple,” were deemed “scientific,” and those that were returned as “flat, very big, square, triangle, green, long and broad; like a house, crooked, differs at places, high, cold, of varied shapes, of sand and mud, good deep, beautiful, longish towards east, west, its shape is ever changing” were labeled “unscientific.” At the same time, the 1995 report was quick to note that these “unscientific” explanations were “based on intuition and were secular in nature.” The surveying scientists were particularly keen to note, “extra-scientific explanations were missing altogether.” “Extrascientific” in this report— as in the others— is code for religion and faith. One has a sense when reading these reports that even if the good folk polled were unscientific in their notion regarding Earth’s shape, at least they were secular and that comes across as something of a relief to the commissioners of these surveys. Not least, perhaps the most striking aspect to these surveys is not just the data collected, but also the place from where it was collected. Every six years

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beginning in 1989, the NISTADS team traveled from Delhi to Allahabad, one of the holiest of Hindu pilgrimage sites and the venue for the Kumbh Mela and the Ardh Kumbh Mela, to document what they presented “as the confluence of science and people’s knowledge.” Arguably, the Kumbh Mela remains to this day the most spectacular mass display of Puranic Hinduism, and the largest gathering at any one spot of Hindu devotees and Pauraniks, teachers and preachers. What better place could there be to ascertain at one swoop and sweep the extent to which “science” has taken hold of and in the modern citizenry? That between 75 and 80% of the people polled at this holiest of holy Hindu moments could and did respond that Earth was round— when the very texts that underwrote the faith they espoused declared otherwise— was clearly a triumph of science over (Hindu) religion, the fervent hope come true of every colonial pedagogue, missionary, and native cartographic evangelist in the previous two centuries. Had what Lancelot Wilkinson once colorfully referred to as the “trash of the Purans,” and the Serampore missionaries and their brethren as “the folly of idolatry,” been obliterated at long last, and the Dominion of Modern Earth come to finally reign?

OF GODS AND GLOBES: PUR ANIC INSURRECTIONS

It is not clear if any member of the NISTADS team visited the bazaars that inevitably spring up at events such as the Kumbh Mela where among other things would have been on display colorful prints of Hindu deities. Scholars of popular visual culture have documented the enormous resurgence from the later decades of the nineteenth century of these printed icons without which modern and contemporary Hinduism is impossible to conceive. These industrial-age “god posters” have helped the ancient deities of this hoary faith become nationally familiar, a common look for them standardized across the length and breadth of this vast land in a manner never before in the religion’s complex history over two thousand years. Most pertinent for the arguments of this book, many of these so-called god posters make plentiful use of maps and globes to enable and ease the passage of Hindu gods into the scientific modern.7 To cite— and show— a few examples from a plethora of such images, figure 6.1 is a late nineteenth-century, possibly early twentieth-century, print of Varaha, the boar-god and third incarnation of the Puranic Super God Vishnu, printed by a publisher who made such god posters famous across colonial India. As recounted in the most dominant of the Puranas and as known to the Hindu

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fiG. 6.1. Varaha avatar. late nineteenth century (?). Karla-Lonavla: Ravi Varma Press. Mass-produced chromolithograph.

devout, once upon a time in the cosmic past, Vishnu took the boar form in order to rescue Prithivi, the Goddess Earth imagined as female and helpless, from the clutches of the demon Hiranyaksha who had spirited her away to the depths of the ocean. The printed poster shows a blue-gray Varaha— half man, half boar— emerging from the primeval waters, his four hands bearing the standard symbols associated with Vishnu. He is gloriously adorned in jewels, a crown atop his head. But arguably the most striking feature of this poster is the beautiful terrestrial globe perched on his tusks, the landmasses and oceans marked in astonishing detail. As importantly, the globe is centered on the Indian subcontinent, its peninsular outline conforming to modern cartographic science’s determinations rather than to Puranic conception of the same space as “Bharatavarsha.”8 The poster seems to suggest that not only is Varaha rescuing Earth on this primeval mission, but “India” as well. From the perspective of the long representational history of the cosmic act of Varaha rescuing Prithivi, a history that stretches back to the early first millennium Ce from when the first lithic monuments depicting the event have survived (see, for example, figure 6.2), the poster marks a fundamental departure. Prithvi is not shown in her conventional manner as a female divinity: beautiful, demure, and obviously in awe of the immense male animal-god who saved her from the wicked demon. Instead, her sensuous, sentient, and obviously female body is unambiguously replaced by the inanimate spherical form of the gridded terrestrial globe, the proud invention of the relatively recent science of modern cartography. Puranic cosmology and scientific geography coexist seamlessly and effortlessly with no seeming discomfort over their essential incommensurability, even hostile relationship, over the past hundred years and more before this poster was printed. In another poster printed in 1953— just a few years after Nehru became prime minister and committed himself to turning India into a secular place of science and technology— the Goddess Earth herself puts in an appearance, and in the company of the terrestrial globe. Titled in English as Bhoodevi, the print shows Earth as a sensuous, sentient, four-armed goddess, and as a terrestrial globe captured within a graticule of latitudes and longitudes in which the peninsular outline of India is clearly outlined (see fig. 6.3). Here, as in figure 6.1, Puranic belief and modern scientific and cartographic knowledge seamlessly coexist side by side within the same frame. Indeed, if we are to go by the title of the print, the viewer is called upon to see the gridded globe itself as Bhoodevi, “Goddess Earth.” In fact, it is not just Varaha or Bhudevi who comes to be explicitly associated with the terrestrial globe and the outline map of India, but other gods of the

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fiG. 6.2. Varaha rescuing Prithvi (Earth). Late fifth/sixth century AD. Sandstone sculpture, Eran, Madhya Pradesh. Photograph courtesy of American Institute of Indian Studies, Gurgaon.

fiG. 6.3. M. Ramiah, Bhoodevi (Goddess Earth), 1953. Madras: R. Ethirajalu & Sons. Mass-produced chromolithograph.

Hindu pantheon as well. They too are carto-graphed, as indeed the new goddess of the nation, Mother India herself.9 Thus, in a beautiful print titled Bansiwala, “the flautist” (see fig. 6.4), that all-important deity Krishna sits firmly on a terrestrial globe on which, once again, the mapped shape of India (its geobody) is distinctly outlined, his feet resting on a lotus suggestively placed at its southern tip. In all such prints, going back to the earliest years of the twentieth century and continuing into the present, the divine bodies of Hinduism’s many gods are unambiguously locked into the geo-body of the emergent nation, itself a product of colonial and scientific cartography, as I have discussed elsewhere.10 Such pictures suggest that modern mapped knowledge is hijacked to ensure the survival of the gods rather than their exile, even as the gods themselves are used to popularize, especially in the colonial period among a largely illiterate populace who did not go to school and learn their terrestrial lessons, the image of Earth as an impersonal spherical globe rather than only a sentient being. In other words, rather than modern science banishing the pesky Puranas, as the cartographic evangelist had fervently hoped over the course of the long colonial period, Puranic knowledge becomes useful for disseminating pedagogic modernity’s planetary consciousness. In turn, Hinduism’s ancient gods themselves are ontologically transformed. Rather than freewheeling deities gadding about an uncharted cosmos or wandering around Bharatavarsha and Jambudvipa, they now come to be cartographed, their bodies hitched to the terrestrial globe, and pinned (down) to the outline map of “India.” An entirely novel and innovative way of seeing these gods as earthbound carto-graphed divinities is thus inaugurated in the subcontinent. Most consequentially, through such a visual and cartographic act, Hindu gods are transformed into Indian gods, the geo-body of India nationalizing their divine bodies. With the help of modern cartographic instruments, Hinduism’s ancient deities, rather than becoming irrelevant or redundant, are rejuvenated as members of the emergent nation’s geo-body, lending it their aura, their powers, and, most importantly, their divinity. Correspondingly, the territory of India is sacralized, transformed from a geo-body on the impersonal face of the terrestrial globe into a hallowed land, a punyabhumi specially favored by the gods themselves. Denis Cosgrove has observed that the terrestrial globe with its geometric grid of latitudes and longitudes “universalizes space, privileging no specific point . . . extend[ing] a non-hierarchic net across the sphere.”11 Yet, in these god-posters, India appears as the gods’ chosen land, centered as these are on the outline map of the nation, which frequently ap-

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fiG. 6.4. Bansiwala (the flautist) Mid-twentieth century (?). Artist unknown. Publication information unknown. Mass-produced chromolithograph.

pears as the only territory on the globe’s surface, and associating as they do the divine bodies of these ancient deities with the modern nation’s geo-body. “The program of the Enlightenment,” wrote Horkheimer and Adorno famously, “was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.”12 Yet the contrary manner in which scientific cartography is deployed in the proliferating god-pictures of (Hindu) India demonstrates how the European Enlightenment project is undone at its (post)colonial address by the revival of old myths and the return of fancy. Rather than heathenism being demolished as many a cartographic evangelist discussed in these pages zealously hoped, the gods come back even more realistically, exuberantly, and potently, transformed from sectarian “Hindu” deities into nationalized “Indian” divinities through the mediation of the very scientific knowledge that ought to have banished them from the lives and livelihoods of their devotees.

THE BURDEN OF THE HUMBLE SCHOOL GLOBE

Puranic Hinduism undoubtedly thrives in modern India, not least nourished by forces of a resurgent Hindu nationalism. This, however, does not mean that Modern Earth is inconsequential; on the contrary. Thanks to the work of what I have called pedagogic modernity and its principal agents— the eager expatriate, the zealous missionary, the educated native, the colonial state, and its successor, the nation-state— the Empire of Geography does flourish in its Indian province, using the evangelism of modern cartography to establish the Dominion of Modern Earth. But like all empires, it is a messy affair indeed, riven by many counter-flows and insubordinations, and populated by a variety of subjects ranging from diehard foot soldiers to adherents who feign obedience even while harboring many a contrary belief, and outright rebels. It has to be underscored that as late as 1995, nearly two centuries after Modern Earth sought to establish its dominion in India, nearly one quarter of those polled in Allahabad by the NISTADS scientists declared the shape of our planet to be “flat, long, uneven, rectangular.”13 And lest we think that this is a particularly postcolonial, or even Indic, proclivity, all one has to do is visit the website of the Flat Earth Society to remember that the naysayers who have chosen to rebel against Modern Earth are an international lot with a core constituency in the very heart of the modern West.14 “In a secular multicultural age,” writes philosopher of science Sheila Jasanoff, “the image of the Earth is the nearest thing we have to an icon, a universal

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common property with shared meaning and, for many, spiritual resonance.”15 One of the goals of this book has been to demonstrate that such an understanding of our Earth as an iconic spinning globe is in fact hard-won, and is by no means free of dissonance. The work of the terrestrial globe in modern India, I have sought to demonstrate, is almost the same as in modern Europe but not quite.16 Complex and complicated processes for adopting, accommodating, rejecting, or deflecting Modern Earth were unleashed. Thus, while Paramanand’s entanglement with Mrs. Sherwood’s “balls of silk” led him to formally renounce his ancestral faith and become a Protestant preacher albeit with many a slippage that cost him dearly, and where Apu’s portable globe propelled him on his journey into urban secular modernity, Serfoji’s interactions with the object did not necessarily pit the inherited against the planetary consciousness he imbibed from modern cartography. On the contrary, the Raja learned to coexist with multiple knowledge systems, even flourish and innovate as a result, as did the many “global pandits” who I have considered here. Tugging at the edges of this book are also Sai and Anandi— and other young women like them— for whom an encounter with “this glorious orb” produced “a glimmer of strength. Of resolve,” and to strike out and forge new paths away from patriarchies and patrimonies alike. These life stories among others that I have explored in this work suggest that there is no single track to the formation of planetary consciousness centered on Modern Earth materialized through an enlightened encounter with its miniaturized and portable proxy. “Stories and objects share something, a patina. . . . Perhaps patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible. . . . But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing.”17 In recollecting the stories of these individuals living out their lives in different parts of colonial and British India and in different contexts as they came to encounter what I have named as a master instrument of pedagogic modernity, I hope to have also “enlivened” the terrestrial globe with its own “positive productive power.”18 I have heeded its call— sometimes loud and clear from the archives of empire, at other times distant and dissonant— and followed it where it has led me to lived lives that were sometimes triumphant, at other times tragic. As I follow its tracks and traces in these archives, I have done so with the conviction that even the humblest of things— like the school globe— has the capacity to enable consequential histories. A few years ago, the critical theorist W. J. T. Mitchell asked, “What kinds of objects do empires produce, depend on and desire? . . . What would it mean to think of empire in terms of a broad range of objects and object types? What are

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the objectives of these objects, their role in constituting forms of objectivity and object lessons?”19 In this book, I have consciously sought to entangle the histories of several empires— the globalizing British imperium, of course, but also the dominions of Christ and science, and not least the Empire of Geography— with the travels of a single object that they variously produced, depended upon, and desired: the terrestrial globe, especially in its incarnation as a seemingly commonplace pedagogical instrument, as it goes about its magnificent work of providing a veritable “synthesis of the world,” a cartographic encyclopedia and library.20 Humble though the school globe, it has been burdened from the start of its modern journey with a mighty and consequential task: that of worlding the young child— of putting him in his place on Planet Earth— by inviting him to abstract himself from dwelling on its surface and instead assume a godlike Apollonian vision from above and away. And yet as the ancients knew so well, and that we moderns have largely chosen to ignore, aspiring to a god’s-eye view comes with its own risks and penalties. One recalls Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s injunction in 1762: “In general, never substitute the sign for the thing except when it is impossible for you to show the latter, for the sign absorbs the child’s attention and makes him forget the thing represented.” Faced with the impossibility— at least before the 1960s and the age of space travel— of showing the Thing that is Earth, countless numbers of teachers and others instead turned to its fabricated and portable proxy, the school globe (or its makeshift equivalents), in order to teach the gatekeeping lessons of terrestrial sphericity and modern planetary consciousness. The result? “Thinking he is being taught a description of the earth, [the child] learns only to know some maps. He is taught the names of cities and of rivers, which he does not conceive as existing anywhere else but on the paper where he showed them. I remember having seen somewhere a geography text that began thus: ‘What is the world?’ ‘It is a Cardboard Globe.’ Such precisely is the geography of children.”21 From Mighty Earth to Cardboard Globe: if that is deemed the fate of our planet in the writings of one European Master, another end awaits it in the hands of one of his postcolonial progeny, perhaps the most mischievous of them all, the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose most famous protagonist Saleem Sinai, the paradigmatic “Midnight’s Child,” born at the very moment that his nation too was born on August 15, 1947, and growing up in a strife-ridden Bombay, addresses his principal female interlocutor and asks, Padma— did you have, when you were little, a world of your own? A tin orb, on which were imprinted the continents and oceans and polar ice? Two cheap

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metal hemispheres, clamped together by a plastic stand? No of course not; but I did. It was a world full of labels: Atlantic Ocean and Amazon and Tropic of Capricon. And, at the North Pole, it bore the legend: made as enGland. By the August of the nodding signboards and the rapaciousness of the Narlikar women, this tin world had lost its stand; I found Scotch Tape and stuck the earth together at the Equator, and then, my urge for play overcoming my respect, began to use it as a football. In the aftermath of the Sabarmati affair, when the air was filled with the repentance of my mother and the private tragedies of Methwold’s heirs, I clanked my tin sphere around the Estate, secure in the knowledge that the world was still in one piece (although held together by adhesive tape) and also at my feet . . . until, on the day of Nussiethe-duck’s last eschatological lament— on the day Sonny Ibrahim ceased to be Sonny-next-door— my sister the Brass Monkey descended on me in an inexplicable rage, yelling, “O God, stop your kicking, brother, you don’t feel even a little bad today?”And jumping high in the air, she landed with both feet on the North Pole, and crushed the world into the dust of our driveway under her furious heels.22

A small tin orb, held together by plastic and scotch tape, kicked about like a football, ultimately crushed, the words made as enGland imprinted across its North Pole— where the furious heels of a girl child lands— disappearing into the dust: an allegory for the inevitable fate of all man-made empires, be they territorial or epistemological. This as well is an object lesson demonstrated by the circulation elsewhere of this master instrument of pedagogic modernity.

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IN GRATITUDE

A book of this length does not happen overnight and without considerable help from numerous individuals and institutions, and it my great pleasure to acknowledge my gratitude in print. The book’s origins go back to 2007– 8 when I spent a delightful year as a Guggenheim Fellow at the British Library in London and in Oxford. A Shivdasani Fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in Spring 2008 enabled me to present some of my early findings, and to its staff and especially its then Director Professor Gavin Flood I am very grateful for this opportunity. A fellowship from the National Humanities Center in 2013– 14 provided the cool sylvan context within which an earlier version of the manuscript was drafted, and to its fantastic staff, especially Cassie Mansfield and the talented librarians, and my fellow fellows, I owe huge thanks for good conversations and provocations. In the interlude between original conception and final drafting, I presented various sections from the work in many venues, including the University of Pennsylvania, Heidelberg University, University of Oslo, Yale University, Dartmouth College, University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton. In the summer of 2011, I was in residence at the l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and I owe a deep debt of gratitude to

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Ines Zupanov for making this possible. To colleagues and friends who attended all these events and talks, I am very grateful indeed for their insights and interventions, which allowed me to finesse various aspects of my argument. A Mellon Faculty Book Manuscript/ Digital Publishing Grant from Duke’s Franklin Humanities Institute and a grant from the Arts & Sciences Council Committee on Faculty Research (which also helped subvent the publication of this book) enabled me to produce a digital exhibition, Going Global in Mughal India, that I referenced in chapter 1, and which also allowed me to lay out— pictorially and digitally— the rudiments of the argument I develop in these pages. Along the way, conversations and discussions with numerous individuals pushed me to further deepen my own ideas and help with critical references. In particular, I wish to thank in this regard Nick Barnard, Shefali Chandra, Matthew Edney, Ken George, David Gilmartin, Francis Herbert, Seth Koven, Lynn Hollen Lees, John Martin, Sy Mauskopf, John Mathew, Chris Minkowski, Khaja Moideen, Mary Pedley, P. Perumal, Indira Peterson, Murali Ranganathan, S. R. Sarma, Sujit Sivasundaram, Sylvia Sumira, T. V. Venkateswaran, and Richard Fox Young. To two of my graduate students, Ketaki Pant and Kena Wani, I am immensely thankful for their helpful feedback as well as numerous conversations over the years. The enormously talented library staff at Duke, in particular Kelly Lawton, Edward Proctor, Lee Sorensen, and everyone in interlibrary loan, deserve special mention for timely help with pesky references and for their unstinting and cheerful assistance, no matter how difficult my requests. At the University of Chicago Press, my commissioning editor, Mary Laur, has been a pillar of strength, not to mention patience! Two anonymous readers generated enormously thoughtful responses to an earlier draft of this work, and I am in debt to them for their effort on my behalf. My late “cousin-uncle” Srinivas Aravamudan was dean of the humanities at Duke when I first started writing up some of the material: his early encouragement and support for this project was a shot in the arm while I was struggling with various arguments of the book. I only wish he had lived to see its publication. He is much missed by me, and by other members of the Duke community. Not least, I could not have started or completed this book without the undying support and encouragement of my partner in life and scholarship, Rich Freeman, to whom I dedicate this work with all my gratitude for sharing his “global” life with mine.

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NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. Secretary, Sociedad Geografica de Madrid, as quoted in Capel 1994, 72. 2. Desai 2006, 18. 3. Desai 2006, 323. 4. See esp. Cosgrove 2001. 5. Findlen 2013. 6. My book builds on scholarship on the history of science and technology in colonial India such as Arnold 2008, 2013a; Prakash 1999; Chakrabarti 2004; and Raj 2006, and on what Manu Goswami calls “colonial pedagogical consolidation” (Goswami 2004, 132– 64), even while pursuing an object-centered inquiry focused on a single and singular artifact. 7. My intentional use of the term “native” throughout this text captures the range of meanings teased out by Raymond Williams 1983, 215– 16. 8. I discuss the concept of pedagogic modernity in the next chapter, but note here that I follow David Lusted in my understanding of pedagogy as “the process through which knowledge is produced,” and as “the transformation of consciousness that takes place in the intersection of three agencies— the teacher, the learner, and the knowledge they produce” (Lusted 1986, 3). See also Salvatori 1996. 9. Cormack 2009a, 29. See also Bachelard 1964, 232– 41. The most exhaustive argument on

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“spheropoesis” as foundational to human thought has been made by Peter Sloterdijk who writes, “The affair between occidental reason and the whole-world unfolded and exhausted itself in the sign of the geometrically perfect round form, which we still label with Greek ‘sphere,’ and even more widely the Roman ‘globe’” (Sloterdijk 2014, 45). 10. Garwood 2007. See also Russell 1991; and Gould 1994. 11. Wood and Fels 1992, 5. The authors add, “As such it is something that little kids have to learn, not something they can figure out for themselves” (ibid.). 12. Pratt 2008, 15– 36. 13. Spivak 1999, 212. For an exemplary instance of such “worlding,” consider G. K. Chesterton’s (ironic) poem “Songs of Education: Geography,” with its opening verse: The earth is a place on which England is found, And you find it however you twirl the globe round; For the spots are all red and the rest is all grey. (Chesterton 1950, 100– 101). 14. Pickles 2004. 15. Schmitt 2006, 351, emphasis added. See also Sloterdijk 2014, 765– 959. 16. Gruzinski 2010, 38. Gruzinski quotes from the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary and naturalist José de Acosta. 17. Said 1994, 7. The scholarship on the history of geography as a global knowledge formation is vast albeit largely limited to Europe and the United States, but see esp. Godlewska and Smith 1994; and Livingstone 2003. 18. “What could, in Victorian eyes, surpass geography— that queen of imperial sciences which, in times of peace, was the continuation of politics by other means?” (Raj 2006, 185). On the active seeking out of useful knowledge by (some) native elites in British India, see Bayly 1996, esp. chap. 6; and Raj 2006, esp. chap. 5. 19. Heidegger 1977. See also Arendt 2007; Szerszynski and Urry 2006; W. J. T. Mitchell 2011. 20. Quoted in van der Krogt 1993, 338, emphasis mine. Cf. Jacob 2006, 52. 21. Quoted in Goldberg 1991, 56. For superb analyses of the impact of such photographs on movements ranging from Green activism to globalization, see Ingold 1993; Cosgrove 1994; Kelsey 2011; Poole 2008; and Lazier 2011. The impact of these photographs on the Indian imaginary has yet to be documented, but for some opening reflections, see Jasanoff 2004. For an Indian poet’s response to the 1968 Apollo mission, including a poem titled “The Earthrise,” see Jaggi 1969. Jaggi’s anthology is dedicated to “the astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell & Bill Anders, who, as they emerged from behind the moon in their Apollo 8 flight, were greeted by the first earthrise that any man has ever seen.” 22. I am adapting here from Latour 1988, 22. “‘Let the earth come to me, instead of me going to the earth,’ says the geologist who starts a Copernican revolution. ‘Very well,’ answers the earth, ‘here I am!’” (Latour 1987, 233). 23. Riello 2009, 36. 24. Appadurai 1986, 5. 25. Anjaria 2012, 130, 132. 26. He is reported to have also stated, “My mental boundaries expanded when I viewed

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Earth against a black and uninviting vacuum, yet my country’s rich traditions had conditioned me to look beyond manmade boundaries and prejudices. One does not have to undertake a space flight to come by this feeling” (quoted in Poole 2008, 111). He was also frequently asked if he had met God.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Orhan Pamuk in Gee 2014. 2. van der Krogt 1993, 401. 3. Brotton 1999, 72. 4. Dekker 1999, 3. 5. Giedion 1948, 3. 6. Riello 2009, 25. A decade later, not least because of Giorgio Riello’s own scholarship, things have become more consequential for historians as manifest in a recent edited work (Gerritsen and Riello 2016). 7. Auslander 2005, 1015. See also Briggs 1988, 13. 8. Cf. Arnold 2013a. 9. Shaviro 2011. 10. Shaviro 2011. See also Candlin and Guins 2009; and Bryant 2011. 11. Busch 2004, 21. 12. T. Mitchell 2002, 299. 13. George 2012, 35– 36. See also George 2016. 14. Bennett 2010, viii. See also Latour 1987. 15. Bennett 2010, xiii. 16. Brown 2001. 17. See esp. Pinney 2003. 18. Pedley 1992; and Sumira 2014, 33– 39. 19. Crane 2002, 230. 20. Dekker 2007, 150. 21. I thank Heidi Wohlschläger for this reminder. 22. Sharma 1995, 188. See also Schwartzberg 1992, 397– 99. 23. Rudolf Schmidt Archives, Vienna. I thank Heidi Wohlschläger for a copy of this letter. The French cartographers referred to by Schmidt as the likely source of influence were the Delisle family, famous for their work in the eighteenth century (Pedley 2005, 31). 24. I am very grateful to S. R. Sarma for bringing this object to my attention and sharing some early photographs he had taken of it in 2005; to Rory Cook, Collections Information Officer, who shared the acquisitions file (T/1988– 95); to Helen Roadnight, the Conservator, for her expertise on various technical matters, and to the Brothers Sophia for beautifully photographing the globe, and other staff of the London Science Museum for facilitating my visit to its storage facility. The Museum’s records have classified this as a “Hindu terrestrial globe,” not in itself the most correct appellation for it, since there is nothing particularly “Hindu” about it. 25. The stand weighs nine kilograms. “The globe is indeed a very heavy object, however, if it was a solid object, I would expect it to be a lot heavier than this! Therefore, taking into account the nature of brass as a material, I would infer from the weight that the globe is hollow, and was

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most likely cast in two sections that were then joined at the seam that can be seen running around its circumference. I would estimate that the metal “skin” of the globe is probably no more than about an inch thick.” (Email from Helen Roadnight, July 17, 2014) 26. The Sahara— named as such— is identified as a desert and a place where bears (baalu) reside! 27. Rupert Snell to Dominik Wujastyk, dated November 9, 1988 (Archives of the London Science Museum, South Kensington, T/1988– 95.) 28. I thank S. R. Sarma for first telling me about this globe and discussing it with me. I am also grateful to Heide Wohlschläger of the International Coronelli Society for sharing Professor Schmidt’s correspondence, and to Vathsala Aithal for translating the German letters written by and to Professor Schmidt. 29. The total height of the globe with stand is twenty-eight centimeteres, with the dimensions from one pole to the other about thirteen centimeters. 30. While the Coronelli Society records indicate that Professor Schmidt acquired the globe in 2006, Paul Peters sold it to him in 1996 (Personal communication, August 6, 2014). The trail runs cold here. Of course, it is not only in India that makeshift globes were fashioned to make up for the absence of the real thing (cf. Molineux 1829, 4– 5). 31. Memorandum dated December 6, 1870, from the Home Office, by Arthur Howell (Government of India, Home Department Proceedings, Public, March 11, 1871, no. 131). 32. Watson 1871, 154– 55. An internal memo in the files of the Central Committee in India for the International Exhibition of 1871 also mentions “a novel globe bearing a map of the world” that was produced in the northern Indian town of Rohilkhand, although we are not entirely clear about what was “novel” about it, or whether this globe made it to London (Memo from W. Tyrell, Hon. Secretary to the International Exhibition Committee, the North West Provinces [Allahabad, June 1871], Proceedings of the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, September 1871 (IOR/ P/687). 33. Watson 1873, 224– 33. In 1886, at another international event in London, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, paper globes from Madras were similarly exhibited, alongside maps used in village schools in that province, terrestrial globes in Bengali, specimens of map drawing from boys schools from the Northwestern Provinces and Oudh, and numerous similar things showing the good work of colonial education in distant India (Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886, 38– 40). 34. India Museum 1880, 210a– 214a. 35. V&A Archives, London, 37/385; AO 581. I thank Nick Barnard for alerting me to these papers and enabling me to get access. 36. Quoted in Dekker 2007, 148. 37. van der Krogt 1993, 35. Thus, when John Dee wrote that people in Tudor England liked to beautify their halls, parlors, chambers, galleries, studies, and libraries with “Mappes, Chartes, and Geographical Globes,” he would have been referring to a handful of elites (Morgan 1979, 148). 38. For a survey of the appearance of the globe in Europe early modern art, see Lippincott 1999. See also van der Krogt 1993; Brotton 1999; Fiorani 2005; and Sumira 2014, 14– 29. I borrow the phrase “calculated display” from Brotton 1999, 82. 39. Strong 1987. Although the very first printed globes produced in England (the so-called Molyneaux Globes) were presented to her in 1592— she is said to have responded with the re-

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mark, “The whole earth, a present for a Prince [sic],”— Elizabeth was not portrayed in their company but with others, as she stands lightly on one (as in the much-produced “Ditchley” portrait by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, ca. 1592), or with her hand resting lightly but possessively on another (in George Gower’s “Armada” portrait, ca. 1588). The picture gallery in her palace at Whitehall also featured world maps of Sebastian Cabot (1549) and Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1580). 40. On the use of globes in early modern education in Britain and Europe, see esp. Wallis 1978; van der Krogt 1993; Jacob 2006, 53; Cormack 2007; and Dekker 2007. 41. Withers 2007, 111– 13. See also Mayhew 2000. 42. Quoted in van der Krogt 1993, 240, emphasis mine. Introductionem Cluverij was a universal geography work written by Phillipus Cluverius in 1624. Van der Krogt notes that maps of “the four parts of the world by Willem Blaeu” were first published in 1608, and issued in a new edition in 1624 by Henricus Hondius. 43. Locke 1898, 157. 44. Steward 1995, 143– 61. See also Brückner 2006 and Schulten 2007. 45. For the teaching of geography outside Euro-America (although not focusing on the terrestrial globe per se), see esp. Fortna 2002, Kashani-Sabet 1999, and Thongchai Winichakhul 1994. 46. I have seen no systematic study of these manuals that belong to a genre that Lesley Cormack calls “De Globis,” the earliest of which might well date to 1507, but for scattered discussions, see esp. van der Krogt 1993; Dekker 2007; and Cormack 2009b. 47. Quoted in Armitage and Baynton-Williams 2012, 236. 48. Brückner 2006, 149– 51. 49. Despite its pedagogical importance, there are few scholarly studies of the genre. In British India, instruction in the use of the globes was first offered in “Indo-European” schools in cities like Calcutta and Madras from the 1790s, and was progressively incorporated into the curriculum for the colonial child from the 1820s until well into the nineteenth century. 50. Wright 1740, 39. 51. Molineux 1829, 9. 52. All quotes here are from Keith 1805, iii. 53. Stoddart 1986, 30. 54. Keith 1805, vi. 55. I borrow these concepts from Thongchai Winichakul 1994, 37– 61; and Redfield 2000, 111– 84. I thank Kena Wani for further discussion. 56. Ironically, though, the terrestrial globe in and of itself, also promotes a geo-centric worldview with the twirling of the object reproducing the daily motion of the Sun rather than the other way around. As Elly Dekker notes, “Most globe makers of the nineteenth century continued to produce Ptolemaic globes as if no Copernican revolution had taken place” (Dekker 1999, 8). 57. Terrall 2002. See also Woodward 1989. For an archival film on how a North London firm manufactured globes (“the world in miniature”) for the educational market in 1955, see http:// www.atlasobscura.com /articles/watch-how-globes-were-made-in-1955-in-this-north-london -workshop. 58. Cosgrove 2001, 105– 6, 114. 59. Quoted in Camps 1957, 207; and Bailey 1999, 123. Xavier was the head of the Third Je-

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suit Mission to the Mughal court between 1595 and 1615. For an extended treatment of the role of Jesuits as transmitters of European and Catholic imagery in Mughal India, see Bailey 1999. 60. Scholars have reached a similar conclusion for the Jesuit project in China, where men like Matteo Ricci (1552– 1610) used science to promote their faith (Wallis and Grinstead 1962 and Yee 1994). Around the same time as they did in India, Jesuit priests also played a comparable role in Japan in initiating discussions on Earth’s sphericity, and in introducing globes, maps, and atlases (Unno 1994, 376– 77; Lopez 2008, 45– 51). For the comparable role of Jesuits in Korea around the same time, which even sparked off an innovation in the construction of a fascinating armillary sphere featuring a European-style terrestrial globe, see Ledyard 1994, 249– 54. 61. Quoted in Yee 1994, 170. 62. Monserrate 1922, 27– 28. When the emperor set out in 1581 on a military campaign to Kabul against his rebel brother Mirza Muhammad Hakim, he summoned Monserrate (who had been recruited to tutor one of the imperial princes) to his quarters, “in order to ask him certain questions, both religious and secular. First of all he had an atlas [ geographiae liber] brought and asked where Portugal was, and where his own kingdom. He wondered how we knew the names of the provinces and cities of India.” (ibid., 126). That he took along with him on a fierce military campaign this cartographic gift from afar is revealing of its likely hold on him. 63. http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia/, 49– 56. 64. On speculations about terrestrial globes in the Islamic world, see Hartner 1950; King 1999; and Pinto 2006. In contrast, the Greek tradition of celestial globes was further refined in the Arab-Islamic world from at least the ninth century, even serving as the model for their European counterpart from the fifteenth century. Elly Dekker has suggested that many of the basic design features of early modern European terrestrial globes were likely indebted to the Islamic celestial globe (in Lamb and Collins 1994, 17). From the mid-sixteenth century, the Mughal city of Lahore— occasionally also the capital of the empire— was an important center for the manufacture of celestial globes (Savage-Smith 1992). 65. Quoted in Camps 1957, 196– 97. 66. Fenicio (whose name is also spelled as Finicio) arrived in India around 1583 and was stationed in Cochin from 1584 and helped found missions on the Malabar Coast. An alliance in 1598 between the Zamorin and the Portuguese against their common Muslim foe, the Kunhali Marakkars, led to the establishment of a Jesuit Mission in Calicut around 1601 under the stewardship of Fenicio for about eighteen years. On this fascinating man and his works, see esp. Charpentier 1923 and 1924; Ferroli 1939, I: 212– 66; Lach 1993, vol. 3 (2): 874– 76, 886– 88, 911– 12; and Zupanov 2005, 175– 92. 67. Titled in Portuguese Livro da seita dos Indios Orientalis (The First Book of the Sect of the Oriental Indians) and completed around 1609, the work was possibly intended to serve as a guidebook for his fellow Jesuits. Although never published, it became an important source for other works that introduced Hinduism— albeit sensationally— to a nascent European reading public in the seventeenth century (for the latest study on this, see Stolte 2012). Of relevance to the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in India that I track in these pages are several illustrations, including a map of the universe in Hindu reckoning, which are unfortunately missing in the surviving manuscript today in the British Library (Charpentier 1923/25; Charpentier 1933). 68. Letter dated November 1603, as quoted in Charpentier 1923, 746. For comparable discussions around the same time that Jesuits conducted with the help of globes in monarchical courts

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in China and Japan about Earth’s sphericity to combat reigning theories of flatness, see Unno 1994, 377, 390– 91; and Yee 1994, 170– 71. 69. Charpentier 1923– 25, 322. A comparable critique exists within the Indic tradition, as I note a little later. 70. Bouchet joined the Society of Jesus in 1670 and served at first in the Jesuit Mission in Siam for a year before being expelled in 1688, when he relocated briefly to French Pondichery. During his time with the Madurai Mission, he built a major church in Avur (Aour in French records)— which is still extant— and claimed to have baptized twenty thousand adults and heard a hundred thousand confessions. In 1792, he was appointed Superior of the Carnatic Mission. He was also the creator of one of the earliest European-style maps of the region. For analyses of his life and work, see Clooney 2005 and Agmon 2014. 71. For Mangammal’s regency, see Nelson 1868: 214– 38; and Sathyanatha Aiyar 1924, 204– 22. The significance of her regency is unfortunately overlooked in the classic account of Nayaka symbolic politics and royal culture by Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1992. 72. For a detailed analysis of this event, see Agmon 2014. I am very grateful to Danna Agmon for many discussions on Bouchet and the Jesuit project in early modern South India. 73. Martin 1707– 9, 132. Over a century later, Martin’s letter was reviewed in the Calcutta Review by an anonymous writer who drew attention to the unusual gifts taken along by the Jesuit priest on his visit to the Nayaka court, observing that “Father Bouchet does not explain the precise object of these purchases, which seem strangely out of place in a Saniassi’s [ascetic] hut” (CR, 1844, 2 (3): 91n). Bouchet’s unusual gifts also received some attention in a travelogue originally published by a British Protestant missionary in 1829 who pointed with reluctant admiration to the astute strategies adopted by the Jesuits in pursuit of their goals (Hoole 1844, 91– 93), and in the standard colonial history of Madurai published in the later nineteenth century (Nelson 1868, 231– 32). Bouchet himself never mentioned the catechist rebellion or this cache of gifts presented to the Nayaka court in his correspondence with Le Gobien (Agmon 2014, 193– 94). 74. Phillimore 1945, 238– 39; Gole 1989, 32; and Clooney 2005, 17– 21. 75. This is not the earliest instance of a European-style terrestrial globe inscribed with a nonEuropean language. For a remarkable twenty-three-inch “Chinese globe” attributed to Jesuits Manual Dias (1574– 1659) and Nicolo Longobardi (1565– 1655) and dated to 1623, see Wallis and Grinstead 1962; and Sumira 2014, 82– 85. 76. While the Dalavay appears to have held on to the Tamil terrestrial globe, he passed along some of the other gifts to Mangammal. Martin writes that the Queen “admir’d above all the Globe of Glass, the Bracelets, and the Cock made of Shels [sic], which she was never tir’d with looking upon.” She was so pleased that she ordered the Dalavay to grant Father Bouchet all that he desired (Martin 1707– 9, 134– 35). 77. For a biographical account of Jai Singh’s life and times, see Bhatnagar 1974. For discussions of his “astronomical” work, and in particular, his engagement with European science, see esp. Pingree 1987 and 1999; Sharma 1995; Raina 1999; and Johnson-Roehr 2011. 78. Pingree 1999. For a comparable recruitment in China, esp. during the Kangxi period (1662– 1722), of Jesuit astronomers and geographers who helped produce the Kangxi Atlas, see Yee 1994, 179– 85. 79. Johnson-Roehr 2011, 47– 48. 80. Johnson-Roehr 2011, 231– 50.

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81. William Blanpied reports seeing in the Jaipur Palace collection, “a 30 to 40 inch diameter geocentric equatorium with the names of the sun, moon, and planets inscribed in in French, which also bears the inscription ‘Francois Le Maire— Paris.’ These latter instruments could have been brought from Portugal . . . or could have been obtained from Claude Boudier, Superior of the Jesuit mission at Chandernagore, in French Bengal” (Blanpied 1974, 118). See also Sharma 1995, 302, 312. For Jai Singh’s map collection (both European and Indic), see Bahura and Singh 1990. 82. Pingree 1987, 317. The inventory of Jai Singh’s library ( pothikhana) from 1741– 43 lists two “terrestrial globes” ( gola) and 7 celestial globes (khagola) (Sharma 1995, 332). A celestial globe was constructed on Jai Singh’s orders by his astronomer Nayanasukha, with constellations labeled in Devanagari (Pingree 1987, 320; see also Sharma 1995, 190). In the 1970s, William Blanpied noted the existence of “a small brass celestial sphere seemingly of European origin” in the collection of the Jaipur Museum (Blanpied 1974, 118). 83. Jai Singh was not the first non-European ruler to order the manufacture of a Europeanstyle globe. Around 1579, the Ottoman Sultan Murad III (r. 1574– 95) ordered a pair of handsome globes from Mercator’s workshop, although these objects were not delivered (I discuss this event in greater detail in http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia /album/, 21– 23). In 1605, on the order of the emperor, the earliest recorded Japanese-made terrestrial globe was made. Also extant in Japan from around this time is a small terrestrial globe that accompanies a padre doll. “The doll is 22 cm tall and resembles a Jesuit missionary carrying a whip; a handle, before it was broken, turned both the doll and the globe” (Unno 1994, 391n183). 84. http://collections.rmg.co.uk /collections/objects/14301.html. See also Zandvliet 1998. From its very founding in 1602, ships of the VOC were usually outfitted with terrestrial globes, despite the debate on their usefulness for navigation purposes, and the Company’s steady demand for much of the seventeenth century sustained the Dutch globe-making business (van der Krogt 1993, 234– 40. See also Davids 1980). 85. Zandvliet 2003, 111– 12. See also King 1999, 314. 86. Ramaswamy 2007a; and esp. http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia /album/. 87. http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia /album/, 91– 92. 88. There are numerous reprints of Macaulay’s Minute of February 2, 1835, but for the most correct version, see Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 161– 73, quotation on p. 166. 89. Quoted in Young 2003, 190, emphasis mine. See also ibid., 191 n25. Jones founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784, its mandate, among others, “to correct the geography of Asia by new observations and discoveries.” It is not surprising that Jones wanted to “correct” and “update” Indic terrestrial knowledge, for as he declared in his Second Anniversary Address to the Asiatic Society in February 1785, in the “sciences . . . it must be admitted, that the Asiaticks, if compared with our Western notions, are mere children” ( Jones 1807, 19). By 1788, when he reported his encounter with the mathematician Ramachandra, his position on Indian scientific capabilities had obviously changed. Nevertheless as late as 1794, a month or so before his death, he suggested that Jai Singh’s interest in astronomy and mathematics and his books on the subject was inspired by the fact that “he probably had European globes or planispheres,” discounting the Raja’s sustained engagement with Siddhantic and Islamic astronomical traditions prior to these acquisitions ( Jones 1831, 255). 90. Pingree 1978, 554. Although not standardized, a yojana is typically about ten kilometers or 6.5 miles (Plofker 2005, 65).

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91. Plofker 2005, 66. 92. Plokfer 2005, 67. 93. Young 2003, 199. Typically on such “cosmographic globes,” of which there are a few surviving examples that I discuss in greater detail in chapter 3, “the Puranic oceans of wine, milk, etc., could be accepted by Siddhanta authors as existing in the southern hemisphere, beyond the realm of direct knowledge” (Plofker 2005, 68). 94. Plofker 2009, 294. 95. Plofker 2005, 67. See also Pingree 1978; Pingree 1990; Minkoswski 2002; and Plofker 2009 for other helpful and interesting discussions of this fascinating issue. 96. Spivak 1999, 216– 17. 97. Wilkinson 1834a, 462. 98. Indeed, as one important interlocutor, Horace Hayman Wilson noted in 1840, “with an acute and argumentative people like the Hindus, you must satisfy them that they are in error before you can persuade them to accept the truth” (quoted in Raj 2006, 171). 99. Smith 1844, 287. See also Young 2007, 95. 100. Viswanathan 1989. 101. Bayly 1996, 300– 301, 309. For a brilliant analysis of the complicated fate of Indic sciences of the sky and land in the colonial period, ibid., 247– 315. More than a century earlier, an expatriate publishing in the Calcutta Review had similarly observed, that it was with the help of “the measuring rod, the theodolite, and the telescope, that the Puranic idol is to be demolished.” Many colonial pedagogues would have added the terrestrial globe to this list of scientific instruments with which to fight Puranic idolatry (Smith 1844, 288). 102. Ahmed 2010. 103. Seth 2007, 1– 2. 104. Foucault 1977. For an influential application of Foucault’s analysis to schooling practices in colonial Egypt, see T. Mitchell 1988. For India, see esp. Chatterjee ed. 1995; Naregal 2002; and Seth 2007. 105. Hunter 1994, 34. 106. Hunter 1994, xxi, 37. 107. Hunter 1994, 12. 108. Gauri Viswanathan first advanced this argument in 1989 in her influential Masks of Conquest. Subsequently, Veena Naregal drew upon this discussion to show how this “premature intervention” resulted in “a selective conferment of modernity” and of the partial transfer of liberal ideas, but also to suggest that education project was “the primary instrument of colonial ideological domination” (2002). 109. East India Company Charter Act of 1813, section 43 (53 Geo. III, c. 155, s. 43) (Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 90– 91). Henry Sharp characterizes this act “as containing the first legislative admission of the right of education in India to participate in the public revenues” (Sharp 1920, 18). At this time, as some estimates had it, the annual territorial revenues of the EIC was about £20 million. 110. Hunter 1994, 38. 111. The scholarship on these issues is extensive, but for some excellent introductions to “the great education debate,” see esp. Hatcher 1996; Zastoupil and Moir 1999; and Dodson and Hatcher 2012. 112. Chatterjee 2012, 125– 26.

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113. Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 112. 114. Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 113. In Bombay, as regulations of 1845 issued by the Board of Education show, any community with a population of 2000 could petition to host a school, the only material requirements being the provision of a schoolhouse “with a small wooden table, two plain chairs, and a plain box with a padlock for the preservation of the schoolbooks” (quoted in Naregal 2002, 79). 115. Orange 1911. One exception in this regard was the famous Hare School in College Square, Calcutta. Named after David Hare (1775– 1842), a Scottish watchmaker and silversmith who arrived in Calcutta around 1800 and became involved in pedagogical endeavors in that city, as I further discuss in chapter 5, the first floor of the School, located at the intersection of College Street and Peary Charan Sirkar’s Street, had “one room set aside for special work in geography” (ibid. 69). On the Geography Room in British schools, see, for example, Nicholls 1912; and Evans 1925. 116. Sengupta 2011, 61– 80. 117. For discussions of such “indigenous” schools in colonial India, including attempts by the state to “improve” and regulate them, see esp. Parulekar 1951 (for Bombay); Shahidullah 1987 (for Bengal); and Radhakrishnan 1990 and Raman 2010 (for Madras). 118. Francis Buchanan (Hamilton), quoted in Shahidullah 1987, 21– 22. 119. For one illuminating early example, see Duff 1840, 48– 55. 120. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 157– 58, 160– 63; vol. 2: 157– 68. See also Allender 2006, 292– 94. 121. Gandhi famously questioned the value of the entire curriculum of Western education, including the teaching of geography, in his seminal Hind Swaraj (Gandhi 1910, 85). Nevertheless, just a couple years earlier, in making a case for the self-evident nature of his particular philosophy of satyagraha, he invoked Earth’s rotundity as a self-evident fact, a fact that he would have learned as a modern schooled subject (“Secret of Satyagraha,” Indian Opinion, February 22, 1908). 122. Schulten 2001, 92– 117. In her study of the introduction of the subject into US schools, Schulten rightly argues, “Geography was well suited to nineteenth-century schools, a uniquely broad subject— adventurous yet utilitarian, synthetic yet scientific, interesting yet rigorous” (ibid., 92). 123. Prakash 1999, 39. See also the classic 1991 study by Krishna Kumar, which argued that colonial education was principally concerned with producing governable subjects (Kumar 2005). 124. There is very little scholarship on the history of childhood in colonial India, but for some important arguments of relevance to learning and education, see Walsh 1983; Bose 1995; N. Kumar 2000; S. Sen 2005; N. Sen 2015; and Topdar 2015 and forthcoming. 125. I am of course adapting here from Marx’s famous formulation. It is also worth reformulating Gayatri Spivak’s famous formulation to ask, “Can the Child Speak?” See also Nita Kumar’s many writings on colonial education and the experience of childhood, esp. Kumar 2000.

CHAPTER TWO

1. Lightman et al. 2013. 2. Located in the fertile valley of the river Kaveri, Tanjavur (“Tanjore,” in colonial records) had been conquered from its Telugu-speaking Nayaka rulers by Maratha forces moving south

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from western India in the seventeenth century. On the death of Raja Tulajaji II (r. 1763–73, 1776– 87), by which time the polyglot kingdom had entered into a tributary relationship with the EIC, a rivalry ensued between his half-brother Amarasimha (r. 1787– 98) and his adopted minor son, as a consequence of which, the British arranged to have the latter moved to Madras. In March 1793, the British declared the adopted son as the “presumptive heir” to the Tanjore throne (“Proclamation” dated March 6, 1793, TDR 3453, 375– 78). 3. TDR 4448, July 31, 1794, 17. A copy of the same letter is also available in TDR 4449, 8– 9, but is mistakenly transcribed July 31, 1795. 4. TDR 4448, August 6, 1794, 87– 88. 5. TDR 4448, 14, 24; and TDR 4449, 15. See also Nair 2012, 7. 6. The important names here include George Adams and his sons (1760s onward), William Bardin (1780 onward) and George, John and William Cary (1790s onward). On eighteenthcentury globe making in England, see esp. Clifton 1999; Worms and Baynton-Williams 2011; and Sumira 2014. 7. MC 1795, 11 (514): 1. This may well have been an ad for globes made by Gilbert Wright, an English instrument maker of Fleet Street, London, who flourished between 1770 and 1803 or so, and who worked in collaboration with other globe makers such as Benjamin Martin and William Bardin (Millburn and Rössak 1992; Dekker ed. 1999, 260– 61). Around the time the Gilbert Wright globes were offered for sale in Madras, several establishments were beginning to advertise a variety of cartographic wares (maps, charts, and plans), both for practical use as well as decorative objects (for example, MC 1793, 9 (412): 1; 1794, 10 (476): 1; and 1795, 11 (493): 4). 8. MC 1790, 6 (264): 4. See also Love 1913, vol. 3: 442– 43. 9. In colonial records and missionary correspondence, Schwartz’s name is spelled as Swartz and even occasionally as Scwartz. 10. For a published version of the missionary’s memoirs, see Pearson 1834. For scholarly evaluations, see esp. Jeyaraj 1999; Frykenberg 2008, 152– 68; Nair 2012; and Indira Peterson’s valuable essays on Maratha-era Tanjavur, esp. Peterson 2003. 11. Peterson 2003, 97– 100. 12. Stern 2010, 118. 13. MMC, August 3, 1787, vol. 114: 414– 22; and TDR, 3473/74, April 28, 1802, 211– 18. 14. Nair 2005. On the (Eurocentric) conception of centers of calculation, see Latour 1987. 15. See esp. the pioneering writings of Indira Peterson, and more recently, Nair 2005; 2011; and 2012. 16. My concept of cartographic evangelism underscores the catalytic role played by Christian missionaries in the globalization of the putatively secular and Western science of cartography and its pedagogic instruments such as maps, atlases, and globes. As such it is modeled on Christian Evangelicalism. For the latter as it manifested itself in colonial India in the nineteenth century, see esp. Powell 1993; Cox 2002; and Carson 2012. 17. Nair 2012, 5. Gericke had been working since 1788 as head of the Vepery Mission, which had been handed over to the SPCK in 1749. Even after he became ruler of Tanjavur, Serfoji remained a liberal patron of its school, and kept close contact with its missionaries (TDR 3487, May 20, 1806, 227– 29; TDR 3514, November 27, 1815, December 6– 7, 1815, 289– 99 [261– 71]; and SPG, Indian Archives, C/ IND/ India General, Box 4). 18. Email from Indira Peterson, June 18, 2012. See also Hommel 2006, 1120; and Peterson

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2014, 441. It is also likely that through John, Serfoji too learned about instruments like the orrery. Later, when Serfoji became Raja, he helped finance John’s educational endeavors until the end of the latter’s life ( John 2006; and Liebau 2006). 19. TDR, 4448, December 16, 1795, 27. At the time of Serfoji’s visit, the Observatory was located in the suburb of Nungambakkam. Opened in 1786 (the first of such institutions set up by the EIC), its building was ready by 1792 after Michael Topping (ca. 1747– 96) persuaded the Court of Directors— ever mindful of improving the Company’s commercial opportunities— of the importance of astronomy “as the Parent and Nurse of Navigation.” On its founding, the Observatory housed several valuable instruments including “a very capital Astronomical Clock, an Astronomical Quadrant, and a large and excellent Telescope” (Phillimore 1945, 170– 74; 190– 93; 389– 93. See also Love 1913, vol. 3: 415– 19). Clearly, Topping was very proud of the “many admirable Astronomical and Geodetical Instruments” procured for the Observatory, as he noted in a letter to the Madras governor (TNSA, MPub, March 30, 1793, vol. 182: 1317– 26). A celestial globe would almost certainly have been among these, although the presence of a terrestrial globe at this time is not entirely clear. In 1827, the Madras Government authorized the purchase of “a pair,” after the celestial globe had become unserviceable, “many of the constellations being nearly obliterated” (TNSA, MPub, February 16, 1827, vol. 547: 806– 7). Several decades later in 1860, the globes, “having become illegible,” were sold, and two new pairs were purchased to replace them (MPub, July 9, 1860, nos. 60 & 61). There are few scholarly studies of this institution, especially as a site for the study of modern astronomy in Madras, but see Kochhar 1985 and Sen 2014. 20. Although primarily a product of Serfoji’s collecting practices, the royal library at Tanjavur also included works purchased or acquired by his son and successor, and books (such as H. Musgrave Wilkin’s The Junior Classic Atlas) were added as late as 1892, well after the kingdom has been absorbed into the Madras Presidency. Many works, especially the magnificent atlases that Serfoji acquired, have long since disappeared. My analysis of the Raja’s personal collection is based primarily on a handwritten catalogue commissioned by Serfoji in 1829– 1830 (TMSSML no. 603), and Anon. 1940; Sadasivam 1989; and Perumal 1997. I have also benefited from valuable conversations on the collection with Indira Peterson and P. Perumal. 21. Wilkinson 1794/95, n.p. A copy of this atlas is on display in the TMSSML Museum. However, on numerous visits to the library, I was unable to check the opening page to ascertain if it bears Serfoji’s signature or its date of acquisition. 22. On Torin’s relationship to Serfoji, see Nair 2012, xxiv– xxv. On the state of Enlightenment geography in England at this time, see Mayhew 2000; and Withers 2007. In my analysis of the various geographical, astronomical and natural history books that Serfoji acquired, I have also benefitted from my reading of Sitwell 1993. 23. Ouiseau 1814, 300– 301. 24. Guthrie 1788, 1– 2. On Guthrie as a Grub Street geographer and his influence, see Mayhew 2000, 38– 39, 168– 80. There are numerous editions of Guthrie’s volumes in the Raja’s collection, including Atlas to Guthrie’s System of Geography (1792), which, among other things, included maps showing Cook’s numerous voyages around the globe. The Raja would have also read similar pronouncements in other books he owned such as Adams 1793, 5– 6; and Bigland 1810, vol. 1: i– ii. 25. For example, Guthrie 1788, v. 26. Hamel 1811, 13. The copy of this work in the TMSSML is not specifically autographed or dated, although it was acquired before 1830. Interestingly, the book also included a twelve-page

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advertisement for school books published by Longman’s, which, given Serfoji’s own pedagogical pursuits, might have been of interest to him. Indeed, the Raja’s collection included several of the works so advertised, leading me to speculate that on perusing this, he might have well requested Torin to procure him copies of these works. 27. Hamel 1811, 13. 28. Alexander Johnston (1775– 1849), a colonial official and administrator then based in Ceylon, visited Tanjore in November 1816. In return for his own cartographic gift, he let it be known that he would both like a “picture of His Highness” and a copy of any book printed in the Raja’s newly installed press (TDR 3520, December 1, 1816, 341– 42). A few years after this visit, Johnston who was instrumental in the founding in 1823 of the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS), sponsored the election of Serfoji as an Honorary Member of that august body (see note 47). 29. TDR 3472, January 8, 1802, 13– 15. One of the reasons that such a work found favor with missionaries like John is because it was both a work of science and “grounded in the orthodox belief in revelation and the truth of Christianity” (Nair 2012, 103). 30. These books were presented in exchange for Serfoji’s gift of a portrait of himself and one of Schwartz, after he attended a sermon given by the missionary. These portraits, Bärenbruck wrote effusively, would be his “companions for life” (TDR 4476, 741– 43, 941– 43, 987– 90). Pinnock’s elementary readers and catechisms of geography were prescribed for schools in Bombay and Madras presidencies into the 1850s, and as we will shortly see, were also part of a package of gifts sent to another native royal in 1834. 31. It is likely— and not entirely surprising— that by the 1850s, these globes were either damaged or had disappeared because George Pope, the missionary-master of the school, applied to the colonial government for a pair of globes under the new grant in aid program (Government of Madras 1857, 6– 8). Johann Caspar (who Schwartz refers to in one of his letters as his “adopted son”) arrived in Tanjore ca. 1786 to help with the educational activities of the Halle mission in the town and its nearby environs, in which project he was joined by his brother Daniel and later by his son C. S. Kohlhoff. After Schwartz’s death, Johann Caspar stepped into his shoes, including acting as advisor to Serfoji, as well as “instructed him in astronomy and geography with the aid of instruments and maps” (Nair 2012, xxviii– xxix). In September 1822 when on the request of the British Resident, the Raja provided a list of all Europeans who were “actually employed” in his service, of the seven men that the Palace records listed, four of them were Kohlhoffs! (SPG, C/ IND/ India General, Boxes 1– 4). 32. These objects were likely provided free passage on the EIC ship Britannica for Torin also noted to the Raja in his letter that “the Court of Directors were very much pleased to see your mind so properly directed to these good purposes, and most gladly gave me their permission to send anything to you” (TDR 3473/4, April 28, 1802, 211– 18). Torin obviously acquired cartographic items for the Raja out of his own initiative as well, as this example shows, as does another instance from 1821 when he dispatched to Tanjore from London “a curious map, by which scale, you will be able to ascertain the height of all the mountains in the world as well as their comparative elevation from the level of the sea” (TDR 4472, March 12, 1821, 153). 33. TDR 3540, 607– 8. See also TDR 3487, 573– 655. The TMSSML also has a copy of another work by Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1816) with the autograph, “Serfojee Rajah, 1820” inscribed on its title page. Volume 1 of this six-part book includes an extended discussion of terrestrial sphericity. 34. TDR 3487, January 22, 1806, 19; March 9, 1806, 71. A decade earlier, an orrery (or tel-

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lurium) in Madras was valued at virtually less than half this price at about a hundred pagodas (Southey 1844, 211). 35. TDR 4471, September 19, 1821, 350. On the planetarium’s global travels around this time, see Lightman et al. 2013. 36. In response to Blackburne correcting his mistake, Shivaji subsequently wrote that the two globes had been moved to the Raja’s palace at Saluvanayakapattinam (another seaside resort), and that he would send them forthwith. They appear to have reached Blackburne eventually in September 1821 (when he was back in Tanjavur) along with “a Book of Maps of the Heavenly Bodies.” The Resident assured Shivaji that “they shall be taken great care of and returned” (TDR 3429, April 10– 11 1821, 91– 95; TDR 4471, September 19, 1821, 350). We also learn from Blackburne’s letter of April 10 that the Resident had earlier borrowed a telescope from the Palace, an instrument “which has afforded much amusement to me, and many of my Visitors.” Years earlier in 1806, Blackburne had similarly borrowed “a large volume of maps, an Atlas” that he had seen on Serfoji’s bookcase (TDR 3487, March 12, 1806, 75). 37. Indira Peterson discusses these in her forthcoming monograph, and I thank her for alerting me to them. 38. Ouiseau 1814, vii– viii 39. It is likely that Serfoji himself directly acquired Keith’s New Treatise on the Use of the Globes, published in London in 1821, although it does not have his autograph or a date. Nor is it mentioned in the 1830 inventory of the European books in the Raja’s Collection. 40. For an incomplete list of these, see Perumal 1997. 41. Shirley 2009, 214. The Raja’s copy has inscribed across its title page, “Serfojee Rajah 1829.” 42. Barber and Harper 2010, 124. See also Armitage and Baynton-Williams 2012. 43. Peterson 1999a; and Peterson 2008. 44. TDR 4425, 215– 17, 221, 224. See also Subramaniyan et al. 1989, vol. 1: 2– 3, 37, 79; and Venkataramayya 1984, 239– 45, 484– 85. My discussion of Serfoji’s pedagogic efforts is also informed by my reading of Peterson 2003; Peterson 2012; and Nair 2011, although I arrive at a different conclusion in regard to the teaching of Modern Earth and Modern Sky in Serfoji’s schools. Any conclusions about the Tanjore curriculum are provisional because no published scholar has consulted a valuable document (most likely in the official Modi script) that Serfoji forwarded in April 1823 to the colonial authorities, offering “two plans of the schools and colleges established by me within my jurisdiction and in the several places in the districts attached to the Palace and two catalogues of the students thereof/in number two hundred and twenty leaves/ and a statement which gives a full account of the schools and colleges and its students” (TDR 4431, 128, 130– 31; see also TDR 4476, 815). Even in the absence of this valuable document, whose current whereabouts are unknown, there is little doubt that under Serfoji, Tanjore was a leader in the field of education, one early report from 1816 even stating (in response to a query from Madras) that “all experience in this District has hitherto shown that there is no want of education in it; indeed, there are few Communities of its size where its benefits are more generally extended then here” (TDR 3279, October 25, 1816, 84– 87). By 1823, for a district of its size, Tanjore boasted the largest network of educational institutions (884 schools and 109 “colleges”), several of them “free,” and many directly or indirectly financed by Serfoji (IOR/ P/294/53, 5347). Indeed, as Indira Peterson writes, “Clearly Serfoji, who had by rights jurisdiction only

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over the Tanjore fort, in fact dominated the landscape of public education throughout the entire district” (Peterson 2012, 21; see also Peterson 2014). For Serfoji’s support for mission schools in neigbouring Danish Tranqubar, see TDR 3514, 261– 71. 45. TDR 3419, June 13, 1806, pp. 70– 71. 46. TDR 4430, 30– 31, and 4431, 128, 130– 31. See also IOR/P/294/53, p. 5,347 and IOR/F/ 4/1015/27843. The Collector of Tanjore’s 1823 report on the schools in the kingdom even categorically declared that in “native” schools and colleges, “There is no provision for teaching astronomy . . . or any other science” (TDR 4394, August 23, 1823, 152– 55). In this regard, Serfoji resembles the other “astronomer-king” Sawai Jai Singh II from a century earlier, whose scientific pursuits seem to have been limited to his court and to the building of giant masonry observatories, rather than educating his subjects in the new sciences. 47. TDR 4486, October 11, 1828, 841– 43. See also TDR 4357, January 29, 1829, 264– 65. Serfoji and the King of Oude were the two “native” men so honored in 1823 (RAS Archives (London), Proceedings of the Council of the Asiatic Society, April 26 and May 3, 1823). 48. In this regard as well, as Indira Peterson writes, he is comparable to Sawai Jai Singh II, who is also credited with producing (or coauthoring) numerous texts on astronomy in Persian and Sanskrit. However, unlike Jai Singh who was heavily invested in maintaining the terms of Islamic science, Serfoji could afford to make the shift in the early nineteenth century, and enabled to do so because of his systematic education “in an array of Western sciences as part of a coherent curriculum” (Peterson 2003, 119). My understanding of the Devendra Kuravanji is based almost entirely upon Indira Peterson’s valuable discussion of the text (cf. Nair 2012, 103). 49. Thyagaraja Jatavallabar 1950, i. See also Peterson 2012, 28– 29. 50. For a comparable text, although one that I have not seen in the Raja’s collection, see Davidson 1784. 51. Peterson 2003, 117– 19. 52. Peterson 2003, 118. 53. Wilkinson 1794/95: n.p. 54. Circa 1818, Serfoji requested from Torin a map “suitable for an Excursion drawn by a Sensible Painter containing a Description of the Degree of Miles from Tanjore to Sea, thence to Calcutta from thence to Causy [Benares], from Causy to Pundarpoor and from thence to Tanjore” (TDR 3540, undated letter of 1818, 501– 3). Earlier in January 1803, when he visited Palani, a temple town particularly beloved to devotees of Lord Murugan, he similarly acquired a map “on a very large scale” of the countryside he was about to traverse (Nair 2012, 104). 55. BL, Mss Eur.D.122, folio 43. The allusion to Cornelius here might be to the Roman centurion who was the first gentile to convert to Christianity according to the Acts of the Apostles. I thank Seymour Mauskopf for this clarification. See also Pearson 1817, 295– 96. Other Britons as well expressed frustration over the Raja’s “staunch” attachment to “Brahmanical doctrines and superstitions,” his other “liberal sentiments” notwithstanding (see, for example, editorial in Calcutta Gazette, March 1, 1821, as reproduced in Seton-Kerr and Sandeman 1864, vol. 5: 403– 4; and Hoole 1844, 128). But it was not just the British. We hear a similar frustration expressed by J. C. Kohlhoff— who had succeeded Schwartz to some degree as a “missionary mentor” to the Raja— when Serfoji set off (after much trial and tribulation) on his pilgrimage to Kasi (Benares) in 1820. As reported by his son, “he had doubtless represented to the Rajah the unprofitableness of this pilgrimage as he had done on a former occasion and had pointed out to the Saviour

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through whom alone redemption is obtained. . . . From all that I have heard of that Prince I am disposed to believe he was like Agrippa almost persuaded to be a Christian” (SPG, Indian Archives, C/ IND/ India General, Box 4). 56. I borrow this phrase from Derek Price (as quoted in Blanpied 1974, 90). 57. Phipps 1891, 4. 58. For other examples of the chance discovery of abandoned globes in early nineteenthcentury royal palaces, see Welsh 1830, 164– 65; and Postans 1839a, 39– 40. 59. Quoted in Wallis 1984, 3. 60. See esp. Buisseret 1992; Biggs 1999; and Harley 2001. 61. Jacob 2006, 165– 72, 323– 24. 62. Pingree 1997, 92. See also Pingree 1999, 77– 78. 63. MMC (IOR/ P/253/28, 958– 60, 1131– 32). On the growing market for such apparatus from the 1790s in colonial cities, see Nair 2013. 64. MMC (IOR/ P/253/29, 1270– 71, 1431– 32). Although the list in the invoice that Oakeley presented for reimbursement does not mention it, late eighteenth-century philosophical apparatus frequently included a pair of terrestrial and celestial globes (Musson and Robinson 1969, 105; 148, 161. Cf. Millburn 2000, 366). 65. Bell 1808, 167. For William Smith’s fascinating letters in which he recounts his experiences of demonstrating these instruments in the Mysore court, and the conversations that ensued with the Sultan, see ibid., 234– 42; and Southey 1844, 472– 76. For more on Smith, see Southey 1844, 213– 21. 66. TNSA, Madras Military Country Correspondence, vol. 45: 107– 10 (from English translation of Persian letter). This letter (on which the date is not noted in the copy preserved in the TNSA) was received in Madras on May 5, 1794. 67. The catalogue of Tipu Sultan’s surviving collection of books and manuscripts, with over two thousand titles in Arabic, Persian and Hindustani, including works in Islamic sciences, was published a few years after this event. The cataloguer Charles Stewart, a Persian scholar in the EIC’s employ, noted that this vast collection showed that “in Asia, at a period when Europe was overcast with ignorance and barbarism, Literature was ardently cultivated, and Science flourished.” Nonetheless, “the Orientals appear more deficient in Geography than in any other Sciences” (Stewart 1809, iii). For a discussion of this library and this cataloguing enterprise, see Bayly, 1996, 150; and Parthasarathi 2011, 198– 200. For a fictional elaboration of Tipu’s encounter with these instruments, see Maria Edgeworth, Lame Jervas (1799), published in 1804. 68. For a recent study of Anglo-Carnatic relations in this period (although it does not discuss this incident), see Dirks 2006. 69. Phillimore 1945, 204. In turn the Company may have been responding to the nawab’s penchant for European-style “furniture, mechanical toys, and mathematical instruments” (Stronge 2004, 295). 70. King and Millburn 1978. See also Baird 2004, 21– 29. 71. Letter dated October 24, 1764, from Fort St. George to the Court of Directors (IOR/ E/4/301, 43– 44). The nawab had remained an ally of the Company in its successful ousting of the French from South India, and he was recognized as such in the Peace of Paris of 1763; hence the show of gratitude expected— and granted. 72. Letter dated December 24, 1765, from the Court of Directors to Fort St. George (IOR/ E/4/863, 281).

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73. Cf. Eaton 2013, 159. 74. Letter dated April 10, 1771, from the Court of Directors to Fort St. George (IOR/E/4/865, 155). Although the records do not show the name of the manufacturer, it is worth noting that a few years later, the London-based Malby and Co. was proud to announce its “grand orrery,” designed by James Simmonds, and especially fashioned for men of means (http://collections .rmg.co.uk /collections/objects/11229.html). 75. Quoted in Eaton 2013, 157– 58. I thank Natasha Eaton for first alerting me to this entire episode many years ago. 76. Letter dated October 15, 1772, from Fort St. George to the Court of Directors (IOR/ E/4/305, 197). The repaired panes were sent out from England in December 1773 (Letter dated December 10, 1773, from the Court of Directors to Fort St. George, IOR/E/4/865, 1005). The trail runs cold here, and we don’t learn how and in what condition they were received in Madras. 77. Eaton 2013, 36– 38, 157– 61. 78. Sardesai 1936, 2– 3. 79. For Malet’s tenure as Resident, see esp. Sardesai 1936 and Howlett 2004. On the basis of sketches done by James Wales, a British artist whom Malet invited to the Maratha court, the famous painter Thomas Daniell completed an oil portrait that shows the Resident at the solemnization of an important treaty (that allied the Marathas with the EIC against Tipu’s forces) with the Peshwa in 1790 (Bayly 1990, 161– 63). 80. Madhav Rao was literally an infant when he was installed as Peshwa, the real power wielded by his chief minister, the famous Nana Phadnis. A much-analyzed painting by James Wales, completed in 1792, shows the young Peshwa with Nana Phadnis. See also Shaffer 2011 and Eaton 2013, 178– 82. 81. BePub, August 5, 1789. Interestingly, a few weeks later on October 23, Malet wrote to Cornwallis that he had been invited to dine with the young king— on the occasion of “an event of great joy and gladness, that the Peshwa’s wife had discovered the first signs of puberty,”— and of “having sat some time with the Peshwa, during which Major Rennell’s map of Hindostan was introduced, and many enquiries made of places on it.” It is not entirely clear from Malet’s letter whether he had presented this famous map (first published in 1782) to the Maratha court on a former occasion, or whether it was his own personal possession (IOR/ H/615, 88– 89; see also Sardesai 1936, 156– 57). 82. Sardesai 1936, 151. The fact that Malet and Cornwallis sought to secure these objects from England suggests that these were not yet readily available in either Bombay or Calcutta at this time. In 1781, a Bengal newspaper had advertised the sale by auction (to take place on January 7, 1782 in Chinsurah) of the personal belongings of one Johannes Mathias Ross which included among other things, globes, telescopes, and microscopes (Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, or Calcutta Public Advertiser, November 8, 1781, p. 42). In late December 1790, the Calcutta house of Burrell, Dring and Forster advertised the auction of an orrery and a pair of globes to take place on January 1, 1791 (Calcutta Gazette, no. 14, 1790 (357). See also chapter 5. 83. IOR/ E/4/48, 338– 40. 84. On these related instruments, which were also designed to demonstrate planetary motions in various ways, see King and Millburn 1978. 85. IOR/ E/4/1007, 551. 86. From the Court of Directors to Bombay (Public), December 14, 1791 (IOR/E/4/1008). It is likely that the globes may have been manufactured by the London firm of George Adams, the

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foremost makers at that time of these instruments in Britain. A pair of Adams globes— twentyeight inches in diameter, and the largest hitherto made in England— were similarly among the gifts presented to the Chinese emperor on behalf of George III by the Macartney Embassy in early 1793 (Millburn 2000, 277). 87. Bombay Letters to Court of Directors, December 21, 1792 (IOR/ E/4/472). See also BoPub, June 1, 1792. 88. Charles Malet to Court of Directors, October 16, 1792 (reprinted in Sardesai 1936, 253– 55). On Emmitt, see Phillimore 1945, 204, 335– 36. 89. In 1817, Kota was compelled to sign a “subordinate alliance” treaty with the EIC, and in 1818 was grouped with other such signatories to form the Mewar and Hadauti Political Agency and placed under the supervision of the political agent James Tod. For a study of British relations with Kotah and other Rajput states in this period, see Vashishtha 1978. Maharao Ram Singh was a particular favorite with artists, appearing prominently and repeatedly “in hunting scenes, darbars, and official meetings with various Rajput rulers and British officers” (Bautze 1997, 55). Indeed, painting became a mode of expressing limited sovereignty in a context in which the state had been hollowed out by colonial rule (Welch et al. 1997). It is thus perhaps fitting that the Maharao decided to gift a painting to the governor-general, although perhaps he did not expect the cartographic cornucopia that his generosity elicited in return from the colonial state. This incident complicates Natasha Eaton’s recent argument about painted portraits as the favored object of giving for the early colonial state (Eaton 2013). 90. Alexander Duff, a fiery Scottish missionary based in Calcutta on whom I say much more in chapter 5, wholeheartedly approved of Bentinck’s move in this regard. “He has instead of sending presents of oriental ornaments . . . resolved, with a wisdom peculiar to himself as governor, to substitute something more profitable, such as globes, telescopes, microscopes, barometers, and spelling-books with large pictures in them . . . the consequence is, that from the Burman empire to the farthest west, there has been a demand for English books and teachers” (Duff 1835, 426). 91. The painting gifted to Bentinck (which the governor-general was not allowed to keep, as per new EIC regulations) is today at the Asiatic Society in Calcutta (no. O.P. 55). It was almost certainly a copy of a detail from an even larger work, currently in the Kotah Palace. For a superb analysis of the painting with a discussion based on Kotah narratives of the encounter, as well as a contemporary French account, see Bautze 1990. The Ajmer durbar was also painted by artists of other Rajput courts (see, for example, Bautze 1998, 158– 63). Bautze’s important accounts do not, however, trace the afterlife of the gifted Kotah painting when it intersects with the itineraries of the terrestrial globe. 92. The colonial official’s letter dated October 1, 1833, that transmitted the gifted art object to Bentinck refers to it as an “oil painting,” but it was done on cloth with gouache, the medium most often used by Indian artists at this time (“Papers regarding Kotah State” [IOR/F/4/1513/59673]). 93. “Papers regarding Kotah State” (IOR/ F/4/1513/59673). On Bentinck’s complex views on (Western) education as the “panacea” for India’s regeneration (without necessarily resulting in conversion to Christianity), see Carson 2012, 194– 98. 94. Wilkinson 1834b, 515. The Observatory at Kotah had been built by one of the Maharao’s illustrious forbears, Umed Singh (r. 1771– 1819). For a scholarly appraisal of the armillary sphere, the sundials, and the ghati-yantra (a time-telling device), but not unfortunately the globes, see Sharma 2000. In chapter 3, I will have more to say about such “Puranic” globes.

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95. On the London firm of John Cary (1755– 1835), among the most important British globe makers of this time, see Dekker ed. 1999, 293– 99; and Worms and Baynton-Williams 2011, 129– 33. 96. A note here adds, “To Thompson’s [sic], The Authorities on which some of these maps have been constructed are the Survey of countries published under the direction of Government, viz., the British Islands from our own Surveys, France from Cassini, Spain . . . and Italy, from Danville.” Bentinck’s list was here referring to John Thomson’s A New General Atlas, published in 1829 in Edinburgh. 97. The gifting of this particular item is particularly important to note given the tensions that had prevailed just a couple years earlier when the Kotah Court had resisted the EIC’s effort to conduct a survey of its territory. While respecting the wishes of the Court, the acting political agent was also asked by his superiors in Calcutta “to use his utmost endeavours to impress on the mind” of those who were so resisting “the advantages of the Survey” (Extract, Political Letter from Fort William dated May 14, 1832, no. 41) [IOR/F/4/1513/59673]). 98. “Papers regarding Kotah State” (IOR/ F/4/1513/59673). I discuss a comparable gift from a decade earlier of scientific instruments to Hindu College in Calcutta in chapter 5. 99. BePol, May 1, 1834, nos. 18 & 19 (IOR/ P/127/14). 100. IPC, February 19, 1835, no. 42 (IOR/ P/193/68). Indeed, it appears that on their journey across the plains of India from Calcutta to Kotah, “as they proceeded up the country, the globes, through the size of the package, attracted uncommon attention from the people” (CCO 3: 511). 101. To be fair to him, it is quite possible matters of greater import than figuring out the correct configuration of our Earth may have weighed on the Maharao’s mind: he was without a male heir and was involved in a major succession dispute in 1834. The Maharao apparently also had the large globes decorated with “gold and precious stones,” turning them into ornaments of a different sort (CCO 1834, 3: 512). See also chapter 3, note 199. 102. Archer 1959, 53. For an analysis of Kotah portraiture in this period, see esp. Desai 1985, 116– 21; and Welch 1997. 103. IPC, February 19, 1835, nos. 41– 43 (IOR/ P/193/68). For a discussion of this instrument (called a turya yantra, “quadrant”) by a British astronomer and faculty member of Hindu College in Calcutta, see Middleton 1839. 104. Bentinck left India a month later, so it is not entirely clear if the orrery arrived in Calcutta and was subsequently dispatched to Kotah. As I discuss a little further in chapter 5, Bentinck presided over a momentous period of ferment and change in the colonial state’s education policy and his cartographic exchange with Ram Singh has to be placed in this context. In my analysis, I have benefited also from an unpublished essay by Richard Fox Young that I read after my own research had been completed (Young n.d.). 105. “Papers regarding Kotah State,” Letter from Wilkinson dated September 28, 1833, para. 4 (IOR/ F/4/1513/59673). Elsewhere, Wilkinson wrote about how he had “copies of the Maharao’s globes made” and sent to a missionary friend in Calcutta, as a reminder to folks over there that “the Hindus knew that the earth was a sphere,” albeit one whose surface was incorrectly mapped (Wilkinson 1834a, 463). 106. Other examples of this type among contemporary British political agents who took up residence in Indian courts in the 1830s include Captain Gordon in the remote eastern Indian kingdom of Manipur, who demonstrated the work of a pair of globes to the young ruler there in order to counter what he calls “the zenana influence”; and James Erskine, on the other end of the

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subcontinent in Kathiawar, who too thought that educating the local chiefs in “Geography and the use of the globes” was intrinsic to a civilizing strategy that would wean them from “opium, intoxication by ardent spirits, and licentiousness” (CCO 1836, 5: 111– 20; “Papers regarding the Promotion of Education in Kathywar,” IOR/F/4/1881/79958). Sometimes, as with the case of Serfoji, such projects yielded changes that met with colonial approval. But invariably, as one commentator noted acidly, “The native rulers of India have more in their power in regard to the improvement of the character of their countrymen than any other class of people whatever; and what have they yet done toward it? Nothing. Worse than nothing” (CCO 1836, 5: 111– 12). Of course, it is not just in India but elsewhere as well that such “global” gifting lubricated the wheels of empire— and pedagogic modernity. For example, as early as the seventeenth century in the New World, John Smith wrote in his General Historie of Virginia of using a “globe-like Jewel” to demonstrate “the roundnesse of earth, and skies, the spheare of the Sunne, Moone, and Starres, and how the Sunne did chase the night round about the world continually; the greatnesse of the land and Sea, the diversitie of Nations, varietie of complexions, and how we were to them Antipodes, and many other such like matters, they all stood as amazed with admiration” (Mullaney 2000, 22). Similar “global” demonstrations are reported in eighteenth-century West Africa (Lipking 1997, 30– 31), Hawaii in 1829 (AJMM 1831, vol. 5: 29– 30); Burma in the 1850s (MR 1828, 16: 395; and Yule 1968, 109– 10), and elsewhere. 107. Thus, a key conference of missionaries held in the resort town of Ootacamund in summer 1857 concluded that alongside the Bible, “School-globes and School-maps, together with an Atlas,” ought to be placed in the hands of every pupil (Winslow et al. 1858, 275). 108. On the Empire of Christ, see Cox 2002. 109. The scholarship on the Tranquebar mission is extensive, but see esp. Frykenberg 1999; Gross, Kumaradoss, and Liebau 2006; Liebau 2013; and Fihl and Venkatachalapathy 2014. 110. Peterson 2003, 99. See also Liebau 2013, 354– 59. 111. Liebau 2013, 360, 364. 112. Liebau 2013, 364. 113. It is important to stress that for nearly a century prior to 1813 when the British Parliament compelled the Company to advance the “the religious and moral improvement” of its Indian subjects, the latter’s Madras establishment was already collaborating with the SPCK in providing financial and even logistical support for mission schools for native children. Support for such schools continued into the new century. 114. Liebau 2013, 360– 62, 380– 82. 115. Liebau 2013, 399. By the early eighteenth century, there were several manuals that offered advice on how to make globes, including with copper, ivory, and paper (e.g., Green 1717). 116. Peterson 2003, 120. 117. Quoted in Peterson 1999c, 210– 11. 118. Liebau 2013, 172– 73. Karsten Hommel describes John as “the most programmatic missionary of the Danish-Halle mission in the spirit of theological rationalism” (Hommel 2006, 1115), and Heike Liebau deems him “the theoretician” among these missionaries (Liebau 2006, 1325). After a stint as a teacher in the Orphan School in Halle, John arrived in India in 1771 and he was based in Tranquebar until his death there in 1813. An early advocate of the so-called “Madras method of instruction” systematized by the Reverend Andrew Bell, John regularly corresponded with the latter (Southey 1844, 199– 212). In “On Indian Civilization,” written in 1812 and published in 1813 in London, John endorsed the Bell method, even while advocating the teaching

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of geography “in simple sentences, whereby special attention would be paid to Europe” (Liebau 2006, 1330; see also John 2006). Not surprisingly, a visitor to Tranquebar in May 1817 wrote of a gathering of more than three hundred young students of whom the boys of the English School conducted a “Conversation on Geography,” although they were barely twelve years old (MR 1818, 6: 457). For analysis of John’s pedagogical work, see Liebau 2013; and Peterson 2014. 119. Liebau 2013, 399. 120. Hommel 2006, 1126– 27. 121. Hommel 2006, 1125. 122. Southey 1844, 211. James Dinwiddie, a product of the Scottish Enlightenment, arrived in India in late 1794 (after a visit to China as a member of the 1792 Macartney Embassy in the course of which he helped set up a European-style planetarium in Peking), and offered a series of public lectures on astronomy and geography using his philosophical apparatus, which included a pair of globes and orrery. He visited Madras in 1796 (where, among other apparatus, he purchased a tellurian from Andrew Bell), and also spent more than a decade in Calcutta where he taught at the newly established College of Fort William from 1801 (Lunney 2004, Lightman et al. 2013, and esp. Nair 2013; and Stewart 2013). See also chapter 5. 123. Liebau 2013, 368– 72. See also Peterson 2014. 124. TNSA, MMC, August 3, 1787, vol. 114: 414– 22. See also Pearson 1834, 150– 51. 125. TDR, 3473/74, April 28, 1802: 211– 18. See also SPG, C/IND/India General, Box 2. 126. Nair 2012, xxviii. 127. Frykenberg 1999; and esp. Peterson 1999b; and Peterson 2002. 128. The poem was originally written in 1799, premiered possibly in 1800 in Madras and performed again in 1809, and finalized in 1820 (Peterson 2003, 110). 129. See also Sweetman and Ilakkuvan 2012; and Jeyaraj and Young 2013. 130. It is likely that Rhenius developed his first acquaintance with Tamil geographical conceptions in Madras from conversations with a “respectable Heathen” (who the missionary refers to as “the Gentoo”) who had “great skill, uncommon for a Native, in geography and astronomy” (MR 1817, 5: 336). 131. On Rhenius’s work, the best published source remains his memoirs (Rhenius 1841), but see also Neill 1985, 218– 22. There are several works in Tamil, of which I have found the most useful analysis in Pavendan 1998 and Paramasivan 2000. In his own lifetime, Rhenius’s fluency in Tamil, a language he started to learn upon his arrival in Madras in 1814, was questioned by native Protestants (Israel 2006; cf. Neill 1985, 218). 132. Rhenius 1841, 402– 4. In the Annual Report that he sent home a couple years earlier in 1829, it was noted that the higher classes of the seminary in Palayamkottai “were studying Tamul, English, Hebrew, Latin, geography, history, European arithmetic, and elements of logic and rhetoric. But their progress, though steady, is slow, because of the want of elementary books in Tamul.” Making a case for the need to print “elementary books,” he noted that “each boy will then have a copy in his hand, whereas now he must make himself one with pen and ink on paper, or with an iron pen on palmeira leaves.” (Rhenius 1841, 357– 58). 133. Rhenius 1841, 218. See also CMS Proceedings 1821– 22, 146. 134. Rhenius 1841, 357. While visiting Tiruchendur (a well-known temple town on the coast) in 1823, Rhenius engaged in fierce debates against native idolatry and resolved to write a tract that would “show that the Hindu system of astronomy, and the various notions they have of phenomena, such as eclipses, thunder, lightning, etc. are false; for with these they intimately

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connect their idolatry” (ibid., 248). I have been unable to locate this tract that was likely titled A Treatise Referring to Miscellaneous Subjects, such as the Solar System, some of the Phenomena of Nature, Astrology, and the Hindu Chronology, and was possibly printed in Madras around 1827 (ibid., 325). 135. In October 1827, Reverend William Reeve, an LMS missionary based in neighboring Bangalore, wrote to the Madras government that he had completed bilingual works titled Elements of Geography and Elements of Astronomy in Tamil, “Carnataca” [Kannada], and Telugu, and solicited financial support for their publication (TNSA, “Copies of Letters Received by the Committee of Public Instruction, March 10, 1826, to June 11, 1828,” Public Sundries 144). He was unsuccessful in securing this support, most likely because these works were deemed “imperfect” and full of errors (UTC Archives, Madras School Book Society Minutes of Meetings, 1823– 29, 58). The British Library’s catalogue in London includes a work dated to 1828 and titled Pukolacastirac Cankirakam, “A Geography Compendium,” a text of about forty pages. The work is unfortunately missing from the library’s collection. Rhenius’s Pumicastiram thus appears to be the earliest extant geographical work in Tamil. For a Tamil analysis of the work, see Ganeshan 2000. 136. This is the first time that the word “geography” was glossed as such in Tamil, albeit in highly Sanskritized form. The term pukolam, “Earth sphere,” to designate this new knowledge form also dates to this early period, as in the work titled Pukolacastirac Cankirakam, published ca. 1828 (see also note 135). 137. Rhenius 1832, no pagination. Despite the coinage of the neologism, the word “globe” continues to be frequently used as such in Tamil (as in other Indian languages) to this day. 138. Rhenius 1832, 7. 139. Rhenius 1832, 15– 19. 140. Rhenius 1841, 358. Although several competing titles— and much shorter works— came to be published soon after, in Tamil and English, Pumicastiram was read by both boys and girls in missionary schoolrooms in Tirunelveli and across the Presidency over the next couple decades, and even given as a prize to worthy students (CMS Proceedings 1832– 1833, 48; Harley 1838, 9; Devasagayam 1846, 49; and Spratt 1849, 179). In 1841, a revised version of the text (with maps), deemed “useful, being comprehensive” was considered for adoption by the newly created Madras High School (Madras University 1852, Appendix I). 141. Rhenius 1832, 153– 57. Tamil schoolbooks authored by other missionaries over the course of the nineteenth century continued this tradition (see, for example, American Mission 1835a, pt. 2: 4– 5; and Thompson 1852, 18). 142. Rhenius 1832, 4– 5. Similarly, Rhenius’s son— who edited his journals and correspondence— observes, after reading his father’s discussion on such subjects with Brahmans, Jains and others he met in the course of proselytizing travels: “They [the Jainas] ridicule the Brahmanical fable of the earth being supported on the back of a tortoise, and maintain that it is kept in its place by three strong winds which are continually sweeping beneath its lower surface” (Rhenius 1841, 162– 63). This is a refrain that one hears well into the end of the century. Thus, a conference of missionaries which met in mid-1858 concluded, “Surely it is better that the Hindu should have some correct idea of the law of gravitation than that he should suppose the earth to rest upon the back of a tortoise” (Winslow et al. 1858, 205). 143. Hall 1858, 186. 144. Rhenius 1832, unpaginated preface. 145. Rhenius 1832, unpaginated preface. 146. Rhenius 1832, 155.

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147. Rhenius 1841, 446– 48. 148. Young and Jesbanesan 1995, 49– 68. Daniel Poor (based in Jaffna from around 1816 until his death there in 1855) worked for about six years with the newly established American Madura Mission from around 1834. His brief correspondence with the Madras government reveals that astronomy and geography were taught in the schools set up in and around Madurai from around 1838, but it is not clear if globes and telescopes were used as they were in his schools in Ceylon (Daniel Poor Papers, Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, NH; see also Poor 1841). 149. Rhenius 1841, 365. 150. Vedadrisadasan 1839, 2– 3. I am deeply grateful to Vathsala Aithal for bringing Vedadrisadasan’s fascinating unpublished diary-cum-memoir to my attention (SOAS Library, Special Collections, MS. 117312). See also Codrington 1939, and Walsh 1983, 168. I discuss Vedadrisadasan further in chapter 4. 151. MCMR 1847, 14 (8): 141– 42; and Fox and Fox 1853, 235– 36. After an Oxford education, and ordained in 1840, Fox arrived in India in 1841. In spite of poor health— he died relatively young when he was only thirty one in late 1848— he kept a vigorous proselytizing schedule, in the course of which his life intersected with that of a half-caste girl called Mary (named at birth by her native mother as Mahalakshmi), to whom he tried to introduce Modern Earth and Modern Sky when she was briefly entrusted to his care while sojourning in the Nilgiris in the spring of 1843 (Fox and Fox 1853). “She was at first very incredulous as to the facts of natural science, and for a time considered Mr. Fox’s accounts to be mere fables invented to amuse her. When he told her that what we call sky was only air, she could not believe it, and exclaimed, ‘Only air! Then what does the moon stand upon?’ Her idea of the sky was it was a mountain of stone, across which the gods passed from place to place; thunder was the noise of their rattling chariots; and lighting was the flash of the chariot-wheels as they struck the stone. The earth, she maintained, was a flat surface, bounded on all sides by interminable oceans, though she owned it had sometimes puzzled her that the English always came by sea and not by land.” After two months of intense instruction, Fox was able to “open” her mind, and he reported, “She now, I think, believes all we tell her, except the fact of the earth going round, and the variety of hours in different longitudes. She says all our other words are true, but this is ‘Ootade’ (nonsense)” (Tucker 1857, 30– 34). Tragically, Mary died in Madras in September 1848, a few days before Mr. Fox passed on himself, in London. 152. Gannaway 1870, 268. 153. Bell 1808, 151– 52. A similar institution had already been established in Calcutta by the Military Orphan Society founded in 1782. 154. Southey 1844, 524– 26. It is likely that as he left the country, he sold many of his apparatus, such as a tellurian, to James Dinwiddie (Nair 2013, 61– 62). 155. Bell 1808, 168– 70. 156. Blackie 2004. On the great interest at this time, especially among expatriates settled in India, for such spectacular demonstrations of scientific experiments by “scientific showmen” like Bell and others, see Lightman et al. 2013. 157. Southey 1844, 222– 26. 158. MC 1805, 21 (1340): 4. The lectures were declared open to men, women, and children. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the northern suburb of Vepery was fast emerging as an educational hub for the city, thanks to the SPCK’s pedagogic activities there in the previous century and its printing press.

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159. MC 1805, 21 (1032): 1. For an advertisement in distant Bombay dated July 21, 1804, for a “Madras Boarding School” at Vipery [sic], where H. H. Smith professed to teach his pupils the English Language grammatically, Writing, Arithmetic, Geography, the use of the Globes, etc.,” see BC 1804, 13 (618). 160. MC 1806, 22 (1078): 1. This school was first opened in the northern Madras suburb of Perambur a year earlier, but likely moved to Vepery, given the latter’s growing prominence in the pedagogical landscape of the city. 161. TNSA, MBoR, July 8, 1822: 6424– 27; July 25, 1822: 6971– 72; “Measures Taken to Promote Education in the Madras Presidency” (IOR/ F/4/939/26354). For a review of key government correspondence, see Arbuthnot 1855, 1– 4, Appendices A– D. In response to the government’s call, one of the more useful profiles regarding the existing mechanics of native education as well as curriculum was provided by the Collector of Bellary, A. D. Campbell (for an accessible version in print, see Campbell 1834). For a historical analysis of education in the Madras Presidency in this early period, see esp. Frykenberg 1986. 162. “Extract of a letter from the Court of Directors to the Government of Madras, dated April 16, 1628” (TNSA, “Copies of Letters Received by the Committee of Public Instruction, March 10, 1826, to June 11, 1828,” Public Sundries 144). 163. Henry Harkness, Secretary of the College to the Chief Secretary to Government, letter dated September 3, 1827 (TNSA, “Copies of Letters Despatched by the Committee of Public Instruction, March 29, 1826 to June 11, 1828,” Public Sundries, vol. 145). 164. Henry Harkness, Secretary of the College to The Chief Secretary to Government, letter dated September 3, 1827 (TNSA, “Copies of Letters Despatched by the Committee of Public Instruction, March 29, 1826, to June 11, 1828,” Public Sundries, vol. 145). See also Arbuthnot 1855, 4– 9; and Appendices E, I, K, and L. In a letter dated November 15, 1832, the Board of Public Instruction acknowledged five years later that although “the study of the Vedas and Pooranums, as well as mythological pursuits” had been abandoned by the students in the system, “with a very few exceptions, nothing like a love of science has been discernible” (Arbuthnot 1855, Appendix I, para. 22). 165. The surviving records do not show if these objects ever did actually arrive in Madras. Harkness also put in a request for twenty-five copies each of the following texts (without specifying the editions needed): Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography; Goldsmith’s Popular Geography; Vince’s Introduction to Astronomy; Ferguson’s Astronomy; and Keith’s Treatise on the Use of the Globes, all standard by now in England for “enlightened” terrestrial lessons (Henry Harkness, Secretary of the College to The Chief Secretary to Government, letter dated September 3, 1827; TNSA, “Copies of Letters Despatched by the Committee of Public Instruction, March 29, 1826 to June 11, 1828,” Public Sundries, vol. 145). 166. Arbuthnot 1855, Appendix G. The displeasure continued to be expressed over the course of the next decade (“Extracts from a Note by J. R. Colvin, Private Secretary to the Governor General, referred to in Lord Auckland’s minute of November 24, 1839,” paras. 44– 45 [IOR/F/4/1846/77638]. See also Arbuthnot 1855, Appendices F and O). 167. “Proceedings of a Meeting held on the 14th April 1820, at the College Hall, Fort St. George, for the purpose of establishing a School-Book-Society” (TNSA, South Arcot District Records, vol. 268: 18– 23). See also “Extract Fort St. George Revenue Consultations,” March 10, 1826 (IOR/ F/4/939/26354). In contrast to its counterparts in Calcutta and Bombay, the MSBS’s founding leadership was entirely British, although native subscribers, including Serfoji, began to soon sign up. Until the founding in 1847 of the Madras Upayukta Grandha Karana Sabha

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(Madras Society for Preparation of Useful Books), the MSBS was the only non-missionary body in Madras in this sector, but even its efforts were largely haphazard, especially in contrast to its counterparts in Calcutta and Bombay. 168. “Proceedings of a Meeting held on the 14th April 1820, at the College Hall, Fort St. George, for the purpose of establishing a School-Book-Society” (TNSA, South Arcot District Records, vol. 268: 18– 23); and “Extract Fort St. George Revenue Consultations,” March 10, 1826 (IOR/ F/4/939/26354). See also CSBS 1823, 12– 14; and CSBS 1828, 19, 40– 42. 169. “Extract Fort St. George Revenue Consultations,” March 10, 1826 (IOR/F/4/939/26354). 170. UTC Archives, Madras School Book Society Minutes of Meetings, 1823– 29, 57. 171. Caumayappa Mudaliar was recruited as the Tamil translator of Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, a multi-volume work that helped popularize complex astronomical, geographical, and natural scientific principles, especially among young people in England. Although Caumayappa’s efforts were debated in the committee, the work appears to have been ready by circa 1828 under the title Castira Camvatangal. A report of 1841 put together by the newly constituted Board of Governors of Madras University showed that the work was circulating then in the Presidency but was “not much in demand” (Arbuthnot 1855, Appendix V; see also Venkateswaran 2007, 93– 95). Jaligamma Venkatarow translated into Telugu in 1828 the CSBS’s bilingual work (in English and Hindustani), A Compendium of Geography (published in 1824). However, the translation was not published after numerous errors were detected (UTC Archives, Madras School Book Society Minutes of Meetings, 1823– 29, 55). 172. Nor did the society succeed in implementing early plans for a seminary (to be called Madras Grammar School) “to train Native Scholars competent to convey European notions and acquirements in an easy and familiar manner to the uninstructed mind.” Instruction in this proposed School intended to produce a new generation of schoolmasters was to be limited to “English, Tamil and Telugu languages, general grammar, penmanship, Arithmetic, Geography, and general history” (“Extract Fort St. George Revenue Consultations, March 10, 1826” [IOR/ F/4/939/26354]). In the 1860s, the society reinvented itself as the Madras School Book and Vernacular Language Society, which, among other things, published a pioneering science monthly called Janavinotini (Venkateswaran 2007, 100– 104). 173. Even the MSBS, ostensibly committed to excluding “the publication of all religious books,” at the same time insisted that “as the only pure and perfect system of morality is unfolded in the records of our Revealed Religion, this rule would by no means prohibit such moral sentiments from being introduced in these elementary works, as altho’ known by us to be of Divine origin, were nevertheless agreeable to the natural reason of men of all religions” (“Proceedings of a Meeting held on the 14th April 1820, at the College Hall, Fort St. George, for the purpose of establishing a School-Book-Society” (TNSA, South Arcot District Records, vol. 268: 18– 23). 174. MPub, January 24, 1834, nos. 26– 27; February 28, 1834, nos. 6– 8. See also Anon. 1833. 175. MPub, March 2, 1841, nos. 7 and 13. See also Arbuthnot 1855, Appendices R and V. As of 1840, the only books circulating in the Presidency broadly concerned with science education were Caumayappa Mudaliar’s Tamil translation of Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues (deemed “not much in demand”); Michael John Rowlandson’s Rudiments of Natural Philosophy (printed “for the use of the Persian class in the College of Fort St. George, and the Mahomaden Collectorate, and, Tahsildaree Schools, established in the Provinces of the Madras Presidency”); J. W. “Nagapattinam” Thompson’s Antacastira Curukkam (Summary of Facts on Physical Science for the Infor-

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mation of Native Youth, published in 1840 by the SPCK at Vepery), and Rhenius’s Pumicastiram. Indeed, colonial administrators in Madras at this point resisted the push to translate useful works of science into the languages of the Presidency on account of their “poverty,” and for their lack of “genius and structure” which would make them difficult to bear the weight of “European ideas and expressions” (Arbuthnot 1855, Appendix V; see also MPub, July 26, 1842, no. 12). 176. MPub, December 12, 1839, no. 40; February 4, 1840, no. 5– 13; March 31, 1840, nos. 87– 88; and July 26, 1842, no. 12. See also Arbuthnot 1855, Appendices S and W. 177. MPub, March 2, 1841, no. 15. See also Arbuthnot 1855, Appendices W; S. S; T. T. and Z. Z.; Government of Madras 1857; Bourdillon 1859a; Education Commission 1884a, 25, 71– 87, 188– 97; and Nathan 1904, vol. 2: 160. 178. Arbuthnot 1855, cccv. See also Arbuthnot 1855, 71– 74, 97– 98, Appendices X; A. A.; and C. C. C.; and Government of Madras 1865, 27– 30, 43– 46. 179. Prospectus of the India School-Books Society 1845, 5. 180. Bourdillon 1859a, 93– 95, 102– 3, 134, 165– 66. On the grant-in-aid system and its many problems, see Government of Madras 1858, Government of Madras 1865, and “Memorandum by Sir Alexander Arbuthnot” (IOR/ C/137 ff. 83– 90). 181. Winslow et al. 1858, 277. 182. Murdoch 1873, 79– 80. See also Murdoch 1871, 114. 183. The use of the orange to demonstrate Earth’s shape was common practice in geography classrooms and books in England as well (see, for example, Joyce 1808– 9, 2: 62– 65; and Pinnock 1827, 1. See also The Instructor 1835, 3: 12– 13). The example also made its way into books written in Indian languages across the subcontinent: see, for example, Shivaprasad 1855, 4– 5 (for an instance in Hindi); Narayanaswamy Iyer 1924, 8 (for Tamil); and Bandopadhyay 1999b, 25 (for Bengali). The naturally available proxies for the globe are clearly subcontinental innovations, making do with things-at-hand, comparable, for example, to the clever use of eggs of the ostrich in Senegal (MR 1820, 8: 157). 184. Proceedings of the Madras Government (Education), April 19, 1869, nos. 51– 52. Of these seventeen terrestrial and celestial globes at hand, only three were “in a tolerably good condition.” I have been unable to find any further information on whether these objects were indeed successfully auctioned off and the fate of the proceeds of the sale. 185. MPub, March 2, 1841, no. 15; July 26, 1842, nos. 3 and 12. 186. UTC Archives, Madras School Book Society Minutes of Meetings, 1823– 29, 29– 30. See also Director of Public Instruction 1862, 80– 81. For some works that includes maps or illustrations of hemispheres, and that were in use in schools according to government or missionary reports, see Guy 1810; and Clift 1869. 187. Prospectus of the India School-Books Society, 3. 188. Shivaprasad 1855, 8. See also chapter 3, note 235. 189. Velupillai 1876, 1– 2; see also Velupillai 1883, 1– 2. This is a concern that continued to be expressed into the next century, both in India and elsewhere (for example, Chamberlin and Grosvenor 1950; and Tiruvutaiyan 1964, 8). 190. The Instructor 1835, 3: 12– 13. 191. American Mission 1835b, 8– 9. This work is a good example of a point I make several times in the course of this work that “terrestrial lessons” are not limited to formal subjects such as geography, astronomy, or natural history, but were also offered through elementary primers and reading books.

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192. Christian Vernacular Education Society 1864b, 107– 9. 193. The CVES was established in May 1858 as a targeted response by the four principal British missionary societies operating in India— the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), the CMS, the LMS, and the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society— to that historic event that almost undid British rule in India, namely, the Great Rebellion of 1857. The organization’s goal was to pedagogically reach the villages of India as well as underclasses in towns through their patois rather than English. The name of the society was changed in 1891 to the Christian Literature Society for India (CLS). While a lot of the correspondence related to the work of the CVES and CLS was lost in the German bombing of London in the 1940s, there is still a considerable archive that has barely been explored by historians of India (see http://archives.soas.ac.uk /CalmView / Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=USCL%2fCLSI). In one estimation, the society had published from its founding till 1911, “4,700 books, tracts, and magazines in 22 of the languages spoken in India, and 44,800,000 copies of these publications have been printed and circulated” (Clayton 1911, 21). See also Savage 1994, 442– 45. 194. Mair n.d. 6. 195. Hewitt 1949, 53. On Murdoch, see esp. Morris 1906 and McClymont 1947, both biographies written by men who were sympathetic to his work. See also Savage 2004. 196. Murdoch was not alone, of course, in making such a charge, which was actually widespread among evangelical educators who operated in the subcontinent (see, for example, Bryce 1856). By the 1870s, Murdoch’s tirade against the “godless” education policy of the colonial state also expanded into a crusade against the “idolatrous” and “immoral” textbooks that such a policy was deemed to sustain. “Christianity has been carefully excluded,” nevertheless, idolatrous discussions had not been, so that “idolatry now has the imprimatur of the British Government” (Murdoch 1872b, 5, 30). 197. Prospectus of the South India Christian School Book Society Instituted 1854, 10. 198. Christian Vernacular Education Society 186?, 26. 199. SOAS Special Collections, USCL/ Christian Literature Society, Minutes, FBN 1 “Meeting of Committee, February 14, 1872.” (CVES, Minute Book, vol. 2: 466– 67.) See also Light for India 1872, 2: 23– 24. Like so many other such primers meant for introducing the child to the rudiments of the language, The Tamil First Book also included foundational lessons in terrestrial sphericity (Christian Vernacular Education Society 1869, chaps. 27 and 29). Similarly, the English First Book, published just a few years earlier, had the following lesson: In-di-a is one of the coun-tries of the earth. The earth is round like a ball. Ships of-ten sail round [sic] the earth. The earth floats in the sky like the moon. The sea cov-ers a great part of the earth. The wa-ter of the sea is salt. In-di-a is in a part of the earth called A-si-a. Eng-land is in Eu-rope (Christian Vernacular Education Society 1864, 35). 200. Among the titles published under Murdoch’s supervision were slim pamphlets that were cleverly marketed for a pice or an anna, hence costing virtually nothing: Astrology, Showing the Evil Effects of a Belief in this Pretended Science (1894); Eclipses: The True Explanation Showing that They

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are Harmless (1894); and Astronomy and Astrology (1897). The Catechism of Geography (a total of ten thousand copies of which had been printed by 1864) began with an assertion of Earth’s rotundity and the truth that it “floats in the sky,” and ends with the question, “What religion is spreading over the whole earth?” The response, “Christianity” (Christian Vernacular Education Society 1864a, 3, 48). The Manual of Geography, first published in 1863, was one of Murdoch’s pet projects, which he revised and updated until his last days. In addition to books explicitly concerned with scriptural truths and language primers, the CVES had a consistent interest in publishing geography texts for much of the time that Murdoch was in charge of its publication program, confirming the importance of the subject for Christian evangelization. Murdoch’s cartographic evangelism did not take heed of the realization of men like William D. Arnold, Director of Public Instruction in the newly constituted province of Punjab, who came to the wise conclusion in 1858: “At the moment the natives have perfect confidence in our schools. They know that we teach Geography, Arithmetic and History, nor do . . . [they object to] the puzzles which some amongst ourselves are so fond of propounding as to the inconsistency of Geography as taught by us with the doctrines of the Hindoos” (quoted in Allender 2006, 99). 201. Murdoch 1885, 153. For similar views expressed by Murdoch’s missionary contemporaries in Madras, see Winslow et al. 1858, 186; 216– 19. 202. Murdoch 1885, 155, emphasis added. The Reverend Moseley was one of Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, and a science popularizer. Murdoch met him in early 1859 in London and consulted with him at the start of his own career as publisher and cartographic evangelist. 203. Journal of the Madras Geographical Association, 1926, 1: 1. For Tamil language publications in natural history and the sciences in this period, see Venkateswaran 2004. 204. “The Madras prejudice” appears to be only a subset of a wider sense of ennui that accompanied the teaching of terrestrial lessons as a string of terms and names of places to memorize. As the Madras Mail reporting the next day on the meeting noted: “In the minds of the generation now using hair restorer [sic] the word ‘Geography’ will conjure up dreary hours of gazing on maps so far removed from reality that Mr. G. K. Chesterton, when a boy, got a shock, on first visiting Yorkshire, to find that it was not, as his atlas had taught him, colored yellow” ( Journal of the Madras Geographical Association, 1926, 1: Appendix A). 205. Journal of the Madras Geographical Association, 1926, 1: 4– 5. 206. The MGA was the third of such associations that sought to institutionalize the discipline in India, similar institutions having been founded earlier in Bombay (1832) and Aligarh (1925). The MGA changed its name to the Indian Geographical Society in 1940 (Kapur 2002, 7– 8, 26– 27). 207. For key discussions, see Bayly 1996, 213, 261– 62; Young 2009; and Mantena 2012, 88– 94, 119– 20. 208. BL, Mackenzie Collection: General, vol. 40 (14): 259– 60. 209. BL, Mackenzie Collection: General, vol. 40 (14): 259– 68. As I have already noted in chapter 1, such reconciliations between the rivaling Indic systems of the Puranic (with its discoidal model of Earth) and the Siddhantic (with its conception of Earth as a stationary sphere) had been attempted since at least the eighth century. What is ingenious, though, as Richard Fox Young notes, is Raghaviah’s attempt to reconcile the Puranic universe with heliocentrism (Young 2009, 73). 210. Young 2009, 72– 73. That not everyone in colonial Madras capitulated to Modern Earth is also apparent from manuscripts and texts that kept inherited and ancestral notions alive. These

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included Pukola Vilasam, “The Play of the Earth Sphere,” possibly composed around 1841 (Vaiyapuri Pillai 1933); the Kola Tipikai, “Light on the Sphere” (Caravanaperumal Aiyar and Vicakaperumal Aiyar 1839); Puviyelupatu, “Seventy [Verses] on Earth,” a celebration of Goddess Earth by a well-known Tamil litterateur (Raghava Iyengar 1927); and Antagola Meyporul, “The Truth about the Earth Sphere” (Raghava Iyengar 1933). These texts offer a mix of Puranic and Siddhantic ideas regarding the shape and disposition of Earth. 211. Venkateswaran 2004; and Venkateswaran 2007. Of course, all of this does not mean that the fabulous and the enchanted entirely disappear from the Tamil imaginary. For an extended analysis of how post-Darwinian arguments about sinking land bridges and lost continents spawn a fabulous discourse around a disappeared Tamil homeland and ancestral stories of floods, see Ramaswamy 2004. 212. Natesa Aiyar 1921. An earlier edition of the book published in 1916 did not include this opening poem. 213. The idea for holding this exhibition originated with the Elementary Teachers’ Association of Georgetown, Madras, and the committee that organized it was staffed largely by locals under the nominal supervision of Arthur Mayhew (the Deputy Director of Public Instruction). 214. Mayhew 1908, 56; and Sreenivasa Aiyangar 1907, 4. As I noted in chapter 1, makeshift paper globes from Madras had earlier been put on display in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held in London in 1886. Globes (plain and in relief ), flat and relief maps, and a tellurium were also displayed at the Arts Exhibition in Jaipur in 1883 (Anon. 1883), and at the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1885, on which more in chapter 5. 215. Allan 1907. See also Sreenivasa Aiyanger 1907, 8– 9. The report for the quinquennium ending in 1912 noted that in elementary or primary schools across the province, “books, maps, and relief maps are better and more numerous,” some even reporting the construction of small school museums (Sharp 1914, vol. 2: 132– 33). 216. Mayhew 1908, 83– 85. 217. Madras Exhibition of the Arts and Industries of Southern India 1915, 224. See also Anon. 1916, 443. 218. Jacob 2006, fig. 14. Such georamas had been constructed in Paris as early as 1823 (ibid., 53– 54). 219. Proceedings of the Madras Government (Education), January 18, 1897, no. 33. 220. Journal of the Madras Geographical Association, 6: 80. 221. See chapter 1, note 115. 222. Journal of the Madras Geographical Association, 1928– 29, 3: 10; 1930– 31, 4: 79. 223. Rajagopal 1972. 224. Arbuthnot 1855, cclvi. 225. The Gospel Missionary (n.s.) 1851, 129– 34; 145– 68. Streenivasa Charry’s conversion was widely reported in numerous other missionary publications of the time.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Kelly 1854, 471– 73. See also Sherwood 1839, 210– 13. 2. In her unpublished diary from which her printed memoir derives, this first meeting is jotted down in a much more prosaic manner when she later recalled this event in November

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1840. “On Sunday the 19th December [sic]— Permanund first came— & at the precise crisis in which our Native congregation must have failed in the failure of Mr. Leonard— there was such a revival as is felt in that quarter to this day” (Sherwood Family Papers, (Collection 1437). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles [henceforth SFP], Box 2, f. 3, 352). She explained the brevity of this entry to the fact that she had been in the middle of getting ready for a visit by the Governor-General Lord Moira and his party to Meerut. 3. Occasionally referred to as Martha Mary, and even as Martha, Mary Martha Sherwood signed off in her own published works as Mrs. Sherwood, the name by which she is invariably referred to in contemporary writings. Parmanand’s name appears in various configurations in the contemporary record, ranging from “Purmunund” and “Purumanunda,” to “Puram Anand” and “Anund.” In Mrs. Sherwood’s extant personal letters to her husband, she even mis-spells his name as “Permunnah.” 4. N. Bhattacharya 2001, 382. Another critic writes that few children of the English gentry who had grown up between 1812 and 1850, “can have escaped the influence of Mrs. Sherwood’s peculiar genius” (Royde Smith 1946, xiv). Mrs. Sherwood is credited with more than 350 books, some of them best sellers in their time. I do not deal with this aspect of her life and career, on which see esp. Royde Smith 1946; Cutt 1974; and N. Bhattacharya 2001. 5. Bhabha 1994, 102– 22. See also Cox 2002, 29; and Bell 2012, 320. For a recent essay that attempts to historicize Anand Masih, see Bell 2012, although this illuminating essay completely overlooks Permanund’s consequential encounter with Mary Martha Sherwood. 6. Among her contemporaries and near-contemporaries— all missionaries who served in India and whose memoirs incorporate details of this relationship— particularly noteworthy are the accounts in Long 1848, 214– 17, 228– 33; Weitbrecht 1858, 469– 74; and Wilkinson 1859, 184– 95. A long obituary published in 1855 in The Lives of the Illustrious, a few years after Mrs. Sherwood’s death, completely ignores Anand Masih, as indeed do many other standard missionary works (Anon. 1855). 7. CMS Archives, University of Birmingham Special Collections [henceforth CMSA], CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1/ O195/8. 8. Long 1848, 217. James Hough, author of the Missionary Vade Mecum (a guide book for missionaries), similarly reported on an encounter between a missionary and a Tamil Brahman-priest ( pandaram) in which they exchanged views about “the figure and motion of the earth.” The Brahman exclaimed, “To say that the earth is globular and has such revolutions as you describe, is contrary to common sense. No one can believe such absurdities.” The missionary proceeded to give him a demonstration in terrestrial sphericity, “to which he gave much attention and manifested child-like admiration on the discovery of truth. He wondered that the Tamul [sic] people could be so blind; that common sense had not led them to the discovery of the truth” (Hough 1832, 58– 60). See also MR 1830, 18: 253, and MCMR 1854, 21 (1): 20. 9. These parts of the Gangetic valley first called Ceded and Conquered Provinces from 1801/03 to 1836 and renamed Northwestern Provinces (henceforth NWP) were administered as part of Bengal Presidency until April 1843, when the region gained full autonomy from Calcutta and placed under its own lieutenant governor. Local control of educational institutions and policy was transferred at this point as well (Richey 1922, 228– 29). In 1877, the province was renamed NWP & Oudh with the amalgamation of the former kingdom of Awadh. 10. Bayly 2000, 104.

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11. In her early letters about Parmanand to her husband and a friend (Mrs. Hawkins), Mrs. Sherwood refers to him as “the Pundit.” This title, however, drops out in all her subsequent writings. Several of his missionary interlocutors such as Michael Wilkinson also referred to Anand as “the Pundit.” For some other examples of “Christian Brahmans” who helped Protestant missionaries disseminate the truths of terrestrial sphericity to their fellow natives, see The Missionary Herald 1840, 36: 264– 66, and The Gospel Missionary (n.s.) 1894, 14, 53– 55. 12. For helpful scholarship on the figure of the pandit, especially in colonial discourse, see Hatcher 1996; Bayly 2000; Kumar 2000, 38– 67; Michaels 2001; Dodson 2007; Hatcher 2012; and the many works of Richard Fox Young cited in this book. Veena Naregal’s term “neo-Brahman” comes close to the configuration that I have characterized as global pandit (Naregal 2002). I have also benefitted from Kapil Raj’s fascinating discussion of cartographic “pandits” who were drawn into the colonial project of surveying and mapping Tibet in the late nineteenth century (Raj 2006, 181– 222). 13. Hodgson 1837, 44. For further development of this argument, see Dodson 2007, 81. 14. My category is also based on a colonial oxymoron, “the English Pandit,” on which see CCO 1836, 5: 116– 17. 15. Hatcher 2005. See also Kumar 2000, 59– 63. 16. As one of her biographers notes, Mrs. Sherwood “kept a full diary, and in the closing years of her life . . . wrote from this diary her autobiography, a vast compilation of fifteen manuscript volumes, containing in all well over half a million words” (Darton 1910, xii). Mrs. Sherwood began writing her diary (based on various personal letters and “memorandums”) on March 20, 1835, and appears to have continued the work until January 23, 1847 (SFP, Box 1, f. 2. See also Kelly 1854, 1– 3 and 577). The SFP also includes her unpublished correspondence and other materials, but not the near daily “memorandums” and journal entries that she had maintained during her time in India, to which she refers frequently in her unpublished diary (http:// www.oac.cdlib.org /findaid /ark:/13030 / kt7000208k /dsc /#dsc-1.8.7). In 1853, shortly after her mother’s death, extensive parts of her reconstructed diary were further edited and readied for publication by her youngest daughter Sophia Kelly (Kelly 1854). In 1910, a descendant of the original publisher of many of her key works published another version of her reconstructed memoirs, along with excerpts from her husband’s, on the grounds that the daughter had expunged some valuable material (Darton 1910). Neither of these published accounts is complete, and the exclusions are fascinating to track. Darton’s version of the memoir entirely expunges Mrs. Sherwood’s encounter with Anand Masih. For a helpful account of the SFP, see Corley 2009. 17. As recounted in Wilkinson 1859, 186– 87. 18. Long 1848, 216– 17. For an extended version of his existential crisis, presented in Anand’s voice, see Wilkinson 1859, 187– 89. 19. Chamberlain arrived in May 1813 in Sirdhana— about twelve miles from Meerut, where he also met the Sherwoods who had themselves arrived there only recently— at which place also resided the colorful Begum Samru, who, despite being a Roman Catholic, was hospitable to the Protestant missionary (Yates 1826, 326– 28). For Chamberlain’s troubles with the EIC authorities on account of his evangelical activities, see Powell 1993, 87; Bell 2012, 311– 12; and Carson 2012, 169. 20. Chamberlain’s letter from Sirdhana dated June 5, 1813 (quoted in Yates 1826, 331). In a subsequent letter of January 14, 1814, Chamberlain waxed eloquently: “I never met with a per-

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son so much to my mind as Purumanunda is. He is willing to work, and works day and night. He attends soon after sunrise, goes away for two hours to eat, and then works again till sunset; after which, two evenings in the week, and more, he attends as my amanuensis in the translation. This evening he staid [sic] till between nine and ten o’clock, and wrote off from my mouth the eight and part of the ninth chapters of the revelations” (Yates 1826, 340). For Parmanand’s putative version of his first contact with the Bible, see Wilkinson 1859, 190– 91. 21. While a letter of February 1814 suggests that Parmanand’s wife and sister had also possibly converted or at least “set aside their caste,” a later account by other missionaries clearly indicate that this was part of the new convert’s problem that so many of his intimate family, including his wife, resisted becoming Christian and also chastised him for having given up his ancestral faith (Yates 1826, 342). See also Wilkinson 1859: 191– 92; and Bateman 1860, 491. 22. Yates 1826, 353. A few weeks later, Chamberlain mentions Parmamand for the last time in his published correspondence in less than assured terms (ibid., 354). For more details on Parmanand’s relationship with Chamberlain as recalled by Mrs. Sherwood, see MR 1817, 5: 33– 35; and Kelly 1854, 472– 75. We learn from the latter that Parmanand (who she refers to frequently as “Mr. Chamberlain’s Pundit”) wished as well “to have his infant children baptized with himself.” On his ongoing anxieties, even his fears, at this point, as recalled later to another CMS missionary, see Wilkinson 1859, 191– 92. 23. Anand Masih’s first person account as recounted in Wilkinson 1859, 193. On Mangal Dass’s conversion, see Sherwood 1839, 193– 94; and Weitbrecht 1858, 465– 67. 24. Bill Bell speculates he might have been born in the 1790s (Bell 2012, 320). 25. SFP, Box 1, f. 1. See also Kelly 1854, 3, 18. 26. SFP, Box 1, f. 2. See also Kelly 1857, 38; and Darton 1910, 34– 35. She also writes a little later, “my head & ideas were almost as much among the ancients as the moderns” (SFP, Box 1, f. 2. See also Kelly 1854, 57). 27. Withers 2007, 230. See also Terrall 2000, 245– 46 and Fara 2004, 109– 11. 28. Somerville 1873, 29– 30. The scholarship on Mary Somerville is extensive, although few if any mention the impact of her work outside Europe (Neeley 2001). 29. SFP, Box 1, f. 3 and Box 6, f. 3. See also Kelly 1854, 86– 143; and Darton 1910, 121– 55. It has been noted that Mrs. Sherwood’s unpublished diary is also by far the most importance source for knowledge about the school attended by Jane Austen (Corley 2009). 30. Fara 2004, 189– 93. See also Wither 2007, 225– 26; Terrall 1995; and Terall 2000. 31. In another letter dated Monday October 4 (no year mentioned), she wrote to her mother that she “was pleased to hear . . . that Massey learns astronomy. I hope he will give me a few lessons at Christmas for I have a great desire to learn it (SFP, Box 10). 32. To quote from one entry in her reconstructed diary from numerous such, “Oh, India! Ever dear birth-place of six beloved children and the grave of two, never shall I again behold thy deep azure, cloudless sky, or the golden glory of thy setting sun, never again shall I breathe the fragrance of thine orange blossoms, nor hear the cheerful voices of my beautiful infants in thine high and airy halls!” (SFP, Box 7, f. 2, 191). In her published memoir, Mrs. Sherwood observes, “There appears, in many portions of my old Indian diary, a sort of discrepancy, which I have observed in the diaries of many religious persons. In one passage, it appears as if I had been the most miserable of human beings; and in the next, perhaps, I speak of the pleasant manner in which my days pass, and of my many enjoyments: both passages have, probably, been tolerably correct copies of my feelings at the time they were written” (Kelly 1854, 309).

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33. Darton 1910, 252, 268. 34. Darton 1910, 393– 94. Completed in its first form in mid-1813 when she was in residence in Meerut and on the eve of her meeting with Parmanand, the book was published in 1818 after her return to England with numerous reprints including one as recently as 1977 (Cutt 1974, 135– 36). The Fairchild Family has been characterized by at least one scholar as the representative text for “the Evangelical penetration of the nursery” (Cutt 1974, 63). Another reviewer observes, “During its vogue, and after, it was perhaps as widely read, as completely ridiculed, and as honestly condemned by child-lovers, as an English book ever written for children. It has deserved all three fates” (Darton 1932, 175). 35. http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki / The_History_of_the_Fairchild_Family. 36. Sherwood 1822, 5– 6. 37. Sherwood 1822, 14– 15. There are resonances here with the work of the pious educationist and Sunday School movement pioneer Sarah Trimmer (1741– 1810), who Mrs. Sherwood knew of and whose work she might have even read, especially Trimmer 1799. “Come here, Henry and Charlotte, look at this globe. Do you know what it was made for? Why, small as it is, it represents the whole earth. . . . The world is an exceedingly large globe, and this before us is a kind of miniature picture of it. You see here vast numbers of lines drawn; one part is painted blue, another red, another yellow, another green; they stand for different kingdoms” (ibid., 79– 80). 38. Sherwood 1822, 15. 39. Sherwood 1822, 15– 18. A year after the novel was first published in 1818 and when she was running her own school for young ladies in Worcester, Mrs. Sherwood wrote a primer on “profane history . . . intended as an introduction to the Study of History in a more diffuse Form,” where many of these themes are revisited (Sherwood 1819). 40. Sherwood 1822, 20– 23. In her memoir, Mrs Sherwood recalls that one of the reasons she titled her book “The Fairchild Family” was because “my eye had constantly before it the dark natives of the south” (Kelly 1854, 480). 41. Kelly 1854, 474. 42. SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 45– 46 (See also Kelly 1854, 484– 85). At the time of her first meeting with Parmanand, Henry Sherwood was away on the Gurkha campaign from October 1814 until sometime in February 1815 when he returned briefly to Meerut and was then again ordered to join his men in their camp sometime around Easter. In late April 1815, in chatty letters to her husband about her activities she writes of her attempts to educate Parmanand and the family munshi (accountant). Her journals offer testimony to the fact that in addition to the Gospel, the two subjects she appears to have taken interest in teaching were geography and astronomy. Thus, as early as 1808, she writes that she was teaching geography to her school children while resident in Kanpur (SFP, Box 7, f. 2, 205– 6). In May 1814, she noted she had “translated the Geography as far as America,” and continued to do so the following month (SFP, Box 2, f. 3, 297– 98). She does not give us any further details of what she was translating from and into what language, although it was most likely what she calls Naugree (Hindi). It was likely a work she intended for use in her school, and as such, the earliest such work undertaken in an Indian language, far preceding efforts in the Presidencies that I document in other chapters of this book. The text not having survived, this achievement is also entirely lost to history. In February 1814, she also started to teach astronomy to the young schoolmaster she employed (the son of the family munshi) (SFP, Box 2, f. 3, 281; see also Darton 1910, 394– 95). In turn, the munshi’s son— whose name we do not know— helped Mrs. Sherwood with her “broken” Hindustani in which she delivered

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her “strange lectures” to her pupils (SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 47. See also Kelly 1854, 485). From a letter that was later published, we learn that her munshi and his family were Muslim (MR 1817, 5: 33). 43. Thus, in one revealing letter, dated May 14 [1815] to her husband, she writes, “The Moonshie & Permunnah are daily & almost hourly requesting me to teach them. I give them all the time I can they suck [sic] in instruction with a glee & greediness which it is a pleasure to see & I find myself more & more able to make myself understood by them” (SFP, Box 3, f. 1, unpaginated). 44. SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 46– 47. See also Kelly 1854, 485. Of course, this was not only the case with English women, but some European men as well who by virtue of their race often secured teaching jobs in colonial schools, but whose own command of useful knowledge, including geography, was rather shaky (for example, Sen 1991, 175). 45. For some fascinating comments on the use of the “feminine” craft of needlework to make maps and globes in both Europe and the United States in this period, see esp. Tyner 1994; Tyner 1996; and Van den Hoonard 2013, 47– 49. See also Schulten 2007. 46. Long 1848, 217. 47. Weitbrecht 1858, 470– 71. 48. SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 46. In the later published version of this statement, there is a small but significant difference. “There is a letter from Permunund in one of the Missionary Registers in which he refers most affectionately to me and my balls of silk” (Kelly 1854, 485; see also Sherwood 1839, 215). 49. “Rev. W. Parish to Archd. Corrie. Report on Anund Masheeh’s Proceedings” (CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1 O195/8, my emphasis). For the published report which leaves out this crucial assertion, CMS Proceedings 1833– 34, 46. 50. Feingold 2004,122. The scholarship on this subject is extensive and insightful. In particular I have benefited from my reading of Terrall 1995, Terrall 2000, and Fara 2004. 51. Quoted in Feingold 2004, 122. 52. Quoted in Fara 2004, 11. 53. Cosgrove 2001, 176– 77. 54. Feingold 2004, 140– 41. I thank Mary Pedley for pointing me to this image and others that I consider here. 55. Feingold 2004, 139– 41. 56. Sumira 2014, 160– 61, where it is reproduced and discussed. For a wide-ranging discussion of women map makers and globe makers from the early modern period in Europe into the nineteenth century, see Van den Hoonaard 2013. 57. The published engraving is based on a painting by artist Sam Shelley. See also Feingold 2004, 122; and Fara 2004, 206– 7. 58. For example, Trimmer 1799. The quote is from Fara 2004, 207. See also Myers 1989, and Benjamin 1991. 59. Gates and Shteir 1997, 9– 10. For an extended discussion, see also Fara 2004. 60. Indeed, Mrs. Sherwood appears to have first written her astronomy book for little Annie, a half-caste orphan she “adopted” in India (SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 630). For a discussion of early English women science writers, see esp. Fara 2004, 204– 7, 216– 17. 61. In the 1940s, Naomi Royde Smith noted that these textbooks “can still be found on the shelves of schoolrooms in old houses” in England (1946, 88). 62. Sherwood 1823, 1. Mrs. Sherwood’s Primer, published in 1821, included a small chapter

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titled “The Earth,” with a woodcut illustration of a spherical globe. The only place identified on the globe is “Europe” (Sherwood 1821, 40). 63. Sherwood 1823, 48– 49. 64. Sherwood 1823, 60. 65. Sherwood 1823, vii. See also Sherwood 1827, vii. In this regard, it is worth noting that some were aware of the incongruity of teaching the Bible and modern terrestrial lessons in the same breath. As the master tells the doubting pupil in one didactic text, “The Bible was not designed to teach us astronomy, geometry, or mathematics. It gives in plain language a relation of the formation of our own system, and intimates the grandeur and extent of the universe. Philosophical researchers soar above the level of common understandings, but moral truth is of the greatest intrinsic value” (Martinet 1818, 11). 66. MR 1818, 6: 147. 67. Wilkinson 1859, 193. 68. Kelly 1854, 475. See also Sherwood 1839, 214– 5; and SFP Box 3, f. 1, 36– 38. 69. SFP Box 3, f. 1, 21. See also CMS Proceedings 1816– 1817, 5, 445– 46; Kelly 1854, 481– 83; and Wilkinson 1859: 194– 95, 198– 200. 70. SFP Box 3, f. 1, 23. 71. There are passing references in Mrs. Sherwood’s writings to a couple of Mr. Sherwood’s encounters with Parmanand, including one reference to meeting with him “privately, to give him deeper instructions [in the Scriptures]. He afterwards employed him in teaching the Naugree [Hindi] Gospel to one bearer and five other men servants” (Kelly 1854, 484. See also SFP Box 3, f. 1, 37). 72. Kelly 1858, 488. Interestingly, Mrs. Sherwood’s reconstructed diary from December 1842 does not include this intriguing statement. Instead, she writes wistfully, “very very sad did we all feel that day [of departure].” See also Sherwood 1839, 219; Kelly 1854, 489– 90; and Darton 1910, 409. 73. SFP Box 3, f. 1. See also Darton 1910, 408– 9 (A date of July 20, is given in Kelly 1854, 488; this recall appears to be incorrect). In her unpublished diary for this month, reconstructed in December 1842, Mrs. Sherwood described her departure from Meerut under “June 1815.” 74. SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 77– 78. See also Sherwood 1839, 221– 22; and Kelly 1854, 493. For other comparable examples of the faith placed in ocular demonstrations of eclipses in missionary and colonial discourse, see Young and Jebanesan 1995, 49– 68; and Sivasundaram 2010, 187– 88. 75. SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 79– 80. In her unpublished diary, Mrs. Sherwood also recalls one of her last conversations with Parmanand in which “I had some discourse with him upon an old book written in Sanscrit . . . 300 years before Christ, in which there is some mention of Christ himself. I know not what foundation there is for this” (SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 79). After Parmanand’s departure for Meerut, Mrs. Sherwood and her husband met with two young Brahmans who “spoke highly of Permunund, of his wisdom, and of his knowledge” (SFP, Box 3, f. 1, 81. See also Kelly 1854, 494). Darton (1910, 410) mentions “the Brahmin’s Grove at Ghurmetsir,” but is absolutely silent on Permanand’s presence there. 76. Wilkinson 1859, 196. 77. Mrs. Sherwood recalled that he named her as his godmother, “of which he apprized her by a most interesting letter which reached her in England” (Sherwood 1839, 222). A letter by Anand, informing her of his baptism and printed in Urdu (with a hand-written English translation, dated September 9, 1817) reached Mrs. Sherwood in England (SFP Box 11, f. 9). Although

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he addresses her as “mother”— not unusual, under the circumstances— he does not in this letter ask her to be his Godmother. He does, however, write, that he sees her “every week in my dream in the same likeness that I used to see you at Meerut.” (He also remarks that he has not heard from her since her departure for England). On his baptism, on which ceremony we have surprisingly few details, see CMS Proceedings 1816– 1817, 5: 445– 46. See also Weitbrecht 1858, 471; and Wilkinson 1859, 193– 94, 200– 201. 78. MR 1817, 5, 425. See also Wilkinson 1859, 184– 86. On Anand’s encounters with the Saadhs, see Bell 2012, 312– 20. 79. CMS Proceedings 1824– 1825, 105. 80. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 454– 55. 81. MR 1828, 16: 101. His salary was not meager at this point at Rs. 80 a month (Bateman 1860, 491). In 1826, the town of Kurnaul was estimated to have about twenty thousand inhabitants with only one school, “supported by the Quanoongas and Choudhries of the Pergunnah . . . of very negative utility” (Letter from William Fraser, Principal Assistant, Office Northern Division, Dehlee Territory Camp, December 24, 1827, BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 87 (IOR/P/125/66). 82. CMS Proceedings 1830– 31, 39. On the geographical catechism as a popular pedagogical genre, see my discussion in chapter 1. 83. Dig durshan was a publication of the Serampore missionaries, containing a miscellaneous collection of essays ranging from Scripture to science. I have more to say about the role of Serampore missionaries and their role in colonial pedagogical modernity in chapter 5. 84. CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1/ O195/8. See also CCO 1833, 2 (5): 45. 85. CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1/ O195/5. 86. “Daniel Wilson, Bishop of Calcutta, to Revd. W. Jowett, January 2, 1837” (CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1 O8/4/4). Wilson describes Anand as “a noble creature— a fine countenance— vigorous intellect— warm, energetic character— and a genuine Christian.” For a more detailed letter from Wilson to Jowett dated March 9, 1837 on the Ordination, see CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1 O8/4/6. Anand’s famous native predecessor in this regard was Abdul Masih (ca. 1769– 1827), a Muslim convert from neighboring Agra with whom he is frequently compared in missionary correspondence (Powell 1993, 110– 17). Abdul Masih was such a cause célèbre in the first half of the nineteenth century that even Mrs. Sherwood (who had met him when he visited Meerut) confused him with her own protégé Anand Masih in one of her later diary entries (SFP, Box 3, f. 3, 353). In an early published narrative of her relationship to Anand, she explicitly describes Parmanand as “a tall handsome man, and, like Abdool Musseeh, of a turn of countenance and air like that of the pictures we are wont to see of Abraham” (Sherwood 1839, 210). 87. Bateman 1860, 491. 88. Eden 1866, 154. While Eden does not mention Anand by name in her letter of 1838, in a later publication he is identified as such, albeit his name is mis-spelled in yet another way (Eden 1844). There is considerable scholarship on Emily Eden as a writer and especially on her book Up the Country, described by one feminist scholar as “the most self-deconstructive and witty text in nineteenth century women’s travel writing in India” (Ghoshe 1998, 85. See also Prior 2012). There is very little scholarship on Eden as an artist and her sketches published as hand-colored lithographs in 1844, but see Claridge 1982. 89. Dickinson 1911, 283. Bishop Wilson also noted that Anand’s ordination took place in Hindustani, suggesting that he did not know English (Bateman 1860, 491). 90. For a letter to the CMS from a Punjabi of “rank and influence,” Koor Ajeeb Sing, who

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wrote that he had “placed his faith in Jesus Christ for the remission of his sins, on hearing Padree Anand Massih preach in Shahjahanabad,” see CMSA, CMS/B/OMS/C I1/O195/6-7. See also Wilkinson 1859, 204– 5; and Bell 2012, 322– 23. 91. CMS Proceedings 1840– 1841, 73; 1841– 42, 66. 92. The specific charges are not entirely clear but it might well have been that Anand was deemed to have continued to practice in native medicine, itself part and parcel of the monstrosity that was Hindu idolatry, as far as the missionaries were concerned (CMSA, CMS/B/OMS/C I1 O150/275). Bill Bell invokes a later report suggesting opium addiction, as revealed in testimony by missionary Thomas Evans to the Royal Commission on Opium (Bell 2012, 329). I am not entirely sure, however, that the “Paramanund” invoked by Evans is indeed Anand Masih. Evans met “Paramanund”— who he identifies as “a pandit,” a former “fakir or Hindu devotee,” and “an opium eater,” but not as Anand Masih— in 1855 in Agra and learned Hindi from him (Evans 1908, 59, 63– 64, 100– 101). 93. Gibbs 1972, 130– 31. The Bishop who had so proudly ordained him in 1836 had noticed even then that Anand “wants only that kind of steadiness of action & persevering, meek, quiet carriage, which are so essential to great success in spiritual labors, and which it would have been a miracle if he had acquired under the thousand disadvantages under which he has been placed” (CMSA, CMS/ B/ OMS/ C I1 O8/4/4). 94. Sivasundaram 2010, 188. 95. Wilkinson 1859, 201– 2. Bill Bell suggests on the basis of Thomas Evans’s testimony that Anand Masih was killed during the course of the Great Rebellion of 1857, in spite of having rejected Christ and re-embracing his former faith (Bell 2012, 324). See also note 92. 96. TNSA, Military Despatches from England to Fort St. George, February 16, 1787, no. 14. There is considerable scholarship on British policies regarding native education in this period and the emergence of a “colonial information order” in northern India, but see esp. Gabriel 1979; Bayly 1996, 247– 315; Goswami 2004; and Dodson 2007. 97. Letter dated May 6, 1827, from the GCPI, para. 32 (IOR/F/4/1170/30639). 98. Letter dated January 16, 1827, from James Duncan to the Local Committee of Public Instruction at Agra, paras. 13– 15; and Letter dated January 22, 1827 from James Duncan to GCPI (BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 87). 99. Along with the globes, Agra College also received ten copies of a Map of the World in Persian, eight copies of a Map of the World in Hindi, and four copies of a Map of Hindustan (India), as well as twenty-five copies of a “Geography Hindi,” thirty copies of “Hindi Astronomy,” and fifty copies of the Mejmua Shemsi, “a summary of the Copernican system of astronomy, translated into Persian” (“Statement of Books and Philosophical Instruments supplied to the following Colleges and Schools under the GCPI, 1825 to 1827 dated 6th May 1827,” BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 87). 100. The earliest evidence I have seen of globes in Persian script being available for classroom use date to the mid-1830s (CCO 1834, 3 (11): 270; 1835, 4: 120– 21). 101. Letter dated March 22, 1828, from the GCPI, para. 2 (IOR/F/4/1170/30639). 102. Letter dated May 28, 1829, from GCPI, para. 31 (BePub, September 29, 1830); and letter dated May 28, 1830 (BePol, August 27, 1830). Nineteen students were also enrolled in the Persian classes and were reading the geography primer titled Resalah Ilmi Urz and the astronomy book called Mejmua Shemsi. I have been unable to trace “Bhoogol Small” or “Bhoogol Large,” the very titles suggesting they were geography textbooks.

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103. “Letter from James Duncan to GCPI dated January 13, 1832” (Report of the Committee of Public Instruction for the year 1831, on the schools and colleges under their control, IOR/ F/4/1386/55228). 104. Woodrow 1862, 66. This suggestion notwithstanding, the college decided to use the donated funds to acquire a telescope from London, possibly because it was already in possession of a pair of globes. Around the same time, another gentleman— one Mr. Davidson— gifted wall maps for classrooms in the college (GCPI 1837, 11). 105. GCPI 1836, 49. 106. See esp. Powell 1993, 195– 202; Minuault 2000; and Pernau 2006. 107. Letter dated April 28, 1826, from J. H. Taylor on behalf of the Delhi College Committee to the GCPI (BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 86). 108. Undated letter from GCPI to Bengal Government forwarding reports for 1827, para. 8 (IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). For the slow acceptance of Copernican astronomy among Muslim scholars in the Delhi area around this time, including the teaching of the Mejmua Shemsi, on account of the hegemony of the Ptolemaic system, see Powell 1993, 207– 9. 109. Letter from Local Committee of Delhi College to GCPI, dated February 12, 1829, para. 2 (BePol, July 3, 1829, no. 82). Arguing against teaching European science through Indian languages which were saturated with “religious prejudice,” the Local Committee noted in the margins of this document, “For instance an erroneous system of Astronomy which teaches that the Sun moves round the Earth forms a part of the Koran and is therefore identified with the religion of the Mahomedans. Now it is natural to suppose, and it is found to be the case that if the solar system is taught to a Mahomedan in the terms of his own Philosophy, which are [sic] the same as those of the Koran, his religious prejudices will be offended by the contrast. But if the system is taught to him in English, especially if he has not been instructed in Arabic nor consequently in the Koran, no such effect is found to take place” (ibid., para. 14). 110. BePol, July 3, 1829, no. 103. 111. Letter from GCPI dated May 28, 1830, Appendix no. 29 (BePol, August 27, 1830). See also GCPI 1832, 35– 36; and GCPI 1836, 51. 112. Fort William, Persian Department, August 21, 1829, no. 29 (BePol, July 3, 1829, no. 82). See also Powell 1993, 197– 219; Habib 2000, esp. 350– 51; Minault 2000; Raina and Habib 2004, 1– 23; and Pernau 2006. 113. http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia/, see esp. 93– 108. 114. For further discussion, see http://sites.duke.edu /globalinmughalindia /album/, 103– 6. 115. GCPI 1841, clxxxviii– clxxxix. 116. A Calcutta-born Eurasian, Thompson was working in the Military Auditor General’s Office when he resigned to join the Baptist Missionary Society around 1812 (Potts 1967; Powell 1993, 204– 5; and Cox 2002). 117. Cox 2002, 38. 118. Serampore Mission 1822, 24; see also Serampore Mission 1821a, 44. His Christian/cartographic evangelism notwithstanding, Thompson might also have been drumming up support within the world of Baptist publishing for his book, and there are hints of this in several reports. For instance, in Hardwar at 1825, “One man, a brahmun schoolmaster of Rampoor near Saharanpore, but teaching a school at Kunkhul, brought his son to me and made him read with great readiness parts of the Geography in Hindee, and produced a copy of the whole book in the young man’s hand, (four leaves excepted.) He said, he was persuaded of the excellency [sic]

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of the knowledge therein contained, but though he had forty pupils he could not prevail upon one to learn what would not yield them a livelihood” (Serampore Mission 1825, 47). A few years later he reported, “The applications for the Hindee Geography were numerous, while it was in my power to meet the wishes of only two persons; one a Jwala-poora brahmun, who has had our books these two or three years and has a thirst for knowledge, and appears a simple-minded man: the other a native doctor of Deyra named Govinda-Ram, who being ill, wrote a note of urzee [petition] and sent a friend for the book, mentioning it by name” (Serampore Mission 1829b, 94). 119. Serampore Mission 1825, 43, emphasis added. In a letter dated January 31, 1831, he wrote, “I cannot tell you how anxious some scores of the Churundasees are for the Geography in Hindee, which one of their chief Muhunts (Goroo-Newas-jee) having profitably and greatly commended to them, they seem to know the value of as calculated to afford them useful knowledge, but I have not been able to give them a single copy” (Serampore Mission 1831a, 3). 120. Serampore Mission 1828a, 49. 121. Serampore Mission 1833, 3. A couple years earlier, in a letter dated April 30, 1831, he reported on meeting in Haridwar with a Bania of Najeebabad named Kuvulnya, “an old inquirer, who, in former years used to visit me at nights, proposing questions, and hearing the things that made for his peace. The treatise on Geography has contributed not a little to remove his prejudices, and enlarge his views on most subjects” (Serampore Mission 1831b, 2– 3). 122. Serampore Mission 1830, 2– 3. 123. Serampore Mission 1829a, 49. In the absence of other details regarding this work, I have not been able to track it down. 124. Heber 1829 vol. 1: 422– 23. Although Heber suggests that “the European pandit” was John Chamberlain (Anand Masih’s first missionary-mentor), I suspect that it was J. T. Thompson. 125. Serampore Mission 1821b, 31. 126. Serampore Mission 1828c, 56. 127. Paton 1836, iv– viii. In 1824, the Serampore Missionaries had published a similar bilingual book in Bengali and English (Pearson 1824), but the 1836 work might well be the first such work in Hindustani. The reach of the book, though, would have been limited to those who could read the English alphabet given that the Hindustani text was printed with Latin orthography. 128. Paton 1836, 12– 14. 129. Paton 1836, 38. 130. Paton 1836, 40. 131. Paton 1836: 40– 44. 132. Paton 1836, 66. 133. Paton 1836, 68. Although my interpretation of the authorship of the text differs, I have found very useful an unpublished paper by Richard Fox Young, which I am grateful to him for sharing (Young n.d.) 134. Paton 1836: x. 135. A translation of the King’s letter is appended to a letter from James Paton to the Bengal government, dated September 8, 1831 (BePol, October 28, 1831, no. 31). In colonial discourse, the King was disparaged as “an indiscriminate Anglophile,” and his fascination with mechanical contrivances like clocks and telescopes was mocked (Powell 1993, 117). 136. “An account of the Lucknow Observatory, extracted from A Short History of Oudh, by Kamal ood Deen, Translator to the Observatory” (IOR/ P/198/56). For scholarship on the Observatory, see esp. Llewellyn-Jones 1985, 66– 75; Ansari 2011, 359– 62; and Sen 2014, 76– 80.

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137. Diary entry of James Herbert dated September 1831 as quoted in Disalker 1937, 11; and IPC, November 16, 1836, no. 27. See also Llewellyn-Jones 1985, 66– 75. 138. IOR/ F/4/1964/86079. 139. “By all means [accept the offer of 200 copies of the King of Oude’s maps], though, to be sure, more detestable maps were never seen. One would think that the revenues of Oude and the treasures of Saadut Ali might have borne the expense of producing something better than a map in which Sicily is joined on the toe of Italy, and in which so important an Eastern Island as Java does not appear at all” (GCPI, bk. G. p. 160, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 80– 81). Comparing the King of Oude’s philanthropy with that of another colonial subject— Dwarkanath Tagore’s annual contribution of Rs. 2,000 toward prizes for students in the Medical College in Calcutta— Macaulay also wrote, “This [Tagore’s] liberality throws the king of Oude and his penny maps quite into the shade” (ibid., 85). Historian N. L. Basak notes that in 1834 and 1835, the King of Oudh gifted forty-seven copies of the “Map of the Solar System” in English; one hundred copies of the “Map of the Solar System” in Hindustani; four small orreries; and two hundred plates “explanatory of eclipses” (Basak 1959, 51n31). Unfortunately, he does not cite his source for this information (which I have been unable to verify), nor to whom these “gifts” were made. 140. Edney 1997, 316– 17, and J. Sen 2014, 124. A Sketch includes a commentary, which freely paraphrases from A Brief Account of the Solar System. See also CCO 1835, 4: 492. 141. BePol, October 28, 1831, no. 31. 142. J. T. Beighton wrote a rich obituary, which I have found very useful in reconstructing Paton’s Indian career (Beighton 1849). On Lucknow in this period, see Llewellyn-Jones 1985; and van Woerkens 2002. 143. CCO 1835, 4: 492. The magazine also flagged “a treatise on Astronomy, translated by Captain Paton, in English and Hindustani,” which I believe is the afore-discussed A Brief Account of the Solar System. In a letter dated July 1, 1831, Paton (who was then Acting Resident) wrote of his plans to translate “a little work on Astronomy” with funds from the Oudh government (BePol, July 1, 1831, no. 55, para. 10). 144. BePol, July 1, 1831, no. 55, para. 10; and IPC August 24, 1835, nos. 39– 40, para. 2. See also CCO 1834, 3: 471. He was likely one of the British “subscribers” to the Allahabad Free School as well in 1826. 145. CCO 1834, 3: 471– 72. It is not clear why Paton was complaining that no globes were to be had in Calcutta, for several vendors had set up shop by then, as I document in chapter 5. Also, by this time, as I also discuss in chapter 5, several schools in Calcutta did have globes on hand. 146. CCO 1834, 3: 471. 147. CCO 1834, 3 (11): 270. Paton’s letters communicating his “global” handiwork caught the attention of other readers of the magazine, many of them missionaries serving in distant outposts. One correspondent from Berhampur asked for “a skeleton Globe of English character, a sketch of the Solar System, and a small Orrery” (CCO 1835, 4: 490). Another wrote from Rampur Baliah asking for globes received from Lucknow for his school (CCO 1834, 3 (11): 266). 148. Beighton 1849, 307. 149. Letter from M. Smith, Junior Assistant to the Acting Governor-General, Saugor, May 1, 1830 (IOR/ F/4/1255/50501) 150. CCO 1834, 3: 525– 26. 151. Letter from M. Smith, Junior Assistant to the Acting Governor-General, Saugor, May 1, 1830 (IOR/ F/4/1255/50501)

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152. GCPI 1836, 43. Earlier, in 1834, a well-wisher of the Sagar schools wrote, “We want three things in the Sagar Schools. A well-educated young man from one of the Calcutta Seminaries to instruct an English class. An orrery to invite the young lads to the study of astronomy, and a good pair of globes” (CCO 1834, 3: 571). 153. CMS Proceedings 1834– 35, 58– 59; and 1837– 38, 53; Heber 1829, vol. 1: 253; and Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 95. See also Dodson 2007, 55. Interestingly, in one of his schoolbooks used in both Bengal and Madras, the missionary Alexander Duff (on whom I say more in chapter 5) uses the context of a discussion of a child’s visit to Benares to insist on Earth’s sphericity and to elaborate on the usefulness of a school globe (Duff 1840, 48– 55). 154. Sharp 1920, 10– 12. For an important discussion of the Benares Sanskrit College (formally opened on October 28, 1791), and its importance for colonial Orientalist pedagogy, see Dodson 2007. 155. On Heber, see esp. Laird 1971 and Laird 2004. For a brief but perceptive commentary on Heber’s visit to the college, see Bayly 1996, 261. Michael Dodson’s otherwise exemplary study of the college misses this encounter, as does Nita Kumar’s study of Benares pandits (Kumar 2000, 38– 67). Heber also met with Anand Masih in the course of his travels up the Gangetic valley, as noted earlier in this chapter. 156. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 261– 62. For another account of this same encounter as recalled in a letter to a colleague, see Heber 1829, vol. 2: 299– 300. “Padalon” is Heber’s Anglicization of Patala, the Hindu underworld. 157. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 262. A decade later, another Christian polemicist and evangelist John Muir similarly disparaged the Vidyalaya’s error-filled curriculum, including “the exploded Ptolemaic” principles of “the Astronomy which the scientific books of the Hindoos teach.” Despite such a view, Muir was appointed in 1844 as Superintendent of the College (Dodson 2007, 91– 92). 158. For perceptive analyses of these objects, see esp. Digby 1973; Gole 1989, 26, 72– 74; Schwartzberg 1992, 352– 58; Schwartzberg 1993; and Bayly 1996, 262. For comparable attempts in Buddhist Japan to map a flat Earth on to a spherical form, see Unno 1994, 391– 92. 159. Bayly 1996, 262. See also Pingree 1978 and Minkowski 2001. 160. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 262– 63. 161. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 250– 51. 162. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 250– 51. See also Heber 1829, vol. 2: 300. 163. Heber 1829, vol. 1: 251. 164. GCPI 1836, 41; GCPI 1837, 21– 22. 165. CMS Proceedings, 1834– 35, 58– 59. Another missionary report, after noting Leupolt’s achievements in teaching the Bible, history, the use of the globes, and geography, concluded, in contrast to Heber’s anxiety from a decade earlier, “Though still professedly Hindoos, not a doubt exists as to the fact that many of the boys utterly despise the creed of their fathers, and at all events give the assent of the understanding to the Divine Authority of the Christian Revelation” (CMS Proceedings 1839– 40, 58– 59). 166. Christopher Bayly rightly christened this tiny little outpost of useful knowledge as “the capital of the new astronomy” (Bayly 1996, 235). 167. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society 1837, 6 (1): 401. This entire incident is admirably described by Richard Fox Young (2003), although note that the governor-general involved has been incorrectly identified in this excellent essay as William Bentinck. The “global” gift was instead made by George Eden, 2nd Baron of Auckland, a man whose name has already figured in these

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pages as the initiator of important measures in the realm of “native education.” In the certificate accompanying the gift that was sent to both recipients, the inkstand is described as “massive” and of “elaborate workmanship.” The pair of inkstands cost the Government Rs. 621, 5 annas and 1 pice. James Prinsep, the Assay Master attached to the Calcutta Mint & Assay Office, hired local “workmen” to produce the objects. “I have rated their work at 8 annas per tola but they are hardly content therewith as being their first trial at such work. They necessarily lost much time in perfecting it to my satisfaction” (BePol, July 24, 1837, nos. 68– 69). I have not been able to track down these silver inkstands nor has Richard Fox Young, who I thank for several useful discussions on both this event and Wilkinson’s Sehore experiments more generally. I also thank S. R. Sarma for several enlightening conversations on this subject. 168. Letter from Wilkinson, political agent at Bhopal to W. H. Macnaghten, Secretary to Government of India, dated June 5, 1836, para. 7 (IOR/ F/4/1635/65465); and “Extract from Letter from L. Wilkinson dated July 18, 1838, Minute by H. Prinsep dated July 30, 1838, para. 9” (IOR/ F/4/1846/77636). In a published essay, Wilkinson describes Subaji “a splendid Pauranik and law pandit, though ignorant of the Hindu astronomy” (Wilkinson 1834a, 461– 62). For further details on Subaji Bapu’s background and training, see Young 2003. For Wilkinson’s enrolment of these pandits in his project to eradicate female infanticide in Malwa, see esp. IOR/ F/4/1671/66885. 169. Wilkinson 1834c, 561. See also a revealing letter by Wilkinson written sometime before July 1839 that is reprinted in Moore 1842, 12– 14. 170. Letter from Wilkinson, political agent at Bhopal, to W. H. Macnaghten, Secretary to Government of India, dated June 5, 1836, para. 7 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). In a later letter to the government, Wilkinson recalled, “When I demonstrated to [Subaji] the universal truth of the proposition in all kinds of triangles his delight was unbounded” (“Extract from Letter from L. Wilkinson dated July 18, 1838” (IOR/ F/4/1846/77636). 171. This is how Lancelot Wilkinson presents his triumph in “turning” an “orthodox” Brahman and pandit into a Copernican. For an insightful reading that complicates this selfpresentation, see Young 2003, 198– 206. Young draws our attention to the fact that Subaji’s treatise began with a paean to “Lord Bhagavan,” and a tribute to Brahmanda, the immense cosmic egg of the Lord Brahma. “Taking the Brahmanda literally as an objective reality, and not merely as a metaphor of cosmic immensity, he had to save it from being discarded along with everything else that the heliocentric theory appeared to place in jeopardy” (ibid., 199). 172. For an extended discussion including publication history in several languages, see Young 2003, 198– 206; and Young 2007, 84– 86, 90. When released in 1836, Subaji Bapu’s Marathi work created quite a stir in Poona, the Brahman stronghold of central India, with both Pauraniks committed to a flat-Earth geocentric viewpoint, and followers of the Siddhantas dedicated to a Ptolemic conception eager to fight back, as per Wilkinson’s own proud reporting to his superiors in Calcutta. Thus, “one of the Shastrees of the Hindoo College is I am told going to publish a reply to it making out the world is flat and shewing that the authorities have been perverted” and “The Chief Astronomer of the Sanscrit College [of Poona) was also apparently preparing a response” (Letter from Wilkinson to Bengal Government, dated June 5, 1836, para 11 [IOR/ F/4/1635/65465]). “The Oojain Pundits contended for the unadulterated Poorans, denying that the earth was a sphere” (GCPI 1841, lxxi). Subaji Bapu’s work appears to have been better received “among the learned in Bombay,” and Wilkinson’s colleague in Bombay, Secre-

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tary Walker wrote saying that the Bombay government had sent copies of the book “to all the Jageerdars [landlords] and [that] the Deewan of Augria speaks highly of it, the quotations are much admired” (Letter from Wilkinson to Bengal Government dated August 30, 1836, para 1 [IOR/ F/4/1635/65465]). For the positive response among the Serampore missionaries in Bengal to this text and the Hindi translation, see FI 1836, 2 (93): 315– 16; 1837, 3 (118): 97– 98; 1837, 3 (150): 355. 173. Proceedings of the Asiatic Society 1837, 6 (1): 401– 2. See also letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten dated June 5, 1836, para. 13 (IOR/ F/4/1635/65465). 174. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 9 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). At a subsequent meeting of the Asiatic Society on August 2, 1837, it was announced that Subaji Bapu followed up the Siddhanta Siromani Prakasa with another pamphlet in Marathi in which he countered those Poona pandits who “have defended the Pauranic system of astronomy, in a brochure entitled Avirodha Prakasa” (Proceedings of the Asiatic Society 1837, 6 (1): 616). See also Young 2003, 203– 5. 175. Subaji Bapu’s certificate read, “This Certificate, together with a Massive Silver Inkstand, of elaborate workmanship, is presented by the Governor General of India in Council to Soobajee Bapoo in Testimony of the learning and ability displayed in his treatise on Geography and Astronomy wherein, availing himself of the lights of European Science, he has engrafted the most approved modern doctrine on the Theory of the Siddantas; and has zealously endeavoured to diffuse among his countrymen the benefit of those enlightened opinions by which he himself is so preeminently distinguished.” Omkar Bhatt’s was worded slightly differently, as befitted his contribution as translator (BePol, June 26, 1837, no. 61– 62; and July 17, 1837, nos. 74– 76, 78). The idea of the certificate appears to have originated with Wilkinson who wrote that the two pandits “conceive that such a certificate would ever prove the best and readiest recommendation to themselves whenever they may be thrown into contact with British officers and be most safely conveyed as an heirloom to their sons and grand sons” (Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated August 30, 1836, para. 6 (IOR/ F/4/1635/65465). 176. I thank Yuthika Sharma for this insight. For a fascinating account of the use of a terrestrial globe placed on “a little inkstand” in the course of a public debate between Protestant clergymen and Buddhist monks in Panadure in Ceylon in 1873, see Lopez 2008, 42. 177. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 21 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). 178. Young argues that these gifts were “at worst a thoughtless put-down: at the time, children received similar gifts from their parents after completing their years of study, few or many, in traditional pathsalas [schools],” although he notes that some of his contemporaries began to refer to Subaji Bapu by the honorific, “raja sri” (Young 2009, 200). I follow a different logic in my reading of this “global” exchange. 179. Wilkinson 1834b, 513. On July 4, 1836, Macnaghten wrote to Wilkinson to get his opinion regarding the governor-general’s choice of “an Inkstand classically ornamented with a suitable Sanscrit inscription.” On August 30, Wilkinson diplomatically concurred with Auckland’s idea for a suitable gift and responded, “I can suggest no other article which will secure the object sought so well as that specified in your letter viz., classically ornamented inkstands with suitable Sanscrit inscriptions. The individuals themselves were at a loss to suggest anything which would please them more.” It is quite possible that Auckland— perhaps inspired by his predecessor Bentinck’s “global” gifts to the Maharao of Kotah in 1834— thought up the idea of incorporating

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a pair of globes in “the classically ornamented inkstands.” To also recall, Wilkinson had inspired Bentinck’s “global” gift a couple years earlier, as per my discussion in the previous chapter (For the complete trail of correspondence on this event, see IOR/F/4/1635/65465). 180. One has the sense that if Wilkinson had not died prematurely, he would have left a sizeable personal memoir advertising his accomplishments on behalf of the native. In its absence, we can only reconstruct his life from his official correspondence, his publications, especially prefaces to books, an important obituary (Muir 1853), and oral history. There is some fine scholarship on him that I have benefited from, including Sarma 1995– 1996a; Sarma 1995– 96b; Bayly 1996, 257– 60; Minkowski 2001; Young 2003; Dodson 2007, 83– 86, 89– 90; and Sen 2014, 122– 28. My contribution to this body of work is to bring to the fore Wilkinson’s cartographic evangelism and its use in worlding native boys and adults as subjects of the Dominion of Modern Earth. 181. Wilkinson 1834b, 510. On Wilkinson’s argument against use of the Latin script, see FI 1836, 2 (93): 315. 182. Quoted in Dodson 2007, 75. In the long run, it was a modified version of this policy of engraftment that came to prevail in colonial pedagogy, with a recognition that the many spoken languages of India were indispensable in the transmission of knowledge in the Indian classroom, especially to the vast majority of rural children (Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 1– 72). 183. For contrary arguments regarding Wilkinson’s tenure as political agent, and his role in the palace intrigues surrounding the Regent Qudsia Begum who by some accounts he sought to depose in favor of her son-in-law, see Shah Jahan Begum 1876, 46– 51. See also Khan 2000, 74– 84; and Preckel 2000. 184. CCO 1834, 3: 510. The very language of this assertion suggests that Wilkinson must have used a globe (possibly belonging to him personally) for his ocular demonstrations of Earth’s sphericity and disposition. In letters he wrote to the Resident in Indore earlier in 1832, he noted that at that time there were only two schools in Sehore which, despite their elementary nature “were well attended, and have afforded education to the sons of many respectable men” (Letter dated June 6, 1832, para. 20 [BePol, August 13, 1832, no. 44]). See also letter dated September 26, 1832, para. 10 (BePol, November 12, 1832, no. 8). 185. BePol, August 13, 1832, nos. 44– 45; November 12, 1832, no. 8. For Wilkinson’s report on measures taken to combat the “abhorrent” crime of female infanticide which included setting up the school, see IOR/ F/4/1671/66885. 186. Wilkinson 1834b, 505. 187. Wilkinson 1834b, 509. 188. Wilkinson 1834a, 462. 189. Wilkinson 1834b, 514– 15. 190. Wilkinson 1834a, 462. See also CCO 1835, 4: 399. 191. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 10 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). It is worth underscoring the militaristic metaphor implicit in Wilkinson’s use of the phrase, “point d’appui.” 192. Wilkinson 1834b, 508– 9. 193. Wilkinson’s letter of August 1836 reprinted in FI 1836, 2 (93): 315. For Wilkinson’s use of the phrase “lost knowledge,” see Wilkinson 1834b, 508. 194. “The measurement of the circumference of the earth is easily and correctly ascertained by the simple rule of proportion” (Wilkinson 1834b, 518; 511– 12). See also Young 2003, 189. 195. Wilkinson 1834b, 511.

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196. Letter from Wilkinson to Lieut. Colonel A. Lockett, agent to the Governor-General Ajmere, dated September 28, 1833, para. 5 (IOR/ F/4/1513/59673). The English school was apparently funded by the Maharao, members of whose household “are enrolled as scholars” (CCO 1834, 3: 509). Wilkinson succeeded in pursuing his own projects in spite of the extreme hostility that prevailed between between his two Kotah allies, the Maharao and his Chief Minister, the Raj Rana, till the latter’s premature death in 1834. 197. Letter from Wilkinson to Lockett, dated September 28, 1833, para. 5 (IOR/ F/4/1513/ 59673). In an essay he published in October 1834, Wilkinson also drew attention to the fact that the American missionaries in distant Jaffna had similarly noted in 1833 “that an examination of the Puranic system of geography and astronomy, compared or rather contrasted with the Copernican system, has been attended to with greater interest, and had been productive of more obvious advantages, than almost any other branches of study” (Wilkinson 1834b, 511). See also chapter 2, note 148. 198. Letter from Wilkinson to Lockett, dated September 28, 1833, paras. 4 and 5 (IOR/F/4/ 1513/59673). 199. GCPI 1841, lxxiii. See also “Minute by the Right Honble Lord Auckland, the GovernorGeneral, dated November 24, 1839,” para. 24 (Sharp 1920, 162). On Wilkinson’s suggestion prior to his own return to Bhopal, the Maharao had agreed to employ an English Secretary in the Kotah court who would also double up as supervisor of the English school. Accordingly, one A. Johnson, “an intelligent young man,” arrived in March 1834 from Calcutta, and took charge of the school. In a report dated August 1834, Johnson wrote a progress report, in which he noted, “The globes, which were presented to the Maharao by Lord William Bentinck, have been so ornamented with gold and precious stones, that I have written to Mr. Wilkinson, who was solicitous to get them for me for the College use, that Mr. Macnaghten, when I spoke to him on the subject, was in doubt whether the Maharau would allow them to be touched; so that I have no means of illustrating my short lectures on geography and astronomy, which as yet, I am obliged to give in the native language (CCO 1834, 3: 512). Johnson also wrote to Calcutta asking for elementary works in English in many subjects including geography and astronomy, since his students “greedily devour” anything in that language, throwing aside in contempt those in their own (ibid., 512) 200. Wilkinson 1834a, 462– 63. 201. Wilkinson 1834b, 511. When his original plan of setting up a “Superior” school with financial contributions from native rulers and the GCPI had stalled in 1832, Wilkinson had soldiered on in March 1834 on his return from Kotah with the establishment of a school on a more reduced means with contributions coming in from only the local royals. In April 1835, emboldened by his progress, he wrote to the GCPI for financial support, which they, however, turned down once again (although a sum of Rs. 300 for purchase of books was sanctioned a few weeks later in August 1835). Meanwhile, in May 1835, the Court of Directors wrote in approval of his scheme, pleased that he was securing the cooperation of local royals, and this appears to have spurred Wilkinson to make an appeal again to the Government of India for more funds in June 1836. The government funding for the school for a limited period of 3 years for specific purposes came through in July 1836, bypassing the GCPI’s reluctance. (For documents relating to these developments, see IOR/ F/4/1635/65465 and IPC, May 27, 1835, no. 18). 202. Wilkinson 1834b, 510– 11. 203. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 4 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465).

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It is quite likely that this pandit was Sevarama who went on to teach Wilkinson’s most famous protége, Pandit Bapudeva Sastri (personal communication from S. R. Sarma, email dated May 13, 2011). 204. Wilkinson 1834b, 511. 205. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 14 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). These students also included the sons of two Rajput chiefs (Thakoors) and the pupils sent by local Rajas or chiefs (Letter from Wilkinson to John Bax, Resident at Indore, dated June 9, 1836, para. 20 [IOR/ F/4/1671/66885]). See also “Extract from Letter from L. Wilkinson dated July 18, 1838” (IOR/ F/4/1846/77636). 206. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 18 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). It is puzzling that Wilkinson complained to the government of lack of “books,” for in a letter written to a missionary friend in September 1834, he observed that his Sehore pandit-pupils eagerly sought out and studied “our school-books, teaching the merest elements of knowledge.” The letter went on to detail how he had manage to procure books such as Pearce’s “book on Geography and Astronomy,” Bhugol Britant (I will have more to say about this text published by the CSBS in chapter 5). In the same letter he also noted that he had a “little Maratha geography book, printed at Bombay by the American Missionaries” (Wilkinson 1834c, 561– 62; see also GCPI 1841: lxx). 207. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 18 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). Wilkinson also wrote with obvious pride when a colleague in nearby Mhow reported that the latter had invited one of his visiting pupils into his library where he “showed him a terrestrial globe; he [the colleague] was surprised at his accurate knowledge of its contents; then moving to the celestial globe, was so completely taken aback by his display of science, that he forthwith led him to another part of the room to prevent his discovering, he amusingly said, his own inferior acquaintance with the subject” (CCO 1836, 5: 147). For the context of Wilkinson’s visit to Mhow with his students, many of them the sons and scions of local chieftains, see IOR/ F/4/1671/66885. 208. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 17 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465); and Wilkinson 1834b, 512– 13. 209. Wilkinson 1834b, 512– 13, emphasis mine. 210. Here it is likely that Wilkinson was responding to advertisements placed in magazines like the Calcutta Christian Observer and A Friend of India for the sale of such items (Wilkinson 1834c, 562). 211. His added comment, “Mr. Pearce’s Bhugal Britant ought to have had a small map of the world, and of Hindustan, and a representation of an eclipse accompanying it” reminds us of the precarious state of publishing in early colonial India when books circulated frequently with their binding ripped apart, missing pages, and poorly printed text and images (Wilkinson 1834c, 562). 212. He proudly wrote that he got the orrery and the armillary sphere “excessively cheap from Captain Gregory of Sagar . . . but they must have cost him more than 1000 rupees to make up” (Wilkinson 1834c, 562). 213. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 20 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). 214. For the trail of correspondence on this, see esp. IOR/F/4/1635/65465. 215. Minute by H. Prinsep, dated July 30, 1838, para. 9 (IOR/ F/4/1846/77636); Baron Auckland’s Minute on Education, dated November 24, 1839, para. 24 (Sharp 1920, 147– 70); and “Extracts from a Note by J. R. Colvin, Private Secretary to the Governor General, referred to

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in Lord Auckland’s minute of November 24, 1839,” paras. 22– 25 (IOR/ F/4/1846/77638). For criticism from outside government circles, see Smith 1844. 216. Letter from Wilkinson to Macnaghten, dated June 5, 1836, para. 21 (IOR/F/4/1635/65465). That the native was not was not so readily duped by his strategy for allying science and the Siddhantas is apparent from another of Wilkinson’s letters (from sometime before July 1839) that was published in Moore 1842, 11– 14. 217. Bourdillion 1859b, 198– 99. See also Sen 2014, 118– 19, 126– 27. 218. GCPI 1841, lxxiv. 219. Sarma 1995– 96a, 193– 94. There has been no study of this exquisite manuscript— which would require the collaborative effort of several scholars well-versed in the various knowledge fields it represents— but for preliminary comments, see Losty 1982, 154– 55. I am very grateful to S. R. Sarma for discussing this manuscript with me, and to Rich Freeman for help with the Sanskrit text. 220. The simple one-column stands on which the globes rest approximate “the English type” (van der Krogt 1984, 31). For further discussion of this work, see also http://sites.duke .edu /globalinmughalindia/, 23– 24. 221. BL, Or. 5259, folio 29r. 222. Savage-Smith 1992, 68– 70. Art historian Losty notes that the unknown artist obviously had access to European pattern books (1982, 155). 223. Sarma 1995– 96a, 193– 94. 224. Wilkinson 1834b, 512. For further discussions of Wilkinson’s role as editor and publisher of Sanskrit works, see Sarma 1995– 96b. 225. Moore 1842. In the colonial capital, the CSBS bought several copies of these works for sale and circulation in Calcutta, on the grounds that they “contain correct statements of astronomical science” (CSBS 1845, 8– 9). See also Sarma 1995– 96b, 78, and J. Sen 2014, 125– 26. 226. “Onkar Bhut,” or Omkar Bhatt, was an Audambar Brahman who hailed from Asta near Sehore but belonged to a family of joshis originally from Gujarat via Malwa (Young 2003, 218). Bhugolsar was first published in 1836 and was introduced to the incipient colonial public sphere by Wilkinson as “An Elementary Treatise on Geography and Astronomy in question and answer, being a comparison of the Pauranic and Siddhantic systems of the world with that of Copernicus.” Although “full of typographical errors,” the entire print run of 100 copies was apparently sold out within a few days, teachers and students of his school in Sehore clamoring for more. “It contained arguments, proofs and quotations, they said, that no joshi or even brahman could gainsay. . . . Brahmans, joshis, banyas, patwarees, mutasaddis, and thakurs, all shewed themselves equally anxious to possess themselves of the learned Bhatjee Maharaja’s work” (FI 1836, 2: 315– 16). See also Stark 2007, 411n42. 227. Prakash 1999, 64– 75. Richard Fox Young argues that Omkar Bhatt goes further than Subaji Bapu in denouncing Puranic cosmology, and in endorsing European observational science (Young 2003, 218– 19). In Omkar Bhatt’s text, geography and astronomy are positioned quite unequivocally as the science of the white master (sahib). 228. Plofker 2009, 66– 67, 110– 12. 229. Young 2003, 196, 199, 219– 20; Sarma 1995– 96b, 83. 230. FI 1841, 7: 770. In turn, we learn from a colleague of Wilkinson’s that Bapu Deva remembered him with “filial affection” (FI 1866, 22: 255). For Bapudeva’s efforts to learn English against all odds, see Kerr 1853, 158– 59.

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231. Quoted in Dodson 2007, 90. A report of the Department of Public Instruction in 1850– 51 noted with great pride the pedagogical wonders Bapudeva wrought with the help of his telescope (Richey 1922, 257– 58). 232. Dodson 2007, 167. On Bapudeva, see esp. Sarma 1995– 96a; Sarma 1995– 96b; Bayly 2000; Young 2003; Dodson 2007, 163– 68; and Sen 2014, 130– 31. 233. BL, Photo 1000/1046 (4709). The photograph was “taken by a Photographer in the Service of H. Highness the Maharaja of Benares.” The Raja of Benares was a member of the organizing committee for the London International Exhibition (1871), where this photograph was put on display. The British Library’s version of the photo includes the display card with some related information. 234. The globe’s diameter might well be 15 or 18 inches. It was most likely of English make, although it is difficult to be definitive about the manufacturer (Personal conversation with Sylvia Sumira, London, June 2014). 235. Bapudeva Sastri 1853; see also Goswami 2004, 189. Interestingly, this work appeared around the same time as another very interesting Hindi text that I briefly noted in chapter 2, Shivaprasad’s Bhugolhastamalaka, whose author, like Bapudeva Sastri, was awarded The Star of India. The latter text’s opening pages provide an instance of how Modern Earth enters the native imagination through the agency of a Jain bureaucrat-scholar: “It is important to know that our Earth sphere (bhugol) is round like an orange and that it revolves around the sun without any support for itself. The reader may be really surprised to know that Earth does not rest on anything, but if they think it rests on something, then they ask what does that support rest upon. It rests on no support but stands by itself thanks to God’s strength (ishwar ki shakti). That Earth has no support is also stated in the jyotishastra of the Hindus, and is confirmed by English knowledge and by instruments like the telescope (durbin)” (Shivaprasad 1855, 3). Shivaprasad’s book was used in schoolrooms into the 1870s. On Shivaprasad, see Stark 2012; on this particular text, see also Young 2007, 88– 89. On Shivaprasad as author of Hindi textbooks, see Lal 2013, 87– 124. 236. Quoted in Goswami 2004, 189. 237. Quoted in Dodson 2007, 100. 238. Dodson 2007, 105– 9, 133– 43. When adapted as a Reprint for the Pandits, Somerville’s text was published as Outlines of Physical Geography (around 200 printed pages), and priced cheaply. In making the case for publishing it, Ballantyne wrote that the object was “to provide a cheap work cleared of a good deal that is of minor interest to the persons for whom it is intended and giving special prominence to the Physical Geography of India. It should serve as a preparation for the acquisition of political Geography which as usually taught is a barren and uninteresting catalogue of names. The study of the proposed work should also prepare the student to read with more intelligence and interest the facts of History— the observation of the accordance of which with that [of ] the physical aspect of the Globe rendered antecedently probable [sic] should plant or develop the germ of the critical faculty, in respect of History, the want of which is so generally lamented when it is attempted to make a Hindu appreciate the force of historical evidence” (NWP General Department June 3, 1854, no. 62 [IOR/ P/215/34]). I thank Michael Dodson for alerting me to this record. I have been unable to locate a surviving copy of this work. 239. Hoffenberg 2001, 129– 65. On the other hand it is worth noting that at this same exhibition, alongside make-shifts globes that showed the good work of spreading the Gospel of Modern Earth were also displayed maps that showed the exact opposite, almost as if reminding the visitors to the exhibition what the project of pedagogical modernity was up against in distant

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India. These included a “Brahmanical Map of the world. As taught at Bikaner, Rajpootana. The mountain Meroo is in the centre, surrounded by concentric circles of land and sea. The Brahmins supposed that, as there is sea at the coasts, there must be alternate circles of land and sea. This map was obtained from the Brahmins with difficulty . . . [by] Colonel Brooke, Governor-General’s Agent”; a “Coloured Plan of the Universe. According to the Hindoos. By Jugutbundhoo Tarkabageesh, Pundit of a Sanskrit Tole at Dacca. Price 2s.,” and a “Pooranic Map of India. Showing the geography of India as taught in the Poorans, or later sacred books of the Hindoos” (Watson 1871, 164. See also Smith 1871, 30). It is worth recalling in this regard Christopher Bayly’s perceptive comment, “In popular culture, the happy mix of puranic cosmology and analytical astronomy became the leading edge of India’s print revolution” (Bayly 1996, 262).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. I thank Sylvia Sumira for identifying the globe as possibly one of Cary’s. The London globe-making family of John and William Cary were in business from 1791 when they first advertised their three-and-a-half, nine, twelve, and twenty-one inch celestial and terrestrial globes manufactured from entirely new plates. In addition to globes, the family also produced and sold other cartographic objects like planispheres, maps, and atlases. For scholarly discussions of Cary globes, albeit one that does not consider their global history per se, see esp. Dekker, ed. 1999, 293– 99; and Worms and Bayton-Williams 2011, 129– 33. As I note later, the Bombay government put in a request for Cary globes for schools in the Presidency as early as 1826. 2. It is hard to tell whether the map is in English or one of the local languages. As I discuss a little later, Marathi and Gujarati maps of India began to be published around 1838. 3. “The camera is the eye of history” is attributed to the best-known American photographer of the mid-nineteenth century Mathew Brady. 4. S. Bhattacharya 2001, xii– xvi. Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya also emphasizes that the overall expenditure in female schooling was a small fraction of the total expenditure on education throughout the colonial period. The scholarship on women’s education in colonial India is vast if uneven in quality, and reported data rather undependable, but for key primary sources and policy statements, see esp. Bhattacharya et al. 2001. 5. Quoted in Bhattacharya et al. 2001, 159. 6. A pair of maps titled “Percentage of Girls under Instruction in Public Institutions” is very instructive in this regard, allowing us to see that in 1891– 92, even in the three oldest presidencies, less than 4% were going to school, while a decade later, there was some improvement in Madras and Bombay (See Nathan 1904, vol. 2). By 1911, “Nowhere in British India more than one per cent of the female population had access to education at any level” (S. Bhattacharya 2001, xxi). For most of the colonial period, 95% of girls enrolled in schools did not get past the primary level (Bhattacharya et al. 2001, 479– 81, 503– 4. On the eve of Indian independence, the situation had improved somewhat with a reported female literacy rate close to 10% (Sargent 1948, vol. 1: 55– 59). 7. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 157– 61, 301– 2. 8. The Education Commission of 1882 came to the conclusion that “history, geography and hygiene are considered by some witnesses to be useless, while others think that the fault is in the way in which they are taught,” but nevertheless, recorded no outright outrage against its

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teaching, nor a recommendation that it be abandoned (Hunter 1883, 533). Even those, like members of the Lahore Arya Samaj, who did not express enthusiasm for female education beyond needlework and morality and insisted that girls “should not be made to swallow history and geography indiscriminately,” were willing to include in such learning “the bare principles of the geography of India, and a little detailed information of that of the Punjab, together with a general knowledge of the geography of the world” (Education Commission 1884e, 480). Indeed, the enlightened Lahore-based bureaucrat-educator Navincandra (1838– 90), on whom Ulrike Stark has written a luminous essay, included an elaborate set of terrestrial lessons on Modern Earth in his textbook meant specifically for female pupils titled Lakshmi-Saraswati-Samvad (Dialogue between Lakshmi and Saraswati) and published in 1869 (Stark 2000). 9. Seth 2007, 142– 44. 10. See, for example, Karlekar 2006, xii, 2, 44; Sinha 2010; and Karlekar 2013, 96– 100. Interestingly, most standard histories of photography in India (including the path-breaking works of Christopher Pinney) hardly discuss this photograph or related ones that I explore in this chapter. 11. The correct name for this Institution at this point was Alexandra Native Girls’ English Institution (henceforth Alexandra Institution). The word “Native” was dropped in 1916, undoubtedly reflecting the growing nationalist aspirations of that generation of Indians (Mirza 2012, 20). 12. Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Vienna Universal Exhibition 1874, vol. 1: 687– 88, emphasis mine. For a complete list of the educational appliances and cartographic objects from India displayed at the exhibition, see Watson 1873. Humble though these were— in contrast to cartographic products of reputed British firms like John Bartholomew’s, Phillips & Sons, and A. & K. Johnston— the maps, globes, and other specimens of schoolwork and educational appliances sent from the diverse provinces of British India received “Honorable Mention” in the exhibition (Her Majesty’s Commissioners for the Vienna Universal Exhibition 1874, vol. 3: 274). 13. The attire of both teachers and students in these photographs suggest that these are Parsi schools. For a contemporary comment by Mary Carpenter on the attire of these young women, see Carpenter 1868, vol. 2: 13. 14. On globes made by Newton and Co, see Dekker, ed. 1999, 422– 36. A globe made by this firm was advertised for sale in Bombay as early as 1846 (Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, June 27, 1846). 15. Captioned as “Vernacular school and ‘pantojee’ (schoolmaster)” in Watson 1873, 224. 16. The globes in this photograph resemble productions by the London firm of John and William Cary. As with the globe in Figure 4.1, their surfaces are too dark for us to be able to decipher the maps. On the Karachi studio of John Michie, see Raza 2014, 101– 3. 17. http://www.bl.uk /onlinegallery/onlineex /apac /photocoll /c /019ph0001000s46u0470 3000.html. See also Allender 2006, 99– 101. 18. http://www.bl.uk /onlinegallery/onlineex /apac /photocoll /c /019ph0001000s46u0465 9000.html. 19. There is virtually no discussion of this topic in Indian historiography, although for an important beginning, see Karlekar 2006, 39– 57, and Karlekar 2013, 96– 100. On the genre more generally, see Grosvenor 1999, and esp. Hirsch and Spitzer 2014. 20. For a contemporary resident of Bombay marveling about the work of the camera, see the Marathi memoir of Govind Narayan (Ranganathan 2009, 206). 21. Shirley 2009, 248. For the pioneering geographical and cartographical work of Emma

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Willard (1787– 1870) in the United States, especially her creation of an atlas as early as 1828, see Schulten 2007. 22. Schwartz 1996, 17. 23. For discussions of these works, see Levitine 1978, 332– 34; Wallis 1978, 107– 8; Steward 1995, 143– 61; Lippincott 1999, 76– 77; and Brückner 2006, 1– 3. 24. Postle 1998, 5– 7. See also Terrall 2000; Withers 2007, 232; and Fara 2004, 109– 11. 25. http:// www.slam .org /emuseum / html /media _singleenlarged _EN .html. See also Brückner 2006, 158– 62. 26. http://digitallibrary.usc.edu /cdm /singleitem /collection /p15799c011123 /id /31210 /rec /1. A curator for the Basel Mission’s photography collection observes that this image “is part of a so-called ‘specimen print’ book, a collection of all wood engravings printed on large pages. It was most probably used to select illustrations for the publications and journals of the Basel Mission. [The] image has been printed in the North- and West-Africa section. Therefore it has been classified under West Africa. However when looking critically at it, I suppose it should have been filed under India for the following reasons: type and hairstyle of the assistant teacher (showing a map) and the girls / the school seems to be quite well equipped with books, maps and globes. As the wood engraving has not been produced after a photograph, it may date back to the mid of the 19th century” (email from Barbara Frey Näf, November 30, 2010). 27. On women’s place in the putatively male science and profession of cartography in the West, see Van den Hoonard 2013. See also Millburn 2000, 107– 8, 263– 65; Schulten 2007; and Sumira 2014, 162– 63. 28. Sharp 1914. Sharp arrived in India in 1894 and started his colonial career in the Central Provinces as Principal of the Government College in Jubbalpore. In 1898, he was appointed Inspector of Schools, and by 1906, he became Director of Public Instruction in East Bengal and Assam. In 1910, when the Government of India created a separate Department of Education, he was at first appointed Joint Secretary and in 1915, he came the first Educational Commissioner to the Government of India, and in 1918, the first Educational Secretary (Whitehead 2003, 26– 27). Sharp’s numerous educational reports and publications are influenced and inflected by the expertise he accrued in these various capacities. 29. Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 210– 11. A leading publisher of maps, atlases, globes and geographical textbooks, George Philip & Son’s cartographic products circulated in colonial India from the later nineteenth, but especially in the early years of the twentieth, century, although this aspect of the history of this prolific firm has not been well documented (Dekker, ed. 1999, 444– 49). For an introduction to the archive of the firm, deposited in the Royal Geographical Society Map Room, see Francis Herbert’s useful “Philip Archive: Catalogues and Lists” (unpublished hand list). 30. A couple decades before these photographs were taken, a report noted the “great interest” among students of the institution in the study of physical geography (Board of Education 1851, 29). Figure 4.12 shows a group of Parsi students, whereas in Figure 4. 13, the clothing worn by the students suggest they were Hindu (the BL’s online catalogue identifies as “Maratha (?) pupils”). Interestingly, the photograph in Figure 4.12 was also subsequently printed as a picture postcard ( Jyotindra Jain Collection, New Delhi). Schools and school going children often featured in colonial postcards from this period, although there is no specific scholarship on this topic (cf. Mathur 2007, 127– 29).

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31. It is quite likely that the globe was manufactured by the London instrument maker Newton & Son, its stand and horizon ring reminiscent of that company’s “Improved Newtonian” terrestrial globe (Clifton 1999, 48). I am grateful to Sylvia Sumira for this suggestion. 32. The idea of having a college named after Governor Elphinstone was first formulated around 1834, and classes began in 1835. In 1840, these classes were merged with schools run by the Bombay Native Education Society— on which more later— to form the Elphinstone Native Education Institution. In 1846, this latter body underwent another change when its English section was separated and took on the name Elphinstone Institution. Finally in 1856, yet another reorganization resulted in the Elphinstone College and the Elphinstone High School (Ahmad 1998, 427). 33. After his return to England and retirement from colonial service, Elphinstone authored the widely read The History of India (published in 1841) in which after expressing his admiration for the ingenuity of Hindu geometry, astronomy, and arithmetic, he wrote in terms— not all that different from missionaries like John Murdoch— “The Hindus have made less progress in [geography] than in any other science. According to their system, Mount Meru occupies the center of the world . . . [India], and some of those nearest to it, appear to be the only part of the earth at all known to the Hindus. . . . But all beyond India is plunged in a darkness from which the boldest speculations of modern geographers have failed to rescue it. . . . It would seem, therefore, as if the Hindus had, in early times, been as averse to travelling as most of them are still; and that they would have remained for ever unconnected with the rest of the world if all mankind had been as exempt from restlessness and curiosity as themselves” (Elphinstone 1841, 252– 53). 34. The Minute is reproduced in Fisher 1832, 511– 19 (quotation from p. 516, emphasis mine). 35. Fisher 1832, 427– 28. For further discussion and reproduction of key documents on this review, see Parulekar 1951. 36. See table titled “A Brief Summary of the Contents of the Reports on the State of Education,” in Fisher 1832, 429. 37. The origins of this society go back to 1820 when it was called the Native School & School Book Committee of the Bombay Education Society. In August 1822, this Committee struck out on its own as the Bombay Native School-Book and School Society, a name it retained till 1827 when it renamed itself as Bombay Native Education Society and lasted till 1840 when it was superseded by the Board of Education. British and elite native men were members and subscribers, and the governor of the Presidency served as president. For an account as well as critical documents pertaining to its history and activities, see Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, xvi– xxx, 40– 202. In the early years of its existence, the society was supported almost entirely by voluntary contributions, both British and native (whose names are listed in the annual reports), but soon government funds became essential for its functioning. For a valuable “non-official” contemporary account of the work of the society (and of the educational scene more generally in Bombay) by Marianne Young, married in the 1830s to Thomas Postans, an officer in the Bombay Native Infantry, see Postans 1839b, 46– 71. 38. BNES 1824, 73. For the report, and the government’s response to it, see Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 47– 62. The BNES’s parent society, the Bombay Education Society, had already earlier indicated in 1820 the need for a few tracts “framed in a popular way on General History, Natural History, Geography, and Astronomy,” and rendered in Gujarati and Marathi (Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 22). 39. In 1832, 2,000 copies of the Marathi translation and 500 copies of the Gujarati translation of Bhoogole were printed, alongside 1000 copies of Pinnock’s work, translated into Marathi by Bal

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Gangadhar Sastri who was also then Native Secretary of the BNES (BNES 1833, Appendix B). In 1838, the Marathi version of Bhoogole was priced at Rs. 4, and the Gujarati at Rs. 2 annas 8, not cheap by any means (Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 194– 96). Meanwhile, until these works appeared in the society’s depository, the Hindustani version of the Compendium of Geography (printed by the CSBS in 1824) was available from 1825. In 1824, the depository also carried the Treatise of Geography (in Bengali), also published by the CSBS (BNES 1824, 74– 78). 40. Naregal 2002, 155. 41. Pinnock 1824, 27– 29. By the mid-1830s, these works began to circulate in the hinterlands beyond Bombay as witnessed by two American missionaries, despite their vested interest in disseminating “Christian books” (Ramsey 1836, 145, 344). 42. BNES 1824, 7– 9. 43. BNES 1833, 36. Even those outside the society felt similarly, as witnessed in an report dated May 17, 1826, written by Bombay’s Chief Engineer S. Goodfellow, in which he advocated the study of astronomy, noting “there is probably no knowledge so likely to impress on their minds, pure and reasonable notions of religion. In prosecuting the study and in contemplating the structure of the universe and the consequences resulting from it, they can scarcely fail of relieving themselves from a load of prejudice and superstition; they will thus gradually in proportion as this knowledge is spread (it is reasonable to believe) become better men and better subjects, and less likely ever to be made the tools of any ambitious man or fanatic” (Fisher 1832, 474). 44. It is likely that this little work was presented by two American missionaries (who ran schools near Ahmadnagar in the 1830s) to a local landlord who invited them to a discussion about it. “We took the map, and pointed out to him the country and directed his eye to America, and told him that this is our country” (Ramsey 1836, 250– 53). 45. BNES 1838, 9, and BNES 1839, Appendices H and M. 46. BNES 1838, 9, 19– 20. The Hindustani “map of the globe,” of which there were twentysix copies available in 1839 was priced at Rs. 5 each, but the atlas by Dadoba Pandurang and Nana Narayan was priced at a more affordable Rs. 1 annas 8 (BNES 1839, Appendix M). A couple years earlier, the depository also had sixteen copies of “Map— of the Globe” in Hindustani at a cost of Rs. 5 each (BNES 1836). By 1843, the society’s depository reported that it had in stock two copies of the Marathi atlas, three copies of the Gujarati atlas, five copies of the Hindustani “Map of the Globe” (priced now at Rs. 3), twenty-eight copies of “Map of the World” (priced at Rs. 1), and one copy of Betts Maps, priced at a hefty Rs. 20 (Board of Education 1844, 65– 71). 47. Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 191. 48. On Bal Gangadhar, see O’ Hanlon 1985, 90– 95; Naregal 2002, 128ff; Ranganathan 2009, 183– 84; 342– 43, and Sen 2014, 116– 27. For a glowing official recognition on his passing of his pedagogic contributions, see Board of Education 1847, 2– 3, and for some contemporary appreciation, see also Postans 1839b, 47– 49, 69– 71. For an informative essay on the emergent reformist milieu at this time in Bombay Presidency (that would have sustained such native cartographic evangelists), see especially Naik 1979. 49. BNES 1824, 74– 78. As noted in chapter 2, Joyce’s important introduction to Modern Earth and Sky had already begun to circulate in both Bengal and Madras by this time. Turner’s Geography, published in 1810, aimed to demonstrate to the school boy “that the path leading to the knowledge of Geography, is not so dull, rugged, and disagreeable, as most young people are apt to imagine at their first setting out; but, on the contrary, that it is capable of giving as much pleasure and entertainment as those silly things that are daily offered to the public under

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the enchanting names of romances, tales and novels.” It was illustrated with numerous maps, including “a Large Map of the World, on which are delineated the different Tracks of Captain Cook’s Ship, in his three Voyages round the World,” and with “a plate of the Terrestrial Globe” (Turner 1810). 50. For relevant archival documents, see IOR/ F/4/1172/30648. By 1826, the total number of students in the school had risen to eighty-six, including fifteen mixed-race “English” youth (Sen 2014, 114). At this time, there were no girls at all in any of the schools run by the BNES on the island of Bombay. However, in Ratnagiri where the Native School Society of Southern Konkan (founded in 1823, mostly by native gentlemen) had opened a Marathi school, six young girls were enrolled, and one girl child had enrolled in its English school (Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, xxx– xxxi). 51. Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 90– 92. Earlier in August 1825, the society had received a gift of books in Sanskrit, Marathi, Gujarati, and Marwari with which it hoped to start “a native library.” When the English books from England arrived, the hope was to promote “a taste for reading them” among the natives (BoE, September 14, 1825). 52. This is obviously a reference to globes made by the London firm of John and William Cary. See note 1. 53. General Department, Education, September 9, 1826, no. 89 (IOR/F/4/1015/27843). 54. Letter to the Bombay Government dated 18 February 18, 1829, para. 18– 21 (IOR/ E/4/ 1050). See also Fisher 1832, 531. Earlier in 1825, when the Directors had learned of the efforts to set up the English school, they had given it their blessings, noting that they were pleased to hear of “the anxious desire of many among the Natives to obtain the benefits of English education for their children” (Extract, Public Letter to Bombay, dated September 21, 1825, para. 13 [IOR/F/4/1172/30648]). The Directors also worried about the fact that there were no plans to hire any Europeans at the Central English School, who would be able to interpret all this complex material that the society had requested (Extract, Public Letter to Bombay, dated June 13, 1827, para. 4 [IOR/ F/4/1015/27843]). 55. BNES 1825, 11. 56. Parulekar 1953, 91– 110 (quotation on page 92). 57. From Bombay Government to Directors in London, letter in the General Department, dated March 15, 1826, para. 18 (IOR/ F/4/1172/30648). 58. Extract, Public Letter to Bombay, dated June 13, 1827, para. 5 (IOR/F/4/1015/27843). 59. On public auctions around this time in colonial India, see Finn 2006. 60. BC 1800, 9 (391). We can presume that since these objects were deemed to be part of his “household furniture,” that their owner might have had them displayed in his home. Also put up for sale at the same time were “an electrical Apparatus almost new, in perfect order; A large and excellent Telescope, Mathematical and Astronomical Apparatus, by the first Artists.” 61. BC 1801, 10 (467). 62. BC 1802, 11 (519). 63. BC 1802, 12 (542). 64. BC 1815, 25 (1214); and 27 (1278). 65. Around March 1817, one Thomas Boyce advertised that his English grammar school’s curriculum in the city included the teaching of Geography, the use of the globes, mapping and charting, alongside attention being paid to the development of “talents, morals, and manners.” It is possible that he personally owned a pair of globes and used these for instruction in his school

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(BC 1817, 27 (1307). Although typically such schools catered to white and Eurasian boys, by 1826 some sons of native elites were also attending this school, given its emphasis on an English education (Fisher 1832, 466). 66. Prices for globes are often not forthcoming in the documents surviving in the colonial archives, and when mentioned frequently do not provide details regarding manufacturer or the size of the object. In 1828, a pair of globes in Calcutta could cost up to Rs. 275 (Extract Bengal Political Consultation, dated June 5, 1829 [IOR/ F/4/1170/30639]). 67. BNES 1831, 10. 68. Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 176, 180– 83. 69. See, for example, BNES 1833, 5, and BNES 1835, 5. For a valuable eye-witness account of one such examination, see Postans 1839b, 51– 59. In the Bengal Presidency, missionary schools reported the ritual of public examinations as early as 1816 and in the Madras Presidency from around the same time. 70. Postans 1839b, 49. The Library of the Elphinstone Institution was not the only such space in Bombay at this time to have globes. In November 1830, the Bombay General Library was founded, and its members (mostly expatriates at this time, one suspects) gave voluntary gifts of globes, among other things (AJMM 1831, 5: 70– 71). 71. Oriental Christian Spectator 1833, 4: 458. See also “Report on the Government Establishments under the Bombay Presidency for the Education of the Natives by Mr. Secretary Wathen dated June 30, 1835” (IOR/ F/4/1908/81611). 72. FI, 1837, 3 (153): 378. The same article reported that at an examination conducted in the presence of European and native gentlemen at the Poona Sanskrit College at the same time, there was a detailed questioning of whether the earth was stationary or moving, and whether the students knew of the truth of the Copernican system” (ibid.) Of course, this did not mean that public assertions always squared with private belief. So we learn from a contemporary biography of a Gujarati Brahman teacher Pranshankar, who even after an education in Bombay in 1837 apparently “continued to instruct his students that ‘the earth never moves around the sun,’ but that they should answer otherwise in order pass their examinations” (Yagnik and Sheth 2005, 72). Writing similarly in the 1840s about discussions he had with pupils and teachers alike about terrestrial sphericity and the convincing proofs regarding this irrefutable fact, H. Green, Superintendent of Schools in the predominantly Gujarati-speaking districts of Ahmedabad, Surat, Broach and Kaira, reported: “The present School masters generally perhaps neither believe nor understand much that they profess to teach, but go through it as a form which is to complied with before they are entitled to draw their pay. . . . Some years ago, the teacher of one of the Goojerathee Masters became very much concerned that his pupil no longer listened to his instructions as a mere matter of form which he was paid to commit to memory, and had begun to reflect upon them and to realize them. He addressed him therefore one day with “What! D. Are you really so simple as to believe that the earth is round and that it spins like a boy’s top?” “Well,” said the pupil, “I have been thinking a great deal about it, and it certainly appears to me to be very probable.” “Go, Go,” was the rejoinder from the instructor, “it is not the earth— it is your brain that turns round” (Board of Education 1847, 48). 73. Board of Education 1842, 53. The fact that the senior class did as well as it did was surprising because, although “a Catechism of Geography and some Maps” were to be found in these schools, the masters had earlier not known how to teach from them (ibid.). 74. Thomas Candy arrived in India in 1822, and was appointed in January 1833 to the office of

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the Assistant in the Poona Hindu College (to help with the preparation of the Marathi dictionary). His services and facility with the language brought him to attention of his superiors, and he (by now Brevet Captain Candy) was elevated to the rank of Superintendent of the Poona Sanskrit College and of the Government Marathee Schools in the Deccan in 1837 (for a set of documents that provides testimonials to his various talents at the time of this prestigious appointment, as well as complaints registered against some of his highhanded ways, see IOR/F/4/1908/81611). In the early years as Superintendent of Schools, he appears “to have personally instructed the scholars of [the] five schools in [the city of Poona] in the principles of Grammar and Geography. Some of the boys have acquired a creditable knowledge of the rudiments of Geography. They can tell the different countries of the Globe, with the name of the chief towns, are able to point them out on the map” (“First Annual Report of the Government Marathi Schools,” dated April 19, 1838, para. 5, IOR/ F/4/1768/72633). In 1839, in his second annual report to the government on the forty two schools under his supervision, he observed that most of the three thousand enrolled students “have acquired the rudiments of Geography, and in some schools can readily point out in the map the situation of any country or capital city. In some schools, however, the Geographical knowledge of some scholars is yet mere rote knowledge; but I labor to induce them to exercise their minds.” Unfortunately, he does not give us an explanation of how he “exercised” their young minds in this regard (“Second Annual Report of the Government Marathi Schools,” dated May 1, 1839, para. 5, IOR/ F/4/1881/79937). The books in Marathi that were used across the region in the late 1830s were titled Catechism of Geography, and Conversations on Geography and Astronomy, etc. In these early years, geography appears to have been the only other subject of study beyond the 3 Rs, and in 1839, Candy in fact decided that it was mandatory that the enrolled student “should provide himself with a copy of the Catechism of Grammar and the Catechism of Geography” (ibid., para. 10). From 1847, Thomas Candy was also placed in charge of textbook production for Marathi schools with authority from the Board of Education, a role that did not go challenged in the native press (Ranganathan 2009, 8. See also 21– 23; 333– 34). 75. Board of Education 1855, 12– 13. 76. Board of Education 1851, 75. The report for 1854 noted, however, that Candy’s “extended work on Geography,” had “long occupied much of his attention, but owing to his many other engrossing occupations, some time must elapse before it will be ready for the press” (Board of Education 1855, 12). Published eventually in two volumes, the work remained the standard for the next two decades and was held up in other parts of British India as worthy of emulation (Government of India, Home (Education) Proceedings, nos. 143– 52, dated March 29, 1873). See also Jacob et al. 1884, 92– 93; and Covernton 1906, 26– 33. 77. On Dadoba Pandurang’s religious and reformist ideas, see Naik 1979 and O’Hanlon 1985, 90– 102. 78. Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 195– 96. 79. Board of Education 1850, 22– 23, emphasis mine. See also above, note 72. 80. Annual Report of the Poona College for the Year 1853, paras. 116 and 117. For more on Keru Laxman, a product of the Elphinstone Institution and also honored with a title of Rao Bahadur for his pedagogical and astronomical work, see Sen 2014, 97– 102. 81. Bourdillon 1859b, 115. 82. Board of Education 1855, 39. 83. Board of Education 1855, 13. 84. Government of Bombay 1860: Appendix F, 169.

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85. Annual Report of the Elphinstone Institution, Bombay, for the Year 1853, para. 118. See also Government of Bombay 1858, 4– 5. Even missionary institutions— such as the Ahmadnuggar Institution for Training Teachers, frequently supported by funds raised among philanthropists in England— complained of lack of globes, microscopes and air pumps (“Meeting of Committee, November 11, 1868,” CVES Minute Book, vol. 2: 225 (SOAS, USCL/ Christian Literature Society, Minutes, FBN 1). 86. Board of Education 1842, 53. Pandurang Triambuck Bhowalkar (for that appears to have been his full given name) was educated in a BNES school, and was praised early on by Thomas Candy as “a superior man” (“First Annual Report of the Government Marathi Schools,” dated April 19, 1838 [IOR/ F/4/1768/72633]; see also “Second Annual Report of the Government Marathi Schools,” dated May 1, 1839, para. 15 [IOR/ F/4/1881/79937]). See also Board of Education 1852, 64– 65. 87. Board of Education 1845, 13. It is worth recalling that at the London International Exhibition in 1871 and the Vienna Universal Exhibition in 1873, one of the exhibits on display was “a Large terrestrial globe, in Marathee. Made by Wanum Trimbuk, Head Master of the Vernacular School at Akola, Berar” (Watson 1871, 154). 88. Board of Education 1852, 75. 89. Board of Education 1855, 155– 56. 90. Board of Education 1852, 70– 71; and Board of Education 1853, 73– 74. Maganbhai’s generosity— as well as support for female education— was recognized by the colonial state in the consequential educational dispatch of July 19, 1854 (para. 83) although his name has been quite mangled in the scribal transmission (across pages and oceans) to the point of being barely recognizable (IOR/ E/4/826, 1141). Mary Carpenter visited Maganbhai’s girls’ school about a decade later and described it in some detail in her account (Carpenter 1868, vol. 1: 52– 54). See also Bhattacharya et al. 2001, 16– 17. 91. Board of Education 1852, 56; and Board of Education 1853, 54. 92. On the place of the BGS (founded in 1832 eleven years after the first such association in Paris, and a year after an equivalent in London) in the institutionalization of geography in India, albeit at first with only expatriate membership, see Kapur 2002, 7– 8. Daniel Ross had been Marine Surveyor of Bombay from 1828, and served as president of the society from 1833 until his death in 1849. 93. Bombay Geographical Society 1850, xlvii– liv. See also FI 1849, 762: 505. 94. Bombay Geographical Society 1852, lxvi– lxvii. On the London cartographic firm of Malby & Co., see Dekker, ed. 1999, 404– 6, 500– 506. Morgen’s Treatise on the Globes was first published in 1845 in London as a guide to the firm’s globes. The thirty-six-inch globes were produced by the firm as recently as 1849 from plates that had likely first been used by the globe maker John Addison. It is possible that the Admiralty chose these globes because Malby & Co. was its principal supplier of charts, and also because they were such recent novelty items (Worms and Baynton-Williams 2011, 430– 32). 95. Bombay Geographical Society 1852, lxxviii– lxxix. In his memoir of Bombay city published about a decade after the arrival of these globes, Govind Narayan describes the activities of BGS to his Marathi readers, and notes that “various kinds of objects have been collected in the Society’s office” (Ranganathan 2009, 225). 96. Journal of the BBRAS 1854, 5 (19): 385. 97. Annual Report of the Elphinstone Institute, Bombay, for the Year 1854, para. 92 and para. 131.

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Although Sinclair’s report included a discussion of the various geographical models and specimens in the Museum, he does not, strikingly, mention the large Malby globes which must have been present in the same room. 98. Journal of the BBRAS 1875, 10: xxxix. 99. Ranganathan 2009, 9, 225– 27. Our reliable eyewitness, Govind Narayan— whose many observations about Mumbai in these years I quote through the course of this chapter— has unfortunately nothing to say about these objects, even though at some point prior to the 1863 publication of his memoir, he appears to have visited the premises of the Asiatic Society (although he was not a member himself ). He has left us with a memorable description of the library and the joy and wonder he experienced on seeing its vast collection of books. From his account, we learn as well that the annual subscription fee for the use of the library was Rs. 100, and that “only scholarly and respectable persons who would use the library for purposes of acquiring knowledge are granted membership of this Society. A rich person who is not a scholar is not given membership just to increase numbers. . . . The number of native people is so few that it is almost shameful to mention it. Most of the native members are Parsis. There are very few Hindus. Isn’t this a sad state of affairs?” (ibid., 227– 28). The Bombay Saturday Review (November 9, 1861, 118– 19) came to a similar conclusion when it noted that “the sole merit” of the BBRAS “is that it has a tolerably large library; the majority of its members do not even attend the monthly meetings; and it is well understood that not only is it no distinction to be a member of the Asiatic Society, but no privileges are attached to membership other than those of belonging to a book-club.” I am very grateful to Murali Ranganathan for his insights on the arrival and travels of the Malby globes. 100. Thus, inspectors were explicitly asked to ascertain the availability of school furniture for institutions of every grade, “including benches, desks, slates, black-boards, globes, planetaria, maps, diagrams, etc.” (Government of Bombay 1857, 61). 101. Jacob et al. 1884, 33– 34. 102. Ranganathan 2009, 234– 35. Given his interests, Govind Narayan may himself have been a purchaser of these. 103. John Betts began making his portable and collapsible globes for the British educational market from around 1850, along with A Companion to Betts’ Portable Globe and Diagrams. His company flourished until about 1875 when it was taken over by George Philip & Son (Dekker, ed. 1999, 276– 78). A few years later, a missionary based in northern India on a visit to Bombay spotted a “Betts’ Patent Portable Globe” on sale and purchased it, since “it was exactly the thing I had long been wishing for.” He goes on to write at length about how he used the globe to put the natives in their place— as subjects of a vast British Empire that was also the Empire of Christ. “The globe and what it tells excited breathless interest. . . . The globe speaks for itself as to the power of England and Christian Nations in general” (Anon. 1882). 104. Government of Bombay 1866, 201– 30. Although several Gujarati maps are listed, no Gujarati terrestrial globe is itemized. 105. Government of Bombay 1868, Appendix L. 106. Times of India, June 5, 1877: 1; October 3, 1878: 1; July 11, 1879: 1; May 2, 1899: 2; November 18, 1901: 2; June 2, 1902: 5; May 31, 1905: 3. 107. Times of India, August 23, 1902: 5. This kind of marketing was also obviously aimed at an upmarket clientele, such as the wealthy Bombay gentleman Baboo Ram Chunder whose home is described by one contemporary visitor in the 1880s as strewn with “a mélange of European

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ornaments, clocks, antique pictures, statues, celestial and terrestrial globes” (Leonowens 1897, 173– 74). I thank Patricia Uberoi for this reference. 108. Times of India, August 23, 1902: 5. 109. Government of Bombay 1879, 71. 110. Anon. 1885. 111. Jacob et al. 1884, 74, 90– 97. 112. It is surprising, especially given the wealth of data and reporting of native elites’ perceptions and views on colonial schooling, including the teaching of geography— archived for the first time, and across British India— that the Education Commission of 1882 has not been more systematically studied by historians (Cf. Allender 2006, 251– 82). 113. Education Commission 1884c, pt. 1: 347. Similarly, inspectors in the NWP reported that Muslim parents objected to the mandatory study of geography in government schools in that province because “their children are merely wasting time in acquiring information about countries they will never see” (Hunter 1883, 491). 114. Jacob et al. 1884, 107. 115. Education Commission 1884c, pt. 1: 427. A few years earlier, the Marathi newspaper Chandrodaya (September 13, 1869) had similarly wondered about the relevance of teaching the terrestrial globe to girls who had not yet mastered even the Gujarati primer (I thank Shefali Chandra for directing me to this). 116. Government of Bombay 1868: Appendix A3. 117. In Marianne Postans’s account of her visit to Elphinstone Institution in the 1830s, she reports meeting “a fine lad of fourteen, from Madras,” whose father Soolochinam Moodeliar (“a singularly intelligent high caste native”) had brought him to Bombay to be educated. Although she does not name the young lad, it was almost certainly Vedadrisadasan (Postans 1839b, 63– 65). The daughter of one of his professors at Elphinstone, Arthur Orlebar, is believed to have created his portrait, although I have not been able to track this down (Sen 2014, 142). 118. The First Report of the Elphinstone Native Education Institution, 1840, 51– 52. See also GCPI 1842, xlii. 119. The First Report of the Elphinstone Native Education Institution, 1840, 14– 15. Vedadrisadasan was also immensely grateful to modern schooling for freeing knowledge from the clutches of Brahmans “who have, by the influence possessed by them over other classes, maintained the exclusive right of studying the sacred language, and have thus debarred them from participating in the blessings, which are the concomitants of enlightenment” (ibid.). He was obviously a model student, for an earlier report from 1839 noted that on being awarded a prestigious Elphinstone scholarship, he gave it up “for those who had more in need of its emolument.” His “disinterested conduct” earned him a gold medal, and his academic work earned him as well a prize of assorted books (Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 165). 120. Vedadrisadasan 1839, 78. 121. Annual Report of the Elphinstone Institution for the Year 1850, 267. 122. http://www.bl.uk /onlinegallery/onlineex /apac /photocoll /g /019ph0001000s46u0464 2000.html; http://www.bl.uk /onlinegallery/onlineex /apac /photocoll /g /019ph0001000s46u 04643000.html. The schools were named after early benefactors (Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 10; and Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1856– 57, 1857– 58 and 1858– 59, 38– 39).

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123. For preliminary discussions, see Naregal 2002, 233– 39; Ranganathan 2009, 20– 21; 368, and Chandra 2012, 41– 42, 48– 49. 124. Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 5– 6. The copious reports of the society are saturated with the language of colonial paternalism and patriarchal benevolence whose mantle is now heroically worn by the young and (English) educated native man. In the Marathi and Gujarati Branch Societies that were soon spawned, particular emphasis was interestingly placed on popular science with lectures, “illustrated with experiments, or otherwise familiarly expounded: the air-pump, the balloon, and the magic lantern, the mariner’s compass, steam and the electric telegraph” (ibid.) 125. Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 5– 6. 8– 9. 126. Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 2, 12– 13. See also Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1856– 57, 1857– 58 and 1858– 59, 8– 9. By 1851, although the society continued to privilege female education, several schools for boys, frequently adjacent to those of the girls, were also opened. The teachers also began to compile schoolbooks in Gujarati and Marathi. Although titled Girls’ Books, these were meant for children of both sexes. For an early critique by a fellow Parsi of the SLSS’s efforts to educate in the vernaculars, rather than in English, see Cursetjee 1856, 5– 7. 127. Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 14– 15. Several decades later when members of the Parsi Girls’ School Association (an organization that took over from the SLSS the management of four of its Parsi girls schools in 1857– 58) met with the Education Commission in 1882, they specifically mentioned the annual budget of Rs. 700 set aside for “maps, etc.,” and the instruction offered to their wards in the geography of India, Asia, and Europe (Education Commission 1884c, pt. 2: 21– 25). In his memorial to the Hunter Commission in 1882, Dadabhai Naoroji noted that the SLSS still remained in charge of its first Hindu schools at this time (Bhattacharya et al. 2001, 88). 128. Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 10. See also Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1856– 57, 1857– 58 and 1858– 59, 27, 39. A wealthy self-made businessman— unusual, because he hailed from a Brahman family— Shankarseth had been a member of the BNES, and was also a member of the Board of Education at the time of the founding of this first school. He was also the first president of the Bombay Association (1852– 57), a political interest group formed to communicate native opinion directly to the British Parliament. Govind Narayan’s memoir of Mumbai is sprinkled with allusions to other important cultural and philanthropic activities of this new big man who also served on the Bombay Legislative Council from 1862 till the time of his death (Ranganathan 2009). 129. A Saraswat Goud Brahman by caste affiliation and a native of Goa, Bhau Daji’s given name was Ramakrishna Vittal. He moved with his family to Bombay and was a product— like so many other native men we have met in this chapter— of the BNES school system in the 1830s (Paramaswaran Pillai 1897, 285– 90; and Ranganathan 2009, 346). 130. Pinney 2008, 12– 14, 115– 16. 131. Govind Narayan whose reaction to the arrival of the camera I have early flagged in note 20, writes that many youths in his time had “mastered [the photographic] process and have established workshops in their houses to capture the images of their near and dear ones. Among the

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Hindus, Dr. Narayan Daji and Harishchandra Chintaman have become experts. Harishchandra Chintaman has set up a large workshop in the Fort and has published a small Marathi book on this science” (Ranganathan 2009, 206). See also Falconer 1990, 275– 76; and Ranganathan 2009, 346– 47. 132. Soon after the change of guard that followed the 1857– 58 Rebellion, the London publisher Day and Son commissioned Simpson (who had attained much fame for his “eyewitness” sketches of the Crimean War, hence also his moniker) to produce images for an illustrated book that would visually document Britain’s newest Crown colony (Simpson 1867). On his return to England in 1862, Simpson spent four years turning his rough sketches into 250 watercolors, 50 of which were subsequently printed as lithographs in 1867. For a comprehensive analysis, see Archer 1986. 133. The watercolor is mounted on a display card on the back of which is a printed label with the inscription, “127* (248) School for Brahmin Girls, Bombay 28.” It is quite likely then that this watercolor was put on display at some point, possibly in 1869 in London at the Pall Mall Galleries (“Archer Collection: Papers of Dr. William Archer and his wife Mildred Agnes Archer,” BL, Mss Eur F236). 134. The three wall maps are rather impressionistic although the outlines in three of them— Great Britain, India, and the World— are quite recognizable. The subject matter of the other two framed pictures is not clear. I thank Nick Barnard of the V&A for discussing the details of this image. 135. Simpson 1867, 21– 24. 136. Simpson 1903, 168. 137. A decade later, on a similar visit in 1872 to a LMS girls’ school in Peking (of which he has also did a sketch), Simpson commented, “On the occasion of my visit to the school, Mrs. Edkins kindly attended and acted as interpreter for me, and while I sketched she caused me to describe what I had seen in the Holy Land, which she translated to the girls, who seemed to take great interest in all the details, and they were evidently familiar with most of the places. As the sketching took some time, I was made to tell of other parts of the world I had travelled to, and Mrs. Edkins, in explaining the numerous places I had visited, said, ‘Why, this gentleman has been all over the world; there is no place he has not been to.’ One of the girls looked up with an arch smile; she had just discovered in her thoughts a region I had not yet seen, and said, ‘He has never been to Paradise!’” (Simpson 1876, no pagination). It is tempting to imagine that a similar interaction occurred between Simpson and the Mahratta Brahmin Girls in Bombay, as he sketched them. 138. I may never be able to confirm these speculations, given that the original sketchbooks of William Simpson are now missing. One of them (covering Simpson’s sojourn in southern and western India) was already lost when Christie’s auctioned the three others on November 15, 1983, Lots 115– 17 (“Archer Collection: Papers of Dr. William Archer and his wife Mildred Agnes Archer,” BL, Mss Eur F236). The latter were purchased by the important collector of Indian and Islamic art John Goelet, and were used by Mildred Archer in her valuable analysis of Simpson’s work, an analysis which unfortunately did not comment on whether the Bombay sketches included among them one of Bhau Dhaji’s school (Archer 1986, vi). Since then, the sketchbooks have disappeared from Mr. Goelet’s possession and hence unavailable for scholarly use (email correspondence with Mr. Goelet’s office, April 2014). 139. Carpenter 1868, vol. 2: 150– 51. Earlier, on a visit in October 1866 to a high school for boys in Ahmedabad, “When asked to explain the eclipse which had recently taken place, they

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did so accurately, and evidently saw the absurdity of the Hindoo superstition respecting such phenomena. . . . We regretted only that there was not a better supply of school apparatus, maps, diagrams, etc., which might have greatly facilitated the acquirement of real ideas” (Carpenter 1868, vol. 1: 56– 57). 140. Simpson 1867, 23– 24. Kaye’s prediction was surely optimistic as reports over the next couple decades showed. For example, Alfred Croft concluded in 1886, “The supply of teachers of girls’ school is both insufficient in quantity and inferior in quality; and under the present social conditions of India there is no class likely to yield a large and steady supply of female teachers” (quoted in Bhattacharya 2001 et al. 157. See also Hunter 1883, paras. 624– 30. 141. In fact, as I have already noted in chapter 3, such lessons were conducted even while disavowing the essential incongruity between sacred and profane geographies. Thus, “This morning catechised the first class girls of the Central School in Bible and geography” (MCMR 1855, 22 (4): 85). 142. Correspondingly, when the first Female Normal Schools were established from the 1860s, it was typically women from the lower castes who were the earliest recruits. Parna Sengupta perceptively explores for colonial Bengal “the paradox of teaching respectability through nonrespectable teachers” (Sengupta 2011, 122). 143. Richey 1922, 38– 40. See also Bagal 1956, 13, 15, 26– 27, 29, 33– 34, 43. 144. FI 1825, 8: 157– 59. A report from two years later of the Serampore Native Female Schools filed in 1827 notes that although many young girls left to get married, the three who had reached the senior most class “have lately committed to memory the Serampore Geography, and can bear questioning upon any part of it” (FI 1828, 11: 90). A report regarding the same schools from a year later proudly noted that “a class of fifteen was examined in Geography, and besides exhibiting their acquaintance with the most prominent features of the globe, by the ready use of the map, they repeated from memory the Geographical definitions, and descriptions of the various countries of Asia” (Serampore Mission 1828d, 75). 145. From the Third Report of the Ladies’ Society for Native Female Education, as quoted in FI 1827, 10: 280, emphasis mine. A year earlier, the Second Report of the same association noted with pride that the girls were able to answer the Lord Bishop himself, who “with his usual condescension, questioned some of them in Hindoostanee, respecting the different parts of the world, several of which they could point out on the Bengalee Map” (FI 1826, 9: 302). 146. MR 1826, 89. 147. CCO 1835, 4: 49– 50. It is hard to tell from this brief report whether this globe was in English or Bengali; while the girls were fluent in Bengali, they also displayed “considerable proficiency in English,” so this might well have been a globe with English lettering. See also CCO 1833, 2: 612. 148. Tucker 1857, 93– 95. Interestingly, this school was reportedly set up at the instigation of a young woman called T. Rukmini Ammal, herself a graduate of another native-run school in Black Town, who apparently persuaded her affluent father-in-law T. Veeraswamy Pillai to open the Royapettah School which she then helped manage albeit only for a few years. Two of the native teachers in the school were in turn products of the Scottish Free Church School opened in 1837 by John Anderson (see also Raman 1996, 13– 14). 149. MCMR 1847, 14: 155– 56. See also MCMR 1848, 14: 175. 150. Young 1981. 151. Wilson 1832, vii.

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152. Wilson 1832, 32. 153. Wilson 1834, 131. 154. The sparkling Mumbai raconteur Govind Narayan joined Wilson’s Institution— where his elder brother Gopinath taught as well— in 1834 as a senior student in its college division, and may even have served as a “monitor” for junior classes, a capacity in which in 1837 he taught geography among other subjects. After graduation he was hired back by Wilson, and worked at the mission school until his retirement in 1863. An Anglophile, Govind ironically learned to appreciate his native Marathi from the missionaries associated with Wilson! In Murali Ranganathan’s estimation, over time, Govind became was one of Wilson’s trusted associates, despite not converting himself to Christianity (Ranganathan 2009, 12– 15; 24– 27). Another key colonial intellectual of the later nineteenth century, Jotiba Phule (1827– 90) was also a graduate of the Scottish Mission’s school in Poona where he learned English but also must have learned to hone his critique of Brahmanical orthodoxy. Phule himself went on to establish one of the earliest girls’ school as well as schools for boys of the under castes in Poona in the early 1850s at a time when schooling in the Presidency as well as elsewhere in the subcontinent was completely dominated by upper-caste interests (O’ Hanlon 1985). In 1882, offering testimony before the Education Commission, Phule affirmed that a curriculum in primary education for children of “the cultivating classes” (and not just of the upper castes) should include instruction in general geography. 155. Smith 1878, 416. 156. Wilson 1840, 404. In addition to teaching geography, on the eve of her early death (likely from the trials of multiple childbirths), she was translating a history of Egypt, Greece, and Persia into Marathi (as we learn from a poignant letter she wrote to her young son back in England in which she instructs him to look for these places on a map (ibid., 442). 157. Wilson 1840, 26, 142. Further, she wrote, “the same God who sends forth an upholding influence among the orbs and the movements of astronomy, can fill the recesses of every single atom with the intimacy of his presence” (ibid., 142). 158. Wilson 1840, 377. See also ibid. 223, 452. 159. Thus, Wilkinson wrote to Miss Bird, “All my Pandits, having first acquired an insight into the truth from your book and my globes, invariably begin by prescribing your little book— ‘You have opened our eyes— you have shewn us the wonders of truth,’ is the heartfelt cry of all” (Wilkinson 1835, 517). See also CSBS 1845, 30– 31; CSBS 1848, 13, 23, 29; CSBS 1852, 24– 25; and Basak 1974, 316, 340– 41, 391. For an interesting obituary that underscores her investment in  the sciences, see Anon. 1851, 64. 160. She also writes that this school was established by some resident English gentlemen for the more respectable class of natives,” its distinctiveness worth mentioning because “most of the English schools admit Caste boys and Pariahs without any distinction, which is really almost like expecting young gentlemen and chimney-sweepers to learn together in England” (Maitland 1946, 22– 23). 161. Maitland 1846, 31. A few weeks later, we learn from an unpublished letter to her mother dated March 28, 1837 that her husband James Thomas was also teaching native boys “true Indian History, of which they are as ignorant as direct, believing all sorts of absurd legends” (Maitland 2004, 58). 162. Maitland 1846, 60. 163. Maitland 1846, 68.

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164. Maitland 1846, 84. 165. Maitland 1846, 86– 87, 105. 166. Maitland 1846, 124 (emphasis mine). 167. Cox 2002, 57. 168. Reynolds 2004. See also Giberne 1896; and Kent 2004, 144– 45, 266– 67. 169. A.L.O.E 1880, 9. For a photograph of a native zenana school in Amritsar, circa 1875, see Allender 2006, 198. 170. A.L.O. E. 1880, 10. 171. Leonowens 1873, 240– 43. See also Leonowens 1870, 78– 87. For a similar nearcontemporary experience in China, where a missionary wife, Mary Richard, enters the native home with a Betts portable globe to demonstrate Earth’s sphericity to women and girl children, see Seton 2013, 130. 172. Morgan 2008. 173. I am drawing here on my own discussion in Ramaswamy 2010, see esp. 248– 52. 174. Nivedita 1923, 37– 38. 175. Nivedita 1923, 109, 65, 59. 176. Nivedita 1975, 43– 45. 177. I thank Mr. Samuel Raja and Mr. Vaseegaran in Bangalore at the UTC Archives for their assistance in securing this rare photograph. 178. American Tract Society 1900. See also Hasinoff 2011, 101– 20. 179. The young women were taught Biblical geography and history every day for half hour. They also read a Tract Society Publication on astronomy and astrology. Although the curriculum did not emphasize profane geography, in another photograph in the same collection, the classroom walls show wall maps of the hemispheres, and a map of either the World or Asia (“India: American Madura Mission of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions: A Cartographical View Prepared for the Exhibit of the Ecumenical Conference, New York City, April 21st-May 1st 1900.” Unpublished manuscript, UTC Archives, Bangalore, AMM 14d). On the evangelical work of Bible women more generally in the Tamil country, see Kent 2004. 180. Government of Bombay 1875, Appendix D. See also Bhattacharya et al. 2001, 52. A little over a decade later, these Female Normal Schools were rather unsuccessful in recruiting students, only 515 girls throughout India in 1881– 1882 with 157 in Madras and only 73 in Bombay (Hunter 1883, para. 624). 181. Chandra 2012, 32. My discussion in these pages is much indebted to Shefali Chandra’s analysis of this institution, as well as many discussions with her over the years about it. See also Palsetia 2001, 151– 52. 182. Cursetjee 1862, 3. 183. Cursetjee 1862, 5. See also Palsetia 2001, 151– 52. 184. Cursetjee 1862, 12– 13. In a letter to Bethune dated April 4, 1850, Cursetjee noted that in addition to English and geography, the governess also taught needlework to his daughter (ibid., 27). The governess, Miss Burton, had explicitly come out to Bombay for the “express purpose of instructing Parsee ladies . . . yet she has not been able to increase the number of her little wards beyond the knight’s daughter and mine” (ibid., 4). The daughter of the “knight” ( Jamsetjee)— in contrast to Kooverbai— apparently continued her English education only for a little while. 185. Cursetjee 1862, 80– 81. For the Governor of Bombay’s praise of Cursetjee’s venture

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even before the formal launch of the institute, see Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1856– 57, 1857– 58 and 1858– 59, 40– 41. 186. Anon. 1873, 314. See also Proceedings of the Students’ Literary and Scientific Society, Bombay, for the Years 1854– 55 and 1855– 56, 17– 18. 187. Cursetjee 1867. 188. Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1865, 3. 189. Anon. 1873, 315. Despite such disheartening figures, by 1873, the institution had been honored by the DPI as “the most successful girls’ school in Bombay” (Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1873, 9). A decade earlier, Govind Narayan estimated, “44, 166 girls study in government-run schools and 91,330 girls study in village schools” (Ranganathan 2009, 194). It is not entirely clear how he came up with these figures, since I have not been able to find comparable ones in government documents. 190. Anon. 1873, 315. On Ranee Sitabai, see ibid., 316. The annual report for the year 1873 names the assistant teacher for that year as Awabai D. F. Kama (Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1873, 19). 191. Quoted in Chandra 2012, 35. 192. Cursetjee 1867, 16– 17. 193. Karlekar 2006, xii, 2. 194. Carpenter 1868, vol. 2: 15. On the Carpenter visit, see also Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1866– 67, 7. From the latter, we learn that the girls were not “frightened” by the appearance of such a distinguished visitor. 195. Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1866– 67, 11– 12. 196. Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1866– 67, 29. 197. Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1873, 5; and Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1875, 5– 6. One dignitary was however not all that impressed with how the girls gave an accounting of themselves, with an apparent familiarity with a distant world rather than of their own country and neighbourhood. Thus, Justice West told the gathered assembly of notable elite men, “The pupils were well acquainted with the geography of Europe and America. In the subject of geography, I confess that instead of acquaintances with the towns or rivers of Europe or America, I should have preferred to learn that the pupils were thoroughly versed in the geography of the Island of Bombay, of the Bombay Presidency, and of India. The study of geography should, I think, begin with the house, the compound, and the neighboring enclosures. The pupil who had learned to look at these, to compare their positions and sizes, to lay them down accurately by reference to the points of the compass, would have laid the foundation of a more truly scientific acquaintance with geography, than by learning the names, or even the relative positions on paper of all the towns and rivers of a distant continent” (Report of the Alexandra Native Girls’ Institution For the Year 1875, 12– 13). 198. Sumitra 1 (3), 1855: 22– 28, translations by Shefali Chandra. I am enormously grateful to Shefali Chandra for sharing this text with me. See also Chandra 2012, 45. 199. Anon. 1873, 315. 200. My discussion is based on my analysis in Ramaswamy 2008, esp. 252– 56. 201. Reprinted in Ramaswamy 2010, Figure 15. 202. Of course, this does not mean that a historian can be casual about this. As Susan Sontag reminds us, “With time, many staged photographs turn back into historical evidence, albeit of

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an impure kind— like most historical evidence” (Sontag 2003, 57). This has certainly been the fate of this particular photograph, as I noted earlier in the chapter. 203. Sinha 2010, 45. See also Karlekar 2006. 204. Pinney 1997, 45– 46. I have also benefitted here from my reading of Zahid Chaudhury’s nuanced arguments on photography in the service of colonial governmentality, “war by other means” (2012, 80– 88). 205. I borrow the phrase “solitary and singular” from Manockjee Cursetjee who uses it to describe his own daughter Kooverbai as she came to be worlded through English education (Cursetjee 1856, 2). 206. There is quite a body of work on Anandibai Joshi, but see esp. Kosambi 1996 and Kosambi 2007. For locating her achievements in the context of the woman question in colonial India, see esp. Forbes 1996, 162– 63. 207. “The author S. J. Joshi, was meticulous in his research. He studied all the written material that was available, primarily relying on the correspondence of Anandi and her husband, Gopalrao. He also contacted people who had met Anandi and Gopalrao. In his zeal to understand Anandi and her world he left no stone unturned” ( Jacket Blurb, Joshi 1992). I am deeply in debt to Indira Peterson for alerting me to this text. In my understanding of the novel and also for help with translation, I thank Shefali Chandra, Anne Feldhaus, and Meera Kosambi. The interpretations that follow are my own. 208. Joshi 1992, 110– 11. 209. Joshi 1992, 92– 93, 101. 210. Joshi 1992, 96– 97. 211. Joshi 1968, 133. 212. Joshni 1992, 108. See also Joshi 1968, 134– 35. 213. Joshi 1992, 109– 10. See also Joshi 1968, 137. 214. Joshi 1992, 110. See also Joshi 1968, 137. 215. Joshi 1992, 110. 216. Joshi 1968, 137– 38, translation by Anne Feldhaus. See also Joshi 1992, 111. 217. Joshi 1992, 124. 218. Joshi 1992, 123. It is worth recalling Sai’s meditations in the same vein in Kiran Desai’s novel Inheritance of Loss with which I began this book.

CHAPTER FIVE

1. Even more so than other administrative units in British India, the contours of Bengal waxed and waned over two centuries of colonial rule, incorporating at various points peoples whose subjectivities were not “Bengali” at all (for an overview of territories added and separated, see Basak 1974, 7). In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with the worlding of boys and girls, men and women who would have considered themselves “Bengali,” or were primary speakers of the language over the course of decades in which it was radically modernizing. 2. I am profoundly grateful to Tanika Sarkar for persuading me to consider this film, and to Shuddhabrata Sengupta for a luminous discussion of its details with me. The grandson and son of Upendrakishore Ray and Sukumar Ray, distinguished writers themselves, Satyajit was born in Calcutta and came of age in this city that features in so many of his films. Over the course

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of his career, he was a recipient of numerous international and national film awards, including an Honorary Oscar in 1992 on the very eve of his passing. The scholarship on him is extensive, of which I have found most illuminating for this particular project his first biography by Marie Seton in 1971 and a later biography by Andrew Robinson published in 1989. 3. Aparajito won several top awards in numerous international venues including Venice, Berlin, and San Francisco, although nationally, it went largely unrecognized, and was a flop as Ray himself later recalled. For Ray’s recollections on why and how he came to make the film, see Ray 1994a, 89– 125. For critical analyses of the film see esp. Seton 1971, 116– 32; Wood 1972, 52– 55; Robinson 2011, 109– 25; and Anjaria 2012. 4. Ray 1985, 83. 5. CCO 1834, 3, 605, emphasis mine. For other examples from the early nineteenth century of “converting” the home through the device of the science school book, see Serampore Mission 1822, 12– 13; and FI 1836, 2 (78): 195. 6. Ray 1985, 84. 7. Ray 1985, 85. See also Ray 1994a, 96. 8. Ray 1985, 85– 86. 9. Ray 1985, 88. 10. Ray 1985, 89. 11. Biswas 2006, 66. 12. Robinson 2011, 121. Marie Seton similarly notes that as Apu gets absorbed in his studies, “he begins to grow still farther away from his mother who is only half-hearted in her desire for him to develop his intelligence. She ceases to hold interest for him and he, unconsciously, pays less and less attention to her wishes” (1971, 124). Indeed, Ray himself surmised that one of the reasons that Aparajito did not fare well in Bengal— sales of tickets began to drop after the first few weeks— was because “people had found the relationship between the grown-up Apu and the mother excessively harsh. The mother-and-son relationships they were used to were painted in soft colours. How could a boy of fifteen be so unfeeling towards a widowed mother who had sacrificed her whole life for him? The truth was that the Bengali audiences were not ready for the kind of psychological relationship that Aparajito depicted” (Ray 1994a, 120. See also Ray 1994b, 42). 13. Seton 1971, 117. See also Ray 1994a, 90. Andrew Robinson notes that Ray’s “own complex relationship with his widowed mother, who had encouraged his artistic talents but discouraged him from giving up his safe job in advertising to become a film-maker after 1950” drew him to Aparajito (1911, 37). 14. Ray 1985, 92. 15. George 2012. The phrase “inhabitant of universe” is from Robinson 2011, 42. 16. In Apur Sansar (1959), the sequel to Aparajito, early scenes show an adult Apu in his rented room in Calcutta. Although terribly run-down, the room is adorned with pictures and books. Perched on the cluttered bookshelf next to the bed is the small globe from his youth (Robinson 1989, figs. 29 and 30. See also Ray 1985, photographs facing p. 112). 17. Ray 1985, 86– 87. In an earlier moment in the film, a much younger Apu is shown attempting to learn the ways of his father’s priestly profession, a look of reluctance on his father. Instead, drawn to the secular world, “he longs to go to school and study” (Seton 1971, caption to Plate 16; 123). 18. For Ray’s revealing comments on the adaptation of books into movies, see Seton 1971, 117.

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19. The phrase is Jawaharlal Nehru’s from 1954 as quoted in Arnold 2013b, 368. 20. For Bandopadhyay’s life and career, I draw on Clark 1999; Robinson 2011, chapter 2; and Anjaria 2012. 21. Bandopadhyay 1999a, 215– 17, 274– 75, 300– 328. 22. Bandopadhyay 1999a, 274– 75. As Brian Hatcher notes in his insightful biography of Vidyasagar, Jivancarit (1849) was a Bengali translation of William and Robert Chamber’s Exemplary and Instructive Biography (1846; 1854) with sketches of men like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and William Jones. The very first sketch, however, in the book is of the French historian Valentin Jameray Duval, raised as a poor shepherd boy who betters himself through hard work, like young Apu (Hatcher 1996, 176– 80). 23. Bandopadhyay 1999a, 303. For a differently nuanced translation, see Chaudhuri 2001, 70. 24. Bandopadhyay 1999b, 137. 25. Bandopadhyay 1999a, 320– 21. For a slightly different translation, see Chaudhari 2001, 81– 82. 26. Bandopadhyay 1999a, 116– 121. For a comparable description of a Bengali village schoolmaster from the 1870s, see Day 1969, 453– 54. Such representations are in contrast from a century earlier when the schoolmaster in the Bengali village was deemed in some colonial accounts as “humble,” but “venerable,” imparting instruction (“for a trifling stipend”) that sufficed “for the village zemindar [landlord], the village accountant and the village shop-keeper” (Basak 1974, 228– 30). 27. Bandopadhyay 1999b, 25. 28. Ray’s Aparajito does not include this foundational pedagogic moment. As Kazi Shahidullah has shown, from the 1840s, the Bengal government variously tried to establish modern schools in the countryside as well as “improve” and regulate the patshala. Such attempts included introducing geography as a subject of study into the countryside at the higher levels of primary education, although by the end of the nineteenth century, there were attempts made to also return the patshala to a focus on practical instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, and accounts. Nonetheless it is worth noting that by the 1860s, the village teacher was expected to know how to draw a map, name the principal rivers of India, and “to give all the proofs that the Earth is a round body” (Shahidullah 1987, 57– 58). Indeed, under a scheme implemented by Lt. Governor Grant in 1860, for every patshala student who could among other things “copy a map neatly,” the teacher would be paid two annas monthly, and for every student who successfully completed the highest course of schooling in Bengali grammar, geography and history in addition to arithmetic and letter-writing, he would be paid four annas monthly (ibid., 48). Shahidullah observes in his analysis of these developments, “the inclusion now of subjects like Geography, History, and general topics like details of the shape of the Earth suggests a desire to transmit knowledge and instill a desire for learning for its own sake” (ibid., 59). I am of course arguing that such worlding was critical to colonial governance and the creation of (docile) subjects who would learn their proper place in the (spherical) world. 29. Sengupta 2011, 81– 101. See also Shahidullah 1996. The training of natives to become modern teachers began with the Serampore missionaries and by Reverend May in Chinsurah in the 1810s, but was scaled up with the government support and setting up of Hooghly Normal Vernacular School in 1856. 30. Anon. 1858, 31.

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31. Quoted in Shahidullah 1987, 57– 58, emphasis mine. See also School Master: A Monthly Journal 1888, 4: 226. 32. Sharp 1914, vol. 2: 189– 90. Thus, “Geography is taught from the map of the village, which the boys also draw frequently on their slates; then, if there are higher classes, from maps of the province, India, and the world. The school may possess a globe (an item in the training course is often the manufacture of a globe by the teacher) for demonstrating the shape of the earth, the phenomena of day and night and the general outlines of land and water” (Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 113, emphasis mine). 33. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 140. “There is one primary school for every 5.3 towns or villages in British India, varying from one for every 2.2 in Madras to one for every 14.2 in the Central Provinces. . . . In Bengal, a school serves every 3.4 square miles” (Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 106). For a lively account of one such village pathsala from earlier in the nineteenth century as recalled by a former student, see Day 1969, 451– 58. 34. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 160– 61. For weekly hours spent by the child at this time in learning geography in the schoolroom, see Nathan 1904, vol. 2: 157– 68. 35. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 152– 53. 36. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 152– 53. 37. Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 101– 3. While this is speculative, the stand and the details of the object suggest that the globe was either made by Bardin or Newton and Son. 38. Indeed, complaints about impoverished classrooms and school buildings continue till 1947, the very eve of Independence (Sargent 1948, vol. 1: 76). 39. Nathan 1904, vol. 1: 156. 40. Basak 1974, 385– 412, quotes from p. 388, 407, 409. 41. Government of Bengal 1855, 9– 10. See also ibid., 11– 12, and Bayly 1996, 221– 22. The halkabandi system was premised on creating a circle (or halka) of rural schools centered on a model school in located in each revenue district (tehsil) which was headed by a trained master (supported on a government salary) who advised the teachers in the village schools in his circle. A series of elementary textbooks (called the Ram Saran Das Readers) were supplied to these schools at cheap prices, and the entire system was regularly supervised by a “Visitor General.” 42. Quoted in Basu 2010, 63n35 43. GCPI 1837, 102. 44. Fisher 1832, 403– 4. See also Basak 1974, 87– 129. In 1825, the Chinsurah boys were examined in the house of the Hooghly Collector, among other things on Pearson’s Geography, which they “apprehended with tolerable precision” (Quoted in Basak 1974, 120– 21). Although elementary, the missionaries were proud of the fact that they were “disseminating much information hitherto beyond the reach of Native attainment, especially in Geography and Natural History” (Letter from GCPI to Fort William, dated May 6, 1827, para. 39, IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). The Chinsurah schools went into a period of decline by the 1830s after their promising beginning. 45. Government of Bengal 1867, 38– 39. 46. On James Long, see esp. Oddie 1999. Besides schools, Long also set up libraries in Calcutta and its hinterland for Europeans to learn Bengali and for natives “who are ignorant of English to read good books” (Basak 1974, 149). Basak estimates about 1400 books in the system, including fifteen geography titles. 47. See, for example, MR 1825, 13: 189– 90. 48. Government of Bengal 1855, 75.

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49. Murdoch 1885, 155. See also Murdoch 1873, 79– 80. 50. Murdoch 1871, 114. 51. India Museum 1880, 210a. 52. Blumhardt 1875, 21. By 1875, the CVES claimed 139 schools across the whole of Bengal in its ambit. 53. Blumhardt 1875, 21– 22. 54. CMSA, CI 1/04/5/1. I thank Parna Sengupta for this reference. For the society’s problems with local missionaries from the very start of its operations there in 1858, see Oddie 1999, 65– 67. 55. SOAS Special Collections, USCL/Christian Literature Society, Minutes, FBN 1, “Meeting of Committee, November 8, 1871.” For Murdoch’s response to these attacks and concerns, see Murdoch 1872a. 56. I borrow here from Dasgupta 2010, 55– 80, and White 2013, 60– 61. On the Serampore missionaries’ education work, see Potts 1967, 114– 36, Laird 1972, and Sivasundaram 2007. 57. Cox 1844, 20, emphasis mine. 58. Bissell 1898, 156. See also Carey 1836, 63– 64. I borrow the term geo-religious triumphalism from Cox 2002, 26. Carey’s passion for maps reminds us that missionaries not only dispensed cartographic objects and published geography books and maps, but also made extensive use of maps to persuade and exhort fellow Christians from early in their lives to sign up for the noble effort of saving “heathen” souls. To cite one example from numerous such, here is Sarah Tucker from Madras writing to a young friend back in England, “My dear Lucy . . . I will only, before I conclude, beg of you to take a map of India, and, marking the stations occupied by our Church, whether in connexion with the Church Missionary Society or the Society for Propagating the Gospel, compare them with the immense and thickly-peopled tracts of country into which we have not even attempted to diffuse the light of salvation” (Tucker 1848, 145– 46). 59. Basak 1974, 65. See also announcement dated March 20, 1800 printed in the Calcutta Gazette (Seton-Kerr and Sandeman 1864, vol. 3: 544). 60. Carey, Marshman and Ward 1816, 7. 61. Ward 1818, vol. 1: 459, 470, 558, 566. 62. Baptist Missionary Society 1814, 497– 98. See also Carey, Marshman and Ward 1816, 13– 15. 63. Serampore College 1819, 10. See also Basak 1974, 75, 85. 64. Carey, Marshman and Ward 1817– 18, 28– 29. The first edition of the Compendium, 128 octavo pages long, was apparently sold out as soon as it was published. The missionaries were not surprised: “The natives have a high idea of the accuracy of our geographical knowledge; they are convinced that, in their own works, all beyond the limits of Bharuta Vursa, or India, must be uncertain; as none of their own writers have visited the countries they have attempted to describe, while they consider our knowledge as derived from actual observation.” An enlarged edition, which incorporated responses to questions posed by a high-ranking native, was already in press and would take the book up to two hundred octavo pages (Serampore Mission 1819, 18– 19). For a fascinating discussion of the difficulties that the missionaries experienced in creating and printing maps at this point, see ibid., 19– 20. Two decades later, they had succeeded in producing a “map of India neatly executed but rather on a contracted scale” and priced at eight annas (IOR/ F/4/1908/81751). 65. Serampore Mission 1821b, 31. These works were also translated into Sanskrit with the

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intention of presenting “copies to the various Sungskrita seminaries of literature throughout both Bengal and Hindoosthan” (Serampore Mission 1819, 28). 66. Carey, Marshman and Ward 1817– 18: 25– 27. 67. FI 1836, 2: 213– 14. C. C. Fink was the eldest son of a missionary who had been laboring in Arakan for a number of years, and had been sent to Serampore to be formally educated. 68. Serampore Mission 1819, 36– 37. These Copy Books were first “submitted to the most respectable among the bramhuns at Bali, a village about six miles north-west of Calcutta, and to contain no less five hundred households of the bramhun cast, who after due examination, declared that they could see nothing in them the learning of which would injure the rising generation” (FI 1836, 2: 195). Over a two-year period, a Serampore student was expected to copy (and presumably master) about 300 octavo-pages of material (Potts 1967, 120– 21). 69. Serampore Mission 1821b, 40. 70. Serampore Mission 1821b, 43. 71. Serampore Mission 1821b, 24– 25. 72. Raman 2010. 73. Serampore Mission 1821b, 27. 74. Serampore Mission 1819, 14. 75. Serampore College 1823, 7. See also Serampore College 1824, 15. 76. Serampore Mission 1828b, 72. This comment is footnoted by a reminder to the (British) reader of the report of what the colonial educator was up against when confronted by the native mind convinced of the fact that Earth is flat. 77. Serampore Mission 1828d, 75. See also FI 1828, 11: 89– 97. 78. Serampore College 1821, 9. Sujit Sivasundaram notes that scientific gifts of this nature were vital to the very existence of Serampore College (Sivasundaram 2007, 117, 139). 79. Serampore College 1823, unpaginated last page. For the complete list of chemical and philosophical apparatus at the college in 1822, see Sen 1991, 101– 3. For Dinwiddie, see chapter 2, note 122, and later in this chapter. 80. The twenty-one-inch pair of globes that was destroyed in the fire cost £13. William Johns (to whom they belonged and who had given it to the missionaries, for their use) sought compensation for his loss, but never secured it, as per his complaint in a later letter. He was paid for the pair that he purchased subsequently and left behind in Serampore, although only after considerable length of time and correspondence, in his account ( Johns 1828, 10– 11). A report on the college from a century later reproduces a photograph of its Upper Hall, the foreground of which is occupied by a large terrestrial globe on its stand, most likely of English make. I have been unable to ascertain when and how the college acquired this object, or whether it is one of the globes presented by Young (Howells 1909, 15). 81. MR 1825, 13: 190. 82. MR 1822, 10: 338. This examination took place of the Bengali students in James Stewart’s schools established in Burdwan from around 1816 (see also note 93). 83. Duff 1839, 563. See also Viswanathan 1989, 64. 84. Quoted in Laird 1972, 82– 83. 85. The scholarship on this subject is extensive, but see esp. Carson 2012. 86. For a comprehensive overview, see Zastoupil and Moir 1999. 87. From the GCPI to the Right Honorable Lord William Cavendish Bentinck, Governor General in Council, Fort William, dated May 18, 1829, para. 31 (IOR/F/4/1170/30639).

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88. GCPI 1832, 44– 49. 89. Thus, along the margins of a letter from A. Troyer, the Secretary of the Government Sanscrit College in Calcutta, to the Members of the Sub-committee of the Sanscrit College [of the GCPI], dated January 31, 1835, is a comment in pencil: “But it is of incalculable importance that the people should know and be aware of the fallacy of their own science” (IOR/F/4/1846/77633, 175– 86). Or consider, the Committee’s concern by 1840 that in the Benares Sanskrit College, “The book studied in the Joutish (Astronomy) class in this College, are chiefly on Astrological subjects. We have therefore recommended that a book treating exclusively of Astronomy be substituted for the books now in use in the Joutish class. The introduction of such books, unconnected with Astrology will be productive of great benefit, as they will create, it is hoped, in the minds of the students, a thirst for European science, and convey to the students an accurate knowledge of the subject, and will dissipate the incorrect opinions which they had derived from the Purans” (GCPI 1841, 84). 90. From General Committee of Public Instruction to Government, dated December 31, 1838 (IOR/ F/4/1846/77637). 91. Members of the Committee were quick to note that such opposition was unusual because of “the readiness with which Geography had been studied in the Sanscrit College from the English books. . . . Learned Brahmins did not hesitate to study the Hindu Astronomy, according to the Sidhantas [sic], though they are as opposed to the conceits of the Puranas, as is European Geography” (From General Committee of Public Instruction to Government, dated December 31, 1838 [IOR/ F/4/1846/77637]). 92. GCPI 1841, 100. 93. James Stewart (d. 1833) arrived in India as a Junior Officer in the EIC’s army. Starting in 1816, when stationed at Burdwan, he established several schools under the auspices of the CMS where instruction was given in geography, astronomy, and history, among other subjects, including the fundamentals of Christianity (Laird 1972, 82 and passim). By 1819, he quit the Army and dedicated himself fulltime to mission work. In March 1819, the Company’s chaplain T. Thomason visited these schools and examined them in several areas of knowledge. Interestingly— but not unexpectedly— two of the questions he posed were “What is the shape of the earth? What does the earth rest upon?” (Basak 1974, 131– 41. See also CSBS 1819, 82). Thomason is also reported as praising “the diffusion of Geographical Knowledge” among the boys, so much so that “it was scarcely possible to put a question out of the first three Geographical Copy-Books, which was not answered” (CMS Proceedings 1821– 22, 112). 94. The Calcutta Monthly Journal 3rd Series, 1836, 2 (November): 296– 97. 95. The Calcutta Monthly Journal 3rd Series, 1837, 3 (3): 317. Later in 1840, the GCPI noted in its report that for the Probational School in Trebbany in Bengal, “We have been given, on several occasions, donations of School-books, Maps, Globes, etc.” The report however does not note who made these latter “donations” (GCPI 1841, 57). 96. Zachariah 1936, 28. For Macaulay’s comment that there would be “no harm in sending the globes” to this college (even thought it had been founded by appropriating and diverting a Muslim endowment), see Woodrow 1862, 92– 93. The college kept up its investment in cartographic objects. In 1878, there were apparently twenty atlases, eight globes and twelve maps on the premises, in spite of a growing attrition in the general health of the institution (Zachariah 1936, 91). 97. Fisher 1832, 408; and GCPI 1841, 1– 2.

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98. GCPI 1841, clxxxviii– clxxxix. See also GCPI 1840: Appendices 1 and 4. For samples of scholarship exams in which terrestrial lessons learned were tested, see Bengal Council of Education 1848, 21; Bengal Council of Education 1849, 15; and Bengal Council of Education 1850, 24, 43. 99. Extract, Fort William, General Consultation of August 9, 1831 (IOR/F/4/1289/51641). For the details on map acquisitions for 1825– 27, see BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 87. In 1828– 29, one copy of a map of Hindoostan (India) and a map of the world in Persian were dispatched to schools in Allahabad and Rajputana, as were four copies of Molineux’s Use of the Globes and one copy of Keith’s work on the same subject to Delhi schools (Extract Bengal Political Consultation, dated June 5, 1829, no. 101. For details and figures for 1829– 30, see BePol, August 27, 1830. 100. From the General Committee of Public Instruction to Fort William, dated May 15, 1832 (IOR/ F/4/1386/55228). 101. From the General Committee of Public Instruction to Fort William, dated May 15, 1832 (IOR/ F/4/1386/55228). This memorandum helpfully includes the contemporary price for such cartogtraphic objects. 102. GCPI 1832, 65– 66. A few years earlier, the Committee also reported acquiring a copy of Cary’s Atlas for a hefty Rs. 20 (BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 87), and two copies of Hazell’s General Atlas for a mere Rs. 2 (Extract, Fort William, General Consultation of August 9, 1831 (IOR/F/4/ 1289/51641). 103. GCPI 1832, 66. 104. GCPI 1837, 159. The globes were quite likely acquired from the London firm of George Adams and sons, given that the order included purchase of eight copies of the instrument maker’s Astronomical and and Geographical Essays. 105. From General Committee of Public Instruction to Bengal government, dated December 31, 1838 (IOR/ F/4/1846/77637). 106. General Report on Public Instruction in the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for 1843– 44, Appendix K: xxxvii. 107. GCPI 1837, 3. See also GCPI 1836, 90– 93. 108. Clive 1973, esp. 342– 425. 109. Trevelyan 1838, 132. See also ibid., 203. 110. Trevelyan 1838, 83. About a decade earlier in February 1829 as a member of the local committee of Delhi College, Trevelyan had dismissed both Hindu and Muslim knowledges in this regard: “In both, their systems of Astronomy and Geography are mixed up with the wildest notions void of principle, and truth” (BePol, July 23, 1829, no. 82). 111. On this material, see Woodrow 1862. Declining at first on his arrival in Calcutta to take on this responsibility, Macaulay did become president of the GCPI by December 1834 (Clive 1973, 364– 65). 112. GCPI, Book G, page 17, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 72, emphasis mine. 113. GCPI, Book K, page 102, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 81. See also Clive 1973, 368. 114. GCPI, Book G, page 17, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 72. Similarly, while sanctioning purchase of one hundred copies of Wollaston’s Geography (published by the CSBS), Macaulay argued that the cost of producing such works in India was much more, and that similar— but cheaper works from England— such as those published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge— should be procured instead (GCPI, Book G, page 22, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 72).

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115. Woodrow 1862, 80. This was the price apparently quoted by the CSBS. Around this time, another Calcutta vendor— Ostell’s— advertised a Loring twelve-inch terrestrial globe for sale at Rs. 100, and a celestial globe as well for the same price (CCO 1835, 4: 120– 21). In a response dated November 13, 1835, Macaulay wrote, “I do not understand why we should employ the agency of the [Calcutta] School Book Society at all. At any rate the terms are extremely high: and I would insist on their being lowered. The Maps [of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge] are excellent” (GCPI, Book G, p. 139, quoted in Woodrow 1862, 80). A few years later, the price of globes in the city had come down, possibly because of growing demand, for the Calcutta Christian School-Book Society (founded in June 1839, with the express goal of not stocking books and such “not inconsistent with the word of God”) stocked pairs of terrestrial and celestial globes— nine, twelve, and nineteen inches in size at Rs. 20, Rs. 30, and Rs. 60 (with a small increase in price for single globes) (Fifth Circular of the Calcutta Christian School-Book Society for the Year 1844, 6). 116. GCPI, Book G, page 53, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 74– 75 (emphasis mine). Accordingly, the GCPI submitted in March 1837 a list of instruments and books to be acquired from England and this included only four pairs of globes at a modest £20.00 each (out of a total budget of £932 s.2, d.0) (GCPI 1837, 159). 117. GCPI, Book L, page 71, as quoted in Woodrow 1862, 66. For Rs. 500, Agra College could have secured more than “2 handsome globes,” given that the going rate for an eighteeninch pair even the previous year was Rs. 260.” Macaulay’s suggestion notwithstanding, the college decided to use the gift for acquiring a telescope from London, possibly because it already had acquired a pair of globes in 1827 (GCPI 1837, 11). 118. MR 1817, 5: 297. See also CCO 1832, 1: 14– 17, 68– 76, 115– 129. 119. East 1818– 1821, 1. In his report on this meeting, East also wrote, “One of the singularities of the meeting was that it was composed of persons of various castes, all combining for such a purpose, whom nothing else could have brought together; whose children are to be taught, though not fed together” (ibid.). East arrived in India in 1813 as the Chief Justice of the Calcutta Supreme Court, a position he held for close to a decade. Recent studies have questioned his claim that he was instrumental in the founding of Hindu College (Spencer 2004). 120. East 1818– 21, 3. 121. CCO 1832, 1: 115– 16. 122. Extract from BePol, dated June 5, 1829 (IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). These pocket globes were part of a considerable number presented by the British Indian Society. There were many manufacturers of pocket globes— quite the fad in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as the world became more “portable”— including George Adams, William Cary, and the Newton family (van der Krogt 1985; and Dekker, ed. 1999). 123. Extract from BePol, dated June 5, 1829 (IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). Goldsmith’s Geography was gifted as a prize book as early as 1825 to students of the Vidyayala (BePol, June 5 1829, no. 84). Its preface would have informed its award-winning students, “To become acquainted with maps, should, therefore, be the primary business of every student in geography.” In 1831, prizes given out to students excelling in geography included an unspecified atlas (H. H. Wilson’s report on the College to the GCPI, dated January 31, 1832 [IOR/F/4/1386/55228]). 124. From H. H. Wilson to GCPI, January 8, 1828, para. 6 (IOR/F/4/1170/30639). In 1830, Wilson was much less sanguine about the progress in the college among young students at the

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elementary level in terms of their acquisition of geographical knowledge and first principles of natural philosophy (From H. H. Wilson to GCPI, dated January 31, 1831, para. 11 [IOR/ F/4/ 1289/51641]). A year later, though, he changed his mind again and reported that the boys gave an accounting of themselves on the subject in a manner that “would have been creditable in any examination” (H. H. Wilson to GCPI, dated January 31, 1832, para. 5 [IOR/F/4/1386/55228])). By 1836, the students of the college were deemed “experts” at the “projection of maps” (IOR/F/ 4/1846/77637). 125. Extract BePol, dated 5th June 1829 (IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). 126. Letter from GCPI dated June 1, 1831 (IOR/ F/4/1289/51641); and Letter from H. H. Wilson to GCPI, dated January 8, 1828 (IOR/ F/4/1170/30639). The college also received as a gift from the London-based East India Society thirteen copies each of “Map of Asia” and “Map of Europe” and six copies each of “Map of Africa” and “Map of America,” although publication details for these are unfortunately not mentioned (Letter from H. H. Wilson to GCPI, dated May 15, 1832 [IOR/ F/4/1386/55228]). 127. Nair 2013, 66– 68. Indeed, in 1823, at another meeting of respectable natives who gathered in Calcutta to form the so-called Hindoo Literary Society, it was resolved to translate into Bengali and publish scientific and useful works, and “to collect European mathematical and Philosophical apparatus and instruments for public instruction” (Calcutta Gazette, March 27, 1823, reprinted in Seton-Kerr and Sandeman 1864, vol. 5: 531). See also AJMM, 1823, 16: 368; and Calcutta Review 1823, 1: 528. 128. Anon. 1821, 261. 129. Anon 1821, 262. See also CSBS 1821, 25– 27. Historian N. L. Basak writes that during the years 1831– 1833, “the British India Society sent to Calcutta no less than 280 different books to meet the needs of the School Book Society” (Basak 1974, 177). Hearing of the largesse in Bengal, the Madras School Book Society also approached the British India Society early in 1824, but nothing seems to have come of this solicitation (IOR/ F/4/939/26354). The BNES in Bombay also sought “to take advantage of the favourable feeling evinced in England by the British India Society” for its own pedagogical “designs” (BNES 1825, 11). 130. On the globe makers and distributors, William and Samuel Jones, see Dekker, ed. 1999, 261– 72, 377– 78; and Clifton 1999, 47– 49. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the firm was collaborating with the globe maker William Bardin who produced largely for the growing educational market (Millburn 1992). In 1795, the firm was in touch with James Dinwiddie in Calcutta, attempting to interest him in its planetariums and orreries (Stewart 2013, 38– 39, 42). In 1799/1800, the firm launched its much-talked about eighteen-inch globes called the “New British Globes,” and it is likely that these were purchased by the British India Society for Hindu College (for a description of these globes, see Millburn 2000, 130– 31). See also note 138. 131. BePub, July 3, 1823, no. 3; July 30, 1823, nos. 12– 14; and August 28, 1823, nos. 35– 36. An early authoritative published report on colonial education (the so-called “Fisher’s Memoir”) mistook the address of delivery for these objects, confusing Hindu College— for which they were intended— with the Calcutta Hindu Sanskrit College (Fisher 1832, 406– 7). See also Heber 1829, vol. 2: 300. Henry Sharp’s authoritative survey for the colonial state repeated Fisher’s error even while observing that their arrival “probably caused consternation among the pandits and may have proved embarrassing to the committee, whose heart was not in these new-fangled sciences” (Sharp 1920, 79– 80; 86– 91). In his masterful analysis of the context within which these

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instruments arrived in Calcutta and their role in instigating science education at Hindu College, Kapil Raj quotes from Fisher’s Memoir without drawing attention to this important error (Raj 2006, 176– 78). 132. BePub, July 17, 1823, no. 41. 133. Letter from the GCPI to the Government, October 6, 1823 (BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 82). See also Extract Public Letter to Bengal dated September 5, 1827, paras. 18 and 20 (IOR/ F/4/ 1170/30639). This may also explain the error that crept into Fisher’s Memoir and other texts (see note 131). 134. Extract of a General Letter from the Right Honorable the Governor-General in Council in the Department of Public Instruction to the Honble the Court of Directors under date January 27, 1826, paras. 48– 60 (IOR/ F/4/1015/27843). 135. Extract Revenue Letter to Bengal dated February 18, 1824, para. 83 (F/4/767/20837). 136. Letter from GCPI to the Government, dated March 14, 1825 (BePol June 5, 1829, no. 84). Included in this list of books were Cary’s Atlas, Squire’s Astronomy, and Whitwell’s Astronomical Catechism. Earlier in May 1824, the government also sanctioned the sum of Rs. 280 from the Education Fund for the college to be able to maintain “the small establishment necessary for the care of the Philosophical Apparatus” (Letter dated May 14, 1824 [BePol June 5, 1829, no. 83]). 137. This, despite the fact that the government had issued an explicit “order” about being kept updated by the college on “the Philosophical apparatus recently received from England for [its] use” (Extract Public Letter from Bengal, dated July 31, 1823, para. 80, IOR/F/4/767/20837). 138. Undated letter from early 1825 from H. H. Wilson to GCPI, para. 2 (BePol June 5, 1829, no. 84). The letter also noted that these students had read Goldsmith’s Grammar of Geography (not an easy book by any means), while students of the two preceding classes had also learned to locate “few considerable places on the Terrestrial Globe.” Wilson also submitted a list of books and philosophical apparatus needed by the college, since “the apparatus sent last out by Messrs. Jones of Holborn was with but few exceptions extremely defective” (Letter from GCPI to the Government, dated March 14, 1825, Appendix [BePol June 5, 1829, no. 84]). See also note 130. 139. Undated letter from early 1825 from H. H. Wilson to GCPI, para. 9 (BePol June 5, 1829, no. 84). In fact, soon after the Vidyalaya got its bounty, Hooghly College used its funds to purchase philosophical and scientific apparatus from England. Within a couple years, “The study of astronomy according to the European system is likely to become very popular in the college, judging from the zeal and industry with which a young class has mastered the greater portion of a small tract published on the subject in English Hindustanee [sic] by the Calcutta School Book Society, and one or two of the younger boys also appear a fair general knowledge of Geography and the use of the Globes” (Letter from GCPI to government, dated December 31, 1838, IOR/ F/4/1846/77637). At the annual examination held in the college in 1838, “There were also several Maps of India drawn by the boys exhibited, which appeared very creditably executed” (FI 1838, 4 (169): 117), and in 1841, a young student of the college named Ramkisto Bose was specially singled out for his knowledge “of the globe” (GCPI 1842, 148). By 1842, so pleased were the authorities with the efficacy of modern pedagogic instruments to convey truths that around £569 was spent by the newly-formed Council for Education (which replaced the GCPI) to acquire a whole range of philosophical apparatus— although the exhaustive list does not include globes— covering all the branches of physical sciences for colleges under its management in Bengal (Sen 1991, 186– 93. See also GCPI 1842, 7). 140. GCPI 1841, 21.

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141. GCPI 1836, 3. See also Long 1855. 142. GCPI 1842, 72– 73. See also Basak 1974, 344– 60. 143. GCPI 1842, xxxv– xxxviii. These recommendations were not followed through by the Council of Education, which took charge in January 1842 (Basak 1974, 294– 95, 349– 50, 383). 144. CSBS 1864, 12– 13, and CSBS 1866, 9. These objects, manufactured locally, were projected at twelve inches in diameter and intended to be placed on teak stands. 145. Quoted in Basak 1974, 353. See also GCPI 1842, 72– 73. 146. GCPI 1832, 49. 147. Sharp 1920, 8. 148. There is a fantastic body of scholarship on this most preeminent of colonial Indian cities, especially in recent years, and I have especially benefitted from my reading of Chaudhuri 1990; Raj 2009; Das Gupta 2010; Chatterjee 2012; Nair 2013; and White 2013. None of this scholarship, however, attends to the teaching of terrestrial lessons or the arrival of Modern Earth in the city in the form of its material proxy. 149. Hicky’s Bengal Gazette 1781, 42: November 8. See also Seton-Kerr and Sandeman 1864, vol. 1: 56– 59. 150. Calcutta Gazette 1790, 14 (357). 151. Asiatic Mirror 1793, 6: October 9. As I noted earlier, from around 1766 for a few decades, the English globe market was dominated by George Adams Senior and his descendants. A catalogue for the firm dated 1794 lists the prices for large globes with stands, so we can speculate on this basis what some of these objects might have cost in distant Calcutta (Millburn 2000, esp. 370– 71). 152. The portrait is currently in the collection of the Victoria Memorial Museum, Kolkata. For a black and white reproduction, see Archer 1979, Plate 226. Home painted other colonial portraits, some of which showed the presence of maps (Archer 1979, 321– 22). Savithiri Nair writes that Home owned a number of scientific instruments and struck up a friendship with James Dinwiddie who was also one of his early clients (Nair 2013, 64). Contradicting the presence of such modern cartographic objects by his side but characteristically, Lord Minto issued an important Minute about a year earlier on March 6, 1811, in which he “emphasized the importance of revitalizing the institutions of traditional ‘native’ education, including Sanskrit education in the ‘principled seats of Hindu learning. . . . These were expressions of a desire to improve Indian society upon its own terms” (Dodson 2007, 72– 73). 153. http:// www.wikigallery.org /wiki /painting _209515 / Thomas -Hickey / Foster-638 -John-Mowbray-with-his-money-agent-Banian. For discussions of this work, see esp. Archer 1979, 216– 17, and Bayly, ed. 1990, 107– 8. 154. Lightman et al. ed., 2013, esp. Nair 2013 and Golinski 2013. This splendid volume however does not consider Dinwiddie’s place in the Dominion of Modern Earth in the city. 155. Nair 2013, 66– 67. On Dinwiddie’s “addiction” to the orrery from early in his career, as well as attempts by the London instrument maker William Jones to sell him one in 1795, see Stewart 2013, 24, 38. 156. Seton-Kerr and Sandeman1964, vol. 4: 432. 157. Calcutta Monthly Journal 3rd Series 1839, 5: 295– 96. 158. Biswas 2011, esp. pp. 727– 28. For a discussion of the development of public “lecture rooms” in Calcutta from the 1790s with the arrival of James Dinwiddie, see Nair 2013. 159. Laird 1972, 50– 51.

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160. The Calcutta Chronicle 1789, 4: 3, and Calcutta Gazette 1790, 14: December 30. For a stinging contemporary satire of such schools, see Anon. 1850. See also Dasgupta 2010, 135– 63. 161. Seton-Kerr and Sandeman 1864, vol. 4: 211. 162. Anon. 1850, 450. Drummond arrived in Calcutta circa 1813, and joined the Academy as teacher and later became its proprietor. Unusual for its time, the Academy admitted European, Eurasian and native boys who were taught the same curriculum. The Academy is credited with the practice of introducing public examinations for the first time as a ritual in Indian schools (Dasgupta 2010, 136– 38; and Chatterjee 2012, 126). 163. AJMM 1822, 14: 89. For an examination conducted in December 1819 at the Park Academy, when “a class of 12 boys was examined in Problems on the Terrestrial and Celestial Globes,” and then advanced to “a pair of 18 inch Globes, which stood in the middle of the room, and performed the Problem he was desired to do” see Legatus 1820. 164. AJMM 1824, 18: 74. 165. Bengal Revenue Consultations April 22, 1822, nos. 52, 54. On this School founded in 1782 to provide education to the (mixed-caste) sons of European military officers, see Lushington 1824, 229– 65. Lushington’s memoir also alerts us to the fact that the girls’ school on the premises also taught “English reading and Writing; English Grammar and Parsing; Arithmetic; Geography, ancient and modern; the Use of the Globes; Needle-work, embroidery,” reconfirming my argument in the previous chapter that in the teaching of terrestrial lessons, no gendered distinctions were followed (ibid., 252). 166. Seton 2013, 127. 167. Lushington 1824, 168– 84. Like many early pedagogical institutions that prematurely provided a context in which colonizers and colonized subjects worked together on a relatively level playing field, the Calcutta School Society counted among its founder-patrons and subscribers notables of the city like judge J. H. Harrington; Serampore missionary William Carey, the Scottish pedagogue David Hare, and native entrepreneurs Dwarkanath Tagore and Babu Radha Kant Deb (Basak 1974, 190– 213). 168. Quoted in Bagal 1956, 15. 169. Serampore Mission 1828b, 77. 170. Serampore Mission 1829c, 239. By 1836, the older boys in this institution were able to skillfully draw their own maps that they exhibited at their annual examination (FI 1836, 2 [54]: 3). In 1838, there appear to have been sixty-seven girls from poor families at this institution and the older ones were learning the “use of the terrestrial globe” (FI 1836, 4: 492– 93). 171. Laird 1972, 243. 172. Dasgupta 2010, 119– 20. For a near-contemporary memoir, see Smith 1879, and for a former student’s laudatory biography, see Day 1879. On Duff ’s importance in colonial schooling, see Laird 1972, 202– 60; and Viswanathan 1989, 48– 67. 173. FI 1836, 2 (54): 6. See also Day 1879, 97– 98. 174. Madras Tract and Book Society 1855. 175. Duff 1840, 48– 55. At least one student recalled in his memoirs having committed the pages of this text to memory (Day 1879, 66– 67). That same student, Lal Behari Day (1826– 94)— parts of whose life story echo Apu’s experiences of growing up in rural Bengal and moving to Calcutta to pursue a modern education— joined Duff ’s institution, converted in 1843, became a teacher himself, and also attempted to found a Bengali National Church that would be not subservient to the imperial master (Day 1969). For Day’s lively recollection of studying at Duff ’s

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school in the 1830s (whose headmaster for part of the time was H. Clift, the author of one of the most widely read of elementary geography textbooks in lower Bengal up to the 1870s), see also Day 1879. 176. CCO 1836, 5: 660. See also Day 1969, 489– 90. 177. Anon. 1849, esp. 404– 5. See also Young 2003, 194. 178. Anon. 1849, 444. 179. BePol, June 5, 1829, no. 83. Given that the GCPI was this moment dominated by the Orientalist faction, the appeal fell on deaf ears and was dismissed as an idiosyncratic expression of a lone writer (Zastoupil and Moir 1999, 19– 20). 180. Dasgupta 2010, 89. 181. CSBS 1821, 22, 36. Given the many struggles that Roy was engaged with in the early 1820s that brought him up against both orthodox Hindu Bengalis and diehard Christians, it is quite likely that this work never did get completed: two years later, the work still appears as “unprepared for press” (CSBS 1823, 36). 182. In his detailed study of the CSBS, Basak confirms that printed reports for the society are not available after 1877, and gives a date of 1914 for the liquidation of the society (Basak 1974, 160); a government report notes its formal end in 1912 (Sharp 1914, vol. 1: 282– 83). See also Basak 1959. 183. Basak 1974, 177. The SDUK (founded in 1826) financed much of its philanthropic work in mass education (in the decades before the British state stepped in) by publishing and selling globes, maps, and other cartographic objects (Cosgrove 2001, 225). India was of particular concern to the SDUK (Bayly 1996, 214– 15). On the maps produced specifically about India, see Barrow 2004. The society ceased publishing in 1846, and its plates of these maps were purchased by the map publishers Stanford (Whitfield 2003, 19). 184. From the Third Report, quoted in Basak 1974, 176. See also CSBS 1819, 8– 9. 185. CSBS 1817, iii. It is this clause (also echoed by other textbook societies in other provinces set up soon after) that allowed the CSBS to collaborate with the Serampore missionaries, many of whom were associated with the society from the start and some of whose popular books— such as Goladhyay (or “Serampore Geography”) and Dig Durshan— it reprinted and distributed across India. For the key argument of how moral education allowed for Christian ideas to seep into Indian pedagogy, see Viswanathan 1989. While Viswanathan’s work focuses on the role of literature broadly defined, one can make a similar argument, as I have sought to demonstrate, for geographical education as well. 186. Kumar 2005, 67. For a superb analysis of textbook production in the NWP by the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow from 1860, including numerous geography books in Urdu and Hindi, see Stark 2007, 228– 50. Comparable robust discussions are not available for the other regions of British India. 187. CSBS 1817, 9. For example, among the first books published by CSBS in the Oriya language was “a small collection of Questions and Answers on the Elements of Geography, Astronomy and Natural History, made from the Bengalee publications of the Society” (CSBS 1830, 6). 188. Basak 1974, 175 (see also map, “Some of the Agencies of the Calcutta School Book Society,” inserted between pages 318 and 319). 189. Pearce 1822. First published in 1819, CSBS reports note that ten thousand copies of this book had been printed by 1821 and all but 278 had been sold by that year (Basak 1974, 166. See also CSBS 1819, 8– 9). A new edition of the book was printed in 1822, and was also adapted into

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Hindi “in the Kythee character” (by Tarinicharan Mitree), albeit without the accompanying maps (CSBS 1825, 9). In the period between 1835 and 1854, despite stiff competition from other titles, the work went into three more editions, and a total of 5000 copies of the Bengali edition were printed, of which over 3,500 copies were sold, and 857 copies of the Hindi edition (Basak 1974, 334– 41). In his analysis of Pearce’s book (which is incorrectly identified as first published in 1846), Subho Basu notes, “This work, while introducing basic physical features of the earth and its movements, refers to the story of conflicts between the Church and scientists, like Galileo and Copernicus, in early modern Europe. The author referred to the contestation between the Church and scientists over the shape of the earth in order to overcome local Brahmanical opposition to new notions of geography. . . . Indeed, in response to the introduction of western cartography, a Bengali Brahmin sought to prove the falsity of the new ideas of the round shape of referring to puranic notions of cosmography in Brahmanical traditions. Thus Dwarkanath Vidyaratna wrote that the earth originated from the navel of the creator in the shape of a lotus” (Basu 2010, 64– 65). 190. Pearson 1824. By 1825, one thousand copies of the Bengali edition of Pearson’s Dialogues, and five hundred of the bilingual edition had been printed (CSBS 1825, 7). The Reverend Pearson (d. 1831) started his missionary career in 1817 as an assistant to Reverend May of the LMS, and took over as European superintendent of the Chinsurah schools around 1817 (Laird 1972, 41– 42). 191. Yates 1825, 48– 50. A Sanskrit version of this text was also published by the CSBS in 1828 and is discussed by Michael Dodson who notes, “By virtue of its dialogue format, which although ‘traditional’ within much pedagogical Sanskrit literature as well as in English schoolbooks, Europe was rendered in the role of the guru, and India in the role of sisya (student)” (Dodson 2007, 77). 192. Pearson 1824, 1– 2, 10. 193. CMS Proceedings 1821, 249. 194. CSBS 1819, Appendix 1. See also Basak 1974, 174– 75. 195. Basu 2010. The quoted phrase is from Bayly 1996, 311– 12. 196. CSBS 1821, 7. 197. By 1819, Montague had begun “reducing a map of India from Arrowsmith, and compiling the names in Bengalee” (CSBS 1819, 8– 9), and by 1821, two maps (referred to as Plates nos. 1 and 2) had gone into production (CSBS 1821, 22). By 1825, one thousand copies “very neatly executed by a native engraver” were printed for the use of schools (CSBS 1825, 7). Although frequently referred to in the society’s reports as “Montague’s Bengali Maps,” Kasinath too was a cocreator. For other Bengalis who followed in Kasinath’s cartographic footsteps in the next few decades as mapmakers, see Government of Bengal 1855, 137– 39. 198. Basak 1974, 167. 199. By 1827, four thousand copies had been printed, of which only three hundred and ninety remained in stock. Seven hundred and fifty copies of “the map of the world (in outline)” were also printed by this time (CSBS 1828, 32). 200. MR 1827, 15: 385– 86; see also 542– 43. 201. I thank Mandira Bhaduri and Sudipa Topdar for help with translating the Bengali phrases. 202. CSBS 1824. As early as 1820– 21, the CSBS hoped to publish Bengali and Persian school maps in “the thousands” but lack of funds prevented this aspiration from realization, as did the

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death of its able map-minded secretary, Montague (CSBS 1821, 7, 22; and CSBS 1828, 7). By 1830, a map of India in Persian was ready for publication (CSBS 1830, 8). 203. CSBS 1866, 8– 11. See also CSBS 1868, 12– 14. 204. Basak 1974, 334– 40. Despite maps still being largely imported, locally produced maps were also available through the CSBS’s depository. Thus in September 1862, the society bought the copyright for Rajendralal Mitra’s Physical Map of the World (in Bengali), along with the existing stock of four hundred and fifty three copies of the map, for the price of Rs. 453 [sic] (CSBS 1864, 16). In the next couple years, Mitra also turned his attention to revising his map of India whose copyright he presented to the society (CSBS 1866, 9). 205. A catalogue of the CSBS published in 1836 lists the atlas, and is the earliest mention I have found of it in the archive (Woollaston 1836). See also CSBS 1845, 27; and CSBS 1852, 21. For appreciation of Tassin’s cartographic contributions in the contemporary press, especially his productions for the “vernacular” education market, see esp. FI 1837, 3: 241– 42; 1838, 4: 113, 120; and 1841, 7: 306. For sales in Bombay from 1839, see Parulekar and Bakshi 1955, 191. 206. Calcutta Monthly Journal 3rd Series 1836, 2 (May): 172. 207. CSBS 1845, 13; and CSBS 1848, 19. 208. CSBS 1857, 19– 26. 209. CSBS 1865, 17– 19. 210. Blochmann 1870, n.p. 211. Even N. L. Basak’s excellent analysis of the society fails to discuss this, even while drawing our attention to the role of the CSBS in distributing “a large variety of school equipment such as copy books, maps, atlases, slates, pencils, paste boards, lead pencils, illustrative plates, picture alphabet [sic], etc. etc.” (Basak 1974, 318). 212. CSBS 1823, 15– 16, 29– 32, 41– 43. See also CSBS 1821, 25– 27; and CSBS 1825, 17. 213. IOR/L/ P&J/3/31, 919; and IOR/ E/4/764, 605. 214. Calcutta Monthly Journal 3rd Series 1836, 2 (May): 172. 215. CSBS 1852, 32. 216. CSBS 1853, 27. See also CSBS 1855, 26. 217. CSBS 1857, 19– 26. 218. CSBS 1864, 12– 13. See also CSBS 1865, 19; and CSBS 1866, 9. 219. CSBS 1866, 25. After a dull year in 1864 when no globes were sold, the society reported the sale of four in 1865 (CSBS 1866, 18). 220. CSBS 1868, 20, 22 221. CSBS 1874, 23. 222. A complete list of pavilions and items put on display may be found in the two-volume Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition (1885). See also H. H. Risley, “Resolution on the Report of the Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition for 1883– 84 (Deposited)” (IOR/ P/2490). For a visual sense of the numerous pavilions and wares on display, see Waterhouse 1883– 1884, and for a scholarly analysis of these photographs, see Hoffenberg 2003. Unfortunately, I have found no photographs of the educational materials on display. 223. Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition, vol. 2: 494– 505. 224. Official Report of the Calcutta International Exhibition, vol. 1: 46. At an earlier international exhibition (in London in 1871), “a map of India. In shaded wool. By girls of the Dacca Normal School” was put on display (Watson 1871, 176). See also chapter 3, note 45.

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225. Raina and Habib 2004, 171. 226. Ray 1994a, 6. He went on to graduate with a degree in economics, deemed an “arts” subject in the 1940s. Unfortunately, in this lovely memoir in which he gives us a delightful take on the making of Apu Trilogy, Ray offers no reflections on his choice of the humble school globe as his protagonist’s companionate object, as I have chosen to call it. 227. Quoted in Dasgupta 2011, xlvi. 228. Roy 2007, 114. See also Chakrabarti 2004, 272– 89; B. Zachariah 2005, 235– 42; and esp. Arnold 2013b. 229. Roy 2007, 115. 230. Nehru 1958, 278. 231. Spivak 1999, 216. See also in this regard Prakash 1999, 64. 232. Kapila 2010, 120. See also Prakash 1999, 201– 37. 233. Raina and Habib 2004, 12. 234. Cody 2013. 235. Anjaria 2012.

EPILOGUE

1. John Donne to Sir Robert Ker, 1624. 2. Raza et al. 1996, 30– 33. See also Raza and Singh 2009. I am very grateful to Dr. Raza and his colleagues for taking time to share their data and discuss it with me at some length. 3. Raza and Singh 2007, 42– 43. 4. Kumar 1984, 1082. Followers of the science movement also quote from the 42nd Amendment to the Indian Constitution, passed in the year 1976, in which Article 51A(h) declared that among the eleven “fundamental duties” enjoined upon the Indian citizen is the development of a “scientific temper,” among other obligations. See also Kannan 2000 and Cody 2013. 5. Lightman 2007. 6. When I asked the principal investigator who led the 1995 survey, Dr. Gauhar Raza, about why this question was posed, he responded that it was “a natural question to be asked. At one level it is a very simple question. On the other hand, it is not a matter of everyday experience. It is not intuitive knowledge.” All the same, the very posing by me of this question and others related to it resulted in some interesting conversations. Thus, Dr. Raza recalled a moment in 1989 when in the middle of an exposition on Earth’s rotundity and the fact that it is freely suspended in the universe, a young boy wondered about the notion that it rested on a tortoise, and asked—like many Siddhantic astronomers well before him— what did the tortoise rest upon, and so on. The very conversation clearly filled the boy with “an uneasiness . . . it is like throwing a pebble in the pond that would generate waves; in certain cases, the waves die out; in others these waves have long-term effects . . . [the surveys] become an instrument of igniting the thought process” (interview with Dr. Gauhar Raza, New Delhi, February 2010). Another member of the survey team recalled that in the course of a People’s Science campaign in the Himalayan town of Mandi and its environs, when the well-meaning urban enthusiasts associated with the movement began to educate the local people about Earth’s correct shape, a farmer in the audience apparently retorted, “Don’t tell us that Earth is round; we already know it is round! Tell us something that we don’t know” (interview with Dr. Surjit Singh Dabas, New Delhi, February 2010).

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7. For a more elaborate version of this argument, see Ramaswamy 2007b. 8. Schwartzberg 1993. 9. Ramaswamy 2010. 10. Ramaswamy 2010. 11. Cosgrove 2001, 105– 6. 12. Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 3. 13. Raza et al. 1996, 30. 14. http://theflatearthsociety.org /cms/index.php/about-the-society/history-and-mission. See also the call to rebellion against “Round Earthers” voiced in: http://www.theflatearthsociety .org /tiki /tiki-index.php. 15. Jasanoff 2004, 49. See also Jasanoff 2001. 16. I am adapting here from Bhabha 1994. 17. de Waal 2012, 402– 3. 18. Bennett 2010, 1. 19. Mitchell 2005, 146. 20. Jacob 2006, 252. 21. Rousseau 2010, quotations on 99, 52. 22. Rushdie 1981, 259. William Methwold serves here as in the novel more generally as the embodiment of British rule in India. Earlier, the narrator recalls burying “a toy tin globe, which was badly dented and stuck together with Scotch Tape” (ibid., 118).

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INDEX

Abdul Masih, 106, 332n86 Adams, George, 50, 261, 307n6, 313n86, 369n104, 370n122, 373n151 Agra, 20, 23, 108, 109, 111, 121, 130, 136, 250, 267, 332n86, 333n92 Agra Bank, 112, 254 Agra College, 111– 12, 136, 252, 254, 333n99, 370n117 Agra School Book Society, 131, 141, 267 Ahmedabad, 175, 183, 186, 187, 201, 351n72, 357n139 Ajmer, 56, 134, 249, 250, 314n91 Akbar, 20, 302n62. See also Mughal Empire Alexandra Institution, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155, 157, 162, 180, 182, 184, 201– 9, 210, 346n11, 361nn189– 90, 361n194, 361n197 Alexandra Native Girls’ English Institution. See Alexandra Institution A.L.O.E. See Tucker, Charlotte American Madurai Mission, 76, 319n148, 360n179. See also American missionaries American Marathi Mission (AMM), 167, 189– 90, 342n206. See also American missionaries American missionaries, 69, 77– 78, 187, 198– 99,

210, 319n148, 341n197, 349n41, 349n44. See also United States Amherst, Lord, 266, 277 Amritsar, 194, 360n159. See also Punjab Anandibai. See Joshi, Anandibai Anandi Gopala, 211, 215, 218, 222. See also Joshi, Anandibai Anand Masih, xix, 91– 109, 112, 115, 116, 123, 125, 129, 130, 195, 228– 29, 266, 292, 326n3, 326nn5– 6, 327n11, 327n16, 327n18, 327n20, 328nn21– 23, 329n34, 329n42, 331n71, 331n75, 331n77, 332n78, 332n81, 332n86, 332nn88– 90; and Bishop Heber, 105, 337n155; conversion and ordination, 94– 95, 105, 327n18, 327n20, 328nn21– 22, 332n86; death, 109, 333n95; meets Emily Eden, 106– 8, 332n88; and Mrs. Sherwood, 91– 93, 94– 100, 102– 5, 106, 108, 109, 123, 229, 292, 325n1, 326n3, 326nn5– 6, 327n11, 327n16, 328n22, 329n42, 330n43, 330n48, 331nn71– 73, 331n75, 331n76, 332n86; as Parmanand, 91– 93, 94– 95, 103– 5, 228– 29, 325n2, 326n3, 326n5, 327n11, 327n20, 330n43;

415

Anand Masih (continued ) and Protestant missionaries, 94– 95, 103– 6, 108– 9, 325n6, 327n11, 327n18, 327n20, 328n22, 332n89, 333nn92– 93, 335n124, 337n155; and the terrestrial globe, 92– 93, 99– 100, 103, 104, 106, 108, 228– 29, 329n42, 330n48 Anders, William, xviii, 298 Anderson, John, 358n148 Anglicist, 28, 111, 125, 126, 135, 138, 166, 248, 249, 252, 266. See also Orientalist Anna of Siam. See Leonowens, Anna Aparajito (film), 218– 29, 232, 256, 261, 275, 276, 363n3, 363n12, 363n13, 363n16, 364n28. See also Ray, Satyajit Aparajito (novel), 230– 34. See also Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Apollo mission, xviii, xx, 298 Appadurai, Arjun, xviii Apu, 218– 32, 233, 256, 261, 276, 279, 292, 363n12, 364n22, 374n175, 378n226. See also Aparajito (film); Aparajito (novel) Apur Sansar, 218, 363n16. See also Apu Arabic, 111, 112, 132, 249, 267, 312n67, 334n109 Arcot. See Nawab of Carnatic Arrowsmith, A., 44, 169, 176, 376n197 Association of Geography Teachers in India, 88 astronomy, 15, 17, 18, 20– 25, 26, 29, 61, 71, 83– 84, 99, 103, 118– 20, 129– 31, 139– 41, 177, 195– 96, 253, 262, 281, 308n19, 317n122, 334nn108– 9, 337n166, 337n175, 343nn226– 27, 344n239; in Europe, 15, 17, 47, 96– 97, 101, 102, 328n31, 330n60, 331n65; and Indian royals, 20– 25, 40, 41, 47, 56, 59, 120– 21, 133– 35, 304n89, 309n31, 311n46, 311n48, 315n103, 341n199; missionaries and, 20– 25, 63, 65, 70, 81, 115, 117, 118, 190– 91, 241, 245, 247, 248, 317n130, 317n134, 317n135, 319n148, 323n200, 331n65, 341n197, 359n157; in native schools, 29, 33, 47, 65, 70– 72, 74, 84, 111– 13, 115, 124– 25, 129, 137– 39, 142– 45, 164– 69, 172, 177, 181, 186, 191, 193, 232– 33, 236, 241, 245, 247, 248, 249, 255, 258, 260, 263, 270, 311n46, 317n135, 319n148, 320n165, 322n191, 329n42, 330n60, 333n99, 333n102, 334n103, 334n108, 337n152, 337n157, 342n206, 348n38, 349n43, 351n74, 360n179, 368n93, 372n136, 372n139, 375n187. See also Hindu astronomy ( jyotisastra); Modern Sky; observatories; orrery atlas, xix, 15, 23, 24, 25, 34, 41, 43– 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 57– 58, 74, 86, 122, 157, 167, 168– 69, 173, 176, 177, 231, 251, 256, 259, 260, 270, 273, 274, 275, 302n60, 302n62, 303n78, 307n16, 308nn20– 21, 308n24, 310n36, 315n96, 316n107, 324n204, 345n1, 346n21, 347n29, 349n46, 368n96, 369n102, 370n123, 371n126, 377n205,

416 ·

377n211; in native schools, 57– 58, 74, 86, 167– 69, 173, 177, 231, 251, 256, 259– 60, 270, 273– 74, 275, 315n96, 316n107, 347n29, 349n46, 368n96, 369n102, 370n123, 371n126, 377n205, 377n211 Auckland, Lord George Eden, 73, 106, 115, 129, 135, 138, 255, 320n166, 337n167, 339n179, 341n199, 342n215 Ballantyne, James, 144, 344n238 Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan, 229– 34, 279, 364n20. See also Apu Baptists, 95, 118, 120, 188, 239, 323n193, 334n116, 334n118. See also Protestant missionaries; Serampore Bapudeva Sastri, 129, 141– 45, 341n203, 343n230, 344n231, 344n232, 344n235 Bardin, William, 307nn6– 7, 365n37, 371n130 Bärenbruck, George, 43, 309n30 Basak, N. L., 236, 336n139, 365n46, 371n129, 375n182, 377n211 Basu, Subho, 270, 375n190 Bayly, Christopher, 29, 121, 126, 337n166, 344n239 Behaim, Martin, xiv Bell, Andrew, 51, 64, 70– 71, 316n118, 317n122, 319n156 Bell, Bill, 328n24, 333n92, 333n95 Benares, 125– 29, 142, 170, 250, 265, 311n54, 311n55, 337n153, 337n155, 344n233 Benares Sanskrit College, 125– 28, 141, 142, 144, 337n154, 337n155, 368n89 Bengal, xx, 12, 53, 54, 72, 110, 115, 150, 161, 164, 165, 183, 187, 191, 196, 200, 217– 75, 277, 304n81, 306n117, 313n82, 326n9, 334n108, 335n135, 337n153, 338n172, 347n28, 349n49, 351n69, 358n142, 362n1, 363n12, 364n26, 364n28, 365n33, 366n65, 366n82, 368n95, 371n129, 372n139, 374n175. See also Calcutta; geography, by region: in Bengal; maps, by region: in Bengal; terrestrial globe, by region: in Bengal Bengali, xx, 12, 73, 300n33, 322n183, 335n127, 348n39, 358n145, 358n147, 362n1, 364n22, 364n28, 365n46, 366n52, 371n127, 375n187, 375n189, 376n190, 376n197, 376n202, 376n204. See also geography, schoolbooks: in Bengali; maps, by language: in Bengali; terrestrial globe, by language: in Bengali Bengalitolah, 128. See also Benares Bengal Renaissance, 255, 277 Bennett, Jane, 3, 29 Bentinck, William, 56, 57, 59, 60, 120, 121, 124, 135, 248, 254, 314nn90– 94, 315n96, 315n104, 337n167, 339n179, 341n199 Bethlehem Kuravanji, 65, 83. See also Vedanayaka Sastri

INDEX

Bethune, John Drinkwater, 202, 203, 360n184 Betts, John, 177, 349n46, 354n103, 360n171 Bhabha, Homi, 92, 105 Bhagwandas Purushottam Girls’ School, 182, 183, 186, 355n122 Bhaskaracharya, 57, 130, 133, 134, 136, 141. See also Siddhanta Siromani Bhatt, Omkar. See Omkar Bhatt Bhau Daji, 183– 84, 185, 186, 356n129, 357n138 Bhopal, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 344n199. See also Sehore bhugol, xviii, 9, 33, 76, 205, 211, 230, 231, 270, 271, 272, 283, 344n235. See also geography: in native schools; Modern Earth: in native schools; Puranic globe; terrestrial globe: in native schools Bhugol Brittanta (Geography), 267, 270, 342n206. See also Pearce, W. H. Bhugolhastamalaka, 76, 344n235. See also Shivaprasad Bhugolsar, 131, 141, 144, 343n226. See also Omkar Bhatt Bhugolvarnana, 144. See also Bapudeva Sastri Bijapur, 25 Bird, Mary, 191– 92, 201, 236, 359n159 Blackburne, William, 44, 310n36 Blaeu, Willem, 14, 24, 301n42 Blue Marble, xviii Bombay (city), xix, 8, 44, 45, 54, 55, 73, 96, 110, 130, 148, 158, 170, 171, 175, 196, 201, 210, 213, 229, 262, 267, 293, 320n167, 324n206, 342n206, 346n20, 353n95, 354n107, 360n184, 361n197; globes and maps in, 171, 176, 177, 213, 313n82, 346n14, 351n70, 353n103, 354n107; schools in, 150– 53, 155, 157– 58, 162– 65, 167, 171, 172, 174, 179– 87, 189– 91, 201– 10, 233– 34, 309n30, 320n159, 348n37, 350n50, 351n72, 355n117, 356n129, 357n133, 357n137, 357n138. See also Alexandra Institution; Elphinstone Institution Bombay (Presidency), xix, 12, 55, 132, 147– 215, 278, 306n114, 306n117, 338n172, 345n1, 345n6, 349n43, 349n48, 349n49, 360n180, 361n197, 377n205. See also geography, by region: in Bombay; maps, by region: in Bombay; terrestrial globe, by region: in Bombay Bombay Education Society, 163, 166, 348n37, 348n38 Bombay Geographical Society (BGS), 175– 76, 183, 353n92, 353n95 Bombay Native Education Society (BNES), 165– 73, 190, 348n32, 348nn37– 39, 350n50, 353n86, 356nn128– 29, 371n129 Bouchet, Jean Venantius, 22– 23, 63, 303n70, 303nn72– 73, 303n76 Brahmans, xix, 21, 63, 69, 85, 87– 89, 93– 105, 106,

INDEX

108, 115, 116, 117, 123– 24, 125, 128, 129– 45, 170, 183, 187, 190– 91, 205, 210– 15, 228– 29, 265, 266, 318n142, 326n8, 327n12, 331n75, 335n119, 338nn171– 72, 343n226, 351n72, 356nn128– 29, 375n189; and the terrestrial globe, xix, 21– 23, 87– 88, 93– 104, 108, 109, 128, 135, 210– 15, 228– 29, 327n11, 337n167, 359n159. See also pandit Brahmochary, Brajo Gopal, 143, 344n233 Brathwaite, John, 38– 39, 41, 50 British Empire, xviii, 6, 33, 43, 93, 177, 196, 246, 293, 354n103. See also geography, by region: and empire British India Society, 257– 59, 267, 273, 371nn129– 30 Brookes, R., 42 Brotton, Jerry, 2 Brückner, Martin, 16 Bryan, Margaret, 101, 102, 103, 159 Buchanan, Claudius, 49 Burdwan, 250, 367n82, 367n83 Butler, Samuel, 168, 251 Butler, William, 96 Calcutta, 8, 44, 45, 49, 54, 57, 60, 71, 72, 73, 75, 97, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 118, 120, 124, 125, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136, 137, 138, 167, 170, 171, 189, 190, 191, 218, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 237, 239, 245, 246, 250, 252, 255, 257, 304n89, 314n91, 315n97, 315n101, 317n122, 320n167, 326n9, 337n167, 337n172, 344n199, 345n225, 362n2, 363n16, 365n46, 367n68, 369n111, 370n119, 371n127, 371nn129– 31, 373n158; globes and maps in, 123, 136, 138, 217, 250, 251, 257– 58, 259, 261– 75, 301n49, 313n82, 315nn104– 5, 336n145, 337n152, 351n66, 363n16, 370n115, 370n122, 371nn130– 31, 373n148, 373n151, 374n163, 374n165; schools in, 142, 170, 186, 188, 191, 192, 196, 202, 203, 230, 231, 238, 250, 260, 261– 75, 301n49, 306n115, 319n153, 336n139, 337n152, 368n89, 374n162, 374n167, 374n175. See also Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS); Hindu College (Calcutta) Calcutta Christian Observer, 122, 220, 342n210 Calcutta Christian School-Book Society, 370n115 Calcutta International Exhibition, 275, 325n214, 377n222 Calcutta Review, 265, 303n73, 305n101 Calcutta Sanskrit College, 256, 371n131, 371n133 Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS), 73, 191– 92, 267– 75, 343n225, 371n129, 375n182, 375n185, 375n188; and atlases, 167, 273, 377n205, 377n211; geography schoolbooks, 112, 251, 267– 70, 321n171, 342n206, 348n39, 369n114, 375n181, 375n187, 375n189, 376n191; and

· 417

Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS) (continued) globes, 260, 273– 74, 370n115, 373n144, 377n211, 377n219; and maps, 270– 72, 376n197, 376n199, 376n202, 377n204, 377n211. See also Bombay Native Education Society (BNES); Madras School Book Society (MSBS) Calicut, 21, 75, 302n66 Cama, Bhikaiji, 205– 6. See also Alexandra Institution Candy, Thomas, 138, 173, 174, 351n74, 352n76, 353n86 Carey, William, 239– 40, 366n58, 374n167. See also Serampore Mission Carpenter, Mary, 186, 187, 204, 346n113, 353n90, 357n139, 361n194 cartographic evangelism, xix, 61, 93– 94, 193– 96, 248, 284, 289, 291; in Bengal, 191– 92, 196– 98, 217– 18, 229, 237– 47, 250, 252– 55, 264– 74; in Bombay, 168– 70, 172– 75, 176, 190– 91, 205, 211– 15, 348n48; in central India, 129– 41, 340n180; defined, xix, 61, 307n16; in Madras, 40, 61– 82, 88– 89, 192– 94, 198– 99, 323n200; in NWP, 93– 94, 103– 9, 113, 115– 29, 141– 45, 334n118 Cary (George, John, and William, globe makers), 44, 57, 147, 169, 171, 307n6, 315n95, 345n1, 346n16, 350n52, 369n102, 370n122, 372n136 Catholic missionaries, 19– 20, 264, 301n59. See also Jesuits Caumayappa Mudaliar, 73, 84, 321n171, 321n175. See also Madras School Book Society (MSBS) celestial globe, xviii, 6, 13, 15, 21, 40, 44, 46, 56, 60, 62, 63, 70, 75, 96, 101, 111, 128, 171, 174, 177, 195, 196, 253, 254, 256, 257, 263, 274, 302n64, 304n82, 308n19, 312n64, 322n184, 342n207, 345n1, 354n107, 370n115, 374n163. See also terrestrial globe; use of the globes Central Provinces, 234, 235, 347n28, 365n33. See also geography, by region: in Central India; maps, by region: in Central India; terrestrial globe, by region: in Central India Chamberlain, John, 95, 327nn19– 20, 327n22, 335n124. See also Anand Masih Charter Act of 1813. See East India Company Charter Act of 1813 Chattre, Keru Lakhsman, 174, 352n80 Chaube, Ayodhya Prasad, 9– 11 Chaudhury, Zahid, 362n204 Chesterton, G. K., 298n13, 324n204 Chinsurah, 237, 250, 261, 313n82, 364n29, 364n44, 376n190 Chintaman, H., 183, 356n131 Christianity, xix, 13, 16, 20, 29– 30, 48, 49, 51, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 80, 89, 91– 92, 93,

418 ·

94, 95, 98, 105, 108– 9, 113, 115, 116, 119, 122, 123, 125, 128, 129, 167, 190, 192, 193, 194, 218, 220, 223, 225, 226, 229, 232, 238– 40, 249, 260, 264, 265, 268, 276, 277, 293, 307n16, 309n29, 311n55, 314n93, 316n108, 323n196, 323n200, 327n11, 328n21, 331n75, 332n86, 332n90, 333n95, 334n118, 337n157, 337n165, 349n41, 354n103, 359n154, 366n58, 368n93, 375n181, 375n185; and empire, 316n108, 354n103. See also Catholic missionaries; Jesuits; Protestant missionaries Christian School Society (Calcutta), 188 Christian Vernacular Education Society (CVES), 80, 81, 84, 194, 238– 39, 323n193, 323nn199– 200, 366n52. See also Murdoch, John Church Missionary Society (CMS), 66, 67, 69, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 128, 189, 190, 192, 238, 239, 247, 323n193, 328n22, 332n90, 368n93. See also Protestant missionaries Claudet, Antoine F. J., 157– 58. See also school photograph Clift, William Horace, 180, 249, 251, 270, 375n175 College of Fort St. George, 72, 321n175 College of Fort William, 262, 317n122 Copernicus, 20, 46, 48, 49, 52, 59, 62, 65, 83, 84, 94, 113, 117, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 138, 139, 142, 194, 298n22, 301n56, 333n99, 334n108, 338n171, 341n197, 343n226, 351n72, 364n22, 375n189 Cormack, Lesley, xv, 301n46 Cornwallis, Lord Charles, 54, 55, 313nn81– 82 Coronelli, 6, 50, 300n28, 300n30 Cosgrove, Denis, 289 Croft, Alfred, 149, 358n140 Cuddalore, 62, 63, 75. See also Tranquebar Mission Cursetjee, Manockjee, 201– 3, 205, 356n126, 360nn184– 85, 362n205. See also Alexandra Institution Cursetjee, Meheribai, 202 Dadoba Pandurang, 173, 278, 349n46, 352n77 Danish Mission. See Tranquebar Mission David Weston Limited, 6 Day, Lal Behari, 374n175 Dekker, Elly, 2, 301n56, 302n64 Delhi, xix, 91, 92, 94, 97, 104, 105, 111, 113, 114, 115, 130, 250, 284, 334n108, 369n99 Delhi College, 112– 13, 116, 136, 334n109, 369n110 Delhi Renaissance, 113, 277 Delhi Vernacular Translation Society, 113 Derozio, Henry, 263 Desai, Kiran, xiii, xiv, xvii, 362n218 Devendra Kuravanji, 48– 49, 65, 83, 267, 311n48. See also Serfoji

INDEX

Digdurshan. See Dig Durshan, or Magazine for Indian Youth Dig Durshan, or Magazine for Indian Youth, 59, 106, 118, 242, 267, 332n83, 375n185 Dinwiddie, James, 64, 245, 257, 262, 317n122, 319n154, 367n79, 371n130, 373n152, 373nn154– 55, 373n158 Drummond, David, 263, 264, 374n162 Duff, Alexander, 190, 246, 248, 264– 66, 314n90, 337n153, 374n172, 374n175 Durgashankar Pathak, 139– 41 Dutch East India Company, 24, 304n84 Dutch globes and maps, 1, 4, 24, 43, 304n84 Earth: conception in Puranas, 27– 29, 76, 83– 84, 109, 126– 27, 134, 135, 136, 173, 241– 42, 246, 253, 265– 66, 281– 91, 305n93, 324nn209– 10, 338n172, 341n197, 343n227, 344n239, 375n189, 378n6; described in Siddhantas, 27– 29, 109, 136; as flat, xv, xviii, 21, 27– 28, 49, 76, 84, 85, 117, 119, 126, 134, 181, 195, 205, 209, 214, 265, 283, 291, 302n68, 319n151, 337n158, 338n172, 367n76. See also Modern Earth; terrestrial sphericity Earthrise, xviii, 298n21 East, Sir Edward Hyde, 255, 257, 370n119 East India Company Charter Act of 1813, 31, 93, 110, 247, 248, 257, 305n109, 316n113 Eden, Emily, 106– 8, 265, 332n88 Edinburgh, 39, 121, 191, 204, 245, 315n96 Edney, Matthew, 121 Elizabeth I, 13, 24, 300n39 Elphinstone, Monstuart, 164, 165, 172, 201, 348n32, 348n33 Elphinstone College. See Elphinstone Institution Elphinstone High School. See Elphinstone Institution Elphinstone Institution, 163– 64, 174, 176, 180– 81, 182, 183, 348n32, 351n70, 352n80, 355n117, 355n119 Emmitt, George Lobey, 55, 314n88 English East India Company (EIC), xix, 24, 37, 38, 39, 53, 70, 71, 72, 94, 97, 105, 110, 120, 121, 125, 132, 135, 192, 194, 250, 261, 308n19, 368n93; and globes and maps, 24– 25, 39, 40, 50– 51, 52, 54– 61, 62, 118– 20, 122, 171, 217, 257, 274, 309n32; and Indian royals, 24– 25, 40– 61, 120– 21, 132, 134– 35, 306n2, 309n32, 312n67, 312n69, 312n71, 313n79, 314n89, 314n91, 315n97, 315n106, 341n199; and native education, 28, 30– 31, 61, 70, 71– 72, 74– 75, 93, 110– 13, 115, 125– 26, 134– 35, 138, 164– 65, 169– 71, 172, 247– 61, 305n109, 316n113, 341n199, 350n54, 368n93, 373n152; and Protestant missionaries, 39, 40, 62, 64, 110, 247– 48, 316n113, 327n19

INDEX

Enlightenment, 13– 14, 17, 35, 40, 42, 48, 50, 67, 84, 93, 269, 291, 308n22, 317n122. See also European science erdapfel, xiv Europe, xvii– xviii, xx, 13– 19, 20, 23, 26, 30, 35, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 56, 63, 68, 69, 75, 84, 85, 88, 98, 100, 102, 110, 119, 120, 133, 158, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 181, 182, 193, 201, 204, 205, 206, 237, 238, 242, 251, 257, 260, 266, 292, 298n17, 312n67, 316n118, 328n28, 357n127, 361n197, 371n126, 375n189, 376n191 European science, 20, 23, 28– 29, 51, 53, 56, 60, 72, 113, 132, 135, 139, 170, 190, 193, 241, 248, 249, 257, 258, 303n77, 334n109, 339n175, 369n89. See also Enlightenment; science education; useful knowledge exhibitions, 85, 86, 87, 152, 335nn213– 14. See also international exhibitions Fara, Patricia, 100 Feldhaus, Anne, 362n207, 362n216 Fenicio, Jacomo, 21, 302n66 Ferguson, James, 169, 191, 320n165. See also astronomy: in native schools Fisher, Henry, 103, 105. See also Anand Masih Fisher, Thomas, 371n131 Flat Earth Society, 291, 317n14. See also Earth: as flat Fox, Henry W., 69– 70, 319n151 Friedman, Thomas, xv Frisius, Gemma, 13 Galileo, 128, 214, 220, 364n22, 375n189 Gandhi, Indira, xx Gandhi, Mohandas, 306n121 Garh Mukteshwar, 104, 105, 116. See also Anand Masih; Thompson, J. T. Gates, Barbara, 101. See also Scientific Mother Geister, Johann, 62– 63 General Assembly’s Institution (Bombay), 190– 91, 359n154. See also Wilson, John General Assembly’s Institution (Calcutta), 264– 66. See also Duff, Alexander General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI), 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 123, 124, 128, 130, 132, 136, 138, 139, 236, 247– 61, 274, 341n201, 368n89, 368n95, 369n102, 369n111, 370n116, 375n179 geographical catechism, 16, 106, 173, 180, 309n30, 323n200, 332n82, 351nn73– 74 geography, xvii, xix, 13– 14, 283, 298n17, 301n42, 317n122, 353n92; and girls and women, xx, 71, 92, 93, 96– 97, 100, 101– 3, 148– 215, 264, 329n42, 330n44, 344n238, 345n8, 346n21, 356n127, 358n144, 359n156, 360n179, 360n184,

· 419

geography (continued ) 361n197, 374n165; and missionaries, 20, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 61– 82, 88– 89, 93, 103, 109, 115– 18, 128, 167, 180, 187– 91, 220, 237– 48, 264– 66, 302n62, 303n78, 316n118, 318n135, 319n148, 323n200, 334n118, 335n119, 335n121, 337n165, 341n197, 348n33, 349n41, 358n141, 358n144, 359n154, 359n156, 360n179, 365n44, 365n46, 366n58, 366n64, 368n93, 375n185, 375n189; and native authors, 48– 49, 65, 73, 74, 76, 82– 85, 86– 88, 113, 168, 173, 201, 259– 60, 267, 270, 277, 311n48, 325n212, 335n175, 344n235, 345n8, 375n189; in native schools, xviii, 9, 16, 33– 35, 40, 62– 63, 65– 67, 69– 82, 83– 89, 96, 105– 6, 111– 13, 115, 123– 25, 128, 132, 133– 39, 147– 56, 162– 75, 176– 209, 220, 229– 47, 249– 75, 306n121, 309n30, 316n118, 317n132, 319n148, 320n159, 321n172, 322n191, 341n199, 342n206, 344n238, 345n8, 347n30, 348nn38– 39, 349n49, 350n65, 351n73, 351n74, 353n97, 353n112, 353n113, 356n127, 359n154, 360n179, 360n184, 361n197, 364n28, 365n32, 365n34, 365n44, 366n64, 368n91, 368n93, 369n114, 370nn123– 24, 372nn138– 39, 374n165, 374n175, 375nn185– 86, 375n189; and pedagogic modernity, xviii, 1, 13– 18, 32, 33– 35, 41– 44, 47, 48, 74, 82, 96, 109, 149, 157– 59, 172, 178– 79, 220, 273, 283, 293– 94, 298n18, 301n45, 306nn121– 22, 308n22, 308n24, 322n183, 345n8, 349n49, 375n185; as royal science, 37– 61, 309nn30– 31, 315n106, 341n199; as science education, 33– 34, 70– 71, 72, 74, 82, 109– 10, 149, 178– 79, 190– 91, 233, 241– 47, 278, 298n18, 322n191, 335n175, 343n227, 365n44, 375n189. See also cartographic evangelism; Modern Earth: in native schools; terrestrial globe; use of the globes geography, by region: in Bengal, 161, 187– 88, 191– 92, 196– 97, 217– 75, 349n49, 358n144, 364n28, 365n44, 365n46, 368n91, 368n93, 369n114, 370nn123– 24, 372nn138– 39, 374n165, 374n175, 375n185, 375n189; in Bombay, 147– 54, 162– 87, 189– 91, 201– 15, 233– 34, 309n30, 347n30, 348nn38– 39, 349n49, 350n65, 351n73, 351n74, 353n97, 356n127, 359n154, 360n184, 361n197; in Central India, 123– 25, 129– 41, 153– 55, 191, 234, 235, 342n206; and empire, xvii, xix, 26, 29, 33– 35, 43, 50– 51, 54– 61, 68– 69, 71– 72, 74, 93, 114– 15, 133, 144– 45, 161, 164, 166– 67, 178– 79, 247– 61, 291, 293, 298n13, 298n18, 304n89, 312n67, 315n106, 323n200, 353n112, 369n110; in Gangetic valley, 92– 123, 125– 29, 141– 45, 155, 191, 236, 329n42, 333n99, 344n238, 353n113, 375n186; in Madras, 37– 89, 111, 188–

420 ·

89, 192– 94, 198– 200, 234, 309n30, 317n130, 317n132, 320n159, 320n165, 321n171, 323n200, 324n204, 324n206, 349n49, 360n179; in rural India, 220, 229– 47, 317n132, 359n154, 364n28, 365n32 geography, schoolbooks: in Bengali, 73, 230– 31, 236, 242– 44, 260, 267– 68, 270– 71, 322n183, 342n206, 348n39, 358n144, 365n44, 375n185, 375n187, 375n189, 376n190, 376n197; in Gujarati, 166, 167, 348nn38– 39; in Hindi, 59, 112, 115– 18, 124, 129, 130– 31, 137, 141, 144, 322n183, 329n42, 333n99, 333n102, 334n118, 335n111, 335n119, 335n121, 343n226, 343n227, 375n186, 375n189; in Hindustani, 59, 111, 113, 118– 20, 191– 93, 236, 269, 271, 321n171, 333n102, 348n39, 375n186; in Marathi, 130– 31, 166, 167, 173, 180, 189, 342n206, 348nn38– 39, 351n74, 351n76; in Persian, 111, 113, 333n99, 333n102; in Tamil, 65– 69, 73, 84, 85, 270, 318nn135– 36, 321n171, 322n183 Geography and History, Selected by a Lady, 96, 168, 192 Geography Room, 32, 306n115; in British India, 87– 88, 306n115. See also geography: in native schools George Philip & Sons, 161, 347n29 Gericke, Christian Wilhelm, 38, 41, 307n17 Gernet, Jacques, 20 Ghoshe, Sreenath, 259– 60 Giedion, Siegfried, 2 gift, 276, 277; of globes and maps, 2, 20, 22, 24– 25, 37– 38, 41, 43, 50– 61, 70, 99– 100, 106, 129– 31, 165, 175– 76, 183, 217, 220, 223, 225, 245, 250, 256, 273– 74, 276, 302n62, 303n73, 303n76, 309n28, 313n86, 314n89, 315nn97– 98, 315n106, 334n104, 336n109, 337n167, 339nn178– 79, 351n70, 367n78, 367n80, 370n117, 370n122, 371n126, 371n130; of paintings, 55– 56, 309n30, 314n89, 314nn91– 92; of schoolbooks, 42, 43, 55– 60, 69, 219– 20, 256– 58, 276, 309n30, 350n51, 370n123 Girodet-Trioson, Louise, 158 globe. See celestial globe; inflatable globe; pocket globe; terrestrial globe god posters, 284– 91 Goldsmith, J., 44, 113, 180, 251, 256, 330n165, 372n138 Goldsmith, O., 59, 309n33 Goswami, Manu, 297n6 Govind Narayan, 177, 346n20, 353n95, 354n99, 354n102, 356n128, 356n131, 359n154, 361n189 grants-in-aid, 74, 176, 274 Gujarati, 147, 165, 166, 168, 173, 174, 175, 177, 181, 183, 186, 345n2, 348nn38– 39, 349n46, 350n51, 351n72, 354n104, 355n115, 356n124, 356n126.

INDEX

See also geography, schoolbooks: in Gujarati; maps, by language: in Gujarati; terrestrial globe, by language: in Gujarati Guthrie, William, 42, 43, 44, 308n24 Guy’s Geography, 113, 251, 264

Hooghly College, 249, 250, 253, 368n96, 372n139 Hooghly Normal Vernacular School, 232– 33, 364n29. See also normal school Hunter Commission, 178– 80, 356n127 Huygens, Constantijn, 14

Halle, 39, 40, 62, 63, 64, 65, 309n31, 316n118. See also Tranquebar Mission Hamel, Nicolas, 43, 308n26 Hare, David, 255, 264, 306n115, 374n167 Hatcher, Brian, 94, 364n22 Heber, Reginald, 105, 116, 125– 28, 136, 137, 139, 335n124, 337nn155– 56, 337n165, 371n131 Heidegger, Martin, xvi, xvii hemispheres map, 34, 46, 61, 75, 76, 79, 119, 159, 251, 322n186, 360n179 Hickey, Thomas, 261 Hindi, 6, 8, 9, 24, 76, 89, 106, 111, 112, 115, 116, 124, 129, 131, 137, 138, 144, 213, 234, 242, 269, 322n183, 329n42, 331n71, 333n92, 333n99, 338n172, 344n235, 375n186, 375n189. See also geography, schoolbooks: in Hindi; maps, by language: in Hindi; terrestrial globe, by language: in Hindi Hindu. See Hinduism Hindu astronomy ( jyotisastra), 23, 26– 29, 47, 50, 60, 61, 71, 72, 118, 126– 28, 129– 30, 139– 41, 165, 170, 249, 253, 265– 66, 324nn209– 10, 338n168, 339n174, 344n235, 344n239, 348n33, 368n89, 368n91, 369n110 Hindu College (Calcutta), 112, 255– 61, 267, 273, 274, 315n98, 370n119, 370n123, 371n126, 371n131, 372nn136– 39 Hindu College (Poona). See Poona Sanskrit College Hinduism, 28, 68, 121, 190, 241, 247, 265– 66, 284– 91, 302n67. See also Puranic Hinduism Hindu Sanskrit College (Calcutta). See Calcutta Sanskrit College Hindustani, 12, 89, 92, 95, 103, 106, 108, 112, 113, 118, 121, 123, 137, 191, 236, 249, 267, 269, 270, 277, 312n67, 321n71, 329n42, 331n77, 332n89, 335n127, 336n139, 336n143, 348n39, 349n46, 372n139, 375n186. See also geography, schoolbooks: in Hindustani; maps, by language: in Hindustani; terrestrial globe, by language: in Hindustani History of the Fairchild Family, 97– 99, 102, 329n34, 329n40. See also Sherwood, Mary Martha Holbein, Hans, 13 Homann, Johann Baptist, 23, 46 Home, Robert, 261, 373n152 Hommell, Karsten, 63, 316n118 Hondius, Jodocus, 24, 301n42

India School-Books Society, 80. See also Murdoch, John inflatable globe, xiii– xiv, xv, 354n103. See also terrestrial globe international exhibitions: in Calcutta, 275, 377n222; in London, 9, 145, 153, 162, 183, 238, 300nn32– 33, 335n214, 344n233, 344n239, 352n87, 377n224; in Vienna, 12, 150, 153, 238, 275, 346n12. See also exhibitions Islam, 20, 27, 112, 114, 118, 121, 127, 139, 141, 258, 302n64, 304n89, 311n48, 312n67

INDEX

Jacob, Christian, 86 Jagannath Shankarshet Girls’ School, 182, 183, 186, 355n122. See also Shankarshet, Jagannath Jaggi, 298n21 Jahangir, 25, 114. See also Mughal Empire Jaipur, 4– 6, 23, 304nn81– 82, 325n214 Jai Singh II, 23– 24, 25, 49, 50, 303n77, 304nn81– 83, 304n89, 311n46, 311n48 Jaligamma Venkatarow, 73, 321n171. See also Madras School Book Society (MSBS) Jambhekar, Bal Gangadhar Shastree, 168, 348n39, 349n48 Jambudvipa, 27, 28, 289. See also Earth: conception in Puranas Janavinotini, 82, 321n172 Jasanoff, Shiela, 291 Jesuits, 19– 23, 100, 262, 298n16, 301n59, 302n60, 302n62, 303nn66– 68, 303n70, 303nn72– 73, 303n75, 303n78, 304n81, 304n83 John, Christoph Samuel, 41, 43, 63– 64, 65, 70, 81, 307n18, 309n29, 316n118 Johnson-Roehr, Susan, 23 Johnston, A. & K., 176, 273, 346n12 Johnston, Sir Alexander, 43, 309n28 Johnston, T. Ruddiman, 86 Jones, Sir William, 26, 27, 304n89, 364n22. See also Orientalist Jones, William and Samuel (globe makers), 257, 371n130, 372n138, 373n155 Joshi, Anandibai, 210– 15, 225, 292, 362nn206– 7 Joshi, Gopalrao, 210– 15 Joshi, Shrikrishna Janardan, 210– 15, 362n207. See also Anandi Gopala Joyce, Jeremiah, 73, 84, 128, 168, 270, 321n171, 321n175, 349n49 jyotisastra. See Hindu astronomy ( jyotisastra)

· 421

Kanpur, 97, 111, 123, 329n42 Kapila, Shruti, 277 Karachi, 153– 55, 346n16 Kasinath, 270– 72, 376n197 Kaye, John William, 185, 186, 187, 358n140 Keith, Thomas, 17, 46, 74, 169, 177, 251, 256, 310n39, 320n165, 369n99 Kessowjee, Hurry, 168 Khan, Ghulam Ali, 114 Khan, Syed Ahmad, 278 Khasi, 161– 62, 200 Khurshedji, Behramji, 182 Kohlhoff, C. S., 309n31 Kohlhoff, Daniel, 47, 65, 309n31 Kohlhoff, Johann Caspar, 42, 44, 47, 65, 309n31, 311n55. See also Tanjore Mission Kooverbai, 201– 3, 204, 360n184, 360n205. See also Alexandra Institution Kosambi, Meera, 214, 362n207 Kotah, 55– 61, 133– 36, 137, 138, 253, 254, 314n89, 314n91, 314n94, 315n97, 315n102, 315n104, 339n179, 341n196, 341n199, 341n201 Krishnamachariar, V., 82, 278 Krishna Rau, 123, 124, 125 Lad, Bhau Daji. See Bhau Daji Lafont, Eugene, 158 Lakshmi-Saraswati-Samvad, 345n8 Lancaster, John, 24 Latour, Bruno, 3, 298n22 Le Moyne, Pierre, 100 Leonowens, Anna, 195– 96 Leupolt, C. B., 128, 337n165 Liebau, Heike, 65, 316n118 Locke, John, 14, 15 Lodge, John, 101 London, 6– 7, 8, 9, 11– 12, 17, 39, 42, 44, 47, 52, 55, 58– 59, 62, 64, 79, 86, 87, 98, 99, 101, 121, 129, 138, 145, 153, 155, 159, 162, 165, 169, 170, 174, 183, 185, 187, 190, 238, 245, 246, 256, 257, 258, 261, 264, 273, 274, 300nn32– 33, 301n57, 307n7, 309n32, 310n39, 313n74, 313n86, 315n95, 316n118, 318n135, 319n115, 323n193, 324n202, 325n214, 334n104, 344n233, 345n1, 345n16, 348n31, 350n52, 353n87, 353n92, 353n94, 357nn132– 33, 369n104, 370n117, 371n126, 373n155, 377n224 London International Exhibition, 9, 12, 145, 153– 56, 162, 183, 238, 344n233, 353n87. See also international exhibitions London Missionary Society (LMS), 69, 180, 190, 237, 247, 318n135, 323n193, 357n137, 376n190 London Science Museum, 6– 7, 299n24 Long, James, 12, 75, 93, 237, 365n46

422 ·

Longhi, Pietro, 101, 159 Lowry, Strickland, 158 Lucknow, 119– 24, 155, 336n142, 336n147, 375n186 Lucknow Observatory, 120– 21, 335n136 Lucy Perry Noble Bible School, Madura, 198– 99, 360n179 Lusted, David, 297n8 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 26, 83, 252– 55, 274, 304n88, 336n139, 368n96, 369n111, 369n114, 370n115, 370n117 Macnaghten, W. H., 129, 130, 137, 339n179, 341n199 Madhav Rao, 54– 55, 313nn80– 81. See also Malet, Charles Madhu Singh, Raj Rana, 135, 341n196. See also Kotah Madras (city), xix, 8, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 49, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 97, 110, 188, 192, 220, 229, 256, 262, 267, 306n2, 317n122, 317n128, 317nn130– 31, 317n134, 319n151; globes in, 37, 39, 44, 50, 51– 53, 62, 64, 70, 74, 75, 82– 83, 85, 86, 130, 300n3, 301n49, 307n7, 308n19, 309n34, 310n44, 322n124 Madras (presidency), xix, 8, 38, 39, 40– 41, 47, 51, 61– 89, 165, 167, 265, 270, 308n20, 317n135, 324n201, 324n204, 324n210, 355n117, 366n58; schooling in, 39, 41, 51, 62, 70– 82, 110, 111, 165, 188, 192– 94, 200, 233, 242, 301n49, 306n117, 309n30, 316n113, 316n118, 318n140, 319n148, 320nn159– 61, 320n165, 321nn171– 72, 321n175, 322n186, 337n153, 345n6, 349n49, 351n69, 360n180, 365n33. See also geography, by region: in Madras; maps, by region: in Madras; terrestrial globe, by region: in Madras Madras Educational Exhibition, 85, 87, 325n213 Madras Geographical Association (MGA), 82– 83, 87, 327n206 Madras High School. See Madras University Madras Male Orphan Asylum, 39, 51, 70 Madras Observatory, 41, 308n19 Madras School Book and Vernacular Society, 321n172 Madras School Book Society (MSBS), 72– 73, 84, 270, 320n167, 321nn171– 73, 371n129 Madras University, 73, 88, 318n140, 321n171 Madras Upayukta Grandha Karana Sabha, 320n167 Madura. See Madurai Madurai, 22, 76, 198– 99, 303n70, 303n73, 319n148 Maganbhai Karamchand, Rao Bahadur, 175, 183, 353n90 Mahomed Mohsin College. See Hooghly College Mainwaring, W. B., 168 Malby & Co., 176, 183, 313n74, 353n94, 353n97, 353n99

INDEX

Malet, Charles, 54– 55, 60, 313n79, 313nn81– 82 Manccharam, Durgaram, 168 Mangal Das, 95, 103, 328n103. See also Anand Masih Mangammal, 22, 303n71, 303n76 maps: defined, 67, 76, 281; and empire, 34– 35, 54– 61, 110, 122, 159, 161, 195– 96, 261, 300nn32– 33, 313n81, 325n214, 327n12, 344n239, 373n152; and girls or women, 99– 100, 102, 147– 48, 151– 52, 156, 159– 62, 180, 182– 89, 193, 195– 96, 197, 199– 200, 201, 204– 5, 206, 212– 14, 275, 330n45, 330n56, 347n26, 351nn73– 74, 356n127, 357n134, 358n144, 377n224; and governance, 50; and missionaries, xix, 20– 21, 23, 67, 73, 75, 77– 80, 81, 100, 106, 123, 136, 137, 187– 89, 191, 199, 237– 42, 244– 45, 264, 270– 72, 302n60, 302n67, 303n70, 309n31, 316n107, 318n140, 347n26, 349n44, 351nn73– 74, 356n127, 358nn144– 45, 359n156, 360n179, 366n58, 366n64, 374n170, 375n183; and native map-makers, 11– 12, 85– 86, 123, 250, 259– 60, 270– 72, 275, 284, 286, 289, 325n214, 344n239, 376n197, 377n204, 377n224; in native schools, 11– 12, 32, 67, 71, 73, 74– 81, 83, 85, 87, 106, 111– 12, 115, 120, 123, 124, 128, 132, 137, 147, 152, 154– 57, 161– 64, 168– 69, 171– 74, 177– 79, 182– 88, 191, 197, 199– 200, 201, 204– 5, 206, 230, 231, 232– 40, 242, 244– 45, 249– 52, 256, 259– 60, 263– 64, 270– 73, 275, 316n107, 322n186, 324n204, 325n215, 333n99, 334n104, 336n139, 347n26, 347n29, 351nn73– 74, 354n100, 356n127, 357n139, 358nn144– 45, 360n179, 364n28, 365n32, 368nn95– 96, 369n99, 370n115, 370n124, 370n126, 372n139, 374n170, 377n211, 377n224; and pedagogic modernity, xix, 14– 15, 16, 32, 158, 178, 193, 201, 237, 250– 51, 293, 300nn32– 33, 307n16, 345n1, 346n12, 347n29, 370n123; in schoolbooks, 67, 73, 76, 118– 20, 270– 72, 342n211, 349n49. See also cartographic evangelism; gift: of globes and maps; hemispheres map; world map maps, by language: in Bengali, 242, 251, 259, 270– 72, 342n211, 358n145, 366n64, 376n197, 376n199, 376n202, 377n204; in Gujarati, 167, 173, 177, 186, 345n2, 349n46, 354n104; in Hindi, 9, 59, 138, 167, 234– 35, 236, 251, 333n99; in Hindustani, 59, 118– 20, 167, 236, 251, 270, 336n139, 349n46; in Marathi, 167, 173, 177, 186, 345n2, 349n46; in Persian, 59, 138, 251, 271, 333n99, 336n139, 369n99, 376n202, 377n205; in Tamil, 67, 73, 74, 76– 79, 199, 270, 318n140 maps, by region: in Bengal, 136, 138, 188, 197, 217, 230– 33, 234, 236– 40, 242, 244– 45, 250– 51, 256, 259– 60, 263– 64, 270– 75, 342n211, 358nn144– 45, 364n28, 366n64, 368nn95– 96,

INDEX

370n124, 370n126, 372n139, 376n197, 376n199, 377n204, 377n211, 377n224; in Bombay, 147, 151, 162– 64, 167– 69, 171– 74, 176– 79, 182– 88, 191, 204– 5, 206, 212– 14, 233– 34, 345n2, 349n44, 349n46, 351nn73– 74, 356n127, 357n134; in Central India, 124, 132, 137, 154– 55, 234– 35, 342n211; in Gangetic valley, 99, 111– 12, 115, 118– 20, 128, 236, 249– 50, 252, 300nn32– 33, 333n99, 334n104, 336n139, 369n99; in Madras, 22, 39, 41, 43, 44, 48, 49, 67, 71, 73– 87, 189, 193, 199, 300n33, 307n7, 308n24, 309nn31– 32, 310n36, 311n54, 318n140, 324n204, 325n215, 360n179 Maratha, 37, 39, 54, 88, 123, 165, 172, 180, 220, 256, 306n2, 307n10, 313n79, 313n81, 342n206, 347n30 Marathi, 12, 48, 65, 83, 130, 165, 166, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174, 177, 183, 186, 190, 205, 210, 211, 267, 338n172, 339n174, 342n206, 345n2, 346n20, 348nn38– 39, 349n46, 350nn50– 51, 351n74, 353n87, 353n95, 355n115, 356n124, 356n126, 356n131, 359n154, 359n156 Marshman, Joshua, 240. See also Serampore Mission Martin, Benjamin (globe maker), 307n7 Martin, David, 158 Martin, Pierre, 22, 303n73, 303n76 Martyn, Henry, 97, 108 May, Robert, 237, 364n29, 376n190 Meerut, xix, 12, 91, 92, 95, 97, 103, 104, 105, 108, 116, 123, 192, 229, 250, 325n2, 327n19, 329n34, 329n42, 331n73, 331n75, 331n77, 332n86 Mejmua Shamsi, 59, 113, 333n99, 333n102, 334n108. See also astronomy: in native schools Mercator, Geradus, 4, 19, 20, 25, 46, 304n83 Mercier, Philip, 158 Meru, 27, 28, 29, 116, 126, 348n33. See also Earth: conception in Puranas Miniature Panorama, 159 Minto, Lord, 261, 373n152 minute on native education, 115, 164, 252, 341n199, 373n152 missionaries. See Catholic missionaries; Jesuits; Protestant missionaries Mitchell, W. J. T., 292 Mitra, Rajendralal, 259, 270, 377n204 Modern Earth, 18– 19, 43, 57, 98, 99, 102, 113, 159, 284, 291– 92, 373n154; defined, 18– 19; and empire, 34– 35, 57, 61, 94, 253, 284, 291– 92, 344n239; and native enthusiasts, 40, 42, 60, 86, 88, 94, 109, 212, 218, 229, 260, 282, 291– 92, 324n210; in native schools, 33, 47, 67– 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 82, 84– 85, 118, 122, 124– 25, 128, 134– 35, 145, 149, 168, 174, 180, 187, 194– 95, 198– 99, 201, 209, 217, 223, 232, 237, 239, 241, 246, 247, 248, 250, 265, 267– 68, 270, 275, 278,

· 423

Modern Earth (continued ) 310n44, 340n180, 344n235, 345n8, 349n49, 373n148; and Protestant missionaries, 42, 61, 67– 68, 115– 16, 319n151. See also cartographic evangelism; geography; Modern Sky; terrestrial globe; terrestrial sphericity Modern Sky, 18, 40, 42, 57, 60, 69, 82, 99, 118, 124, 128, 193, 194, 209, 241, 268, 278, 310n44, 319n151. See also astronomy; Modern Earth Molineux, Thomas, 16, 113, 251, 369n99 Montague, E. S., 270– 72, 376n197, 376n202 Morse, Samuel, 158 Moxon, Joseph, 15 Mughal Empire, xix, 19– 21, 23, 25, 37, 46, 91, 93, 110, 112, 113– 15, 125, 217, 269, 301n59, 302n64 Mukhopadhyay, Bhudev, 232, 237 Munro, Thomas, 71, 72, 165 Murdoch, John, 80– 82, 83, 84, 190, 194, 238, 239, 323nn195– 96, 323n200, 324nn201– 2, 348n33, 366n55. See also Christian Vernacular Education Society (CVES) Muslim, 23, 25, 26, 51, 106, 112, 113, 238, 264, 302n66, 329n42, 332n86, 334nn108– 9, 335n113, 368n96, 369n110. See also Islam Nagpur, 130, 154– 55 Nair, Savithiri Preetha, 262, 373n152 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 182, 356n127 Narayana Rao, Rao Bahadur, 82– 83. See also Madras Geographical Association (MGA) Narayan Daji, 183, 356n131 NASA, xx Natesa Aiyar, G., 85, 325n212 National Geographic, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS), 281– 84, 378n6 Navincandra, 345n8 Nawab of Carnatic, 51– 53, 312n68, 312n71 Nayaka, 21– 23, 303n71, 303n73, 306n2 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 229, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 286, 364n19 Newton, Isaac, 52, 100, 127, 220, 364n22 Newton & Co., 151, 346n14, 348n31, 365n37, 370n122 Nicholls, George, 128, 270 Nivedita, 196– 97, 198 normal school, 12, 154– 55, 178, 187, 189, 232– 33, 358n142, 360n180, 377n174 Northwestern Provinces (NWP), 236, 239, 300n33, 326n9, 355n113, 375n186. See also geography, by region: in Gangetic valley; maps, by region: in Gangetic valley; terrestrial globe, by region: in Gangetic valley

424 ·

Oakeley, Charles, 38, 51, 312n64. See also Tipu Sultan observatories, 5– 6, 41, 120– 21, 308n19, 314n94, 335n136 Oiseau, J., 42, 44 Omkar Bhatt, 130, 131, 137, 141, 144, 339n175, 343nn226– 27. See also Bhugolsar Orientalist, 26, 27, 28, 111, 125, 164, 248, 252, 253, 256, 258, 337n154, 375n179. See also Anglicist orrery, 44, 49, 51– 55, 60, 64, 72, 96, 123, 138, 157, 171, 172, 174, 194, 217, 233, 250, 261, 262, 274, 307n18, 309n34, 313n74, 313n82, 315n104, 317n122, 325n214, 336n139, 336n147, 337n152, 342n212, 371n130, 373n155 Ortelius, 20 Oudh, 120– 21, 155– 56, 250, 300n33, 326n9, 335n125, 336n139, 336n143. See also Lucknow; Paton, James Pachaiyappa’s Central Institution. See Pachaiyappa’s College Pachaiyappa’s College, 74, 86, 188 Palayamkottai, 66, 67, 317n132. See also Tirunelveli Palsetia, Jesse, 201 pandit, xix, 26, 91– 145, 165, 168, 170, 190, 255, 258, 265– 66, 267, 292, 327nn11– 12, 327n14, 333n92, 335n124, 337n155, 338n168, 338n171, 339nn174– 75, 341n203, 342n206, 344n208, 359n159, 371n131. See also Brahmans Parish, William, 105– 6 Parmanand. See Anand Masih Parsi, 176, 181, 182, 183, 186, 201, 202, 203, 204, 346n13, 347n30, 354n99, 356nn126– 27 Pather Panchali (film). See also Apu; Ray, Satyajit Pather Panchali (novel), 230, 233. See also Bandopadhyay, Bibhutibhushan Paton, James, 118– 25, 132, 138, 173, 248, 250, 335n135, 336nn142– 43, 336n145, 336n147. See also Oudh Pearce, W. H., 187, 236, 264, 268, 269, 270, 271, 342n206, 342n211, 375n189 Pearson, J. D., 268, 269, 270, 271, 365n44, 376n190 pedagogic modernity, xv, xviii, xix, 19, 29– 35, 41, 89, 98, 180, 197, 217, 256, 268, 283, 289, 291, 292, 315n106; agents of, 31, 291; defined, 30, 297n8. See also geography: and pedagogic modernity; maps: and pedagogic modernity; terrestrial globe: as master object of pedagogic modernity Persian, 59, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124, 126, 132, 137, 138, 236, 248, 251, 263, 267, 271, 272, 311n48, 312nn66– 67, 321n175, 323nn99– 100, 333n102, 369n99, 376n202. See also geography, school-

INDEX

books: in Persian; maps, by language: in Persian; terrestrial globe, by language: in Persian Peterson, Indira, 41, 47, 48, 62, 63, 65, 307n10, 307n15, 308n20, 310n37, 310n44, 311n48, 362n207 photographs, xviii, 25, 44, 298n21, 346n131, 360n202, 377n22. See also school photograph Phule, Jotiba, 359n154 Pinney, Christopher, 209, 346n10 Pinnock, William, 16, 43, 58, 166, 309n30, 348n39 planetarium, 44, 55, 245, 257, 310n35 planetary consciousness, xvi, xvii, xx, 17, 29, 195, 197, 212, 214, 223, 270, 282, 289, 292, 293. See also Modern Earth; Modern Sky Plütschau, Heinrich, 62. See also Tranquebar Mission pocket globe, 171, 256, 274, 370n122. See also terrestrial globe Poona, 34, 54, 55, 138, 139, 165, 172, 173, 178, 190, 196, 201, 211, 212, 338n172, 338n174, 359n154 Poona College, 174. See also Poona Sanskrit College Poona Sanskrit College, 170, 338n172, 351n72, 351n74 Poor, Daniel, 69, 319n148 Pope, George U., 309n31 Portuguese, 19– 20, 23, 62, 66, 302nn66– 67 Postans, Marianne, 172, 348n37, 355n117 Prakash, Gyan, 141 Pratt, Mary Louise, xvi Presidency College. See Hindu College (Calcutta) Protestant missionaries, 17, 40, 49, 83, 84, 93, 104, 125, 194– 95, 210; as cartographic evangelists, xix, 40– 41, 61– 82, 93– 94, 131, 246– 47, 326n8, 327n11, 331n74; and schooling, 28, 31, 32, 33, 62– 82, 93– 94, 110– 11, 115, 148, 149, 187– 91, 200, 237, 246– 48, 361n69. See also geography: and missionaries; maps: and missionaries; Serampore Mission; terrestrial globe: and missionaries; Tranquebar Mission Ptolemy, 20, 23, 27, 46, 109, 126, 128, 138, 253, 269, 301n56, 334n108, 337n157, 338n172 Pumicastiram, 67– 69, 318n135, 318n140, 321n175. See also Rhenius, Charles Pune. See Poona Punjab, 156, 194, 234, 323n200, 332n90, 345n8 Puranas, 27– 29, 49, 83, 84, 126, 133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 144, 190, 205, 241, 243, 246, 249, 284, 320n164, 338n172, 344n239, 368n89, 368n91 Puranic globe, 26, 56– 57, 61, 126– 27, 135– 36, 305n93, 314n94, 315n105, 344n239 Puranic Hinduism, 64, 76, 284– 91. See also Hinduism Puranic idolatry, 76, 145, 260, 305n101

INDEX

Raghaviah, P., 83– 84, 324n209 Raj, Kapil, 327n12, 371n131 Rajput, 23, 55, 56– 57, 314n89, 314n91, 342n205 Ramachandra, Yesudas, 113, 277 Ram Raz, 73. See also Madras School Book Society (MSBS) Ram Singh II, Maharao, 55– 61, 133, 314n89, 314n94, 315n101, 315nn104– 5, 339n179, 341n196, 341n199. See also Kotah Ray, Satyajit, 218, 220, 221, 223, 225, 229, 232, 233, 256, 261, 275– 76, 278– 79, 362n2, 363n3, 363nn12– 13, 363n18, 364n28, 378n226. See also Aparajito (film) Reeve, William, 318n135 Resalah Ilmi Urz, 111, 112, 333n102. See also geography, schoolbooks: in Hindustani Rhenius, Charles, 66– 69, 81, 83, 84, 317nn130– 32, 317n134, 318n135, 318n137, 318n142, 321n175. See also Pumicastiram Riello, Giorgio, xviii, 299n6 Roe, Sir Thomas, 25 Ross, Daniel, 175, 353n92. See also Bombay Geographical Society (BGS) Round World, 159– 60 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 293 Roy, Rammohun, 266– 67, 277, 375n191 Royal Asiatic Society (RAS), 47, 129, 176, 309n28 Royapettah Hindoo Female School (Madras), 188, 358n148 Rukmini Ammal, T., 358n148. See also Royapettah Hindoo Female School (Madras) Rushdie, Salman, 293 Sagar, 9– 11, 123, 124, 129, 138, 337n152, 342n212. See also Krishna Rau; Paton, James Sai, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 292, 362n218 Said, Edward, xvii Sanskrit, 6, 23, 24, 27– 29, 83, 84, 109, 111, 118, 125, 126, 129, 130, 133, 135, 137, 138, 139– 40, 141, 142, 144, 165, 211, 212, 241, 248, 249, 258, 267, 311n48, 318n136, 337n154, 343n219, 343n224, 344n239, 350n51, 351n72, 351n74, 366n65, 368n89, 371n131, 373n152, 376n191 Sarbojaya, 218, 220, 223– 25, 226, 228, 230, 275, 363n12. See also Apu Sartorius, Johann, 62– 63 Sarvasiddhantatattvacudamani, 139– 40. See also Siddhantas Schmidt, Rudolf, 5– 6, 9– 10, 299n23, 300n28, 300n30 Schmitt, Carl, xvi schoolbook. See geography, schoolbooks

· 425

schoolbook societies. See Agra School Book Society; Bombay Native Education Society (BNES); Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS); Madras School Book Society (MSBS); Murdoch, John school globe. See terrestrial globe: in European schools; terrestrial globes: in native schools schooling. See astronomy: in native schools; atlas: in native schools; English East India Company (EIC): and native education; General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI); geography: in native schools; geography, schoolbooks, maps: in native schools; pedagogic modernity; schoolbook societies; terrestrial globe: in native schools school photograph, xix, 143– 45, 147– 48, 150– 59, 161– 64, 182– 84, 186, 198– 200, 201, 203, 206– 9, 234– 35, 344n233, 346n10, 346n13, 346n16, 347n30, 360n169, 360n179, 362n204, 367n80 Schools for Mahratta Brahmin Girls, Bombay, 184– 86. See also Simpson, William Schwartz, Christian Friedrich, 39, 42, 64, 65, 81, 220, 307n9, 309n31, 311n55; and schooling, 40, 44, 64; and Serfoji, 28, 41, 49, 64, 220, 309n30; the Tanjore Mission, 64, 66 Schwartz, Joan, 158 Schwartzberg, Joseph, 6 science education, 17, 26, 28– 29, 31, 34, 41– 42, 64, 132, 141, 233, 276, 278, 321n175, 371n131. See also useful knowledge Scientific Dialogues. See Joyce, Jeremiah Scientific Mother, 101– 2, 191, 195, 201 Sehore, 129, 130, 131, 133, 136– 39, 142, 145, 191, 229, 253, 255, 337n166, 340n184, 342n206, 343n226. See also Bhopal Serampore, 124, 239, 240, 367n67 Serampore College, 241, 245, 257, 367nn78– 80. See also Serampore Mission Serampore Mission, 239– 46, 249, 270, 284, 332n83, 335n127, 338n172, 364n29; and geography books, 115, 116, 117, 241– 46, 268– 69, 358n144, 366n64, 375n85; and schooling, 239– 46, 358n144, 364n29, 366n56, 367n68; and terrestrial globe, 244– 46, 358n144, 367n80 Serfoji, 37– 50, 63, 65, 83, 84, 109, 267, 306n2, 311n47, 311n55, 315n106; collecting practices, 308nn19– 22, 308n26, 309n28, 309n33, 310n39, 311n54; relationship with Schwartz, 37– 41; support for schools, 40, 47– 48, 307n17, 310n44, 311n46, 311n48, 320n167; and the terrestrial globe, 37– 38, 41, 44– 50, 51, 53, 60, 220, 256, 292, 307n18, 308n19, 309nn31– 32, 310n36. See also Tanjore Shankarshet, Jagannath, 182, 183, 186

426 ·

Sharma, Rakesh, xx, 298n26 Sharp, Sir Henry, 159, 234, 235, 305n109, 347n28, 347n121 Shastree, Ramachandra, 168 Sherwood, Henry, 97, 104, 250, 329n42 Sherwood, Mary Martha, 91– 93, 94– 100, 102– 5, 110, 191, 192, 194, 229, 292, 325n2, 326n6, 328nn31– 32, 329n42; and Anand Masih, 91– 93, 94– 100, 102– 5, 106, 108, 109, 123, 229, 292, 325n1, 326n3, 326nn5– 6, 327n11, 327n16, 328n22, 329n42, 330n43, 330n48, 331nn71– 73, 331n75, 331n76, 332n86; as Evangelical author, 92, 97– 99, 102– 3, 326n4, 329n34, 329nn39– 40, 330nn60– 62; private papers, 325n2, 326n3, 327n11, 327n16, 328n29 Shivaji, 43, 44, 310n36 Shivaprasad, 76, 344n235. See also Bhugolhastamalaka Shteir, Ann, 101. See also Scientific Mother Siddhantas, 23, 27– 28, 57, 109, 126, 129, 130, 133– 34, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 253, 305n93, 338n172, 339n174, 343n216. See also Hindu astronomy ( jyotisastra) Siddhanta Siromani, 133, 141. See also Bhaskaracharya Sihura. See Sehore Simpson, William, 184– 87, 357n132, 357nn137– 38 Sinclair, R. S., 176, 353n97 Sinclair & Halifax Academy, 263 Sinha, Suryanandini, 206 Sivasundaram, Sujit, 109, 367n78 Sloterdijk, Peter, 297n9 Smith, William, 51, 312n65. See also Madras Male Orphan Asylum; Tipu Sultan Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 39, 40, 62, 64, 73, 307n17, 316n113, 319n158, 321n175. See also Protestant missionaries; Tranquebar Mission Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), 267, 369n114, 370n115, 375n183 Society for the Education of the Poor. See Bombay Education Society Somerville, Mary, 96, 144, 191, 192, 201, 202, 328n28, 344n238 Sontag, Susan, 360n202 South India Christian School Book Society, 80. See also Murdoch, John Spivak, Gayatri, xvi, xvii, 277, 306n125 Stark, Ulrike, 345n8 Stewart, James, 250, 367n82, 367n83 Streenivasa Charry, 88– 89, 325n225 Students’ Literary and Scientific Society (SLSS), 182, 183, 185, 186, 187, 202, 205, 356n124, 356nn126– 27 Subaji Bapu, 129– 31, 137, 139, 141– 42, 338n168, 338n170, 338nn171– 72, 339nn174– 75, 339n178,

INDEX

343n227. See also Omkar Bhatt; Wilkinson, Lancelot Subramanya Aiyar, N., 86– 88 Surat, 24, 164, 351n72 Symonds, A. R., 88 Tagore, Dwarkanath, 336n139, 374n167 Tamil, 22, 47, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76– 78, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 180, 192, 198, 199, 270, 278, 303n76, 317nn130– 32, 318nn135– 37, 318nn140– 41, 321nn171– 72, 321n175, 322n183, 323n199, 324n203, 324n210, 325n211. See also geography, schoolbooks: in Tamil; maps, by language: in Tamil; terrestrial globe, by language: in Tamil Tanjavur. See Tanjore Tanjore, 37, 39, 40, 42, 49, 64, 65, 229, 306n2, 309n28, 309nn31– 32, 311n54; and schooling, 47, 64– 65, 309n31, 310n44, 311n46. See also Serfoji Tanjore Mission, 64, 65, 66. See also Schwartz, Christian Friedrich Tarkhadkar, Dadoba Pandurang. See Dadoba Pandurang Tassin, J. B., 167, 273, 377n205. See also atlas tellurian. See orrery Telugu, 72, 73, 74, 84, 87, 89, 130, 188, 306n2, 318n135, 321nn171– 72 terrestrial globe: in artworks, 13– 14, 15, 24, 25, 46– 47, 101, 114– 15, 139– 40, 158– 59, 261, 300nn38– 39, 330n57; in cinema, xx, 218– 29, 275, 276, 279, 378n226; defined, xiv, xviii, 16, 106, 329n37; Dutch manufacturers of, 4, 13, 24, 304n84; Edinburgh manufacturers of, 39, 44, 191, 245; as elite object, xv, xvii, xx, 2, 6– 8, 12– 13, 42, 45, 50, 261, 267, 299n25, 300nn37– 39, 304n83, 313n86, 315nn100– 101, 354n107; and empire, xviii, xix, xx, 3, 17, 18– 19, 24– 25, 29, 30, 34, 37– 39, 40, 50– 61, 62, 93– 94, 101, 110, 129– 30, 145, 150– 51, 153, 246– 47, 253– 55, 277, 292– 93, 298n13, 305n101, 314n90, 315n106, 339n179, 354n103; in European schools, xviii, 1– 2, 14– 18, 40, 102, 157– 58, 301n40, 301n49; and girls, xiii– xiv, xix– xx, 147– 215, 245, 292, 355n115, 358n144, 358n147, 360n171, 374n170; and Indian royals, xix, 19– 26, 37– 61, 113– 15, 133– 37, 175, 217, 304n82, 304n89, 310n36, 312n58, 314n90, 314n91, 315nn100– 101, 315n105, 315n106, 339n179, 341n199; London makers of, 39, 44, 50, 151, 257, 301n57, 307nn6– 7, 313n86, 315n95, 345n1, 346n16, 347n29, 348n31, 350n52, 353n94, 354n103, 360n104, 365n37, 369n104, 371n130, 373n151; makers of, 4, 13, 15, 18, 39,

INDEX

44, 50, 75, 151, 301nn56– 57, 307nn6– 7, 313n86, 315n95, 330n56, 345n1, 346n14, 346n16, 347n29, 348n31, 350n52, 353n94, 365n37, 369n104, 371n130, 373n151, 375n183; as makeshift object, xiv, xvi, 8– 11, 12, 32, 62– 63, 82, 85, 106, 174– 75, 178, 193, 220, 232, 275, 300n32, 300n33, 316n115, 322n183, 325n214, 330n45, 344n239; as master object of pedagogic modernity, xiv, xv– xviii, 4, 13– 19, 29– 35, 41, 45– 46, 109– 10, 148– 50, 180, 256, 275– 79, 291– 94, 301n40, 305n101, 312n64; and missionaries, xix, 19– 24, 38, 39– 40, 41, 44, 47, 49– 50, 61– 82, 93, 106, 126– 27, 128– 29, 187– 88, 191, 237, 238, 244– 45, 264, 309n31, 314n90, 316n107, 337n153, 337n165, 339n176, 353n85, 354n103, 358n144, 367n80, 370n115, 374n170, 375n183; in native schools, xix– xx, 9– 12, 16, 31– 32, 34, 39– 41, 44, 47, 48, 62– 63, 65, 67, 69, 70– 71, 72, 74– 75, 77– 79, 81– 82, 85– 86, 87– 88, 93, 103, 106, 111– 13, 115, 119– 20, 122– 23, 124– 25, 128– 29, 131, 132, 135, 136– 38, 141, 143– 45, 147– 48, 150– 56, 162– 64, 167, 169, 171– 75, 176, 177, 178, 180, 191, 197, 201, 205– 9, 218– 22, 232– 36, 237, 238, 244– 45, 249– 61, 262– 64, 273– 75, 300n33, 301n49, 309n31, 316n107, 318n137, 320n159, 333n99, 334n104, 336n145, 336n147, 337n152, 337n153, 340n184, 341n199, 342n207, 346n12, 350n65, 351n70, 353n85, 353n87, 354n100, 355n115, 358n144, 358n147, 359n159, 365n32, 367n80, 368nn95– 96, 370nn115– 17, 370n122, 371nn130– 31, 372nn138– 39, 374n163, 374n165, 374n170; in novels, xiii– xvii, 210– 15, 232, 293– 94, 379n22; and planetary consciousness, xv– xvii, xviii, xx, 17– 19, 45– 46, 109– 10, 246, 281, 291– 94, 301n56, 312n64; and women, xix, 13, 14– 15, 71, 92– 93, 96, 98– 104, 108, 109, 110, 194– 99, 205, 221– 26, 228– 29, 275, 292, 300n39, 329n37, 330n45, 330n56, 330n62. See also celestial globe; geography; gift: of globes and maps; inflatable globe; Modern Earth; pocket globe terrestrial globe, by language: in Bengali, 12, 260, 274– 75, 300n33, 358n147; in Gujarati, 174; in Hindi, 4– 12, 24; in Hindustani, 12; in Marathi, 12, 174, 177, 353n87; in Persian, 333n100; in Tamil, 22, 62– 63, 303n76, 318n137 terrestrial globe, by region: in Bengal, xx, 12, 123, 187, 188, 196– 97, 217– 75, 301n49, 313n82, 336n145, 351n66, 363n16, 367n80, 368nn95– 96, 370n115, 370n122, 371nn130– 31, 372nn138– 39, 374n163, 374n165, 374n170, 377n219; in Bombay, xix, 12, 53– 55, 147– 48, 150– 53, 162– 87, 191, 201– 9, 213– 15, 313n82, 346n14, 350n65, 351n70, 353nn94– 95, 353n97, 354nn99– 100,

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terrestrial globe, by region (continued) 354n103, 354n107, 355n115; in Burma, 315n106; in central India, 9, 123– 24, 132– 33, 137– 39, 337n152, 339n179, 342n207, 359n159; in Ceylon, 319n148, 339n176; in China, 302n60, 302n68, 303n75, 313n86, 317n122, 360n171; in Europe, xiv– xv, xvii– xviii, xx, 1– 3, 4, 6, 7, 12– 19, 24, 25, 40, 45– 46, 61, 62, 97– 99, 100– 102, 157– 59, 300nn37– 39, 301n40, 301n46, 301n49, 301n56, 301n57, 302n64, 316n115, 329n37, 330n45, 330n56, 330n62; in Gangetic valley, xix, 12, 92– 129, 139, 141– 45, 155, 252, 254, 300n32, 333n99, 334n104, 336n147, 337n153, 354n103, 370n115; in Islamic world, 302n64; in Japan, 302n60, 302n68, 304n83; in Korea, 302n60; in Madras, xix, 37– 89, 180, 193, 194– 95, 300n33, 301n49, 307n7, 308n19, 320n159, 322n184, 325n214; and Ottoman court, 304n83; in Siam, 195– 96; in the United States, 15, 16, 158– 59, 315n106, 330n45; in West Africa, 159, 315n106, 322n183, 347n26 terrestrial lessons. See geography terrestrial sphericity, xv, xvii, xviii, 9, 18, 28, 32, 86, 99, 116, 131, 133, 134, 141, 150, 153, 158, 162, 167, 195, 197, 213, 225, 266, 269, 282, 283, 293, 309n33, 323n199, 326n8, 327n11, 351n72. See also Earth; Modern Earth; planetary consciousness; terrestrial globe Thing theory, 3 Thomas, Julia, 192– 94 Thomason, James, 236, 257 Thomason, Thomas, 104, 368n93 Thompson, J. T., 115– 18, 242, 334n116, 334n118, 335n124 Tinnevelly. See Tirunelveli Tipu Sultan, 38– 39, 51, 54, 312n67, 313n79 Tirunelveli, 189, 318n140 Topping, Michael, 41, 308n19 Torin, Benjamin, 42, 44, 308n22, 308n26, 309n32, 311n54 Tranquebar. See Tranquebar Mission Tranquebar Mission, 39, 40, 41, 43, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 316n109, 316n118 Trevelyan, Charles, 252– 53, 369n110 Triamback, Pandurang, 174– 75, 353n86 Trimbuck, Wanum, 12, 353n87 Trimmer, Sarah, 73, 102, 329n37 Tucker, Charlotte, 194– 95 Tucker, Sarah, 366n57 Turner, R., 168, 349n49 United States, 15, 16, 30, 148, 158, 210, 214, 225– 26, 272, 273, 298n17, 330n45, 346n21. See also American missionaries

428 ·

Urdu. See Hindustani Urdu textbooks. See geography, schoolbooks: in Hindustani useful knowledge, xvii, xix, 26, 28, 29, 30, 34, 43, 47, 48, 59, 68, 72, 84, 87, 94, 110, 111, 116, 151, 164, 166, 167, 168, 182, 192, 194, 209, 231, 240, 246, 248, 253, 257, 265, 283, 298n18, 330n44, 335n119, 337n166. See also Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) use of the globes, 16, 17– 18, 33, 39, 46, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 87, 101, 112, 113, 128, 139, 141, 169, 172, 174, 177, 180, 201, 238, 249, 251, 252, 256, 259, 263, 264, 301n49, 310n39, 315n106, 320n159, 320n165, 337n165, 350n65, 369n99, 372n139, 374n165. See also terrestrial globe: in European schools; terrestrial globe: as master object of pedagogic modernity; terrestrial globe: in native schools van der Krogt, 1, 301n42 Vandopadhyay, Krishna Mohan, 270 Vedadrisadasan, T., 69, 180– 81, 319n150, 355n117, 355n119 Vedanayaka Sastri, 65, 317n128 Velupillai, J. M., 76 Vepery, 65, 71, 319n158, 320n160, 321n175 Vepery Academy, 71 Vepery Mission, 41, 307n17 Verri, Antonio, 158 Vienna Universal Exhibition, 12, 150– 51, 153, 162, 204, 207, 238, 275, 346n12, 353n87. See also international exhibitions Viswanathan, Gauri, 29, 305n108, 375n185 Ward, William, 240, 257. See also Serampore Mission Warden, Francis, 170 Wilkinson, John, 171 Wilkinson, Lancelot, 60, 94, 121, 129– 42, 173, 191, 241, 248, 249, 253, 284, 338n169, 340n180; Kotah years, 60– 61, 133– 36; and native education, 132, 135, 136– 39, 191, 340nn181– 82, 340nn184– 85, 341nn196– 97, 341n199, 341n201, 342nn205– 7, 359n159; relationship with native astronomers, 129– 42, 338n168, 338nn170– 72, 339n175, 341n203, 343n226, 343n230; in Sehore (Bhopal), 132– 33, 136– 42, 191, 253, 340n183, 341n201; and Siddhantas, 133– 41, 343n216, 343n224; and terrestrial globe, 60– 61, 129– 31, 135, 137, 138, 139, 315n105, 339n179, 340n184, 341n199, 342n207, 342nn210– 12, 359n159. See also Bapudeva Sastri; Omkar Bhatt; Subaji Bapu Wilkinson, Michael, 103, 109, 327n11

INDEX

Wilkinson, Robert, 46 Williams, Raymond, 297n7 Wilson, Daniel, 106, 332n86, 332n89 Wilson, H. H., 256, 305n98, 370n124, 372n138 Wilson, Issac, 192 Wilson, John, 190– 91, 359n154 Wilson, Margaret, 191, 192, 193, 359nn156– 57 Wilson, Richard, 158 Withers, Charles, 13, 96, 98, 159 Woolaston, M. W., 112, 270 worlding, xvi, xx, 17, 209, 212, 215, 222, 293, 298n13, 340n180, 362n1, 364n28 world map, 32, 44, 59, 73, 76, 111, 118– 19, 138, 163, 167, 171, 174, 177, 214, 238, 251, 264, 300n32, 300n39, 301n42, 333n99, 349n46, 349n49, 360n179, 369n99, 376n199

INDEX

Wright, Gilbert, 37, 307n7 Wyld, James, 86 Xavier, Jerome, 20, 301n59 Yates, William, 268, 269 Young, James, 245, 367n80 Young, Marianne. See Postans, Marianne Young, Richard Fox, 190, 315n104, 324n209, 335n133, 337n167, 338n171, 339n178, 343n227 Young Bengal, 260 Zakaullah, 113, 277 Zenana Reader, 194– 95. See also Tucker, Charlotte Ziegenbalg, Bartholomaüs, 62. See also Tranquebar Mission

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