Composite: (Sheets 1 and 2) Hindoostan by J. Rennell F.R.S. 1782

Authorship and object

Major James Rennell (1742–1830) trained as a surveyor in the Royal Navy before joining the East India Company and becoming the first Surveyor-General of Bengal (1767–77). This two-sheet general map was published in London in 1782; its cartography was engraved by J. Phillips and the lettering by W. Harrison, with original colour in outline. It distils a decade of field survey and was elaborated in his Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan, issued in three editions between 1783 and 1793.

From report to measurement

Where d'Anville had reconciled the reports of others, Rennell's map rests on first-hand survey — route-traverses run with chain and compass across Bengal and beyond, anchored by astronomical observation and supplemented, where necessary, by indigenous maps and informants (notably for the Punjab). It was the first scientific survey of any part of the subcontinent, mapping some districts in greater detail than European states then enjoyed of their own territory, and it remained the basis for maps of India for some sixty years — the direct ancestor of the Great Trigonometrical Survey begun in 1802.

The gaze

The map does not disguise its purpose. Boundaries and principalities are drawn with administrative intent at the moment Company power was hardening, and the cartouche at lower right stages the relationship without subtlety: Indian figures presenting to a seated Britannia. Accuracy here is not neutral — it is at once the instrument and the emblem of governance. To have measured the country was already to have begun to possess it.