Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography

by Sanyal, Sanjeev

  Some of these places were towns of importance but there were many caravan-serais along the way although their quality varied a great deal. The larger caravan-serais had spacious walled enclosures where merchants could spend the night in safety. Travellers would have been able to draw water from the wells and buy provisions. In addition, many of the busy roads would have had water-stops or ‘piyaus’. The provision of drinking water to a thirsty traveller was said to gain religious merit (punya) and people built piyaus in memory of loved ones. Many of these have survived to modern times (indeed, new ones are still being built). The road from Delhi to Gurgaon (MG Road) used to have several old piyaus till recently. The last one was demolished in 2009 to make way for the new Metro line.

  Of course, the quality of the road and accommodation could sometimes be appalling, especially on the less-frequented routes. The Portuguese Catholic priest Friar Sebastian Manrique has left us a most amusing anecdote of his travels through Orissa and Bengal during the monsoon of 164018. After leaving the town of Jalesar, the priest and his companions found themselves in a small village which did not have a proper caravanserai. They were, therefore, obliged to spend the night in a large cowshed. The bovine occupants of the shed were the least of their problems for they were attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes. When they thought that matters could get no worse, it began to rain and they discovered that the roof leaked.

  It was almost dawn when Sebastian Manrique was finally able to doze off but the peace did not last. The cowshed was suddenly full of birds including two large peacocks. The friar’s companions decided to kill and eat the peacocks. They were aware that the locals regarded the birds as sacred and tried to hide their activities. Unfortunately, the truth was discovered by their hosts and very soon an armed mob gathered outside. The friar’s party hurriedly fled, firing muskets to cover their retreat. Such was the experience of life on the road in seventeenth-century India.

  HISTORY RHYMES

  By the time Bernier and Tavernier were criss-crossing India, Shah Jehan was no longer the emperor. The throne had been usurped in 1658 by his son Aurangzeb, who imprisoned his father in Agra fort and ruthlessly eliminated his siblings, including the liberal and scholarly Dara Shikoh. The new emperor next attempted the last great expansion of the Mughal empire. The governor of Bengal, Mir Jumla, pushed into the Brahmaputra valley in 1662 till he reached Garhgaon, between modern Jorhat and Dibrugarh, the capital of the Ahom kings of Assam. However, he was unable to completely eliminate the Ahoms due to torrential rains, the difficult terrain and constant guerrilla attacks.

  Despite Aurangzeb’s efforts in the north and in the east, his big push was into the southern peninsula. He shifted to the Deccan in 1682 and would never see Delhi again. Instead, he lived in a state of constant campaigning for the next twenty-six years. Although Aurangzeb extended the empire to its maximum geographical coverage, he also effectively destroyed it. His constant wars devastated the landscape and drained the exchequer. This is why Bernier comments that, although the Mughal emperor had revenues that exceeded the combined receipts of the Shah of Persia and the Ottoman Sultan, he could not be considered wealthy because it was all consumed by expenditure. Thus, Bernier tells us that Aurangzeb was ‘perplexed how to pay and supply his armies’.

  Equally important, Aurangzeb was a religious bigot who needlessly destroyed Hindu temples and re-imposed the hated jiziya tax on non-Muslims. It is said that when this tax was first announced, the Hindus of Delhi gathered in large numbers in front of the Red Fort to protest against it. The emperor set his elephants against them and many were trampled to death. Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh guru, was executed in Delhi in 1675 for standing up for the Hindu Pandits of Kashmir. The Gurudwara Sis Gunj in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk stands at the spot where he was beheaded.

  Not surprisingly, the pact between the Hindu majority and the Mughals began to come unstuck. There were revolts in many places across the empire. One of the most successful revolts was led by the Maratha rebel Shivaji. The exploits of Shivaji and his band of Maratha guerrillas are so audacious that one would not believe them but for contemporary accounts of them. Using the volcanic outcrops of the Deccan Traps, the Marathas repeatedly outwitted the larger Mughal armies and remained a constant thorn in Aurangzeb’s side. One of my favourite tales is about how the Marathas captured Sinhagadh by using a trained monitor lizard named Yeshwanti to scale the walls. The guerrillas tied a rope around the lizard, which climbed up a rock-face that was so steep that it had been left unguarded. A boy then climbed up the rope and secured it for the rest. The fort of Sinhagad is just outside Pune and can be easily visited. You will see cadets from the nearby military training school climbing up the hill with their heavy packs.

  Another group that broke out in open revolt were the Bundelas. Their leader Raja Chhatrasaal used the low hills of the Vindhya range to wage a campaign against the Mughals. There is a colourful tale that links the Bundelas and the Marathas. Raja Chhatrasaal had a very beautiful dancer named Mastani in his court (some claim she may have been his daughter by a concubine). When the Marathas rescued the Bundela chief from a tight spot, Chhatrasaal thanked the Maratha commander Baji Rao by gifting him Mastani. Baji Rao would rise to become the Peshwa (Prime Minister) of the Marathas and Mastani would become his favourite. Although Mastani is usually left out of history books, she was a significant figure in her times and is said to have ridden with Baji Rao on his many campaigns. On the highway between Orchha and Khajuraho, there is a small but picturesque palace built on a lake by Chhatrasaal for Mastani during her younger days. Not many people know about it and visitors are likely to have it all to themselves. The surrounding hills are heavily fortified, a reminder of the turbulent times in which Mastani lived.

  Nonetheless, it was not at the hands of the Marathas or the Bundelas that the Mughals suffered their first decisive defeat. This happened in the middle of the Brahmaputra in faraway Assam at the hands of the Ahom general Lachit Borphukan. The Ahoms came to India as refugees in the early thirteenth century. They were distantly related to the Thais from what is now the Burma–China border and were probably no more than a few thousand in number. Soon, they converted to Hindusim and established a kingdom that would last from 1228 till 1826. Mir Jumla’s raid of 1662 had hurt them, but they had survived and were steadily clawing back territory. The conflict reached a climax in 1671 in the Battle of Saraighat, not far from modern Guwahati. The Assamese forces were far smaller but their commander cleverly avoided a battle on open ground. Instead, he coaxed the Mughals into a naval battle on the Brahmaputra river, where the smaller and more manoeuvrable Assamese boats won a decisive victory. Although seriously ill, Lachit Borphukan personally led the assault. It was the Indian equivalent of the Battle of Salamis where the ancient Greeks defeated the Persian fleet against overwhelming odds. The myth of Mughal invincibility had been shattered.

  The Mughal empire may yet have survived religious bigotry, leaky public finances, Maratha guerrillas, Bundela chieftains and the Assamese navy. The foundations built up by Akbar and his immediate successors were still quite strong, but Aurangzeb committed the ultimate sin—he stayed on the throne too long. He ruled till he died at the age of ninety in 1707. As happened in the case of Ashoka and Feroze Shah Tughlaq, he was followed by a succession of weak rulers culminating in a foreign invasion. In 1739, the Persian army of Nadir Shah occupied Shah Jehan’s Delhi and massacred twenty thousand of its citizens. They left with much treasure, including the famous Peacock Throne. With the prestige of the Mughals fast waning, the Marathas occupied large swathes of central India even as the governors of far-flung provinces like Bengal and Hyderabad became virtually independent. Eighteenth-century India dissolved into a chaotic scramble.

  A number of foreign players saw the opportunity to extend their influence in the subcontinent. In the North West were the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani, even as the Burmese eyed the North East. In peninsular India, the rivalry between the Dutch and the Portuguese had been rep
laced by that between the French and the English. Mercenary armies wandered the countryside, feared by rulers and common people alike. For a short while it appeared that the Marathas would replace the Mughals and establish order, but their internal rivalries let them down. Defeat at the hands of the Afghans in January 1761, in Panipat, Haryana, came as a big blow to their reputation. They would never quite regain their momentum. The scene was set for a war of maps.

  THE WAR OF MAPS

  As we have already seen, maps were a very important military weapon (and remain so today). One can almost trace the ascendancy of a particular European power by the relative quality of its maps. The Marathas were the only Indian power who developed some cartographic ability. Although their maps are not as rigorous as their European counterparts, they were complemented by an intuitive knowledge of the terrain. Meanwhile, the French and British cartographers replaced the Dutch at the cutting-edge of mapping. At first, it was the French who held the advantage, both on the ground as well as in the quality of their maps. By the early eighteenth century, they had a well-established network of enclaves on the Indian coast. The most important were Pondicherry, just south of Madras (Chennai) and the ancient submerged port of Mahabalipuram. There were smaller outposts like Mahé on the Kerala coast, Yanam on the Andhra coast and Chandannagar on the Hooghly channel of the Ganga, just north of the English settlement at Calcutta. The French also controlled the strategically important island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

  Mirroring the strategic advantage of the French, their maps of India are also superior to those of their rivals. Arguably the best of the French cartographers was D’Anville. He never visited India but appears to have collected the best available information from his Paris home. Cartographic historian Susan Gole has called him the first scientific map-maker. Unlike his predecessors, he strictly focused on geographical accuracy and refrained from eye-catching embellishments. The influence of John Mandeville was finally wearing off. Thus, when D’Anville wanted to correctly locate Satara, the Maratha capital, he asked the Portuguese ambassador to the French court for more information. The Portuguese were fighting the Marathas at that time. D’Anville was told that Satara was in the Ghats and that it was eight days’ journey from both Goa and from Bombay, at the apex of a triangle formed by these two lines and the coast. For most cartographers of that time, this would have been more than enough information but D’Anville left Satara out of his map on the grounds that this was not exact enough.19

  The British, meanwhile, were only marginally behind. The first half of the eighteenth century saw a series of British mapmakers—Herman Moll, John Thornton and Thomas Jefferys. Their records show that they keenly kept abreast of the latest French maps. There are also detailed local maps of specific ports and military installations. One of the most interesting is an English map of Maratha admiral Kanoji Angre’s sea fort. From its fortified base at Vijaydurg, the Maratha navy harassed European shipping up and down the Konkan coast for several decades. Angre also defeated the Abyssinian pirates, the Sidis, but was unable to evict them from their base at Murud-Janjira.

  The forts of Vijaydurg and Janjira lie south of Mumbai and are worth a visit. The fort at Janjira is built on a small island but local fishermen are happy to take visitors out on a rowboat for a small consideration. Vijaydurg is built on a peninsula but also offers spectacular views of the Arabian Sea. The eighteenth-century English map of Angre’s fort shows a worryingly detailed knowledge of its defences. It also gives an amusing insight into the European attitude towards the Maratha admiral. Prominently marked is a building labelled as ‘Godowns where he keeps his Plunder’. To them, he was no more than a pirate!

  One of the characteristic features of European cartography till the mid-1700s is the obvious nautical orientation. By now, we have maps of India that show detailed depth measurements along the coast and even greater detail for the entrances of major ports. Yet, they remain curiously ignorant of the Himalayas, one of the most prominent geographical features on the planet. Most maps do show some awareness of mountains to the north, but the range is not systematically marked anywhere. There was a widespread belief going back to the time of Alexander that the northern mountains were a continuation of the Caucasus.

  Nonetheless, the redoubtable François Bernier did visit Kashmir, and left a detailed eye-witness account of the province that was used by the Mughal Emperors as a summer retreat.20 He tells us that there were two wooden bridges over the Jhelum at Srinagar and beautiful gardens along the river banks. Most of the houses were made of wood, although some larger buildings, including the ruins of ancient Hindu temples, were made of stone. He tells us that the rich owned pleasure boats on Dal Lake and that they threw lovely parties in the summer.

  Bernier also tells us that the Mughals used their base in Kashmir to extend their influence into Little Tibet (i.e. Ladakh) and, intriguingly, Greater Tibet (i.e. Tibet itself). The cold, bleak but stunningly beautiful landscape does not seem to have impressed a contemporary chronicler who wrote, ‘No other useless place can be compared with it.’21 I could not disagree more. For me, Ladakh is the most spiritual place in the world. To experience it, spend a full-moon night—alone—on one of the lonely mountain passes. It is impossible to describe the way stars look at these altitudes and the way the moonlight reflects on the bare rocky mountainsides. The moon can be so bright that one could almost read a book by it. I have spent nights in the open in the African savannah and have watched the sun rise over the Mayan pyramids of Tikal—but nothing comes close to a full-moon night in Ladakh.

  It appears that the Mughals also made some inroads into Tibet itself. The Tibetans promised to pay an annual tribute, allow the building of a mosque in their capital and to issue coins in the name of Aurangzeb. We know that the Ladakhis did allow a mosque to be built in Leh; it can still be visited at the head of the main bazaar (and just below the old palace). However, given the difficult terrain, the Mughals had no way to ensure compliance from Tibet, and Bernier tells us that no one really believed that the Tibetans would honour the promises.

  Bernier was very intrigued by the stories he heard about Tibet, including those about the institution of the Dalai Lama. He tried to question Tibetan merchants about their country but received little useful information. As we shall see, the British would have to make great efforts to get reliable information about this land in the nineteenth century. For now, the Europeans needed to find out about more about the geography of the subcontinent itself. Indeed, knowledge of India’s interiors remained quite basic except for major trade routes. This would change with the Battle of Plassey in 1757 where the troops of the English East India Company, led by Robert Clive, decisively defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal. With this victory, for the first time, a European power came to control a major province. Soon, the British would be acquiring large territories and sustaining campaigns in the deep interiors of the country. Accurate maps were more important than ever. Enter Colonel James Rennel.

  7

  Trigonometry and Steam

  The Portuguese first arrived in Bengal in 1530. They set up trading posts at Chittagong in the east and Satgaon in the west. Over time, the river near Satgaon silted up and the river port of Hooghly became the main trading hub. The port was on the Bhagirathi distributary of the Ganga—although we now usually call it the Hooghly after the old port town. By the seventeenth century, other Europeans had also set up trading posts along the river—the French at Chandannagar, the Danes at Srirampur and the Dutch at Chinsurah. The English East India Company initially had its local headquarters at Hooghly. However, it seems to have had problems with the local Mughal officials and was forced to sail downriver after a skirmish in 1686. When matters were finally settled two years later, the English sent a squadron on ships from Madras (now renamed Chennai) to re-establish their presence in Bengal. The initiative was headed by the company’s chief agent Job Charnock.

  THE BUILDING OF CALCUTTA

  On 24 Aug
ust 1690, Charnock landed at a village called Sutanuti on the east bank of the river. He had already visited the spot during the retreat two years earlier and had obviously liked it. So he decided to build the new English trading post here. It would grow into the city of Calcutta, now renamed Kolkata. This was not, however, an uninhabited landscape. There were three villages in the area—Sutanuti, Gobindapore and Kalikata The city’s name is derived from that of the last village. The merchant families of the Setts and Basaks already ran sizeable business establishments here. There was a fourth village nearby, called Chitpur, from where the road ran all the way to the ancient temple of Kalighat. Just off this road, in the middle of tiger-infested jungle, was a Shiva temple erected by a hermit called Chowranghi. 1 The temple no longer exists, and the place is now occupied by the Asiatic Society on Park Street. The hermit’s name, however, was retained as Chowringhee Road, which would become one of the city’s principal arteries. In an act of misplaced nationalism, the road was renamed after Jawaharlal Nehru in the 1980s, which is especially inappropriate since the hermit was one of the original inhabitants of the place. Fortunately most citizens of Kolkata persist with the old name.

  Job Charnock probably chose this site from a standpoint of defensibility. The river ran along the west of the site while there were marshy salt lakes to the east. To the south there were dense, tiger-infested jungles, while to the north there was a creek that ran from the river to the salt lakes and was navigable by large boats. Many of these features are still discernible. The creek has long since silted up but is remembered in place-names like Creek Row and Creek Lane. The eastward suburban extensions of the 1970s, officially called Bidhannagar, are commonly called Salt Lake, recalling the marshlands. A few of the lakes still exist as the East Kolkata Wetlands that provide the city with a unique natural sewage recycling system that is now protected under the Ramsar Convention.