Viewing the Exhibition of Colonial Maps at the Asiatic Society, Bombay.
Bombay, Thursday, April 19, 2022.
The weather in Bombay is truly blistering at this time. April and May are the two most horrific months when it comes to the heating of the Indian sub-continent. I am torn between my desire to get out and explore the city and partake of its treats before the fury of the Southwest Monsoon winds hit us and a desire to stay put indoors in air-conditioned comfort. Eventually, it was exploration that trumped laziness and I set out to see an exhibition about which I had heard a whole lot from a whole lot of friends.
By 12. 15pm, I was at the steps of the Asiatic Society. I took a fast train from Bandra Station and then, braving the heat, walked to Horniman Circle where the Asiatic Society in located. Inside, in the austere Darbar Hall whose rounded walls are encircled by the oil-painted portraits of various worthies, the exhibition was mounted. It was entirely managed by a company called ‘Past Perfect’ that employs professional conservationists. The exhibition is entitled ‘Meandering Through a Mapped Canvas” and it features rare maps of Bombay and India as created in colonial times—British, French and Portuguese.
At a time when navigation and maritime exploration led to colonial conquest, five Western European powers began a systematic movement to ‘claim’ newly-discovered lands for themselves. Thus was born colonization and its twin brother, Colonialism. In an attempt to show off their recently-acquired territory, cartographers lost no time creating maps to send back to the home country. Although there were probably maps made in India before 1652 (after all the Portuguese colonized Goa in 1498 and the British East India company had begun trading in Surat from 1600 itself), the earliest map in the exhibition dates from the mid-seventeenth century. As might be expected, they are in a dismal condition. Bombay’s heat and humidity, lack of climate-controlled storage space and simply the impact of Time have taken their toll on the maps that are uniformly sepia-toned and so fragile that they are falling apart. It is only the expertise of professional conservationists that have saved them and placed them on display.
Among the many maps that are part of this collection one sees those depicting areas of India that were involved in the Sepoy Mutiny of 1858, plague maps depicting areas of Greater Bombay that were affected by the deadly scourge at the end of the 19th century and a superb railway map of British India that gives a wonderful idea of the rapidity with which the rail network was constructed by the British from 1855 onwards. In addition, the ones that caught my eye depicted White Town in French-possessed Pondicherry, the Portuguese possession of Salsette stretching down the West Coast of India and a map of Greater Bombay depicting regions from Mahim down to the southernmost tip of Colaba (long before Nariman Point was even conceived).
Curatorial notes help the viewer navigate the show and allow one to pause with a magnifying glass (supplied by the organizers) to peruse a particular area that strikes the imagination. I was particularly thrilled to find the road on which I was born, the road on which the church in which I was baptized stands in Mazagoan and the road on which my school is to be found on Clare Road in Byculla. Needless to say, these roads carry the names with which we all grew up—names of colonial officials such as Clare and Nesbit—and give the viewer a very good idea of the manner in which the area has been altered as much as the names of its roads have. It was a superb walk down Memory Lane for me, made all the more poignant because I was alone and left with the intensity of my nostalgia. Yes, we were allowed to take pictures and I did take a couple.
The exhibition is nicely laid out on specially designed wooden structures each of which houses a couple of maps. Curatorial notes and commentary from the two curators who conceived and laid out the exhibition, Sanghamitra Chatterjee and Dipti Anand accompany each of the exhibits. Another key figure in this exhibition is conservationist Amalina Dave without whose delicate touch and finely thought-out decisions these maps (or what remains of them) could never have been preserved for the centuries to come. Sadly, none of these accomplished women were credited on the nice pamphlet that was available for distribution nor on any of the displays. It would have been nice to give credit where it was due.
I am deeply excited by the use of this space for this exhibition—certainly it was the first one ever of its kind that I have seen (but then I have only just returned to remain long-term in Bombay). It is very likely that such exhibitions are commonplace. In the event that this is the first time, I can only hope there will be many more such displays. After all, the Asiatic Society probably owns an absolute treasure trove of books, manuscripts, newspapers, journals, legal papers, maps, and the like and, in the manner of the continuous exhibitions that are held in places such as the Pierponte Morgan Library in New York City and the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, it is my hope that we, the good citizens of Bombay, can enjoy such perusing on a regular basis.
I have to say that after I left the precincts of the Darbar Hall (which was mercifully air-conditioned), I stood on the Neo-Classical steps of the Town Hall looking down upon traffic as it whizzed past Horniman Circle. The heat hit me like a slap in the face and I actually had difficulty breathing! However, I simply had to get to Yazdani Bakery to buy myself one of those wonderful white bread loaves it sells as I could see visions of ham and cheese sandwiches dancing before my eyes—as I simply cannot abide the thought of hot meals in this weather.
That mission accomplished, I beat a hasty retreat into the nearest air-conditioned retreat I could find—Starbucks—and downed a bucket-sized iced chocolate, stacked with ice and topped with whipped cream! It was the best liquid lunch I could possibly have imagined. Any thoughts I might have had of exploring the neighborhood were wiped clean from my mind as all I wanted to do was get back on the train and home to sleep off the rest of a brutally hot afternoon.
I reached home at 4.00 pm, switched on the air-conditioner and gave myself up to the blissful peace of an afternoon nap to the accompaniment of the AC’s hum. It had been worthwhile, after all. I have no regrets that I made the journey into town on a commuter train in such dreadful weather. For the sheer (and now very rare) joy of seeing a well-curated exhibition is indeed a pleasure for which I will scale mountains, if the opportunity arises .
Until next Thursday, I wish you happy exploring…
