Adam's pique

To rule the colonies effectively, European colonialists needed to know what they were ruling — land as well as people. This was the root motive for the explosion of European research and exploration of India, Africa and other parts of the colonised world during the 19th century.

Appropriately, in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), by the end of the century the largest department of the colonial government was the survey department.

Which is odd because, as American historian Ian Barrow points out, it had taken the department a full 100 years to prepare up-to-date maps covering the entire island. He tells us why, and — because the story involves stubborn bureaucracy, eccentric officers, personality clashes and infighting, commercial imperatives (such as finding land for coffee plantations), scams and scandals, the trickiness of training capable “natives” to do the technical work rather than slack British surveyors, the need to build roads and gain access to the interior, not to mention the obligatory examples of bad behaviour of certain British officers towards their native subordinates and labourers — the story is an entertaining one.

This may be an academic book written largely for an academic audience, but it isn’t encumbered by dreary scholarly prose. Because it is full of characters and for the most part is a narrative of failures, it’s possible to read for fun, and it is easy to read. And because Sri Lanka makes a smaller stage for the action than vast India, it’s possible in one slim book to encompass a critical slice of history. A pullout section reveals a few detailed portions from the map of Sri Lanka, dated 1899, that the survey department was at last able to compile.

SURVEYING AND MAPPING IN COLONIAL SRI LANKA 1800-1900
Ian J Barrow
OUP
xii + 212 pages
Rs 595