Exploring our archives

Today I’ve escaped from the depth of the Royal Society archive to the lofty heights of the British Library map room to look at a map made by James Rennell entitled ‘A map of Hindoostan or the Mogul Empire from the latest authorities’. The map was dedicated to Joseph Banks, who was President of the Royal Society at the time of its publication in 1788.

Rennell was first Surveyor-General of India appointed by the East India Company in 1767. Rennell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1781, around which time he also published two accounts of his mapping experiences in Bengal and the empire of the ‘great Mogul’. These make it clear that Rennell compiled his map using a wide range of informants, including Indian and British soldiers, missionaries, and local people as well as the tables compiled of districts under the Emperor Akbar, who ruled India for the last half of the sixteenth century and who had used them to levy taxes.

The map itself is a beautiful creation and tells us a lot about European conception of India at the time. Of course this is true for any attempt at cartographical representation; as Siddharth Varadarajan points out in his essay India Tertia and the mapping of the colonial imaginary ‘in the very act of rendering intelligible the world with lines and shapes on stone, parchment or vellum – is always and everywhere an attempt to fashion new social boundaries and domains from the arid reality of geography.’

Rennell’s map is particularly interesting from this perspective as it is positioned on the boundaries of ‘modern’ methods of map-making, including the method of triangulation developed by his contemporary William Topping, and the older reliance on a collation of previous authorities and local informants. The idea of shifting boundaries and regions of influence is also evident in the map: Rennell shows both the subas, the divisions used by the geographical tables of Akbar in 1598 and the new divisions labeled according to their current rulers. These overlapping boundaries are distinguished by different typeface giving the map an almost three-dimensional effect. The scale of the map also speaks of transition and borrowing; adegree is given in reference to ‘Geographic miles’, ‘British miles’, ‘Cosses of Hindoostan’, ‘Carnatic Cosses’ and ‘Pliny’s road map, reduced to horizontal distance’.

The map retains many of the blank spaces that were said to have inspired Conrad’s hero: a large area of the interior is marked ‘unexplored by Europeans’ and the Coast between Bombay (Mumbai) and Goa is dubbed ‘pirate coast’. The blank spaces are also strategic, however, and the exceptions often reveal the commercial interests of Rennell’s employers, the East India Company. For example most of Burma is blank apart from the painstaking depiction of the area of ‘teek (teak) forests’ in the south. Such forests were always of interest to the European merchants given rising concerns about provision of wood for shipping.

Rennell produced many other maps, including the one below which shows the currents and patterns of wind as an aid to the circumvention of Africa. Oceanography was another subject on which Rennell corresponded with the Royal Society, writing to Blagden to ask for further information about the gulf stream.

Rennell’s connection with the Royal Society followed from an interest of many of the members in cartography and a concern to produce accurate maps for seafarers. This had been evident since their involvement with incomplete the ‘English Atlas’ project of Moses Pitt between c. 1675 and 1683. As Banks wished when he presented Rennell with the Copley medal, the map of India went on to inspire other large-scale projects of this nature, including the mapping of England.

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