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Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c26: XXII. Cartography

Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c26

Language
English

XXII. Cartography

c26.1

There is no special word in Sanskrit for ‘a map’. The word *nakshā* (from Arabic *naqshah*) has been adopted in most modern Indian languages in this sense, although it also signifies ‘a picture, a plan, a general description, an official report.’ In Eastern India, the word *māna-citra* has been coined to indicate the English word ‘map’. The absence of any special Sanskrit word raises the question whether map-drawing was at all known to the Indians of old. There is, however, reason to believe that in ancient India a map or chart was regarded as a *citra* or *ālekhya*, *i.e.* ‘a painting, a picture, a delineation’. It will be seen that the Sanskrit word *citra* and its synonyms have practically the same meaning as the Arabic word *naqshah*.

c26.2

That maps were made in ancient India seems to be quite clear from the evidence of the *New History of the T’ang Dynasty*¹ which gives an account of the Chinese general Wang Hiuen-tse’s exploits in India in the year 648 A.D., as to how with the help of 1000 Tibetan soldiers and 7000 Nepalese horsemen he defeated and captured Na-fu-ti O-lo-na-shuen, who had usurped Chi-lo-i-to’s (*i.e.* Śīlāditya-Harṣavardhana’s) throne, in a battle near the town of Cha-puo-ho-lo, and received the submission of 580 walled towns as well as the offer of friendship of Chi-kieu-mo (*i.e.* Śrī-Kumāra *alias* Bhāskaravarman), king of Eastern India. King Chi-kieu-mo’s presents to the Chinese general is stated to have included 30000 oxen and horses and considerable war material and it is further said in this connection that the said king of Kia-mu-lū (*i.e.* Kāmarūpa) presented to the Chinese emperor some curious articles including ‘a map of the country’. This map of Kāmarūpa appears to have been prepared by the artists at king Bhāskaravarman’s court.

c26.3

¹ See *Journ. As. Soc.*, Letters, Vol. XIX, 1953, p. 38.

c26.4

Act I of the *Uttararāmacarita* by Bhavabhūti, who flourished in the eighth century A.D., is styled ‘the inspection of the painting’. It is said that a painter (*citrakara*) painted along a walk (*vīthikā*) the experiences (*carita*) of the Ikṣvāku king Rāma of Ayodhyā in Daṇḍak-āraṇya, Kiṣkindhyā, Laṅkā and other places, according to the instructions of the king’s brother Lakṣmaṇa who had accompanied Rāma to the forests. These paintings included some which are said to have depicted particular regions and may be regarded as a sort of maps. One of the paintings seems to have been conceived as showing the Prasravaṇa hill as ‘extending to the heart of Janasthāna whose darkness is deepened by perpetually pouring clouds and whose caves ring with the flow of the Godāvarī which is embraced by the forests at the skirts that are of a uniformly mild blue colour because of the dense rows of trees.’¹ The reference to forests painted in mild blue colour is interesting. Another picture of the nature of a map in the same context is introduced by Lakṣmaṇa to Rāma and Sītā in the following words: “Here is the tract (*bhāga*) of the Daṇḍaka forest, known as Citrakuñjavat, to the west of Janasthāna, haunted by the headless giant Danu; this is the site (*pada*) of the hermitage of Matanga on the Ṛṣyamūka hill; this again is the emaciated Śavara woman named Śramaṇā; this is the celebrated lake calle Pampā.”²

c26.5

¹ Ed. S. Ray, Calcutta, 1934, p. 106.

c26.6

² *Ibid.*, p. 121.

c26.7

The above references to map-like paintings in an eighth century Sanskrit drama remind us of the following remarks of Wilford made about a century and a half ago: “Besides geographical tracts, the Hindus have also maps of the world both according to the system of the Pauranics and of the astronomers; the latter are very common. They have also maps of India and of particular districts, in which latitudes and longitudes are entirely out of question, and they never make use of a scale of equal parts. The sea shores, rivers and ranges of mountains are represented by straight lines. The best map of this sort I ever saw was one of the kingdom of Nepal presented to Mr. Hastings.

c26.8

It was about four feet long and two and a half broad, of pasteboard, and the mountains raised about an inch above the surface, with trees painted all round. The roads were represented by a red line and the rivers by a blue one. The various ranges were very distinct with the narrow passes through them: in short, it wanted but a scale. The valley of Nepal was accurately delineated; but towards the borders of the map everything was crowded and in confusion.¹ The map of Nepal noticed of by Wilford appears to have been of the same type as the painting the Citrakuñjavat region of Daṇḍak-āraṇya conceived by Bhavabhūti. The Indian maps mentioned by Wilford were probably uninfluenced by foreigners, as otherwise he would have added a note on the point. Unfortunately, Wilford does not say anything about the antiquity of the Indian maps noticed by him. The one of Nepal, of which he has given some details, could not have been very early.

c26.9

¹ *Asiatic Researches*, Vol. VIII, 1805, pp. 270-71 ; cf. pp. 267-334 ; Vol. X, pp. 127-57.

c26.10

A good deal of information on early Indian cartography under Hindu and Muslim inspiration is given by Francesco I. Pullé in his interesting work in Italian, entitled *La Cartografia Antica dell' India*, Parte I.² In section II of the work³ dealing with Indian sources, there are reproductions of three maps, drawn by ancient Indian cartographers according to the Puranic ideas of cosmography and geography. As is well known, the world was regarded as consisting of seven concentric islands, each one of them encircled by a sea. The island at the centre was called Jambu-dvīpa, the southern division of which was called Bhārata-varṣa, bounded by the Himalayas in the north and the waters of the sea in the other directions.⁴ Two of the three maps have been reproduced from a manuscript of the *Lokaprakāśa* which seems to have been originally composed by the celebrated Kashmiri polymath Kṣemendra in the eleventh century A.D. but contains a good deal of much later interpolation,⁵ while the third¹ from a manuscript of another work entitled *Saṃgrahaṇī*. Figure 2 represents the concentric islands and the encircling seas, while Figures 8 and 9 are representations of Jambu-dvīpa. The map of Jambu-dvīpa published in Gladwyn’s translation of the *Ain-i-Akbarī*, Vol. I, was no doubt copied from an origial like those found in the manuscripts of the *Lokaprakāśa* and *Saṃgrahaṇī*, noticed by Pullé. Similar maps were found by Wilford in a manuscript of a work entitled *Kṣetrasamāsa* and were characterised by him as ‘several fanciful delineations of the world’. ² The cosmographical map from a Tibetan Buddhist source reproduced in Figure 4 at p. 23 of Pullé’s work is also interesting in this connection as its origin is certainly Indian. It is, however, difficult to say whether other Tibetan drawings such as the sketch of the Cathedral of Lhāsa published in the *Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal*, Vol. LXIV, Part i, 1895, Plate XXVI, were similarly of Indian inspiration.

c26.11

² *Studi Italiani di Filologia Indo-Iranica*, Vol. IV, Firenze, 1901.

c26.12

³ See *op. cit.*, pp. 8-44.

c26.13

⁴ Figure 2 at p. 16 and Figure 8 at p. 33.

c26.14

⁵ Cf. Stein, *Raj. tar.*, trans., Vol. II, p. 313.

c26.15

¹ Figure 9 at p. 34.

c26.16

² *Asiatic Researches*, Vol. VIII, p. 269.

c26.17

Figure 5 at p. 25 in Pullé’s book is a Hindu map of Jambu-dvīpa and its surroundings. This is of a slightly different kind. In it, the egg-shaped island is surrounded by nine circles in a row, each representing a *graha*. In another row, encircling the *grahas*, are given the twelve *rāśis* each in an oval. Figure 6 (at p. 29) is the representation of the *nava-khaṇḍa* or the nine subdivisions of India. In Figures 10 (at p. 36) and 11 (at p. 37), Pullé has copied two maps of Jambu-dvīpa from Wilford. These are drawn after two slightly different cosmographic conceptions of the ancient Indians. On the authority of Rennel and Santarem,³ Pullé also speaks of an old geographical map incised on a copper plate which was discovered at Monghyr.⁴

c26.18

³ *Cosmographie et Cartographie*, Paris, 1852, Vol. I, p. 364.

c26.19

⁴ *Op. cit.*, p. 12.

c26.20

In section VII (pp. 139-58) of Pullé’s work, dealing with Indian cartography from Persian and Arabic sources, we have several interesting maps. Figure 35 at p. 142 represents India according to an old Persian map of the earth. A map, after that of Ibn Haukal (975 A.D.), is given in Figure 36 at p. 147 and another from Edrisi (1154 A.D.) in Figure 37 at p. 156.

c26.21

With reference to the knowledge of map-making among the people of India, especially the Dravidians of the South, the following remarks in the *Encyclopaedia Britannica* (14th ed., Vol. XIV, pp. 840-41) are also interesting: "The charts in use by the medieval navigators of the Indian Ocean—Arabs, Persians or Drāviḍas—were equal in value, if not superior, to the charts of the Mediterranean. Marco Polo (thirteenth century) mentions such charts; Vasco da Gama (1498) found them in the hands of his Indian pilot, and their nature is fully explained in the *Mohit* or 'the Encyclopaedia of the Sea,' compiled from ancient sources by the Turkish admiral, Sidi 'Ali Ben Hosein, in 1584. These charts are covered with a close network of lines intersecting each other at right angles. The horizontal lines are parallels, depending upon the altitude of the Pole Star, the Calves of the Little Bear and the Barrow of the Great Bear above the horizon. This altitude was expressed in *isbas* or inches, each equivalent to 1° 42' 50''. Each *isba* was divided into *zams* or eighths. The intervals between two parallels thus only amounted to 12' 51''. These intervals were mistaken by the Portuguese occasionally for degrees, which accounts for Malacca, which is in Latitude 2' 13'' N., being placed in Cantino's chart (1502) in latitude 14' S. It may have been a map of this kind which accounts for Ptolemy's moderate exaggerations (in the second century A.D.) of the size of Taprobane (Ceylon). The first meridian, separating a leeward from a windward region, passed through Ras Kumhari (Comorin) and was thus nearly identical with the first meridian of the Indian astronomer, which passed through the sacred city of Ujjain (Ozéné of Ptolemy) or the meridian of Azīn of the Arabs. Additional meridians were drawn at intervals of *zams*, supposed to be equal to three hour's sail."

c26.22

The suggestion seems to be that the Indians had the knowledge of making maps as early as the beginning of the Christian era and that the Arabs and Greeks were indebted to them for the charts of the Indian Ocean together with the islands in and the lands bordering on it.

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