Presenting Historical Imagination Via Cartography
Partha Chatterjee
ATLAS, HISTORIQUE DE L'INDE by Arundhati Virmani Editions Autrement, Paris, 2013, 96 pp., Euro 19.00
July 2013, volume 37, No 7

This is a slim and beautifully produced book of maps about India’s history, culture, religion and politics, wide ranging in its scope and very enlightening too. For reasons best known to Indian historians and their publishers, maps have played only a marginal role in pedagogic endeavours and their inclusion in text-books has been instrumental and narrowly political. Which student and teacher has not groaned at the stern warning in small print that the Survey of India has made mandatory about the rightful boundaries of our beleaguered nation? Even the relative safety of the past has not escaped the censorious reach of the Survey. Maps, for centuries, in the hands of authoritarian states, imperial adventurers, modern governments and romantic nationalists have been ways to appropriate spaces, not only political boundaries but also strategic territories, productive areas, religious reach. Perhaps that is why they function as wish-fulfillment for the powerful who want to revel in ownership. For this reason maps are sometimes downright lies, a denial and travesty of the reality on the ground.

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