Cartography of India

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
History of science and
technology in the
Indian subcontinent
By subject

The cartography of India begins with early charts for navigation

Islamic traditions,[4] and in turn, were influenced by the British cartographers who solidified modern concepts into India's map making.[5]

A prominent foreign

Muslim
geographers, while European maps of India remain very sketchy. A prominent medieval cartographer was
Abu Rayhan Biruni (973–1048) who visited India and studied the country's geography extensively.[6]

European maps become more accurate with the

Republic of India
.

Prehistory

Indus Valley civilization (c. 2500–1900 BCE) may have known "cartographic activity" based on a number of excavated surveying instruments and measuring rods and that the use of large scale constructional plans, cosmological drawings, and cartographic material was known in India with some regularity since the Vedic period (1st millennium BCE).[clarification needed][7]

'Though not numerous, a number of map-like graffiti appear among the thousands of Stone Age Indian cave paintings; and at least one complex Mesolithic diagram is believed to be a representation of the cosmos.'[8]

Susan Gole (1990) comments on the cartographic traditions in early India:

The fact that towns as far apart as

Ellora in Maharashtra was carved down into mountain for 100 feet, with intricate sculptures lining pillared halls, no easy task even with an exact map to follow, impossible without. So if no maps have been found, it should not be assumed that the Indians did not know how to conceptualize in a cartographic manner.[2]

Antiquity

Geography, rediscovered by Maximus Planudes in Constantinople
c. 1300.

Classical Antiquity
.

In

a sea) but their idea of the size of Taprobana (Sri Lanka
) was vastly too large and the Indian peninsula much reduced. They also had little knowledge of the interior of the country.

Native Indian cartographic traditions before the Hellenistic period remain rudimentary. Early forms of cartography in

Gupta empire in 400 CE—showing the meeting of the Ganges and the Yamuna.[10]

Middle Ages

The 8th-century poet and dramatist Bhavabhuti, in Act 1 of the Uttararamacarita, described paintings which indicated geographical regions.[11] In the 20th century, over 200 medieval Indian maps were studied in the compilation of a history of cartography. Also considered in the study were copper-plate text inscriptions on which the boundaries of land, granted to the Brahman priests of India by their patrons, were described in detail.[2] The descriptions indicated good geographical knowledge and in one case over 75 details of the land granted have been found.[2] The Chinese records of the Tang dynasty show that a map of the neighboring Indian region was gifted to Wang Hiuen-tse by its king.[12]

In the 9th century,

Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi included a section on the cartography and geography of India and its neighboring countries in his world atlas, Tabula Rogeriana.[16]

Italian scholar Francesco Lorenzo Pullè reproduced a number of Indian maps in his magnum opus La Cartografia Antica dell'India.

Dravidian people of India.[1][17]

16th century Portuguese navigational chart of the region

The cartographic tradition of India influenced the map making tradition of Tibet, where maps of Indian origin have been discovered.[3] Islamic cartography was also influenced by the Indian tradition as a result of extensive contact.[4]

The Portuguese explorer

Portuguese, navigate and chart much of the sub-continents coast line, within decades. These charts were rapidly reproduced, and appeared in say the 1502 Cantino planisphere
.

Mughal era

Map of the “Inhabited Quarter” by Sadiq Isfahani from Jaunpur c.1647. This was one of the only surviving Indian made maps.

Maps from the 1590

Mughal document detailing India's history and traditions, contain references to locations indicated in earlier Indian cartographic traditions.[11]

Through the 16th century European explorers, and traders, such as

Jan Huygen van Linschoten
ventured into the interior, from the growing number or European trading posts, and expanded on and refined the previous navigational charts, with geographic detail. A series of geographies published under the title Itinerario (later published as an English edition as Discours of Voyages into Y East & West Indies), appeared in 1596, and graphically displayed for the first time in Europe detailed maps of voyages to the East Indies, particularly India.

Map of Goa, in Linschoten's Itineraries, ca.1590

The seamless hollow Celestial globe was invented in Kashmir by Ali Kashmiri ibn Luqman in 998 AH (1589–90 CE), and twenty other such globes were later produced in Lahore and Kashmir during the Mughal Empire.[18] Before they were rediscovered in the 1980s, it was believed by modern metallurgists to be technically impossible to produce hollow metal globes without any seams, even with modern technology.[18] These Mughal metallurgists pioneered the method of lost-wax casting in order to produce these globes.[18]

The scholar Sadiq Isfahani of Jaunpur compiled an atlas of the parts of the world which he held to be 'suitable for human life'.[10] The 32 sheet atlas—with maps oriented towards the south as was the case with Islamic works of the era—is part of a larger scholarly work compiled by Isfahani during 1647 CE.[10] According to Joseph E. Schwartzberg (2008): 'The largest known Indian map, depicting the former Rajput capital at Amber in remarkable house-by-house detail, measures 661 × 645 cm. (260 × 254 in., or approximately 22 × 21 ft).'[19]

Colonial India

Nain Singh Rawat (19th century CE) received a Royal Geographical Society
gold medal in 1876.

A map describing the kingdom of Nepal, four feet in length and about two and a half feet in breadth, was presented to Warren Hastings.[9] In this raised-relief map the mountains were elevated above the surface and several geographical elements were indicated in different colors.[9] The Europeans used 'scale-bars' in their cartographic tradition.[2] Upon their arrival in India during the Middle Ages, the indigenous Indian measures were reported back to Europe, and first published by Guillaume de I'Isle in 1722 as Carte des Costes de Malabar et de Coromandel.[2]

With the establishment of the British Raj in India, modern European cartographic traditions were officially employed by the British Survey of India (1767). One British observer commented on the tradition of native Indian cartography:

Besides geographical tracts, the Hindus have also maps of the world according to the system of the puranics and of the astronomers: the latter are very common. They also have maps of India and of particular districts, in which latitudes and longitudes are entirely out of question, and they never make use of scale of equal parts. The sea shores, rivers and ranges of mountains are represented by straight lines.[9]

The

Great Trigonometric Survey, a project of the Survey of India throughout most of the 19th century, was piloted in its initial stages by William Lambton, and later by George Everest
. To achieve the highest accuracy a number of corrections were applied to all distances calculated from simple trigonometry:

Thomas George Montgomerie organized several cartographic expeditions to map Tibet, as well as China.[20] Mohamed-i-Hameed, Nain Singh and Mani Singh were among the agents employed by the British for their cartographic operations.[20] Nain Singh, in particular, became famous for his geographical knowledge of Asia, and was awarded several honors for his expeditions.[21]

Modern India (1947 to present)

Main article: Survey of India

The modern map making techniques in India, like other parts of the world, employ

CARTOSAT-2 project, equipped with single panchromatic camera which supported scene specific on-spot images, succeed the CARTOSAT-1 project.[23]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Sircar, 330
  2. ^ a b c d e f Gole (1990)
  3. ^ a b Sircar, 329
  4. ^ a b Pinto (2006)
  5. ^ a b Fuechsel (2008)
  6. ^ a b O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Abu Arrayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
  7. ^ Schwartzberg, 1301–1302
  8. ^ Schwartzberg, 1301
  9. ^ a b c d e Sircar, page 327
  10. ^ a b c Schwartzberg, 1302
  11. ^ a b c d e Sircar, 328
  12. ^ Sircar, 326.
  13. ^ Covington (2007)
  14. ^ Kennedy, 189
  15. ^ Salam (1984)
  16. ^ See Ahmad, S. Maqbul (1960), Al-Sharif al-Idrisi: India and the Neighbouring Territories
  17. ^ See Encyclopædia Britannica, 14th edition, volume XIV, 840–841.
  18. ^ a b c Savage-Smith (1985)
  19. ^ Schwartzberg, 1303
  20. ^ a b Nagendra (1999)
  21. Indian Government honoured him with the grant of a village, and 1000 rupees in revenue. The crowning achievement came in 1876, when the Royal Geographical Society
    honoured him with a gold medal as the ‘man who has added a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia than any individual of our time—Nagendra 1999.
  22. ^ a b See Indian Express (1999). Modern map-making techniques on display. Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.[permanent dead link]
  23. ^
    ISBN 0-7864-1852-4
    .

References

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External links
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