Mapping the Great Game: Bird’s eye view of the Great Game

During the colonial era, it was often remarked that Indians have no sense of history. Today, it may be argued that our postcolonial romance with historiography — writing our own history, so to speak, is now being replaced with a zeal only for a supposedly glorious, if distant (read mythological) past. However, for those of us keen on seeing each historical period in its own context, Riaz Dean’s Mapping the Great Game offers not only factual treats, but also echoes fiction that many of us will have encountered.

For those familiar with the Great Game, it may connote a colonial adventurism often aimed at furthering their loot and plunder of the Indian subcontinent, a shadow battle for control over India’s vast riches which had invited many a traveller over the ages. It is equally undeniable that the efforts of the Great Game’s many players provided a modern, European context for the often tenuous relationships that underpinned geopolitics and trade in pre-colonial Asia. Dean’s work offers us the latest glimpse into the extremely eccentric personalities whose life work makes up the Great Game.

Mapping the Great Game is a book about Europeans colouring in hitherto unknown areas of a region they understood only in fragments, and its content is as colourful as its cover promises. That it uses quotes from Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (first published by McMillan & Co. Ltd. in 1901) is also utterly unsurprising. Kipling’s work, for those unaware, is perhaps the finest fictional tribute to the Great Game — and by extension to the Raj itself — detailing through a bildungsroman how a person may become drawn into the Great Game, often under the guise of ethnological curiosity.

But the central action of Dean’s book is by no means the spy thriller-befitting exploits of the adventurers, it is the more prosaic yet more crucial aspect of map-making which, per the book, “was integral to the Age of Imperialism”. Indeed, the true protagonist of Mapping the Great Game is the Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS). The GTS is the labour of two individuals, one of whom received recognition in unexpected ways. This was George Everest, Surveyor General of India from 1830-1843, after whom the world’s biggest mountain peak is named. But the person who began this monumental endeavour was William Lambton, now nearly forgotten. Dean quotes Showell Styles in commenting about Lambton’s penchant for using the word “great” — Lambton worked on the Great Theodolite besides the GTS. It is however left to the reader’s conjecture whether the Game itself was made Great by the GTS.

Lambton, who came to India at the age of 43, featured also in the Siege of Seringapatam against Tipu Sultan’s armies. From this unlikely beginning, at an age when most Britishers in India were considered too old to be useful, he would go on to establish the baseline for the GTS — a 12 km feature completed in 42 days, based on which the entire peninsula would be mapped. For his persevering attention to the mathematical aspects of cartography, he would later be called the “Father of Indian Geodesy”.

But going beyond the British administration, Mapping the Great Game recognizes the efforts of the various Indians —the Pundits, the Khalasis, and others who were invariably those handling the equipment and in many cases running the greatest risks. It is the stories of these overlooked people that makes the book most readable.