INDIA LONG AGO: A map of ‘East Indies’ , drawn some time after the 15th century.
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Its tip is too bulbous and its bottom rather heavy. The flanks are unwieldy and the middle is out of shape. And it's unnaturally inclined to its right. But the legend at the top says 'East Indies' — it's a map of India and the countries to its east. The makers of this map could be forgiven for not getting it right; after all, it was sketched sometime soon after the 15th century.
What is it about old maps that fascinates people despite their inaccuracies , sloppiness and inelegance? What is it that makes connoisseurs dig deep in their pockets to buy them at exorbitant prices? The East Indies map (shown alongside), part of a set of 250 giving details of Southeast Asia, including India was sold for a staggering £223,250 (Rs 1.9 crore) at a Sotheby's auction titled 'Travel, Maps, Atlases and Natural History' in London on May 9. The set dates to 15th-19 th centuries.
One reason we find old maps worthy of collection is their incorrectness. The fallacies, after all, are not errors but a reflection of what people in those times thought their world to be like. This is how a cartographer, drawing upon the explorations undertaken before his time, would sketch the lines of a landmass. And each successive effort would be more definitive than its predecessor. It's fascinating to think that this is how — through a process spanning centuries and generations — geographers would have come to understand the triangular shape of the Indian subcontinent.
Maithili Parekh, the India director of Sotheby's , says that it is the inaccuracies that make maps appealing. "It's interesting to look at maps from earlier times that show us how explorers and cartographers researched geographies and landmasses. Maps were used for defence, invasions, understanding far off lands, and were critical in strategic planning for kingdoms. On a recent trip into interior Rajasthan, I was surprised to note that people even today don't know the shape of the world, or have never seen the sea, only imagined it."
Andrew Currie, London-based representative of the Bonhams auction house calls maps a window into the past which illuminates the present. "Their appeal is in showing us how the people before us made sense of the changing knowledge; how they reflected on political developments and how they charted completely unknown territory. In fact, as recently as 1990, the map of Europe looked completely different from the way it looks today with large swathes of Eastern Europe lying within the Soviet bloc. The Czech Republic and Slovakia didn't exist and most of the now-independent states in the Balkans were part of Yugoslavia," he says.
Some of the maps that Bonhams has sold include journals written by the East Indies explorer Thomas Bowrey (1662 - 1713), known as one of the first Europeans to sample the narcotic effects of bhang. "The journals, sold in 2006 for £40,000, also included 'An account of the Journall of a Voyage from England to Bengall in the East Indies... from the 11th of December 1689 to the 14th of December 1691'," says Currie.
As Currie says, map creation is an ongoing process, not just because of the changing global politics but also because of the constant revision of our knowledge about a distant past. While older maps attain historical value as they get outdated, the newer ones clear cobwebs in our understanding about the past. Irfan Habib and Faiz Habib's 'Atlas of Ancient Indian History' , soon to be published by Oxford University Press, is important in this context.
Through 12 maps, it presents comprehensive data on what the political, economic and geographical divisions of India looked like, from pre-historic times to AD 750. In a first for ancient India, these maps give a highly detailed description of our earliest history, showing political and linguistic boundaries, trade and occupations, the pottery in use and more.
The atlas is not just of academic interest but also amazes with the list of Greek names of Indian places. It's interesting to note that the Greeks, the trading partners of Indian kingdoms, referred to Saurashtra as Syrestrene, Bharuch as Barygaza, Ujjain as Ozene, Kalyan as Kaliena and Machlipatnam as Masalla.
Irfan Habib, historian and professor emeritus, Aligarh Muslim University, says that the task of creating the atlas was painstaking — it grew out of a paper he had presented at the 1986 Indian History Congress on the 'Economic Map of India, AD 1-300 ' — because of the limited information . "Indians didn't have much interest in geography and the earliest map of India that shows it to be a peninsula is Persian and dates to the 14th-15 th century." While Prof Habib undertook the research, the maps in the atlas were created by his son Faiz, a cartographer.
It will be a while before the latest maps of ancient India attain historical value. In the natural progression of knowledge, they may even get outdated in the distant future, with fresh insights into the times of the Indus Valley Civilisation, Buddha, Ashoka and, perhaps, somebody else whom we don't even know of yet.