Mercator was born in 1512 near Antwerp and was an accomplished engraver of maps and charts by the time he was twenty-four. Although he does not seem to have ever travelled to the faraway lands that were being newly discovered, he was able to systematically assimilate all the information available about them. In 1538, he published his first world map that is one of the earliest to bear the names North and South America. He also showed Asia and America to be separate continents long before the discovery of the Bering Strait proved it to be a fact.
Mercator lived in a time of great religious and political ferment. An innovator who asked too many questions was always suspect and, in 1544, he was arrested as a heretic. If he had not been rescued by influential friends a few months later, it is likely that he would have been beheaded or burned at the stake by the Inquisition. A few years later, Mercator would shift east to Duisburg where he would produce his most famous work. In 1569, he produced his world map with the legend ‘New and Improved Description of the Lands of the World, amended and intended for the use of Navigators’11. The map did not just have richer information than earlier maps; it used a novel system of projecting the curved surface of the world on a flat surface. This was a major innovation in cartography. The ‘Mercator Projection’ is still the most commonly used format for a world map even though it is based on a distortion that squeezes the countries near the equator and stretches those near the poles. This is why countries like Norway and Sweden look much larger than they are in reality while India and Indonesia look much smaller.
It was with Mercator’s encouragement that Ortilius produced the first atlas in 1570 in Antwerp. The first edition of the atlas had seventy sheets and was called the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World). It proved such a success that forty editions would eventually be published. It is interesting to see how the rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman works had a profound impact on the European mind of that time. Ortelius took pains to include a map that tried to reconcile the new findings about India with the Periplus and with Arrian’s account of Alexander’s expedition. The map identifies the location of cities like Pataliputra and Muzaris with surprising accuracy given the passage of time. In a sense, it was the first attempt to recreate the history of India’s geography and is consequently a direct ancestor of this book.
THE CITY OF VICTORY
One of the most prominent features of early European maps of India is the kingdom of ‘Narsinga’ that covers much of the southern peninsula. Most modern Indians will have difficulty identifying this name because it refers to what is now remembered as the Vijayanagar empire, named after its capital city. It was ruled by Narasingha Raya when the Portuguese first arrived in India. He was not an especially important monarch in the history of Vijayanagar, but his name stuck and Europeans continued to mark it on their maps long after he and his empire were gone.
The city of Vijayanagar was established just after the devastating raids of Alauddin Khilji’s general Malik Kafur had broken down the old power structures of southern India. Around 1336, two brothers, Hukka and Bukka, appear to have rallied various defeated groups under their banner and built a fortified new city called Vijayanagar or City of Victory. At its height in the early sixteenth century it was probably the largest city in the world.
The city was built across the river from Kishkindha, site of the monkey-kingdom described in the Ramayana. It is a dramatic landscape of rock outcrops and gigantic boulders. The choice of location, therefore, was no coincidence as the rocky terrain partly neutralized the military advantages of Turkic cavalry. An additional advantage was that the place had easy access to iron-ore from the nearby mines of Bellary, still in active use today.
A number of visitors have left us lucid accounts of Vijayanagar, including Abdul Razzaq, envoy from the Persian court, and several Europeans such as Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes. They tell us that the city was encircled by a series of concentric walls, perhaps as many as seven of them, that enclosed a massive area. The large gap between the first and second wall was used mostly for gardens and farming. The inner walls enclosed bazaars, homes, mansions and temples. At the core of the city was a magnificent palace-complex surrounded by strong fortifications. Despite thinking of itself consciously as a bastion of classical Hinduism, the city was very cosmopolitan with sizeable populations of Muslims, Christians and even Jews. Paes tells us that ‘the people of this city are countless in number, so much so that I do not wish to put it down for fear that it should be thought fabulous’. He goes on to say ‘This is the best provided city in the world … the streets and markets are full of laden oxen so much so that you cannot get along for them’.12
The remains of the city can be visited at Hampi in Karnataka, and can only be described as spectacular. In my many travels across the world, I have found only the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia to be comparable to those of Hampi in terms of sheer scale. It is too large to be explored solely on foot and the visitor will need both a car and a good guide. As described by the medieval travellers, there is still a fair amount of farming that continues within the UNESCO World Heritage site, in many cases using the old canals. We even have remnants of a system of stone aqueducts that brought water into the city. The remains of temples, palaces and bazaars make it clear that the reports about the city’s size were not exaggerations. Indeed, after decades of excavations, much of the site has still not been uncovered. One of the more remarkable remains is that of Ugra Narasingha—a gigantic sculpture of Lord Vishnu as half-lion and half-man (unlike the Egyptian sphinx, it has the head of a lion and the body of a man). Given that the Vijayanagar empire was known as Narsinga by the early Europeans, this sculpture is particularly appropriate.
As already mentioned, the ruins of Vijayanagar are located right across the Tungabhadra from Kishkindha and it is worthwhile crossing the river to visit it. Although a modern bridge was almost complete at the time of writing,13 when I visited the site in 2007 and 2008, one still has to cross the Tungabhadra in a round coracle boat piled with people, goats, motor-cycles and sacks of rice. Almost five hundred years earlier, Domingo Paes made the same crossing and wrote, ‘People cross to this place in boats which are round like baskets; inside, they are made of cane and outside, are covered with leather; they are able to carry fifteen or twenty people and even horses and oxen can use them if necessary but for the most part these animals swim across. Men row them with a sort of paddle, and the boats are always turning around.’14 I know exactly what he meant.
In 1565, Vijayanagar was attacked by a grand alliance of all the Muslim kings of the Deccan. After being defeated in the Battle of Talikota on 26 January, the Vijayanagar army withdrew instead of defending the capital. It is said that the great city was plundered for six months. It never recovered. Vijayanagar can be considered the last flash of the ‘classical’ phase of Hindu civilization. The second cycle of India’s urbanization had begun on the banks of the Ganga but ended on the banks of the Tungabhadra.
THE CITY OF THE KING OF THE WORLD
By the late 1500s, the Portuguese and the Spanish had competition from rival European nations. In the autumn of 1580, Francis Drake returned to London after his circumnavigation of the globe. By 1588, the English had decisively defeated the Spanish Armada. However, it was the Dutch who first took on the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, only recently free from Iberian rule, set up the United East India Company in 1602. It was the world’s first company to issue common stock and would grow into a truly enormous multinational company. By 1603, the Dutch had a trading post in Banten, West Java and by 1611 in Jayakarta (later Batavia and now Jakarta). Soon they were challenging the Portuguese along the Indian coast and in Sri Lanka.
The Dutch were not just helped by the efficiencies of private sector enterprise, but also by the better quality of their maps. Thanks to Mercator and Ortilius, they were at the cutting edge of cartography. A map of the Bay of Bengal by Janssan and Hondius printed in the 1630s shows the improvements in the level of knowledge since Wal
dseemüller a century earlier. The map shows Sri Lanka, the eastern coastline of India, Bengal, the Burmese coast, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the northern tip of Sumatra. There is a lot of detail along the coast with both major and minor habitations marked out including Musalipatam and Pallecatta. The temple-town of Puri in Orissa is marked as Pagod Jagernaten after the temple to Lord Jagannath. Since it is a navigation chart, depth measurements are marked out in a number places such as the Gangetic delta. For the first time, we see some detailed knowledge of the interior of the country. For instance, the riverport of Ougely (Hooghly) is clearly marked out on the westernmost channel of the Ganga. Hooghly was then the most important trading centre in eastern India and, despite its subsequent decline, the river channel continues to bear the name of the old port even today.
Meanwhile, the English had also formed their own East India Company. By 1612, they had set up their first factory at Surat, Gujarat. Its position was strengthened a few years later by the embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the court of Emperor Jehangir. Interestingly, Roe presented an atlas of the latest European maps to the Mughal court but it was politely returned after four days.15 It is possible that the courtiers were unused to cartographic representations and could not understand the atlas. However, in my view, it may also have been because it showed how small the Mughal Empire was in relation to the world known to the Europeans. Maps have always had a geo-political aspect to them, and the recent friction between India and China about the depiction of Arunachal Pradesh shows that it remains the case to this day.
Shah Jehan succeeded Jehangir in 1628. The name Shah Jehan means ‘King of the World’ in Persian, and his reign was the golden age of Mughal architecture. Many edifices small and great, including the Taj Mahal, were built under him. He also decided to move the capital back to Delhi and build a new city in 1639. The city would be called Shahjehanabad after himself, although we now know it as Old Delhi. Completed in 1648, it had twenty-seven towers, eleven gates and a population of around 400,000. Shah Jehan had chosen a site that was farther north of the existing city, the northernmost Delhi yet. It contained a walled palace-complex surrounded by walls of red Dholpur sandstone—what we call the Red Fort. For lesser buildings, material was scavenged from the older Delhis, especially Dinpanah and Feroze Shah Kotla. The Red Fort was built along the river and, during the monsoon, water would have flowed along the palace walls. However, most of the time there was a ‘beach’ between the river’s edge and the fort where elephant-fights and other events were organized for the entertainment of the court.
It is not easy to see the original layout of Shahjehanabad by merely visiting Old Delhi because the city has gone through many changes over the centuries. Nonetheless, one can still discern many of the key features. There was a straight and wide avenue that began at the Red Fort’s western gate and ran through the main bazaar to one of the city’s main gates. It remains as Chandni Chowk, named after the way the full moon once reflected on a canal that ran along the middle of the road.
The French traveller Bernier visited the city a few decades after it was completed and has left us a detailed eyewitness account16. One of the first things that struck Bernier was that the fortifications of both the city and the Red Fort were old-fashioned and not designed to withstand artillery. He states, ‘Considerable as these works may appear, their real strength is by no means great and in my opinion a battery of moderate force would soon level them to the ground’. It is unclear why Shah Jehan opted for designs that were already considered outdated in the mid-seventeenth century. Perhaps the empire felt so secure that he did not feel it necessary to build for a military siege. Perhaps, it is just another example of the increasing technological gap between India and the West. It would prove a major error as Shahjehanabad’s walls repeatedly failed to hold off attackers over the next two centuries.
Bernier describes the opulent palaces of the nobility with their courtyards and walled gardens. He tells us that the rich had raised pavilions set in the middle of flower-gardens and open on all sides to allow the breeze to flow from any direction. The insides of the private apartments had cotton mattresses covered in cloth in summer and carpets in winter. Cushions of brocade, velvet and satin were scattered around the rooms for the use of those sitting down. This matches what we can see in Mughal paintings and buildings that have survived from that time across northern India.
However, one should not get the impression that Delhi was a city merely of grand palaces and imperial mosques. The majority of the people of Delhi were common folk—shopkeepers, artisans, servants, soldiers and so on. These people lived in huts made of mud and straw that were built between and around the great palaces of the nobility. In other words, Shahjehanabad suffered severely from slums, that perennial problem of modern Indian cities. Bernier tells us that these slums gave the city the impression of a collection of many villages. Fires were common and sixty thousand roofs had been gutted in just one year (the number is probably an exaggeration, but point taken). The problem with fires had been described 1800 years earlier by the Greek ambassador Megasthenes when he visited Mauryan Pataliputra, but had yet to be solved in Mughal India. In other words, Mughal Delhi was a city of extremes. As Bernier puts it, ‘A man must either be of the highest rank or live miserably.’
The Frenchman describes the bazaars as bustling, chaotic and dirty, not dissimilar to what Old Delhi looks like today. He tells us that there were many confectioners (i.e. halwais) all over the city but disapproved of the dust and the flies. There were also shops selling a variety of kebabs and meat preparations. Old Delhi remains home to some excellent kebab shops. The visitor can get off at the Chawri Bazar Metro stop and then take a five-minute rickshaw ride to the Jama Masjid area. Go late at night when the lane with the kebab- and sweet-shops throngs with people. With smoke rising from the open ovens and the old imperial mosque looming in the background, one could be back in medieval Delhi. Bernier, however, was quite suspicious of the kebab shops for he wrote, ‘There is no trusting their dishes, composed for aught I know, of the flesh of camels, horses or perhaps oxen who have died of disease’. Perhaps he had suffered a bad case of Delhi Belly during his stay.
MONSIEUR TAVERNIER, I PRESUME
At the time that Bernier was travelling through the Mughal Empire, there were many other Europeans—merchants, officials, mercenaries, adventurers—who were also in the country and have left us colourful accounts of their experiences. One of these was Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, also a Frenchman. In the winter of 1665–66, he travelled from Agra to Bengal and wrote about the experiences. We know from his writings that the imperial highways were full of bullock-cart caravans carrying rice, salt, corn, and so on. Although most caravans consisted of one or two hundred carts, some were huge, with 10,000 to 12,000 oxen. When two large caravans going in opposite directions encountered each other on a narrow section of the road, it could take two to three days to pass each other. One can imagine the dust, the noise and the tempers.
The bullock-cart caravans were driven by nomadic castes called Manaris who travelled the trade routes with their families and belongings. At every stop a temporary village of tents would be set up. Each group had a chieftain who could be identified by a string of pearls. Often there would be quarrels between the leaders of rival caravans and matters could be escalated all the way up to the Emperor17. In other words, the ill-tempered truck drivers that one encounters in modern Indian highways have a long lineage.
Tavernier tells us that travellers had a choice between two kinds of transport—light carriages pulled by bullocks and palanquins carried by men. The former cost about a rupee a day and came with luxuries like cushions and curtains. The palanquins needed about six people to lift and a long journey required a company of twelve men at least so that they could relieve each other. Each man cost four rupees a month. Of course, if one wanted to make a statement, one could hire twenty to thirty armed guards who came with muskets and bows. These cost as much as the palanquin-bearers but were hig
her in status. In addition, Tavernier says, the English and Dutch officials also insisted on a flag-bearer who walked in front of the party in honour of their respective companies. I suppose this is the origin of the little flags that modern-day ambassadors and dignitaries have fluttering in front of their luxury cars.
On 6 December 1665, Bernier and Tavernier met each other on the banks of the Ganga near Allahabad. They drank a toast of wine mixed with water on the banks of the river—but this seems to have upset Tavernier’s stomach. A couple of days later they crossed the river at Allahabad but had to wait half the day for the governor to send them entry/exit permits. Revenue officials stood on both banks, checked papers and charged octroi. Wagons were charged four rupees each and carriages one rupee. The boatman had to be paid separately.
In addition to the Sadak-e-Azam highway through the Gangetic plains, there were many other internal trade routes that continued to thrive. As per a tradition that went back to ancient times, trees were planted all along the way to provide shade. This custom survived into the twentieth century but is unfortunately no longer adhered to. In the south, the road through the Palghat Gap continued to be used to connect the ports of the Kerala coast with the interior. However, the old Dakshina Path route appears to have gone into decline during this period. Instead, there were a number of important trade routes that linked the imperial capitals of Agra and Delhi with the ports of Gujarat. For instance, a route used by Peter Mundy of the English East India Company originated in Agra and made its way south-west through Fatehpur, Bayana, Ajmer, Jalore, Mehsana, Ahmedabad and finally to Surat. An alternative route was to head more directly south from Delhi–Agra to Dholpur, Gwalior, Narwar, Ujjain and finally to Mandu. From Mandu the route turned west to Surat. Bernier tells us that goods from Surat made it to Delhi in four–six days.
Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Page 17