The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  Nain Singh left Lhasa in April along with a Ladakhi caravan and headed west for 800 km along the River Tsangpo. All along, he kept taking readings in secret. After two months, he slipped away on his own and made his way back to India through the sacred Mansarovar Lake. He came back to the Survey of India headquarters on 27 October 1866. During his twenty-one-month adventure, he had surveyed thousands of kilometers, taken thirty-one latitude fixes and determined height in thirty-one places. And he’d determined the first accurate position of the Tibetan capital! Nain Singh later returned to Tibet and explored a more northerly route from Leh in Ladakh to Lhasa. Some members of his family joined the dangerous profession and went on to work for the Survey of India.

  Nain Singh’s reports raised an important geographical question. Where did the Tsangpo flow? Did it cross the Himalayas as Singh suggested? Was it the river known to Indians as the Brahmaputra? To solve this mystery, the people at the Survey of India decided to send someone back into Tibet and float something identifiable down the Tsangpo. If it turned up in the Brahmaputra in Assam, they’d know the answer!

  The two-man team for the job was made up of a Chinese lama living in Darjeeling and a Sikkimese surveyor called Kinthup. But the lama was quite the man of jolly times. He was more interested in getting drunk than doing any serious work. The team was stuck in one village for four months because the lama fell in love with their host’s wife! When this story came to be known, he had to pay rs 25 in compensation and leave the place.

  Things did not improve when at last the team crossed into Tibet. The lama sold Kinthup as a slave to the headman of a Tibetan village and disappeared! From May 1881 to March 1882, Kinthup worked as a slave before running away to a monastery. After living for several months as a monk, he received permission to go on a pilgrimage. He went to a place near the Tsangpo and spent many days cutting up 500 logs into a regular size. He hid these in a cave and then returned to the monastery.

  A few months later, he received permission to go to Lhasa on a pilgrimage. There, he received a fellow Sikkimese to write a message to his bosses at the Survey. He told them what the lama had done to him and then said that he had prepared 500 logs according to the orders given to him. He was going to throw 50 logs a day into the Tsangpo from Bipung in Pemake, from the fifth to the fifteenth day of the tenth Tibetan month of the year called Chuhuluk, of the Tibetan calendar.

  Kinthup did what he’d promised to do. But the watch on the Brahmaputra had been abandoned and the letter came too late. We do know now that the Tsangpo is indeed the Brahmaputra. The logs must have floated down to Assam and then Bengal. Kinthup did not become famous as he deserved to. He spent his remaining life as a tailor in Darjeeling. These were the days of adventure that writers like Rudyard Kipling captured in books like Kim and The Man who would be King.

  THE LAST OF THE LIONS

  The British didn’t just take surveys and build large structures in India. They also had a good time! One of their popular pastimes, like the rulers before them, was hunting, especially tiger hunting. According to Valmik Thapar, as many as 20,000 tigers were shot for sport between 1860 and 1960 by Indian princes and British hunting parties. Another estimate says that about 80,000 tigers may have been killed between 1875 and 1925. Tigers were thought to be dangerous animals and rewards were given to those who killed them. Despite this mass killing, the tiger population in 1900 was between 25,000 to 40,000. But where were the lions?

  You may remember Sir Thomas Roe who had to obtain special permission from Emperor Jehangir to hunt a lion that was troubling his group. Clearly, the British did know about the animal. There are many accounts from Aurangzeb’s time which suggest that the lion was still quite common in the beginning of the eighteenth century. But their numbers seem to have suddenly fallen by the mid-nineteenth century. Why did this happen?

  First, it’s possible that modern guns led to the lion’s downfall. It became easy to kill an animal that lives in the open. Second, with the fall of the Mughals, lion hunting was no longer restricted to the royals. Anybody with a gun could go out and hunt the animal. Despite this, there were still a number of lions in North India in the early 1800s. William Frazer is supposed to have shot eighty-four lions in the 1820s and he took great pride in having been personally responsible for the extinction of the species in Haryana. There are reports of large lion populations in Central India in the 1850s and of ten lions being shot in Kotah, Rajasthan in 1866. Then, suddenly, the lions simply disappeared except for a small population in Gujarat. What happened?

  Could it be that habitat loss had led to their disappearance? According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, between 1820 and 1913, India’s population jumped from 209 million to 303 million (not counting the rest of the subcontinent). To feed this huge population, it became necessary to increase farming. The railways made it possible to export agricultural products like opium and raw cotton. So the open ranges needed by the lion (and the cheetah) were just gobbled up by farming in a few generations. The tiger, too, lost much of its habitat but it could live in hilly and swampy terrain and so it survived better.

  By the late nineteenth century, there were reports that perhaps only a dozen Asiatic lions were left in the wild in the Gir forests of Junagarh, a princely state in Gujarat. The actual number was probably higher but finally, people began to worry about the lion. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, refused to go on a lion hunt in Gir during his state visit to Junagarh in November 1900. The Nawabs of Junagarh, with the support of the British government, now became the guardians of the lion for the next half-century.

  The Gir forest was protected and hunting was strictly regulated. Only the most senior British officials and Indian princes were allowed to hunt them. The Nawabs took their job very seriously—they refused permission to many princes and British officials though it wouldn’t have been easy for them to do so. Gir is still the only place where the Asiatic lion survives in the wild—a count of 411 in 2010.

  The Indian cheetah was not as lucky as the Asiatic lion. The last documented sighting of the animal was in Madhya Pradesh in 1947, the same year that India became independent.

  A NEW NEW DELHI

  After the sack of 1858, Delhi became a mere district headquarters in Punjab province. The 1881 census shows that its urban population had come down to 173,393. The Mughal-era city of Shahjehanabad was still the main urban hub, with European troops based inside the Red Fort and Indian troops in Daryagunj. The railways connected the city to Lahore in the west and to Calcutta in the east. To the north of the walled city, the British had built a civil lines with large bungalows and gardens. With all its old ruins, Delhi in the late nineteenth century would have been beautiful but really, compared to Bombay, Calcutta or Madras, it was not a ‘happening’ place. And so it remained till 1911.

  In the meantime, tiny cracks were appearing in the British Raj. Yet again, nature played a role in this. From 1874, India suffered a series of severe droughts. At first Bengal and Bihar were affected but Viceroy Lord Northbrook and Famine commissioner Sir Richard Temple dealt with it by importing rice from Burma. But the British government, headed by Prime Minister Disraeli, didn’t approve of this. They said that Northbrook and Temple had wasted money! Northbrook resigned over this. Lord Lytton took over from him.

  In 1876, the rains failed for the third time and the famine situation became really bad in southern India. Lord lytton, However, was not moved to action. He even scolded the Governor of Madras for being too generous. Sir Richard Temple, in the meantime, had learnt his lesson. He did not intervene as he had earlier. By 1877, the famine spread across the Deccan and Rajasthan to the north-west and yet grain from places which had surpluses was still being exported out to the rest of the world.

  The Great Famine directly or indirectly killed 5.5 million people, more than two-thirds of them in British-controlled parts of the subcontinent.

  In the middle of such a terrible crisis, when people were dying all around him, Lord Lytton blew up a lot of money on the D
elhi Durbar of 1877 where Queen Victoria was proclaimed the empress of India in front of all the princes of the subcontinent. This show of arrogance led to a lot of anger which ultimately led to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885.

  As the demands for independence became louder, the British government decided to take steps to prove that they had a right to rule over the country. One idea was to follow the Mughals and build a new capital in Delhi because it was argued that the ‘idea of Delhi clings to the Mohammedan mind’. Viceroy Hardinge thought this was his best chance to be remembered as the founder of a great city. The British also needed a grand sound bite for the durbar held in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of George V as Emperor of India. The proclamation was read out at Coronation Park, to the far north of the city. This is the same spot where Queen Victoria had been declared the empress of India. A great stone column was raised to mark the event.

  Almost no tourist visits the place these days. King George V glares down from a pedestal removed from the canopy opposite India Gate in the 1960s. There are also several pedestals without statues, as if their occupants were upset that nobody was visiting them and simply walked off!

  The architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker were given the job of designing the new city of Delhi. The original idea was to build the city to the north of Shahjehanabad, roughly around where Delhi University now stands. But after a number of ground surveys, it was decided that the new city would be built to the south of the existing urban centre. This area was close to the ruins of many older Delhis—Dinpanah, Indraprastha, Feroze Shah Kotla. The new city was not built for trade or industry. It was constructed to show the power of the British Empire.

  The centrepiece was the palace of the Viceroy built on Raisina Hill—what we now know as Rashtrapati Bhavan. There were many opinions about what this building should look like. Should it be Classical European? Indo-Sarcenic? Mughal? Lutyens’s own opinion of Indian aesthetics was closer to those of Mughal Emperor Babur but Baker preferred the style of the locals. Ultimately, they decided on a design that combines Classical European columns with Mughal and Rajput detailing. In front of the palace was a grand venue called Kingsway (now Rajpath) inspired by the Mall in Washington DC. The intention was to impress and more than a century later, it still impresses.

  The rest of New Delhi consisted of government offices and big bungalows built like a garden city. It was a Civil Lines on a huge scale with a strict order of things. There was no space for senior Indian officials because the British never thought there would be one! The whole thing was designed for a population of 60,000 or lesser, including servants and other support staff. The only space for commerce was Connaught Place and its surroundings. Called ‘Lutyens’s Delhi’, this city is today the capital of the Republic of India.

  Did you know?

  In those times, the senior white officers who were to live within the Civil Lines were informally called ‘fat white’. It’s funny that, after Independence, over-fed politicians who pretend to be poor in their white kurta-pyjamas should live in these spacious bungalows which were meant for the ‘fat white’ of those times!

  A lot has been written about the grand buildings and bungalows of Lutyens’s Delhi. But if you look at early photographs of the cityscape in the 1920s and 1930s, it looks very different from what we see today. It’s not just that much of the city is under construction. You also see that the trees we now associate with the city have not yet grown! The systematic and careful planting of trees was a very important part of the overall design—it’s a feature we still identify with Delhi.

  The planting of trees was not new in Delhi. At its heights, Shahjehanabad (Old Delhi) had many private Mughal gardens belonging to the royal family and senior nobility. This included the Begum Jehanara’s gardens north of Chandni chowk and the two famous gardens within the Red Fort—Hayat Baksh (Life-Giver) and Mahtab Bagh (Moonlit Garden). The British, However, took this to a totally different level as they tried to create a garden city. There were heated debates between foresters, horticulturists and civil servants about which species should be planted. Finally, the Town Planning Committee submitted a report in 1913 with a list of thirteen trees including neem, jamun and imli that were thought to be suitable for planting along the avenues of New Delhi. Other species were planted later but trees from this original list still dominate many of the roads of Lutyens’s Delhi.

  The British also spent a lot of money and resources on reforesting the Aravalli ridges around New Delhi, particularly the Central Ridge just behind Rashtrapathi Bhavan. The mesquite, a Central American tree, called the ‘vilayati keekar’ was the tree that was commonly planted. Many think this is a local tree but it’s actually not and it has successfully pushed out many trees that are actually native to the place! As a result of all this tree planting, Central Delhi looks really green when seen from a height.

  As the construction of the new city drew close to completion, the British raised their own pillar in front of the Viceregal palace—the Jaipur column headed by a six-point crystal star. It is easily visible through the main gate on Raisina Hilla. At its base is the inscription: ‘In thought faith/ In word wisdom/ In deed courage/ In life service/ So may India be great.’ Was this a patronizing blessing or an expression of awareness that British rule would one day end? Did the British also leave behind a column like Ashoka so that future generations would think well of them? By the time New Delhi was completed in the mid-thirties, it was quite clear that British rule wouldn’t last for long.

  SHIP AHOY! AGAIN!

  As we have seen, India had withdrawn into itself from the twelfth century. Why did the caste rules that prohibited a person from crossing the seas come up? We don’t really know. It’s quite puzzling because many Indian merchants and princes became very wealthy because of overseas trade. Brahmin scholars also benefitted because there was a great demand for them in South East Asia.

  Despite these rules, there were Indian Muslims and even Hindus who continued to travel to foreign lands. There are remains of a large Indian trading post in faraway Azerbaijan. Built in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the Ateshgah of Baku includes the remains of a Hindu temple and inscriptions invoking the gods Ganesh and Shiva. There are also records of Indian merchants in Samarkand and Bukhara. Still, these outposts were not as busy as the ones that had existed in the past.

  It was in the nineteenth century, under British rule, that Indians began travelling abroad again in large numbers. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, the British needed bonded labour in their colonies. In the beginning, this demand came from sugarcane plantations but soon, Indians were used to build railway lines and work mines. In the early years, the workers thought that they could return home after the period of their bond was over, but the British decided it would be cheaper if these people settled down in the colonies. Indian women were encouraged to join their husbands in these colonies. The bonded workers lived a hard life but more and more of them signed up for it because of the Great Famine of 1877.

  Large Indian communities settled down in faraway British colonies like Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaya, South Africa and Mauritius. The French colony of Reunion and the Dutch colony of Surinam also had several Indians. The place where half a million Indian workers landed in Mauritius is called ‘Aapravasi Ghat’ or Immigration Depot and is now a UNESCO World heritage Site.

  Of the hundreds of thousands of Indians who left their homes with contracts, less than a third returned. Many died during the sea journeys and the years of hard labour. Yet, enough of them survived to form the Indian communities scattered across these faraway lands.

  Soon, Indian traders and clerks also began to follow the British to the colonies. Gujarati merchants and shopkeepers established a network in Eastern and southern Africa. The Tamil Chettiar community was especially active in South East Asia and established a network in Burma, Malaya, Singapore and even French-controlled Vietnam. As they settled in these places, they found tiny remnants of Indian me
rchant communities that had survived from ancient times! The Chitty community in Malaysia is one such example.

  Though this network of Indian communities was created and controlled by the British, these communities played an important role in India’s struggle for independence. Mahatma Gandhi, for example, was part of the Indian community in South Africa between 1893 and 1914. He developed his political and spiritual philosophy of non-violence while fighting for the rights of Indians there. The incident in June 1893 when he was pushed off the first-class compartment of his train despite having a valid ticket changed his life. This incident took place at Pietmaritzburg station—there is a plaque here today which shows where he was thrown out. Gandhi returned to India only in 1915, at the Age of forty-six, but he soon became the country’s leading political figure.

  Singapore, by contrast, was the centre of a very different effort to free India. When the Japanese captured the city during the Second World War, Netaji Subhash Bose used the opportunity to form the Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army. This army was made up of Indian civilians and soldiers who were prisoners of war. The first review of the troops took place in July 1943 on the Padang, a large open field that still exists at the heart of the city. There is a small memorial near the Singapore Cricket Club that marks the event. The original one was demolished by the British after the war, so the current memorial dates only from 1995.

  Near the memorial is Dhoby Ghat, where Bose declared the formation of the Provisional Government of Free India. This proclamation was read out at the Cathay Cinema Hall. The building has been demolished but a part of its façade exists as part of a new shopping mall.