a truly faith ful trans-lation always implies a certain amount of invention, and the same may be true for thetranscription of oral sources.

The transcript turns aural objectsinto visual ones, which inevitably implies reduction and manipulation. T

written and oral sources are not mutually exclusive

Although cartographers write about the art as well as the science of mapmak-ing, science has overshadowed the competition between the two approaches. The corollary is that when historians assess maps, their interpre-tive strategies are molded by this idea of what maps are claimed to be. In our own Western culture, at least since the Enlightenment, car-tography has been defined as a factual science. The premise is that a map should offer a trans-parent window on the world. A good map is an accurate map. Where a map fails to deal with reality adequately on a factual scale, it gets a black mark. Maps are ranked according to their correspondence with topographical truth. Inac-curacy, we are told, is a cartographic crime.

It is commonplace to say that cartography is an art of persuasion.

Like books, they are also the products of both individual minds and the wider cultural values in particular societies.

The corollary is that when historians assess maps, their interpre-tive strategies are molded by this idea of what maps are claimed to be. In our own Western culture, at least since the Enlightenment, car-tography has been defined as a factual science. The premise is that a map should offer a trans-parent window on the world.

Within the constraints of survey techniques, the skill of the cartographer, and the code of conventional signs, the role of a map is to present a factual statement about geo-graphical reality.

maps as historical documents

An unbroken silence, the peacefulness of an untroubled calm, settled over the place. The rays of the afternoon sun flooded through the west windows in long parallel shafts full of floating golden motes. There was no sound; nothing stirred. The floor of the Board of Trade was deserted. Alone, on the edge of the abandoned Wheat Pit, in a spot where the sunlight fell warmest—an atom of life, lost in the immensity of the empty floor—the grey cat made her toilet, diligently licking the fur on the inside of her thigh, one leg, as if dislocated, thrust into the air above her head.

At once there was a great silence, broken only by the harsh rasp of the carpenters' saws and the voice of the janitor exchanging jokes with the washerwomen. The sound of footsteps in distant quarters re-echoed as if in a church.

All articulate expression was lost in the single explosion of sound

Then suddenly, cutting squarely athwart the vague crescendo of the floor came the single incisive stroke of a great gong. Instantly a tumult was unchained

one long roll of uninterrupted thunder

In the Western Union booths the keys of the multitude of instruments raged incessantly.

By now the chanting of the messenger boys was an uninterrupted chorus.

the deep-toned hum of the murmur of many voices swelled like the rising of a tide

the clicking of the throng of instruments rose into the air in an incessant staccato stridulation

Comparable and Competing Works

Three copies of the Alexander Thompson map are known to exist.

Maps and history are deeply complementary. “Both reduce the infinitely complex to a fi-nite, manageable, frame of reference,” theorist Denis Cosgrove points out. “Both involve the imposition of artificial grids—hours and days, longitude and latitude—on temporal and spatial landscapes, or perhaps I should say timescapes and landscape. Both provide a way of reversing divisibility, of retrieving unity, of recapturing a sense of the whole, even though it can not be the whole.”

Taste was used in the colonial context to police racial boundaries through the critique of architectural design.

The terminus seems to be at once the factory of Englishness that John Ruskin, T. Roger Smith, and Governor Frere intended it to be, and to be a monument to the imperial production of hybrid identities, and to be a space in which the colonial state reveals its capacity to collect and exhibit alterity. The same object produces all of these readings — not in sequence, but simultaneously.

These small mi-norities conceived of themselves somewhat as outsiders in India, were loyal to the colonial regime, and became anglicized. They wanted to appear modern by adopting the English language and modes of dressing, and also by surrounding themselves by things European. Thus the Indo-Saracenic was hardly attractive to them and not surprisingly, “Not just the British, but the city’s Indian resi-dents as well, made of Bombay a Gothic city.”

What is relevant is that the Gothic Revival allowed for many levels of engagement and analysis, even the most basic.

Debates about style, usually directed to an audience in England, focused on assurance that the hybridity seen in colonial architecture was the sole intellectual product of British architects, who com-bined European forms with universal principles in Indic design, rather than the aesthetic fruit of the intermingling of races, which was from the intermixture of the ruler and the ruled. At the same time, the claim for universal principles was an attempt to assure the British who used or worked in these hybrid spaces that they were not really hybrid subjects.

Sir Bartle Frere, who promoted the use of the Gothic Revival in Bombay, spoke in 1870 of the development in that city of what he hoped would become “an indigenous school of Anglo-Indian architecture, as extensive and as distinct as the pure Hindu and Mahometan schools of former days,”

Dr. Bhau Daji (1821–74), a prominent public Bombay figure

Here, Fergusson takes the reader, over sixhundred pages and more than two hundred illustrations, on a historically guided tourof all the four to five hundred structures in India he had sought out on his travelsand the many more he could never visit but could now add to his scholarly compen-dium from the vantage ground of a full, authoritative overview.

These priorities would also now resonate across the spectrum of European engage-ment with Indian monuments, both official and private. We see its manifestations inthe first photographic surveys undertaken by Colonel Thomas Biggs and Dr. WilliamPigou in the Deccan during 1855–56, by Major Gill at Ajanta and Ellora in the 1860s,and by Linnaeus Tripe and Captain E. D. Lyon with regard to South Indian temples.

it was a statement less about the priority of imagesover words than about the infallibility of the visual image as evidence and the im-perative of collating and preserving this evidence. The photograph, like the accuratedrawing or the plaster cast, came to be seen as the best record of original buildingsand designs that were succumbing to decay.

For Fergusson, the act of seeing became inextricably tied to the act of knowing.

the picturesque . . . provided . . . a congenial, respectable, eminentlycivilizedstand-point from which to study and enjoy the wilderness. To the strong national ego . . .the picturesque added a controlling aesthetic vision—a wilderness-subduing ‘eye’—to help organise, shape, and even half-create a native landscape.

cohering