Mapping the Great Game

Title: Mapping the Great Game – Explorers, Spies & Maps in Nineteenth-century Asia

Author: Riaz Dean

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2019 (First)

ISBN: 9780670092918

Pages: 293

When European powers competed among themselves for colonial annexation in the nineteenth century, it became the lot of Asia to come under their hegemonic invasions and also to provide the battleground for their internecine warfare. Britain stood its ground in India quite firmly and convincingly by 1818, when they defeated the Marathas, the last native challenge to colonialism. While Britain had no ambitions on the barren wastelands of Central Asia with its sparsely populated but aggressively tribal communities, this was not the case with Russia under the tsars. Russia always coveted a land route to the warm water ports of South Asia. With Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, their hopes were kindled to try something bold. Their overtures to Persia and the Khanates of Turkestan stung Britain to wake up to the possibility of a Russian invasion on India, by that time treated as the Jewel in the Crown. It too began countermeasures towoo and/or browbeat the petty principalities which controlledthe trade routes. This diplomatic and sometimes military confrontation is known as ‘The Great Game’. It continued on and off for nearly a century till 1907 when an Anglo-Russian Convention was signed to keep Afghanistan as a buffer state between the two empires. While this tussle for new land was being played out, the colonial government in India came alive to the need for making maps of the subcontinent using thoroughly scientific methods. The Great Trigonometrical Survey precisely did the same with painstaking work that spanned four decades. This book is the charming story of these initiatives along with the East India Company's desire to open trade up with Tibet which wanted to keep itself hidden in a clock of mystery and deep religiosity.Born and brought up in the Fiji Islands, Riaz Dean has travelled much of Central Asia including Turkestan and the roof of the world. He has written on the ancient Silk Road and its mapping. He lives in New Zealand. This is his first book.

The author identifies William Moorecroft as the first Britisher to investigate beyond Afghanistan. Arrived in India as superintendent of studs, he took it as a pretext to venture north in search of fine horses. It was essential to keep such secrecy as spieswere immediately executed in the war-torn principalities. He set out in 1811 and his third journey was especially important due to another unexpected development. We know that literature in India extended to the first millennium BCE, but Indians were reluctant to write down history. On this aspect, she trailed behind Greece. We had the equivalent of Pythagoras or Democritus, but no one comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides. Other than eulogies and epics that exaggerated facts to an unrecognisable mangle, India can point out only to the treatise ‘Rajatarangini’(river of kings) written in Kashmir in the eleventth century CE about its dynasty. This book was brought to light by Moorecroft’s efforts. He had some medical talents and he cured a learned Brahmin while in Kashmir and managed to obtain the manuscript of the volume as a reward.He died in Afghanistan on his last journey and the copious notes and logbooks he left behind were recovered and published after his demise.

It is amusing to know that India was the only country in the world that was mapped with state of the art cartographic methods in the early nineteenth century. This was achieved by the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS) organised and kick-started in 1802. This system involved fixing three prominent pointsin the countryside as the vertices of a triangle and then proceeded to measure the angles between them. Based on the length – actual or calculated – betweenany two vertices, the other two lines can be computed trigonometrically. Hilltops were the usual targets, and even the tower soaring above the Brihadeshwara temple at Thanjavur had also been used as a point. Lambton carried on the measurements for twenty-one years in the rugged country with a most demanding climate. He died in 1823 while surveying near Nagpur. The management of the men and instruments was a herculean task. The measurement apparatus alone took thirty-four camels and three elephants to move. It employed up to 700 workers and was completed only in 1841 when it reached the Himalayan foothills. This was soon extended to other uncharted regions and the principal triangulation of the subcontinent was finally finished in 1883.

Dean notes down the enthusiastic participation of native surveyors in finalising the route surveys to Tibet. It was a forbidden country for foreigners, but a few tribes in the Kumaon sector were permitted to travel there and carry out essential trade. The British saw this as an opportunity to explore the theocratic kingdom under the nominal suzerainty of China. They trained Indian volunteers in the art of surveying and taught them to walk all the way to Tibet in a consistent fashion. Their trained steps of standard length were then carefully counted from specially made prayer beads. They then walked into Tibet and other uncharted territory under the guise of merchants or religious mendicants. They were called pundits and the most famous among them was Nain Singh who made it to Lhasa in 1866. Kishen Singh made another great feat by traversing 2800 miles entirely by walking in a span of two years. These pundits were on their own on these long travels. In the absence of modern communication facilities, they were often presumed to be dead. When Kishen Singh returned, he found his two-year old son already dead and his wife had taken up with another man. Abdul Hamid is another noteworthy figure who had made more than fifty explorations. In all, these pundit mapmakers route-surveyed over 25,000 miles of territory worth of India’s frontiers, covering a staggering one million square kilometres. Much of this region was previously uncharted and where most European explorers had dared not venture.

This book also presents the picture from the Russian side too, where the kingdom gradually gobbled up the Central Asian states. The towering Hindukush mountain ranges made it difficult for transporting troops from the Indian side. But no such geographical features hindered the Russians. The Volga River flowed into the Caspian Sea and a rail line was laid from the other shore of this land-locked sea to Tashkent. What is remarkable is the relative ease with which the Russian forces overwhelmed the fabled Turkish defences. These remained firmly under Russian control till the fall of Communism in 1991 when they turned independent one by one. Turkestan was in effect divided into two parts by the imperial interests of Russia and China. China renamed its half Xinjiang which remains under sectarian rife even now. The Great Game came to an end after Russia’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 and the rise of Germany as a concern for both powers in the run up to the First World War.

The book is very easy to read. It has three major sections – those dealing with the power struggle with Russia, surveying of India and opening up of the trade route to Tibet. These three are practically mutually exclusive with nothing to link them. It thus takes extraordinary coordination on the part of the author to seamlessly join them so that the readers’ attention is not jarred. The author always exhibits an understanding of the sensibilities of the Indian readers in exposing the blatant racial prejudices in favour of the British geographers whose only physical trouble was the exposition of the efforts of their Indian subordinates and translation of their narrative into English.

The book is highly recommended

Rating: 3 Star