‘Discoveries’, Explorations and the Imperial Survey

Description

India and the subcontinent stimulated the curiosity of the British who came to India as traders. Each aspect of life in India – its people, customs, geography, climate, fauna and flora – was documented by British travelers, traders, administrators, soldiers to make sense to the European mind. As they ‘discovered’ India and occupied it, they also attempted to ‘civilise’ the natives.
The present volumes focus on select aspects of the imperial archives: the accounts of “discovery” and exploration – fauna and flora, geography, climate – the people of the subcontinent, English domesticity and social life in the subcontinent, the wars and skirmishes – including the “Mutiny” of 1857-58 – and the “civilisational mission”.
Volume 1 ‘Discoveries’, Explorations and the Imperial Survey consists of documents that deal with England’s discovery of India, its exploration and mapping of the subcontinent.
The texts collected here are accounts of how the British ‘discovered’ the subcontinent. The narrative of discovery, with the freshness of the ‘new’, was couched very often in the rhetoric of wonder. But this sense of wonder, even astonishment in some cases at the variety, magnitude and sheer difference of the land and its people, was tempered over time with a narrative of exploration. If the ‘discovery’ moment had a surprise, awe and a sense of uncertainty at facing something totally new-which, in many ways, the subcontinent was-in the early writings of the seventeenth century, the tone, emphasis and attitude shifts later on.

Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India.

Prefatory Note General Introduction: Archive and Empire Introduction Acknowledgements 1. Thomas Stephens. ‘Letter’. 1579. In The First Englishmen in India: Letters and Narratives by Sundry Elizabethans written by Themselves, edited by J. Courtney Locke. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930.
2. Robert Barker. ‘An Account of Some Thermometrical Observations, Made by Sir Robert Barker, F. R. S. at Allahabad in the East Indies, in Lat. 25° 30′ N. during the Year 1767’. Philosophical Transactions (1683–1775) 65 (1775).
3. James Rennell. ‘An Account of the Ganges and Burrampooter Rivers’, communicated by Joseph Banks. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1781).
4. William Jones. ‘The Plants of India’. Asiatic Researches 2 (1807 [1787]).
5. William Chambers. ‘Some account of the Sculptures and Ruins at Mavalipuram’. Asiatic Researches 1 (1788).
6. John Forbes Royle. Illustrations of the Botany of the Himalayan Mountains. London: WH Allen, 1839.
7. Henry Piddington. ‘Fifth Memoir. Madras Hurricane of May 1841’. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 11 (1842).
8. John Goldingham. ‘The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India’. The Calcutta Review 38 (1863).
9. Alexander Cunningham. The Stupa of Bharhut. London: WH Allen, 1879.
10. W.W. Hunter. ‘Chilka Lake’. The Imperial Gazetteer of India. London: Trübner and Co., 1885. Vol. III. 415–417.
11. C.S. Middlemiss. “Preliminary Account of the Kangra Earthquake of 4 April 1905”. Records of the Geological Survey of India. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1905. Vol. XXXII. 258–271.
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