A few months back, I was assigned a project to analyze a few maps from a city of choice and come to some conclusions. Naturally, I chose Bangalore because apart from it being the city I was most familiar with, I was positive that there were so few maps of it online, appealing to the hereditary laziness in me. After a frustrating few hours of perusing the deepest depths of the internet, I managed to pick out a few maps from different time periods, each with fairly credible sources.
Alright, now all I have to do is look at the legends, make some vague connections between them, and I'm good to go. Those little green puffs in the 1791 map? Trees, or something. Hey, look! Those green things are gone in the Google Maps version - boom. Urbanization causes deforestation. Blame it on colonialism.
Uhh... those large roads in the center of the city? Now they are the major arteries of the cities, with smaller capillaries branching out into a million different households. Population influx, growth of IT, easy! Again, let me just blame that on colonialism.
This is pretty easy! It's just like a vague connect-the-dots puzzle, but one that traverses space and time. Let's move on to the next-
Hold on. What is that? Is that... the fort? Bangalore Fort? The whole map of Bangalore is simply "Bangalore Fort" in the 1791 version, but in 1914 it's just this tiny little oval perched on the left side of the page. It's not even present in the 1956 map! And the center of Bangalore in Google Maps is far off from Bangalore Fort. Now, it gets interesting. I need to dig deeper, figure out why the most prominent and arguably only element in the city is minimized to this tiny, insignificant dot. Let's analyze the map data with relation to the Bangalorean and - on a larger scale - Indian timeline.
1791: Bangalore is a British establishment, maintained and run by the army. The fort, captured earlier that year, has been taken from the hands of Tipu Sultan, the King of Mysore. Killed in battle, his legacy is being written off by the foreigners just like they did to countless people, victims, and stories before, across every continent. Bengaluru is changed to Bangalore, and words such as "cantonment" and "park" are being introduced into the lexicon. All traces of India are being wiped away, replaced with the crimson cross and the promise of democracy.
1914: Unbeknownst to much of the outside world, India has been in revolution for decades. Riots have been extinguished as quickly as a candle, but underground armies refuse to back down. Violence is only one means of revolt - the effective protesters are the ones we never see or hear because they've penetrated the defenses so subtly that even the British have no idea what has struck them. The silent cartographer, in a constant war with history, attempts to reverse the damage that the invaders have done. Bangalore as a city has expanded, but in reality, the focus of the city still surrounds the walls of the fort. The silent cartographer sees this, and slowly, measuredly draws the attention away. First, the structure becomes smaller - because it's all relative. The size of the paper stays the same, the size of the fort stays the same, but the size of the city grows; the building that was 1/3rd of the page is now 1/6th. Then, he ever so slightly changes the perspective: each year, the fort moves half a square to the left. Just enough to be noticeable, not enough to arouse suspicion. Who bothers studying maps, anyway?
1956: Freedom. The British are gone from our lives, never to return. Gandhi was just the end - the last straw on the camel's back. Plans have been in motion for nearly a century, and it shows: Bangalore Fort? Vanished. Mirrors and smoke. Just like that, it's gone.
How does it matter? Just because the fort is gone from the map, doesn't mean it has actually vanished. Like the Pyramids of Giza, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall of China, it too has stood the test of time. History can't be overwritten if the physical structure still remains! Unfortunately for the colonists, it can. Ask any Bangalorean the directions to the fort, and nine times out of ten you'll get the response, "What fort?". Gothilla, saar.
The systematic process of colonization was the driving force behind the erasure of culture and context from the world. It devastated millions of lives, dehumanized the rest, and injected countries with enough large-scale problems to last centuries. Yes, it was terrible. But it is equally important to acknowledge those that quietly, subtly stood up to it. They were the ones who managed to start the process of decolonization while colonization was still happening, right under the noses of the British.
What started off as a pretty mundane project turned out to be arguably the most captivating work I've done so far. I was reading literature I had never in a thousand years imagined I would pick up. The homework had turned into a game - I was playing the detective and the clues were scattered across time. While this is neither groundbreaking, phenomenal, or even close to admirable, the passion I felt completing it is something I haven't felt for years. High school had almost completely dissolved any interest I felt towards history and archaeology, and I'm extremely glad to be out of there. I think my fascination with archaeology is not the artifacts, the mummies, the buildings - it's the prospect that I can play a time-traveling Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid to pick up a shovel just to find some answers.
Alright, now all I have to do is look at the legends, make some vague connections between them, and I'm good to go. Those little green puffs in the 1791 map? Trees, or something. Hey, look! Those green things are gone in the Google Maps version - boom. Urbanization causes deforestation. Blame it on colonialism.
Uhh... those large roads in the center of the city? Now they are the major arteries of the cities, with smaller capillaries branching out into a million different households. Population influx, growth of IT, easy! Again, let me just blame that on colonialism.
This is pretty easy! It's just like a vague connect-the-dots puzzle, but one that traverses space and time. Let's move on to the next-
Hold on. What is that? Is that... the fort? Bangalore Fort? The whole map of Bangalore is simply "Bangalore Fort" in the 1791 version, but in 1914 it's just this tiny little oval perched on the left side of the page. It's not even present in the 1956 map! And the center of Bangalore in Google Maps is far off from Bangalore Fort. Now, it gets interesting. I need to dig deeper, figure out why the most prominent and arguably only element in the city is minimized to this tiny, insignificant dot. Let's analyze the map data with relation to the Bangalorean and - on a larger scale - Indian timeline.
1791: Bangalore is a British establishment, maintained and run by the army. The fort, captured earlier that year, has been taken from the hands of Tipu Sultan, the King of Mysore. Killed in battle, his legacy is being written off by the foreigners just like they did to countless people, victims, and stories before, across every continent. Bengaluru is changed to Bangalore, and words such as "cantonment" and "park" are being introduced into the lexicon. All traces of India are being wiped away, replaced with the crimson cross and the promise of democracy.
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| Bangalore Fort, 1791 Earl Cornwallis |
1914: Unbeknownst to much of the outside world, India has been in revolution for decades. Riots have been extinguished as quickly as a candle, but underground armies refuse to back down. Violence is only one means of revolt - the effective protesters are the ones we never see or hear because they've penetrated the defenses so subtly that even the British have no idea what has struck them. The silent cartographer, in a constant war with history, attempts to reverse the damage that the invaders have done. Bangalore as a city has expanded, but in reality, the focus of the city still surrounds the walls of the fort. The silent cartographer sees this, and slowly, measuredly draws the attention away. First, the structure becomes smaller - because it's all relative. The size of the paper stays the same, the size of the fort stays the same, but the size of the city grows; the building that was 1/3rd of the page is now 1/6th. Then, he ever so slightly changes the perspective: each year, the fort moves half a square to the left. Just enough to be noticeable, not enough to arouse suspicion. Who bothers studying maps, anyway?
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| Bangalore, 1914 Verlag von Karl Baedeker |
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| Bangalore, 1956 Satyaprakash & Co. |
The systematic process of colonization was the driving force behind the erasure of culture and context from the world. It devastated millions of lives, dehumanized the rest, and injected countries with enough large-scale problems to last centuries. Yes, it was terrible. But it is equally important to acknowledge those that quietly, subtly stood up to it. They were the ones who managed to start the process of decolonization while colonization was still happening, right under the noses of the British.
What started off as a pretty mundane project turned out to be arguably the most captivating work I've done so far. I was reading literature I had never in a thousand years imagined I would pick up. The homework had turned into a game - I was playing the detective and the clues were scattered across time. While this is neither groundbreaking, phenomenal, or even close to admirable, the passion I felt completing it is something I haven't felt for years. High school had almost completely dissolved any interest I felt towards history and archaeology, and I'm extremely glad to be out of there. I think my fascination with archaeology is not the artifacts, the mummies, the buildings - it's the prospect that I can play a time-traveling Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid to pick up a shovel just to find some answers.
