Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent
Historical Annotation of a Corpus of Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Maps
‘Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent’ will focus on the annotation of a corpus of colonial maps generated in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the Indian subcontinent was witness to rapid geopolitical transformations. During this period, a number of European colonial interventions in South Asia were substantially enlarged, consolidated and ultimately collapsed. This project will compile and annotate a series of maps which exhibit the transformations which took place in the Carnatic (from the 1740s), the Deccan (in the first two decades of the 20th century), and the North-West subcontinent (in the mid-19th century).
The annotation will create a preliminary historical gazetteer for the subcontinent. The research will trace the cartographic allocation of nomenclatures by military and civil authority from eighteenth century wars of conquest to the imperial formation of Native States, Presidencies and Provinces in British India. The study of toponyms across this period will offer new insights into the nature and use of cartographic regimes in relation to the landscapes they purported to describe.
Maps created during this period offer an insight into these geopolitical transformations, containing a rich array of historical geographical information that reflects the constantly evolving boundaries and nomenclatures across the sub-continent. These maps were produced for a variety of purposes including, but not limited to, the following:
- Military strategy
- Revenue administration
- Medical topographies
- Civil administration
- Colonial gazetteers
- Education
We will identify a corpus of maps and geographic texts from this varied source material, with a range of scales, regions and sources, with a particular focus on peninsula India (from the Gangetic plains to Kanyakumari, formerly known as Cape Comorin). The characteristics of these maps present a particular set of challenges — especially in relation to the selection, transliteration, and translation of place-names from a variety of linguistic regions. We hope to also identify Tamil and Telugu language maps and geographical accounts in order to compare to colonial cartographies.
Digitally annotating these maps using Recogito will enable us to explore and analyse these complexities, enabling the formulation of standardised nomenclatures as well as the facility to trace geographic patterns through which these transliterations emerged from the eighteenth through to the early twentieth centuries. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate the evolving representations and understandings of space during this period of significant political, social, and geographical upheaval, tracking patterns of short- and long-term changes in cartography and nomenclature in the Indian subcontinent.
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