Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent:
Exploring Colonial Cartographies and Toponyms in India
Our project began by identifying a range of high quality digitised maps of the subcontinent, all created and published in Europe. Of these, six maps were selected for annotation; these maps were published between 1714 and 1894 and contained English, Dutch, French translations of Indian toponyms.
Our aim was to trace continuities and discontinuities in the assignment of place-names and to gather clues about the transliteration of place-names and categories from Indian language into European cartographies. Annotation focused on the southern part of the subcontinent from the Deccan south and created a gazetteer containing 1932 annotations. Geographic tags were assigned for all annotated places. The majority were settlements, regions, rivers, mountain ranges, and coastal regions. Stylistic, graphical elements of text and symbols were also tagged. Exploration of these tags is an opportunity for future research into the graphic conventions of colonial cartographies of Southern India.
With such a large number of annotations, we decided to focus disambiguation on the Carnatic and Coromandel coasts on the south east of the subcontinent. 335 toponyms that could not be assigned automatically using Recogito’s in-built gazetteers were investigated manually, primarily using Google Maps and mapmyindia.com. Of these, 232 were successfully disambiguated and identified, extending the gazetteer for the subcontinent.
The full gazetteer created by the project is available here. Metadata is provided on the second sheet for the eight spreadsheet columns. The gazetteer includes a transcription of the toponyms as they appear on the map, universally unique identifier, latitude, longitude and tags assigned to describe annotated entity (e.g. settlement, italics, underlined). Time-management required a limit to be set for each disambiguation. A maximum of 15 minutes was spent assigning co-ordinates for toponyms. A designation of confidence for the disambiguated toponyms is provided, 1 for definite and 0 to indicate a degree of uncertainty. Colonial contexts present considerable complexity for disambiguation; some toponyms were untraceable. Around 1000 settlement toponyms could not be assigned locations either using Geonames or through disambiguation due to both the complexity of the corpus, and time constraints. As the database develops through different projects, it is hoped that coordinates can be assigned for many of these toponyms in the future.
A range of additional associated place-names were identified for 207 of the 232 disambiguated toponyms. These associated place names illustrate the complexity and potential of place name analysis. Some of the place names were similar, varying only due to transliteration. The associated names for Pedapalli, now the name of a district of northern Telangana, were clearly variations of the same root Petapouli, Peetapolee, Pettapoli, Pettepole and Peddapalli. Others showed far greater variation in nomenclature. The place located as Caliatur, for example, had six associated place-named: Krishnapatnam, Kistnapatnam, Caleture, Caletur, Calitore and Calletur. The Hill Fortress at Kondaveedu appeared on three maps and was associated with different names on each.
This preliminary work indicates the importance for smaller-scale explorations of place names that will map nomenclatures at the local level and trace their relationship to changes in government, administrative, urban growth and environmental transformations.
The annotation and georeferencing of this small selection of maps has initiated what will hopefully begin a more comprehensive expansion of a historical gazetteer for colonial India. It raises issues about the assignment and slippages of toponyms between cartographic representations of territory in colonial contexts. Further research can use place-names to trace out the appearance, disappearance and movement of place-names between cartographies, between maps and textual materials and between place-points and regions.
If you have any questions related to this project, please get in touch with Deborah Sutton (d.sutton[at]lancaster.ac.uk, @DebsSutton) or Katherine Bellamy (k.a.bellamy[at]lancaster.ac.uk, @kbellamy_)
