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Prshant Lahoti's quest for vintage maps started about 14 years ago when he walked into a little antiques shop in Scotland. Something about the ancient topographical depictions in that shop had him smitten, and in the years that followed, Lahoti, who heads the Kalakriti Archives gallery in Hyderabad, collected over 3,000 maps from across the world, making his the largest private collection of historic maps in India. Now, 70 of these painted and printed vintage maps are coming to Delhi to be displayed at the National Museum in a two-month-long exhibition titled "Cosmology to Cartography".
With the focus on the Indian subcontinent, this cartographic journey will depict the global interests and influences - religious, economic and political - that shaped the perception of India over the centuries.
"The oldest map in the exhibition dates back to 1482 and was printed in Ulm ( Germany) 16 years before Vasco da Gama arrived in India," says Lahoti. This woodcut map reflects how the ancient Romans conceived India. India's depiction in this map is based on the writings of Claudius Ptolemy, a Greco-Egyptian geographer who lived in the 2nd century in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Roman Empire. To the modern eye, the India seen here might appear unfamiliar at first sight. But look closely and the details begin to emerge - the "Indus flu" (Indus River) in the northwest and the delta of the "Ganga flu" (Ganges River) in the northeast. However, instead of the triangular peninsula of southern India is a coastline that meanders jaggedly into the sea. The script accompanying the map explains that this "misrepresentation of Peninsular India is in good part due to Ptolemy's underestimation of the circumference of the globe, combined with his miscalculation of the length of the Indian coastline".
But there are other reasons too. The Romans, explains Lahoti, were more concerned with creating maps that featured roughly accurate sequences of destinations for travel purposes rather than devising precise topographic renderings. "As Roman contact with India was limited to maritime trade, the map provides an accurate procession of the main ports of India, as they appear along the coastlines," it is explained.
Another fascinating portrayal emerges through an 1832 map of Calcutta. This rare, hand-coloured map is among the finest early city plans printed in India and provides a detailed representation of what was then the capital of the "Company Raj" and India's preeminent commercial and cultural centre with a population of almost 200,000.
On the map are visible the densely populated urban blocks in red, confined by the Hooghly River and the New Circular Canal, and the great citadel of Fort William. While most of the city comprises narrow, curving streets and alleyways, common to many traditional Indian cities, there also sits in contrast the urban European model with its broad thoroughfares. A number of squares, dominated by grand edifices, are also identified through references given at the bottom of the map - there is the supreme court, city hall, treasury, post office, theatre, surveyor general's office, Hindoo (Hindu) College and Mussuleman (Muslim) College.
The maps tell the story of the evolution of cartography. The initial Jain and Hindu maps were, for example, more cosmological than geographic and represented the "world of mortals" as against the "world of gods". These "monumental paintings of profound religious symbolism from the 15th to 19th centuries will be juxtaposed with ground-breaking historical maps of India, many of which have never before been placed on public view," says Lahoti.
Some maps will depict pilgrimage sites, clashing empires or sacred rivers. Others will show extraordinary plans of future metropolises such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi. There will also be maps of medieval Hyderabad, Bangalore and French Pondicherry.
In all, 72 maps will be on display - two from the National Museum reserve. One of these is an 18th-century Rajasthani image of Krishna showing his Vishwaroopam form, while the other is a fifth century watercolour of Hyderabad's Nizam Ali Khan giving audience to French envoy M Bussy with the Walled City as a sprawling backdrop.
The exhibition is on from August 11 to October 11 at National Museum, Delhi
