Click to enlargeComposite: (Sheets 1-3) Map of the Province of Malabar, Drawn from Various Surveys By A. Arrowsmith
Aaron Arrowsmith's Map of the Province of Malabar, Drawn from Various Surveys — the first accurate, detailed map of newly conquered northern Malabar, compiled from military surveys as a strategic aid for the British Indian Army and administration. The survey-as-instrument-of-rule in its purest form.
Authorship and object
Aaron Arrowsmith (1750–1823), Hydrographer to the Prince of Wales and among the foremost London map-makers, compiled this multi-sheet map — here the joined three sheets — in 1809 from recent surveys, finished in his distinctive hand-colour. It was a private commission, not an atlas plate.
A map born of conquest
Malabar — roughly the northern half of present-day Kerala, including Calicut, Cochin and Cannanore — had just been taken by the East India Company during the Third and Fourth Anglo-Mysore Wars and remained restive. The map distils the military surveys made during and after those campaigns, putting a wealth of regional detail into print for the first time.
The gaze
Here the equation of survey and control is explicit. Made expressly as a working tool for the army and civil service governing a newly conquered, still-rebellious province, it is less a representation of Malabar than an apparatus for holding it — to map the country was, directly, to administer and police it.