See chapter one, pp 60.

communicate the principles of western positivist empiricism. In the introductions to their works, writers and translators often referred to the laws of Newton and Copernicus as forming the basis of their investigations. According to these principles, texts began with a description of the globe, its shape and various terra-aqueous divisions followed by a description of the world divided into continents and nations.56 The Bhugol Darpana, for instance, sets forth a straightforward list of political divisions followed by another of cities, rivers, mountains and so on. In this case conceptual/political categories were listed alongside physical categories thus naturalising the former to appear consistent with the latter. ‘National’ territories were also defined in terms of their ‘other5 spaces, or the nations that lay externally to their borders. Hindustan, which was described as the territory which the British had inherited from the Mughals was represented as an historical nation whose various parts had been united during the time of the Mughal

57

empire.

Despite an unequivocal projection of political space as being both exclusive and unambiguous in its form of sovereignty, several aspects of these early texts indicate that the mediation of western scientific knowledge into the indigenous sphere was not enacted without some slippage, both in the information transmitted and in the process of translation. In the case of Hindustan and, more specifically the Gangetic Provinces, many of the texts displayed an inconsistency and vagueness regarding the representation of political and administrative divisions. The Bhugol Darpana described the Gangetic Provinces as consisting of Bengal, Bihar, Ilahabad, Avadh, Agra and Delhi. Within this division moreover each region had several major cities. Those of Bengal were Calcutta, Dhaka and Murshidabad; those of Bihar were Azimabad, Ilahabad, Banaras, Azimgarh, Jivanpur and Ghazipur.58 While the author does not refer to the source from which he has drawn this division it is clear that he is not following any colonial division of the region since at the time of publication the cities of Ilahabad, Banaras, Azimgarh and Ghazipur were all part of the colonial province of the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency. Furthermore, while Bengal, Bihar and Awadh were all substantial

56 This is the order o f most o f the early texts such as Bhugol Darpana (Mirror o f Geography), Calcutta, 1835; Jyotish aur Goladhyaya (Astronomy and Geography), Serampore, 1822; Pt Ratnalal, Bhugol

Darpana, Calcutta, 1838.

57 Bhugol Darpana, 1835, p. 40.

regions in their own right, Ilahabad, Agra and Delhi were merely individual districts of the new North Western Provinces.

A second text also called Bhugol Darpana demonstrates a similar tone of confusion and inconsistency regarding the correct provincial and regional divisions. In this text the author claims that at the time of the emperor Akbar Upper Hindustan had been divided into eleven regions, or pradesh, and while the boundaries of these divisions had since changed the names had remained the same.59 The author then goes on to claim that the British territories of Hindustan included the Bengal, Madras and Bombay

presidencies. Within the Bengal presidency were Bihar, Avadh, Orissa as well as Agra, Delhi and Allahabad. Bengal itself was divided into six administrative districts, or zila, which included Calcutta, Murshidabad, Dhaka, Patna, Banaras and Bareilly! It is clear from these examples that the relatively recent changes to colonial administrative and provincial divisions had not been thoroughly absorbed by the composers of geography textbooks. In many of the early texts in fact the adoption of the Mughal term suba to indicate province indicates their archaic influences, since this term had been abandoned some years before as an administrative division. The early period in which these texts were produced suggests that a degree of vagueness as to administrative divisions still persisted both in colonial and, more understandably, in indigenous circles. The level of collaboration moreover between colonial administrators involved in education and native textbook writers is unclear in this period. Nevertheless, we see that whereas on the one hand new concepts of political space are represented, incorporating modem notions of political boundaries as an indication of absolute and exclusive sovereignty, on the other the representation of the internal divisions of Hindustan often turned out to be closer to the inherited Mughal divisions than the new provinces of British India.

Bearing in mind that most vernacular texts from this early period were translations of English originals a further disruption to the smooth transmission of western geographical knowledge into the sphere of colonial education is apparent in the inadequacy and inconsistency of the vernacular terminology used to convey western geographical and political concepts. The word bhugol was a combination of the Sanskrit

58 Ibid, p.30.

term bhu, meaning land, earth or ground and the term go/, meaning round or globe. There were no terms to convey the idea of ‘geography’ as an independent science, distinct from astronomy and astrology. Words like desk, jagat, pradesh, mulk, prant. and so on which had a broad and variable meaning in their indigenous usage which was determined by context and even by the social position of the audience being addressed,60 were henceforth employed in these texts to refer to modem political categories such as nation, region, state and globe. This collision of old and new meanings emerged in the use of a single term to denote several different concepts. For example, the word desh was used to mean country or nation as well as a small locality or village. The general direction of this translation process however was more often from a multiple and contingent meaning to a singular and exclusive one. Thus the mediation of western science into the public realm depended on the taxonomies and vocabularies of vernacular languages and their regional idioms.

That the remnants of older, pre-modern categories of space and environment appeared, albeit inconsistently, in textual representations of new forms of knowledge is not altogether surprising when one considers both the early period in which the texts were written and the social and educational background of their authors. Despite the patronage of their British employers and their role as mediators of the new knowledge these men had all received a traditional education and remained more or less rooted in their own cultural environment. Bapu Deva Shastri’s text, Bhugol Varnan, published in Mirzapur in 1853 encompasses an interesting example of the mediation of traditional Sanskrit based knowledge in the new political and cultural context of western education and learning. In his introduction Bapu Deva claimed that he was moved to write such a text by the general ignorance he encountered amongst the people, both of their own region and of their country.61 Certainly the conventional list of topics to be covered in the introduction - the physical co-ordinates of countries, their languages, customs, raw materials and manufactured goods and their arts - does not indicate the content to be anything different to the empirically driven compendia of British geographies.

60 For an argument about the social context of pre-colonial language use see David Washbrook, ‘To Each a Language o f his Own’: Language, Culture and Society in Colonial India’, in P.J. Corfield, ed.,

Language, History and Class, Oxford, 1991.

61 Bhugol Varnan, Mirzapur, 1853, p. 1.

Nevertheless, from the outset Bapu Deva’s text suggests a more complex negotiation of older, specifically classical and shastric-based, notions of space and environment alongside the newer designations of western scientific geography. For example, in the first and largest section of the work, on India, Bapu Deva employs the Sanskrit term Bharatvarsha to denote the country in addition to the more popular term Hindustan. His explanation of the meaning of the term, furthermore, was based 011 the Puranic notion

that Bharatvarsh was so called because it referred to the land that once belonged to Raja Bharat. This reference was then elaborated in his description of Bharatvarsh as being in the shape of a triangle with its base in the north, across the Himalayas, and its apex in the south; a description which mirrored that in the Mahabharata of Bharatvarsh as being in the shape of an equilateral triangle that was divided internally into four smaller triangles representing different regions of the subcontinent. The second term he uses, Hindustan, also involved the grafting of an older definition of cultural and religious space onto a modem conception of national territory. Hindustan, he claimed, was the term used more recently to refer to the land occupied by the Hindus. In Bapu Deva’s usage both terms have been applied to the concept of a political territorial unit, but the former which he used in his title, denotes a more explicitly Hindu religious and cultural context.

After this introduction to the terms used to refer to India Bapu Deva gave a region by region description of the subcontinent. Each one is noted for its climate, topography, agriculture, trade, customs and languages. Throughout this section the author continued to import older categories of space and cultural notions of land and people into the new territorial divisions. Regions are divided internally by the different types of land that characterise them. Distinctions are made between hilly areas and plains, riverine and dry territories. The author demonstrates a detailed knowledge of places, the various types of agriculture that are practised, the raw and manufactured materials of each province and the customs and habits of the people that inhabit them. In contrast to the format of other geography texts however little mention is made of the political condition of each region, its government and system of rule; instead places are noted for their local produce, their markets, trade, religious significance, their pilgrimage

places and historical importance. In the north, the city of Allahabad is noted for its significance in the Hindu shastra. Its name prior to the Muslim empire was Prayag and along with Varanasi or Kashi, now known as Banaras, it is considered to be a holy (param pavitra sthan) and merit-giving (punya kshetra) place for those pilgrims who visit it. There are eight thousand Brahmin households in Kashi and the city has been famous for its excellence in all the branches of Hindu learning since ancient times. Also in the north, the colonial district of Agra which is divided into five smaller divisions is noted for its historical significance. Nearby is the ancient Hindu city of Kannauj, once a centre of Hindu political power and the pilgrimage centres of Mathura and Vrindavan, sacred to the gods Krishna and Radha. The region of Bihar is noted for its links to the ancient past: the southern part was once the powerful Hindu kingdom of Magadha, while the northern portion was Mitthila, birthplace of the Buddha. Tirhut is a famous place in this district as it is renowned for the learning of its Brahmins who are versed in Nyaya and Jyotish. Avadh, still an independent kingdom, is called by its Sanskrit name, Uttarakosala, and is famous for the city of Ayodhya.

To what precise degree Bapu Deva employed modem classifications of political and economic space, or not, is difficult to ascertain. The point is that his text reveals a complex array of influences which included those of European interpretations of Indian/Hindu culture as well as European ideas about climate and race, and he attached to these indigenous social and moral meanings. In the account of the Gangetic Provinces the author distinguished between certain types of environment and the concomitant nature and disposition of the inhabitants. In the flat, marshy lands in the north of Bihar, known as the terai, wild animals are in abundance and regularly destroy the

neighbouring crops. The people here are also described as being physically strong and resilient in contrast to the people of other less demanding environments.63 This

connection between climate, topography and human disposition which the author makes draws on older conceptions of the influence of the environment and ecology.64 In the

63 In other areas also the author notes how the disposition o f the inhabitants has adapted to their

envimoraent so that the cultivators in the eastern part o f Agra district have become tough and skillful due to the aridity o f the land, Bhugol Varnan, p. 47.

64 Francis Zimmerman has demonstrated how classical distinctions between wet and dry zones, cultivated and waste lands and the perceived effect o f the environment on human behaviour and temperament

classical Sanskrit texts, which dealt largely in a prescriptive capacity with certain types of space, the designation of land as jungle (jangala) or forest iyand) carried a certain moral and social meaning. The attitudes to specific categories of space no doubt shifted with time as a result of migration, new technologies and conquest. Thus in later

medieval and early modem texts the designation of jangala to wild and uncultivated land differed from that of its earlier more positive connotation. This term also carried the sense of being uncivilised.65 Equally, the description of land as forested, at different points in time, carried a particular socio-political meaning. It referred, alternatively, to the habitation of the barbarous (atavi) and the civilised (vana). When understood as barbarous, or uncivilised, it was often used in opposition to the notion of country as being land which was populated (janapada).66 In the classical texts the opposition between populated and unpopulated land carried political significance since the former designated the type of land that was appropriate for kings.67

Once again it is impossible to say exactly how far Bapu Deva carried these classical distinctions of land, climate zones and environment into the western designation of geographical domains. What is more many of the designations and associations made here were already current in European thinking about environment and human disposition. Orientalists had already several decades earlier unearthed many of the sites of ancient capitals in the region and their historical and cultural significance and it is difficult to know how far Bapu Deva would have been influenced by these 'discoveries'. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that a Sanskrit scholar such as he would not have been aware of the classical Sanskrit allusions to them and this is apparent in his own divisions of land and territory. Perhaps what we have here is a level of conjuncture, where ideas and moral evaluations come together from a wide variety of sources, both 'indigenous' and ‘colonial’, and often serve to support and reinforce one another.68 Thus

informed the medical principles o f ayurveda. The Jungle and the Aroma o f Meats, An Ecological Theme in

Hindu Medecine, Berkeley, University o f California Press, 1982, Chapters 1-3.

65 David Ludden has pointed out the changing attitudes to different types o f land and space from classical to medieval and modem times in Indian history. See ‘Archaic Formations o f Agricultural Knowledge in South India’, in Meanings o f Agriculture, Essays in South Asian H istoiy an d Economics, ed. Peter Robb, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 35-70.

66 Zimmermen, The Jungle and the Aroma o f Meats, pp. 49-50.

67 Kautilya, Arthashastra, ed. L.N, Rangarajan, N ew Delhi, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 178-194. 68 For instance, the long held connotations o f forests and uninhabited lands as wild and uncivilised in European folklore and culture.

throughout the regional descriptions distinctions are made between cultivated and uncultivated areas, their respective levels of population and, less overtly, the level of civilisation of their inhabitants. In Bhagalpur, for instance, which the author describes as a wild and uncultivated area of Bihar, there is only a sparse population and little

civilisation.

Educated within the Sanskritic tradition, and no doubt, familiar with many of the Sanskrit works on polity (niti) and medecine (ayurveda) it is most likely that Bapu Deva would have been familiar with the classical designations of ecological frontiers, the distinctions made in all areas of moral and social life between wet and dry zones, and that these concepts would have appeared in his own representations of Indian space and environment. The tenacity of these concepts is further maintained by their appearance, albeit in a highly repressed form, in other geographical texts which adhered to a more overtly ‘colonial’ taxonomy. Raja Shiva Prasad’s Bhugola Hastamalik published in 1859 began with an outright refutation and derision of the puranic notions of geography and an exaltation of Newtonian science.69 Drawing attention in his introduction to the British sources on which he had based his work he proceeded to divide the world into

hemispheres, continents and nations, each with their distinct boundaries, populations and languages.70 His section on the North Western Provinces described the province in tenns of the thirty one districts and their separate administrative divisions.71 Even so, despite this overtly ‘scientific’ and rational approach to his subject matter it appears that Shiva Prasad still imported some of the older classifications of land and people into his work. Like the eighteenth century topographical works which went into elaborate detail on the climate, fruit, grains, cloths and so on specific to each region, Prasad’s work contained a large spectrum of information on plants, animals, minerals, dress, manners, customs, religion and literature of each area. Moreover there were subtle allusions to the

distinctive character and behaviour of people from different regions. In the hill districts

69 Bhugola Hastamalik, Benares, 1859, p. 1, 70 Ibid, pp. 2-5.

71 Ibid, pp. 22-3.

72 Indigenous topographical works from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century also linked climates, places, products, the essences o f the people and the prevalence o f learning and virtue. In his account o f Gorakhpur Mufti Ghulam Hazrat stated that the hills and waters o f the Terai in the northern part o f Gorakhpur gave the area its particular human and moral configuration. In one division water and

of Uttarakhand, the author stated, ‘situated between the Ganga and the Sindhu rivers [the people] are fair and attractive and straight and true5.73

In his study of agricultural knowledge in south India in the nineteenth century David Ludden has argued that most of the indigenous traditions concerning particular attitudes towards or concepts of space were not textualised until the nineteenth century when they were collected and incorporated into colonial texts relating to discrete disciplines of agriculture and geography. In this way many of the terns used to refer to particular kinds of space lost their original meaning in the de-contextualising process that occurred with textualisation. Irrespective however of the very real confusion over tenns and terminology in their texts and the equally unavoidable problems of translation from one epistemic system into another quite different context, the agents of colonial geography, both British and Indian, served to mediate a complex amalgam of ideas concerning notions of space and environment into their texts. While on the one hand Orientalist interpretations of Hindu geography and history appear in conjunction with the more ‘scientific5 expressions of political geography, it is possible and indeed highly likely that these authors also incorporated in their texts the older indigenous conceptions of space which had persisted as valuable repositories of archaic knowledge well into the