This past week, the Museum of Art & Photography (MAP), with its collection of over 60,000 pieces of Indian art, photography, and textiles, opened in an edgy new building on Kasturba Road, as a wonderful new addition to Bengaluru’s burgeoning museumscape.
The link between MAP and the subject of today’s column is admittedly tenuous, but the acronym works as a good opening to a discussion of the first scientifically conducted surveys of the Bangalore-Mysore region, and the maps that resulted from them. The process involved three savants, who led three pioneering surveys at the turn of the 19th century – Dr Francis Buchanan conducted the agricultural survey, Lt-Col William Lambton the trigonometrical survey, and Col Colin Mackenzie the so-called Mysore Survey.
The fourth son of the chief of Clan Buchanan, Scotsman Francis Buchanan had little hope of inheriting either land or title. He chose medicine to earn a living, graduating in 1783 from the University of Edinburgh, where he also studied botany under John Hope, among the first in Britain to teach Carl Linnaeus’ system of botanical classification. After serving many years as a doctor on Merchant Navy ships, Buchanan joined the medical services of the Bengal Presidency in 1794.
In 1799, after the fall of Tipu Sultan in the fourth Mysore War, Buchanan was tasked with surveying the newly acquired territories of the East India Company. In 1807, he published his ground-breaking magnum opus ‘A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar’, investigating and documenting the ‘agriculture, arts, commerce, religion, manners, customs, natural and civil history, and antiquities’ of the region.
William Lambton came from humble origins, but his talent for mathematics won him a place in a reputed school, where he studied under surveyor and mathematician Dr Charles Hutton, famous for calculating the density of the earth. In 1781, Lambton travelled with his regiment to America, where his surveying skills soon saw him put to work measuring land for the American settlers. The loss of an eye saw him appointed to a cushy desk job; he used his leisure time to teach himself advanced mathematics, which would serve him well in later years.
In 1796, he came to India as part of a regiment under Lord Arthur Wellesley. Following the British victory in the fourth Mysore War, where he demonstrated his ability to navigate accurately by the stars in unmapped country, he asked to be allowed to undertake a survey of the new territory. Permission was granted, and in 1800, Lambton began the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), a 110-year-long exercise hailed as one of the world’s greatest scientific endeavours, which resulted in near-perfect maps of the Indian subcontinent.
The baseline of the first triangle that kicked off the GTS was 7.5 miles long, took 57 days to complete, and was drawn in Bangalore in 1800, between what is today HSR Layout and the Ramamurthy Nagar underpass on the ORR. Lambton continued working on the GTS until January 1823, when he died with his boots on at Hinganghat, Maharashtra.
Colin Mackenzie arrived in India in 1783 to join the Madras Army, which stormed Tipu’s Seringaptam in the fourth Mysore War. Between 1799 and 1810, Mackenzie led the Mysore Survey to establish the boundaries of the state, and produced the first maps of the region, along with illustrations of the landscape and copious notes on archaeological landmarks. In 1815, in recognition of his services, he was appointed the first Surveyor General of India, but remains far better known for his eponymous collection of thousands of manuscripts, epigraphs, coins and paintings, all of which are a crucial source for the study of Indian history.
Together, these three men truly put Bengaluru on the map.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bangalore)