| Ancient cartographers wanting to delineate the geography of the subcontinent had one unique advantage over their modern counterparts: they did not have to accommodate the vexatious and divisive consequences of the two-nation theory. Looking at examples of rare maps of the north-western areas of the subcontinent that today constitute the modern state of Pakistan, it is almost with a sense of relief that one finds much to admire, for instance, in a map of the natural geography of the Punjab as a whole without the disfiguring blue pencil Radcliffe later scrawled across it, or can appreciate the mountainous contours of Kashmir before it became such a fractured bone of contention. |
| To early cartographers, the local politics of the areas they sought to delineate meant comparatively little. Their prime concern was with natural boundaries - with ranges of mountains or the course of sinuous rivers or with the unarguable demarcation of sea coastlines. To obtain such data, necessarily they had to rely upon the information they could glean from those who were less sedentary than themselves - from intrepid travellers or explorers or ambitious invaders. The earliest of this latter group was the Greek expansionist Alexander the Great who crossed into India in 325 BC, conquered the Punjab and then having followed the Indus southwards as far as lower Sindh, traversed the arid inhospitable wastes of Makran until the reached Persia. |
| The accounts provided by the remnants of his returning army found a permanent place in Claudius Ptolemy's volume Geographia, compiled by him before his death in 150 B.C. Ptolemy's seminal work, expansive but inaccurate, nevertheless remained an authoritative source for subsequent geographers and cartographers for over a thousand years until it was replaced gradually by more up-to-date maps prepared during the 16th centuries. The first edition of Ptolemy's Geographia appeared in Italy in 1475. By 1486, editions were issued in Ulm and in other European countries. |
| A similarly extensive work was Dell' Arcano del Mare or Secrets of the Sea, issued in 1646 by Sir Robert Dudley, a British sea captain employed by the Grand Dukes of Venice. His fine map of the southern coast of Sindh and Balochistan, engraved by the master engraver A. Lucini, is perhaps one of the most stylish examples of 17th century copper plate engraving. When such knowledge was synonymous with power, it was not surprising that every ruler sought to maintain a tight control on information brought back by their sea captains. According to one recent map historian, `before each voyage the captain was allowed to draw a map from the royal library, and had to return it as soon as he was safely home, marking in any new territory he had discovered.' Dudley's nautical expertise explains why his map concentrates on the coastal ports, leaving the mainland blank and uncharted. |
| That deficiency was compensated partially by the maps prepared from accounts of ambassadorial delegations, particularly that of Sir Thomas Roe, the envoy sent by King James I to the Mughal emperor Jahangir. Roe stayed at the Mughal court between 1616-1618. During his stay, Roe presented the Mughal ruler with a map of the subcontinent done by the Flemish mapmaker Mercator. Jahangir returned the map within a few days, offended perhaps that his vast kingdom had been reduced on Mercator's world scale to such provincial proportions. It did not prevent him from using it as a footstool in the miniature done embracing his Persian counterpart Shah Abbas. |
| On his return to London, Roe and his travel companion William Baffin prepared a map of the Mughal empire which became, like Ptolemy's Geographia had been earlier, a prototype for subsequent versions. The map by Pieter Van der Aa, printed in 1724, over a century after Roe's visit, reveals the degree of his dependence on Baffin's, repeating the earlier inaccuracies which showed Multan adjacent to Lahore, and Attock in the south close to Sindh. The most prominent feature is the straight avenue of trees linking Delhi and Lahore, the forerunner of the Grand Trunk Road. |
| Gradually, as the commercial interests of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and finally the British expanded eastwards towards and then across the subcontinent, an increasing amount of detail in maps of the 17th and 18th centuries become a noticeable feature. Accuracy shifts from being an ideal to a practical necessity. By 1842, the date of W. Allen's sophisticated folding map, there was little mystery left. This level of dependable accuracy had been made possible by the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, an indefatigable body of men - British and local - who over a century or so surveyed the whole of the subcontinent, discovering `an error of more than 40 miles in the breadth of the Peninsula, as formerly laid down by astronomical observations', and not surprisingly that `nearly all the chief towns were misplaced on the old maps.' |
| Once the subcontinent had been surveyed, attention was focussed on its extremities, on the border-states like Kashmir, and the inaccessible confines of Chitral, Kafiristan and Tibet. Under the guidance of the imaginative Col. T. G. Montgomerie, a group of surveyors known as the Pundits (including both Hindus and Muslims) were trained to pose as pilgrims and to walk through the uncharted northern areas, measuring distances as they walked and keeping counting on the beads of the rosaries they carried. The level of their accuracy can be gauged from the fact that over a span of 500 miles, the margin of error was discovered after the same area was formally surveyed, to be only two per cent off the mark. Even though at the time, Col. Montgomerie and his Pundits acted under cover, they achieved lasting recognition in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. |
| Rare Maps of Pakistan, hopefully, will achieve for earlier mapmakers and cartographers a similar recognition - an accolade they richly deserve for their diligence, talent and versatile skill. |
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