Terrestrial Lessons: The Conquest of the World as Globe

By Sumathi Ramaswamy

Why and how do debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape enlightened subjectivity and secular worldliness in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a scientific instrument, and not least an educational tool for inculcating planetary consciousness.
 
In Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy provides the first in-depth analysis of the globe’s history in and impact on the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era and its aftermath. Drawing on a wide array of archival sources, she delineates its transformation from a thing of distinction possessed by elite men into that mass-produced commodity used in classrooms worldwide—the humble school globe. Traversing the length and breadth of British India, Terrestrial Lessons is an unconventional history of this master object of pedagogical modernity that will fascinate historians of cartography, science, and Asian studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226476742

Book preview

Terrestrial Lessons

Terrestrial Lessons

The Conquest of the World as Globe

Sumathi Ramaswamy

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47657-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47674-2 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476742.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ramaswamy, Sumathi, author.

Title: Terrestrial lessons : the conquest of the world as globe / Sumathi Ramaswamy.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016057345 | ISBN 9780226476575 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226476742 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Earth (Planet)—Study and teaching—India—History. | Geography—Study and teaching—India—History. | Globes—India—History.

Classification: LCC G76.5.I5 R36 2017 | DDC 910/.020954—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057345

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For

Rich

The Earth, the Heavens—are fraught with Instruction.

CALEB BINGHAM, 1796

And the world is like an apple

whirling silently in space

like the circles that you find

in the windmills of your mind.

ALAN BERGMAN AND MARILYN BERGMAN, 1968

Contents

List of Abbreviations

Prologue: Global Itineraries, Earth Inscriptions

1.  In Pursuit of a Global Thing

2.  As You Live in the World, You Ought to Know Something of the World

3.  The Global Pandit

4.  Down to Earth? Of Girls and Globes

5.  It’s Called a Globe. It Is the Earth. Our Earth.

Epilogue: The Conquest of the World as Globe

In Gratitude

Notes

References

Index

Abbreviations

PROLOGUE

Global Itineraries, Earth Inscriptions

The earth . . . will belong to whoever knows it best.¹

This is an unconventional history of a commonplace object we moderns have likely encountered at some point of time in our lives, especially as school-going children. I introduce you to it by way of a fleeting but luminous appearance it makes in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, when its teenage heroine, Sai, mails off a coupon to a distant American address in Omaha, Nebraska, from Kalimpong, a small town in the Himalayan foothills of northeastern India. The coupon is for a free National Geographic inflatable globe:

When so much time passed that they had forgotten about it, it arrived along with a certificate congratulating them for being adventure-loving members pushing the frontiers of human knowledge and daring for almost a full century. Sai and the cook had inflated the globe, attached it to the axis with the provided screws. Rarely was there something unexpected in the mail and never anything beautiful. They looked at the deserts, the mountains, the fresh spring colors of green and yellow, the snow at the poles; somewhere on this glorious orb was Biju [the cook’s son]. They searched out New York, and Sai attempted to explain to the cook why it was night there when it was day here, just as Sister Alice had demonstrated in St. Augustine’s [her school] with an orange and a flashlight. The cook found it strange that India went first with the day, a funny back-to-front fact that didn’t seem mirrored by any other circumstances involving the two nations.²

This is a moment from the very beginning of Desai’s award-winning novel, set in the 1980s against the backdrop of a fiery separatist movement. Desai’s story concludes with another fleeting but telling appearance of my book’s chief protagonist:

Sai stood there—She thought of her father and the space program. She thought of all the National Geographics and the books she had read. Of the judge’s journey, of the cook’s journey, of Biju’s. Of the globe twirling on its axis.

And she felt a glimmer of strength. Of resolve. She [too] must leave.³

Terrestrial Lessons, as well, is about arrivals, encounters, and departures, about bonds established with one another and between the self and the world, and about the wonder and reverie that flow from such acts of forging but also the unease and uncertainty that may follow. Mostly, though, this book is about relationships forged with and around a singular artifact that was once laden with the circumstances of history but now appears self-evident and banal, even in places like contemporary India, notwithstanding Sai and the cook’s joyous response to it in Desai’s fictional narrative.

I write of the object that is named in English, but also in many other languages of India, as globe, which, since at least 1492—from when the earliest European example survives in Nuremberg in the famous Behaim erdapfel—has served as the model of and for the physical form of Earth, the planet whose surface we inhabit as sentient beings. For the last half millennium, the terrestrial (or terraqueous) globe has been a master object of its time, a knowledge of whose shape and contours has been deemed critical to, indeed constitutive of, one’s status as literate and schooled, even enlightened. Today, it is a ubiquitous symbol of our global times, its familiar spherical outline seemingly everywhere, from billboard logos on our streets to screen savers on our computers. Scholars of cartographic science and practice have written quite extensively on its appearance in Europe and its complex history on that continent.⁴ This is understandable to some extent because, after all, the terrestrial globe as we know it today was quintessentially a European invention of the so-called early modern centuries when it was fabricated in workshops across Western Europe, from where it was exported over a period of time when the planet for which it served as a thingly proxy was also taken over by the very peoples who had thought up the artifact. It was an extraordinary early modern thing thrown into motion beyond its own time.⁵

Yet, does this singular artifact have the same history elsewhere and everywhere, and with the same affect and effects? This is a key question that I explore in Terrestrial Lessons, locating myself in the Indian subcontinent, home today to more than one-fifth of the world’s population, and yet a place where its arrival, dispersal, and work has been completely ignored by both scholars of South Asian studies and by historians of cartography and science.⁶ My primary interest lies in tracking the terrestrial globe’s itineraries as it makes its way across the subcontinent, picking up the elusive traces of its travels from south to north, west to east, the architecture of my book more or less reproducing the geo-body of British India put in place under two centuries of colonial rule from the later decades of the eighteenth century. As I attend to numerous histories disclosed by its travels and travails, I am particularly focused upon its transformation over the course of the long nineteenth century from a thing of distinction, whose possession was the prerogative of elite (European) men, into a mass-produced commodity—a throw-away even, like Sai’s National Geographic inflatable globe—primarily associated with the learning child and related beings like woman and native.⁷

In the process, I also explore three connected sets of questions that the circulation of this object reveals more generally about the relationship between terrestrial sphericity and pedagogic modernity.⁸

First, despite pronouncements by media pundits like Thomas Friedman that we live in a flat world (or should aspire to live in one such), our status as moderns is resolutely and unambiguously grounded in our acceptance of the foundational fact of Earth’s sphericity. As Lesley Cormack puts it pointedly, rotundity equals modernity.⁹ There might well be scholarly consensus today that the infamous idea that medieval Europeans believed our planet to be flat was itself a modern invention.¹⁰ Nevertheless, knowledge of Earth’s spherical form has not come to us naturally or easily. "It is a residue of cultural activities, of watching ships come to us up out of the sea for eons, of thinking about what that means, of observing shadows at different locations, of sailing great distances, of contemplating all this and more at one time. It is hard won knowledge. It is map knowledge.¹¹ What is at stake, then, in the repeated, indeed anxious, insistence that our world is round, and not any other form? How and why does the innocuous question What is the shape of Earth?" posed at the very beginning of one’s formal schooling—and demonstrated with a globe (or its makeshift substitutes, like the orange Sai’s teacher showed her in school)—become an influential gatekeeper, the one and only correct response determining entry into the select club of the educated and the enlightened, indeed, the modern?

As the fictional example of Sai and her cook in Kalimpong also suggests, we are schooled from a very young age to size each other up—as individuals, but more often as denizens of bounded territories, colored pink, green, yellow, and so on—from our varied locations on this spinning sphere that we learn to call Earth. Such schooling is essential to what literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt so felicitously described as planetary consciousness focused upon Earth as a knowable subject.¹² Such schooling also helped underwrite the conquest—literally, but also cognitively and epistemologically—of most parts of our world in the centuries of European imperial expansion through a process that Gayatri Spivak, following Heidegger, characterizes as worlding.¹³ A primary objective of this book is to underscore the indispensable, indeed constitutive, role of the terrestrial globe in the pedagogic production of planetary consciousness, and in the transformation of a hitherto un-inscribed Earth into the gridded geo-coded sphere onto whose surface we are worlded.¹⁴ As Carl Schmitt reminds us,

In all the ages of mankind, the earth has been appropriated, divided, and cultivated. But before the age of the great discoveries, before the 16th century of our system of dating, men had no global concept of the planet on which they lived. Certainly, they had a mythical image of heaven and earth, and of land and sea, but the earth still was not measured as a globe.¹⁵

This indeed is the first revolution, this capacity to think the world no longer as an abstract sphere, largely unknown and imaginary, but as a globe—‘a perfect globe or ball . . . that has its boundaries and limits, its roundness and vastness.’¹⁶ As I demonstrate, this first revolution is conducted largely in schoolrooms across our (spherical) world from the eighteenth century onward and in the delivery of foundational terrestrial lessons to the learning child. How, then, is planetary consciousness taught in a manner that each one of us is put in place on the surface of a mapped round artifact and schooled to recognize our relative position on it?

Not least, but most elusively, I ask what constitutes worldliness—of being in the world and of being curious about that world—in the age of mathematized terrestrial sphericity, after we have been cartographically worlded as subjects of the imaginary lines drawn on the surface of the gridded globe? The struggle over geography, Edward Said wisely noted many years ago, is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.¹⁷ On the one hand, the terrestrial globe—unexpected, beautiful—is an artifact that elicits wonder, joy, and curiosity, pushing the frontiers of knowledge and daring, in the words of the National Geographic brochure that reaches young Sai and her cook in remote Kalimpong. On the other, it is an object around which anxieties and doubts accumulate (darkness in one place, light in another; some of us resplendent on its northern hemisphere, others confined to its antipodal bottom). How, then, does this artifact participate in—indeed enable—a Great Divide between those who are schooled to cross over the threshold into a new worldliness grounded in geographic curiosity, cartographic reason, and planetary consciousness, and those who are unwilling or unable to do so?

These questions have pertinence for all of us as moderns wherever we live on the surface of this gridded sphere, and whenever we allow ourselves to be schooled in the discipline of geography (lit. Earth writing; but, following Spivak, Earth inscription) and learn to abstract ourselves to look at ourselves from afar but placed amid the deserts, the mountains, the fresh spring colors of green and yellow, the snow at the poles, to recall Desai. Such matters, however, take on an extra charge for those who live(d) in places that became subject to British rule from the later eighteenth century, like the Indian subcontinent, where alternative visions of our world and of the universe in which it exists were delegitimized and dismissed, and where the arrival of modern Europe’s useful knowledge also underwrote imperial governance and the exercise of colonial power.¹⁸ Our Earth indeed comes to belong to those who know it best, to hark back to this chapter’s epigraph, and to know it as a spherical entity.

Hence also the subtitle of this book, inspired by philosopher Martin Heidegger’s insistence that the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. For Heidegger, the age of the world picture does not mean a picture of the world in the sense of being its copy, but the world conceived and grasped as a picture, so that it appears as an enframed image. Enframing is revelatory of the emergence of the modern subject, who stands abstracted from a world that he can observe, manipulate, and have at his disposal.¹⁹ The increasing circulation from the closing years of the fifteenth century in Europe of the terrestrial globe coincides with the emergence of the modern subject who imagines himself as abstracted from the planet whose surface he inhabits and which he begins to see as a whole, as if from a point afar and above. In 1803, at the height of the enthusiasm in Europe for this thingly proxy for our planet, Jacob de Gelder, professor at the University of Leiden, declared that terrestrial and celestial globes "give us, as it were, wings to consider at our leasure [sic], far away from the limits of our dwelling place, from all the viewpoints we would like, the great earth and immeasurable celestial sphere."²⁰ These are words that signal an aspiration for an Apollonian gaze—synoptic, omniscient, intellectually detached, and not least masculine—exemplified by the dashing figure of the astronaut of the US space program whose missions from the 1960s and early 1970s provided the first photographic images of the whole Earth taken by human hands. In the words of William Anders who is credited with the iconic photograph named Earthrise, dated December 24, 1968, I think that all of us subconsciously think that the Earth is flat, or at least almost infinite. Let me assure you that, rather than a massive giant, it should be thought of as [a] fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should handle with considerable care.²¹ For centuries before influential photographs such as Earthrise or Blue Marble (December 7, 1972) were technologically possible, the mounted terrestrial globe enabled an Apollonian vision, allowing the modern subject to observe, twirl around, and have at his disposal the planet that he inhabited but could not otherwise see as a whole. The globe stands in for the unfathomable Earth-as-a-whole, even as it offers a reduced, manageable, and readable model of it.²² This is the promise—as well as the hubris—of this master object of scientific and pedagogic modernity whose Indian travels and (mis)adventures I narrate in this book.

As I do so, I follow historian Giorgio Riello’s call to connect artifacts to narratives and concepts.²³ The chapters that follow are accordingly organized around four inaugural global encounters. Each reveals a new contour, a different curve, or a novel moment in the terrestrial globe’s subcontinental peregrinations, as that part of the world itself came to be increasingly incorporated into a globalizing British Empire, and as a European preoccupation with terrestrial sphericity becomes an Indian concern, reflected as well in the very name of the new discipline of geography in the region’s languages: bhugol, Earth sphere. In adopting this strategy of connecting objects and narratives, I have also been encouraged by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s invitation

to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through an analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.²⁴

Accordingly, the first of the thingly encounters with the terrestrial globe that I examine in chapter 2 takes me to July 1794 when an exiled teenage prince in southern India was presented with one by an East India Company (EIC) official in the colonial metropolis of Madras. On the one hand, I use this encounter to explore royal entanglements with this proxy for our planet, as these transpire in a period when different parts of India were progressively coming under the dominion of the Company State, hollowing out native crowns and sovereignties. On the other, this encounter also allows me to chart terrestrial lessons delivered in schoolrooms across nineteenth-century Madras Presidency, as propagated by a new fervent figure that I characterize as cartographic evangelist, an enthusiastic emissary of the new useful knowledge centered on atlases, maps, and globes whose mastery was deemed critical to the improvement, even salvation, of the native, and in whose capacity to redeem the world there was confidence, indeed certitude.

My next global encounter transports me to northern India, circa 1815, and to a small outpost of colonial progress near Delhi called Meerut where a devout Christian woman presents a globe—a makeshift ball of silk, fashioned out of some cloth at hand—to a young Brahman plagued by doubt about his ancestral beliefs. The result of this brief but consequential transaction was transformative, as the Brahman abandons his inherited faith and even undergoes baptism, subsequently becoming a teacher of terrestrial lessons to a new generation of native pupils in mission schools. While this encounter that I explore in some detail in chapter 3 allows me to deepen my analysis of the role of the Protestant missionary in cartographic evangelism that I began in chapter 2, I also use this story to track the advance of the terrestrial globe in pedagogic contexts across northern India, focusing especially on the decades following 1815 when colonial rule both expanded and consolidated itself in this part of the subcontinent that was formerly the heartland of the vast Mughal Empire. As I do this, I bring to the fore an enigmatic entity I have named the global pandit, an intellectual belonging to a formidable caste which had the most at stake—apparently—in upholding the ancestral and the antiquated and yet without whose consent and participation the new Empire of Geography could not take root, as we will see.

Anchoring chapter 4 is an exceptionally lovely photograph dated to 1873, which focuses in on a schoolroom in Bombay and shows a group of girls seated around a handsome terrestrial globe, one of them lightly touching it (see cover of book). The chapter foregrounds the circumstances for the creation of this photograph, and others like it, to explore the unfolding of pedagogic modernity across schoolrooms in western India and Bombay Presidency. At the same time, I also analyze how terrestrial lessons produced gendered governable subjects across Britain’s Indian realm, in a consequential period leading up to 1882–83 when a major review of colonial education policies was undertaken. The terrestrial globe, I have noted, circulated in early modern Europe as a sign of an increasing masculine preoccupation with the spherical world whose surface we inhabit, and of a desire to manage and dominate it. Interestingly, though, in Europe and its far-flung colonies by the nineteenth century, its pedagogical dissemination is largely gender-neutral, with women and men, girls and boys sought to be brought within its ambit. Gender and geography are thus the key concerns of this chapter.

The final global encounter I analyze is a fictional moment as it appears in a 1956 Bengali-language film, directed by one of independent India’s most famous creative spirits. It is based upon a narrative set in late colonial Bengal that has been likened to a bildungsroman, a novel of education/formation that charts the struggles that make up the actual and sometimes messy work of forging a modern consciousness.²⁵ The movie has been much analyzed in the scholarly literature, but virtually no one has attended to the luminous part played by the humble school globe in the magical worlding of an adolescent boy as he grows into manhood and modernity. In chapter 5, I draw upon this story to explore the terrestrial lessons taught across the nineteenth century into the twentieth in Bengal, a region of India that has often stood in for all of colonial India in historical scholarship. Does the itinerary of the terrestrial globe display a particular precociousness in the Bengali modern? That, too, is one of my questions.

As a child growing up in India, like millions of others, I, too, followed with utter fascination NASA’s space explorations and especially the Apollo missions to the moon. As the last of the Apollo rockets left Earth’s orbit on December 7, 1972, Commander Eugene Cernan radioed back to base in Houston, I know we are not the first to discover this, but we would like to confirm . . . that the world is round. Houston responded, That is a good data point. A little over a decade later, when the first Indian astronaut went into orbit on April 3, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi reportedly asked Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma what India looked like from space, and he responded with words made memorable by the poet Muhammad Iqbal (ironically one of the founding fathers of Pakistan): Saare jahan se achcha Hindustan hamara, Of all places on Earth, India is the best.²⁶ This, too, is a good data point for this study about the pedagogic formation of planetary consciousness that I have undertaken three decades later in which I track the colonial history of the conquest of our world as a terrestrial globe in order to understand how my fellow Indians have been worlded as subjects of the spherical home that we call Earth.

CHAPTER ONE

In Pursuit of a Global Thing

There is a story to tell every time people and objects meet.¹

An air of melancholy seems to hang over the scholarship on the terrestrial globe as an object that was once consequential, but no more. Thus, Peter van der Krogt, one of the foremost scholars on the European history of the artifact, ends his meticulous analysis of Dutch globe production from its very beginning in the sixteenth century into our time with the following account of globe use in the Netherlands in 1978:

In many geography classrooms, the beginning of a new school year often brings with it the following scene: the teacher climbs on a wobbly chair, carefully takes down the globe from the shelf and blows off a layer of dust, much to the amusement of the students (and tells his yearly joke: these are the snow storms at the North Pole). He then begins to explain parallels and meridians to the diligent seven and eight year-olds; after two or three lessons when he thinks he has succeeded, the globe disappears again to its elevated position until the following year.²

The literary scholar Jerry Brotton might well argue that this anecdote is yet another sign of the waning of the image of the terrestrial globe under the sign of [contemporary] globalism. Formerly an artifact of acute distinction—the prerogative of monarchs and ministers, the possession of which suggested mastery of the world; often taking the pride of place in gentlemen’s studies and libraries in genteel homes in Europe; and a gift worthy of emperors elsewhere—the terrestrial globe, frequently dusty and scratched, sometimes even dented and damaged, seems no longer a socially affective object.³ It seems to have spent its force, rarely able to summon up the excitement or interest that it elicited in former times. Today, it undoubtedly has a diminished role in our lives, a residual educational tool, possibly even a toy, to be recalled (albeit not without affection) by adults as something that they had once enjoyed when they were kids. Not surprisingly, as scholar of cartography Elly Dekker laments, Too many historians have regarded the globe as if it were a piece of furniture and, even if they fancy a rare and antique example to adorn their study, they hardly see it as an object for research.⁴

Yet, as the architectural historian and critic Siegfried Giedion reminded his peers, for the historian, there are no banal things. Taking heart from this proposition, and from his exhortation to seek out the unworn eyes of contemporaries to whom things which are now commonplace once appeared marvelous or frightening, I have self-consciously instated—and as a historian who does not take anything for granted—the terrestrial globe, this apparently commonplace object, as the chief protagonist of this book.⁵ Yet, as I follow its itineraries across the subcontinent, I am up against the fact that until recently most historians have survived, even thrived, during the last two centuries with little or no engagement with objects. In many ways, it appears that historians do not feel at ease when dealing with material things.⁶ As a professional class, we are, it seems, generally suspicious of things, our stock-in-trade words and narratives.⁷

Even with few precedents in my home discipline of modern (South Asian) history,⁸ however, the timing is just right for cultivating an ease with material things, dropping our customary suspicion, and for taking a fresh look at the world around us—or rather, at the innumerable objects among which we find ourselves, perpetually withdrawing from our grasp, and yet ever bursting forth in surprising new configurations.⁹ There is a history to be learned from things, as there is a history of things, even a thing-driven history. It is also about time we acknowledged that even when we have shaped things into tools, and thereby constrained them to serve our own purposes, they still have independent lives of their own.¹⁰ As things—and indeed other nonhuman entities—enter into partnership with us, we demand participation from them, and we ask them to be our witnesses and accomplices.¹¹ Yet, they do so often with an element of surprise to them that exceeds our ability to control and manage them.¹²

In coming to this recognition about the liveliness—but also the recalcitrance—of objects, I have been aided by a cluster of recent disciplinary interventions that have succeeded in pulling away from a subject-centered ontology toward the recognition that things, too, can be actors, and mingle with us in our everyday life-worlds and publics . . . and as we dwell together with them we become vulnerable to them, and they to us.¹³ From philosopher of science Bruno Latour, I have learned to think of the globe-object as an actant, "a source of action that can be either human or nonhuman; it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events.¹⁴ With political theorist Jane Bennett, I see the school globe—the humblest iteration of this once-wondrous object—pulsating with a vital materiality, and have been persuaded to follow the scent of a nonhuman, thingly power, as it leaves an elusive trail in the vast archives of empire.¹⁵ Learning from scholars who have contributed to the emergent subgenre of Thing Theory, I too pay attention to the form of the globe and its sheer materiality, even as I consider moments when it eludes my attempt to grasp" it in the archives I have inherited or sought out.¹⁶ In doing so, I resist the all-too-quick translation of the object, when I encounter it, into sign. Instead, when and where I can, I take account of the sheer materiality of the globe as a palpable and implacable textural presence in the world(s) that it creates as it does its work, especially in the schoolroom and in the company of the learning child.¹⁷

Most of all, though, my pursuit of the terrestrial globe is undertaken as a postcolonial historian, seeking to write a different history of and for this object that as scholars we think we know all too well. For, although the very form of the object ought to have fostered a truly global knowledge about it, alas, this has been not the case with the current scholarship focused as it is on Euro-America. My task, therefore, is to begin pluralizing the history and politics of this icon of European modernity and science, as it leaves its putative originary home in the metropole and goes elsewhere, in this case, to the Indian subcontinent. In doing so, I attempt to also make strange the familiar and the ubiquitous, in order to understand the lessons there are to learn from the (European) conquest of the world as globe.

Not least of the important lessons I have learned in following the elusive scent of my thingly protagonist is that for much of its career until the nineteenth century when advances in lithography enabled its mass production, the terrestrial globe was in fact quite a vulnerable object, its material fragility recognized almost from the very beginning of its early modern invention.¹⁸ Thus the Dutch cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512−94), the foremost globe maker of his time, complained about the difficulties he faced in shipping to customers all over Europe the artifacts that he so carefully and laboriously crafted, with each piece having to be individually padded with straw in specially made containers.¹⁹ As working instruments, all but the most expensive of globes were meant to be not merely seen and apprehended from afar—as is the case today, when many have been turned into collectors’ items and museum artifacts, and placed under lock and key and behind glass—but also to be touched, and turned around and about. Repeated handling, however, meant that if the artifact survived at all, it is frequently worn out, its parts and accessories frequently thrown askew, as the 1580 will of the Spanish mathematician and cartographer Juan Gesio suggests.²⁰ Its inherent vulnerability increased exponentially when the object was shipped abroad, especially to the tropics. Although all manner of materials—gold, silver, brass, glass, even ivory—were used to produce them, globes were most often made of papier-mâché or wooden shells, which were not infrequently smashed in the long sea voyages over to places like India, the printed gores on their surface torn or smudged, not to mention the inclement weather of the subcontinent that took its toll after their arrival. Not surprisingly, few globes from early modern and colonial India have survived into our times as material objects, including those that arrived from Europe, which were the majority into the twentieth century. So, even as I make a plea for understanding the materiality of the terrestrial globe as pedagogical object, ironically, I can study its Indian travels largely through discourse and representation, words and images, the thing as such rarely if ever encountered.

The Indian Travails of a Worldly Object

So it is with pleasure that I flag here the instances when the pursuit of this non-human thing has led me to three material survivors, which have managed somehow to elude the passage of time, use, and neglect to linger on in our midst, albeit poorly documented, underappreciated, and barely studied.

The first of these hardy survivors hails me from Jaipur in northwestern India where in the early eighteenth century, an astronomer-king, on whom I will have more to say in the following section, likely commissioned it (see fig. 1.1). Measuring about thirty-eight centimeters in diameter, it was fashioned out of wood, on which a layer of paint and varnish was applied by hand, and seated on a four-legged wooden stand with cross beams. The wooden horizon does not have any markings, and if there were meridian rings once upon a time, these have not survived. The oceans are painted a grayish-green, landmasses in brown, and Tasmania is still connected to Australia, as it was believed in the eighteenth century.²¹ The equator, the tropics of Cancer and Capricon, and the elliptic are painted in alternating orange and black. Most interestingly, key landmarks on the globe are labeled in Rajasthani Hindi in Nagari script.²² The late Rudolf Schmidt, the Vienna-based founder of the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes, first reported this globe in 1972, and wrote of it to the American geographer Joseph Schwartzberg on September 21, 1989:

In 1972, on a business tour to India, I paid [a] visit to the Jaipur Observatory. In one of the big instruments-building, a guardian—after receiving a tip and under a seal of secrecy—opened a green paint door in the building and carried out of a closet two globes: one of the usual brass celestial globes to which I did not pay much attention but another [a] terrestrial globe. . . . The guardian did not allow me to take many fotos nor I have a camera for close up shots, so all I can send you is this one . . . (after the guardian wiping the dust from the globe’s surface by means of his sleeve of his jacket!!!) To my memory the globe diameter [was] 30 cm ca., having inscriptions in Sanskrit letters showed a cartography of early eighteenth century which is corresponding to the time of the construction of Jaipur city. My first idea was the influence of French cartographers—de l’Isle for example.²³

Fig. 1.1. Wooden terrestrial globe on stand, ca. 1730s. Jantar Mantar Observatory, Jaipur. Photograph courtesy of Rudolf Schmidt Archives, Vienna.

By the time Schmidt encountered it, the object—which must have been truly singular and unusual to its beholders in its own time—wore a totally forlorn air, its paint dull and chipped off, its wooden stand dusty and cracked, the writing on its surface difficult to read. Of the same vintage as many European globes which are lovingly preserved and displayed in the best of museums of the West, the Jaipur artifact has had a very different fate indeed, locked away in a cupboard, out of sight, out of mind.

The lure of the object leads me next to the bowels of one such great museum in the heart of the former British Empire, where, in the summer of 2014, I spent some time with another terrestrial globe that had been produced in India, circa 1860 (see fig. 1.2). It is not entirely clear how and through what routes this object reached London where, in 1988, the London Science Museum in South Kensington acquired it from an antique dealer David Weston Limited.²⁴ That great institution has never put the object on display, and today it resides in its large storage facility at Blythe House in West Kensington. Unlike the wooden Jaipur globe, the London globe is made of brass, which once must have had a high polish (although today it is a tarnished dark brown). With a diameter of 48 cm, it is comparable to many such large globes that some European mapmakers were producing at this time. At one point, the object had obviously been suspended from a two-legged wooden stand—which the Museum still owns, albeit in a condition today that can no longer support its weight—and weighs twenty-two kilograms.²⁵ In contrast to the typical modern terrestrial globe, there are no lines drawn on its highly polished surface, the join of the two hemispheres serving as the equator (labeled vishwatrekha). There is no horizon ring, and even the meridian ring that is strung between the two poles has no markings. The map drawn on the surface shows all five continents, and Antarctica, although the interior of Africa is largely blank, as would be true on most maps from this period.²⁶ Most distinctively, the surface of the globe is covered with legends and markings, with attention especially to rivers and mountains, which are distinctively marked. India is identified as Hindustan, with some idiosyncratic references (for example, the small town of Nagor is the most distinctive place on the Coromandel coast, Bombay has been etched upside down, and Madras and Calcutta, the other great colonial metropolises, are not distinguishable among the welter of names and phrases). Along with names of places, rivers, oceans, and mountain systems, the most distinctive aspect is the confluence of demographic and geographic data, the longest inscription inscribed in a north-south direction in an area identified as the North Atlantic (Uttar Atlantic Mahasagar):

Of the area of dry land on the surface of this earth, rather more than two and three quarter parts out of ten are of water, in other words if the surface of the earth were divided into 1000 equal parts, there would be 266 parts of dry land and 734 parts of water. The area of the dry land over all the earth is 52100000 miles, and an estimated 1110000000 people live on it; one book book says 80 crore, one 90 crore, one 100 krore, but those are old books. The circumference of the whole world is 25020 miles; one mile is 3520 cubits [hāth]. The area of England is 50900, which means that England could be divided into portions a mile long and the same in width.²⁷

Fig. 1.2. Brass terrestrial globe on wooden stand, ca. 1860s. London Science Museum, 1988–95. Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library.

While the surface of the globe is covered, literally, with numerous such inscriptions and data, what is not mentioned anywhere is the name of the maker or the place and date of its making. The language of the globe is Hindi (albeit with idiosyncratic spellings) in the Devanagari script, so one can conclude that the globe was made somewhere in northern India, perhaps even Rajasthan (given the concentration and accuracy of place names from that part of the subcontinent). From its size and makeup, it is also possible to say that it was not a cheap object, and that it required expertise in working with brass, and obviously the patronage of someone who was willing to pay for it.

In contrast to the brass London globe, quite possibly a vanity project, probably commissioned by an elite man in colonial India to display his newly acquired modern geographic and demographic knowledge, is my third example, today part of the private collection of the late Rudolf Schmidt in Vienna (see fig. 1.3).²⁸ Its origins are truly humble in an everyday household comestible, the common pumpkin! The maker of the globe hollowed out one of these vegetables, allowed its outer skin to harden, covered it with paper, painted on it with a protective finish (which is partially flaked off), and mounted it on a single-legged turned wooden stand with red lacquer finish.²⁹ The globe, whose diameter measures about fifteen centimeters, has no horizon ring, and even the meridian ring is not really functional, but in contrast to the London globe—whose pedagogical use is very doubtful—it was clearly intended for schoolroom use, the familiar cartographic grid laid out neatly on its surface. This use is also confirmed by a cartouche on the globe (see fig. 1.4).

Fig. 1.3. Pumpkin-shell terrestrial globe on wooden stand, late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Made by Ayodhya Prasad Chauve, Sagar. Photograph courtesy of Rudolf Schmidt Archives, Vienna.

Fig. 1.4. Cartouche on pumpkin-shell terrestrial globe on wooden stand, late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Made by Ayodhya Prasad Chauve, Sagar.

From the cartouche we learn that its maker’s name was Ayodhya Prasad Chauve Mastar, the last word obviously a reference to the fact that he was a schoolmaster, and likely, a geography teacher. We also learn that Chauve (or more correctly, Chaube) worked in the Government Cantonment School in Sagar, a town in Central India and the scene of some interesting global encounters, which I recount in chapter 3. Chaube also identifies the object in Hindi, simply, as prthvika glov—literally, Earth globe—using the English word globe instead of the linguistically more precise bhugol. The map in Hindi drawn on the globe is contemporaneous with late nineteenth-century cartographic representations of the world’s landmasses and oceans, although it is not the most accurate of renderings. Several oceanic shipping routes are delineated, and the Suez Canal, an engineering wonder of its time, is clearly identified.

The fact that a humble school globe—especially one fashioned by a small-town school teacher in the later nineteenth century out of dried pumpkin shell!—has survived into our time is nothing short of a miracle. Schmidt acquired this globe from a Dutch dealer, Paul Peters of Iris Globes, who in turn purchased it in 1994 in London.³⁰ As I note later, similar makeshift objects were made by schoolmasters across British India—in the absence of the real thing, which was frequently the case—to demonstrate to their wards the gatekeeping lesson of terrestrial sphericity. Although most disappeared as material objects, a handful of such expedient globes traveled all the way to the West, and were displayed for a few weeks in London in the summer of 1871 in the London International Exhibition. Responding to an invitation from Her Majesty’s Commissioners who signaled their intention to showcase progress in education at home and abroad in the exhibition, the Government of India, on the express desire of the Viceroy, decided to tout its achievements in this field,

although it will probably be at once admitted that India, even in those Provinces where education is most advanced, is not capable of competing with European countries in any of the means and appliances of instruction . . . enumerated. Our educational machinery is for the most part supplied from England, or at best is a rude imitation of European models; and if our object were to compete with other countries and to offer models intended for adoption elsewhere, our show would be very poor.

In many places, India’s colonial bureaucrats conceded that the school house is an open shed. There are no maps, forms, chairs, tables, desks or globes or the usual apparatus of a school; or, if any they are of the very rudest possible description. A round earthen pot serves for a globe.³¹ Undaunted though by the realization that their show would be very poor, the Local Committees that were quickly constituted across British India to meet the government’s order enthusiastically went about gathering evidence that proved the ingenuity of the natives in this regard, and the following objects were proudly shipped off to London:

Large terrestrial globe, in Marathee. Made by Wanum Trimbuk, Head Master of the Vernacular School at Akola, Berar. Bombay Committee.

Small globe, in Bengalee. Made of cow dung, and costing 1s 6d. Used in the Circle School of Shologur, Dacca. Bengal Committee.

Small globe. Made of cocoa nut, and costing 1s 6d. Rev. J. Long.

Small globe, in Hindustanee. Made of wood. By the son of a carpenter. Government of Oude.

Small globe, in Hindee. Made of pasteboard. By schoolboy of Alyghur. N.W. Provinces Committee.

Small globe. On stand. By student of Normal School, Meerut. N. W. Provinces Committee.

Globe. Made of paper.³²

Two years later, a couple of these humble objects—the globe made out of cocoanut shell, and the Marathi globe made by the Berar schoolmaster—crossed the Atlantic again, and were put on display at the Vienna Universal Exhibition of 1873, alongside other locally produced globes and maps from different parts of India.³³ Once so displayed, these objects were returned to London to become part of the collection of the India Museum from where, in 1879, they were transferred to the South Kensington (now Victoria and Albert) Museum.³⁴ To the best of my knowledge, they were never again put on public display, and at some point after 1909, disappeared from the Museum’s storage facility for reasons not specified in the records. In 1937, they were declared missing, and ordered to be written off, and were permanently obliterated.³⁵

In the face of loss of these objects—made once upon a time with excitement and curiosity by newly-worlded men in a distant colony, deemed important enough to be displayed in international venues, but yet ultimately, destroyed after decades of neglect and oversight—a melancholic pall does hang over me as well as I write this book. Nonetheless, their very loss also obliges me to heed their call as discursive and pictorial presences, and follow this call where it leads me, taking me briefly first to early modern Europe where the terrestrial globe was first wrought as an object of fancy and learning.

A Pedagogic Proxy for Our Planet

The utility, the enjoyment and the pleasure of the mounted globe, which is composed with such skill, are hard to believe, if one has not tasted the sweetness of the experience. For, certainly this is the only one of all instruments whose frequent usage delights astronomers, leads geographers, confirms historians, enriches and improved legists [sic], is admired by grammarians, guides pilots, in short, aside from its beauty, its form is indescribably useful and necessary for everyone.

So wrote physician, mathematician, and globe maker Gemma Frisius (1508–1555), in an early Latin manual that described in 1553 the construction and use of the terrestrial globe.³⁶ The Dutchman’s sentiments at this point were surely aspirational for despite Frisius’s assertion that the terrestrial globe was indescribably useful and necessary for everyone, for much of the sixteenth century, its owners in Europe were primarily heads of state and diplomats who were concerned with the new balance of power after the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494); the Church, which heeded the call to bring Christianity to the new areas; and tradesmen, who wanted to increase their commerce.³⁷ Over the course of the next century, as Western Europe increasingly looked outward in the so-called age of discovery, others joined this select group as the globe widened and quickened its travels: explorers, navigators, astronomers, burghers, and the occasional scholar. That it remained very much an object of symbolic prestige and elite privilege, is confirmed by numerous artworks of the period—such as Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533)—in which adult men take pride in offering calculated displays of themselves in its company.³⁸ With the possible exception of Elizabeth I of England, even elite women rarely appeared in the globe’s company until the eighteenth century.³⁹ Nor did the common man and woman, or the learning child.

From the time it was first fashioned in classical antiquity, and especially after it resurfaced in the sixteenth century in Europe as an early modern object that was useful but also offered enjoyment and pleasure (to recall Frisius), the terrestrial globe has been a repository of knowledge regarding the physical form of our Earth, and alongside its celestial companion, of Earth’s place in the Universe. It has therefore always served as a pedagogic proxy for our planet, placing the unfathomable in our grasp.⁴⁰ Its role as a teaching aid and instructional apparatus, however, became most manifest from the eighteenth century in the so-called Age of the Enlightenment at a time when our Earth became the subject of scientific study as never before, as Charles Withers notes. The ardor of the age was to discover everything there was to know about it: its shape and size, its antiquity, its features, its place in the universe, even the role of God, if any, in its creation and maintenance. The task was huge, the object seemingly without order. Nevertheless, it was a project pursued diligently and with enthusiasm by the greatest minds of the age across Western and Central Europe, for geographical knowledge was central to how the world came to understand itself in the Enlightenment—to how, indeed, the earth came to be known as a world.⁴¹ Fortified thus by this Enlightenment ardor, the globe appeared seemingly everywhere, in letters and narratives, but also in artwork, in which astronomers, scientists, and geographers are shown working with or posing with them and other cartographic instruments.

Prior to the Enlightenment, even as its study came to be progressively incorporated into the curricula of early modern universities across Europe, the terrestrial globe remained largely an adult instrument. The image of the learning child whose attention is focused on the object came to the fore largely in the eighteenth century, at first limited to young boys obviously belonging to royal, elite, and genteel families, and then, progressively, as the great project of educating the masses began to trickle down the social ladder, the generic pupil seated in a modern classroom. We get some intimations of this fundamental shift of focus in two texts from the seventeenth century, the first, the biography of Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687), which shows us how fathers and sons could bond around the study of this spherical object:

Constantine and Christian, now having adequate control of the Latin language, began to wish to use the same and [to learn] history; to which end, desiring to lead them along the right path, I took for them and read aloud the Introductionem Cluverij so that they could learn geography in broad terms. . . . I instructed the children in an easy way in the general principles of Spherical Circles, and their use, so that they examined and studied the terrestrial globe every day, calculating the moment of sunrise and sunset at various times of the year, and the like. Next there was a general and more particular division of the world. . . . To strengthen them more and more in this area, I hung up the four parts of the world by Willem Blaeu in my front room, where they often played, so that they would gain a firm idea in their minds of the shape of the world and its parts.⁴²

These two young boys, so guided on the right path through a daily study of the terrestrial globe with their father when they were ten- and eleven-year-olds, went on to become among the most illustrious men of their times, the poet Constantijn Huygens, Jr. (1628–97), and the mathematician and astronomer Christiaan Huygens (1629–95). Across the North Sea, and toward the later part of the century in which these young men were so worlded, the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote in 1693, "I now live in the House with a Child whom his Mother has so well instructed this Way in Geography, that he knew the Limits of the four Parts of the World, could readily point, being ask’d, to any Country upon the Globe, or any County in the Map of England; knew all the great Rivers, Promontories, Straits and Bays in the World, and could find the Longitude and Latitude of any Place, before he was six Years old."⁴³

Although it would be a while before the mother became the principal instructor for the child in the average British home, as she apparently was in Locke’s, nevertheless, over the course of the eighteenth century, a growing number of oil paintings and watercolors, engravings, and pen-and-ink illustrations show the young student absorbed in acts of learning maps, atlases, and the terrestrial globe often at hand, as I discuss in greater detail in chapter 4. Across the Atlantic in the United States as well, the new child surfaced in an emergent pedagogical landscape that saw in the teaching of terrestrial lessons one of the fundamental ways in which a new nation could be rendered literate.⁴⁴ By the nineteenth century, the child in the classroom surrounded by maps, atlases, and globes becomes a staple of pedagogic culture in both Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, we have virtually no knowledge of such matters for other parts of the world, hence also my concern in this book with asking the question—What happens to the terrestrial globe when it goes elsewhere?—and providing a suite of responses from colonial India.⁴⁵

From almost the very start of its modern career, the terrestrial globe—and its companion until the nineteenth century, the celestial—had to be explained, and was invariably accompanied by the equivalent of a user manual (at first in Latin, and then increasingly in other European languages), which was quite frequently also furnished with illustrations that introduced its various parts and components.⁴⁶ As Joseph Moxon (1627–91), globe maker and author of one such manual published in 1674 in English put it, The Globes is the first Study a Learner ought to undertake, for without a competent apprehension of them he will not be able to understand any author either in Astronomy, Astrology, Navigation or Trigonometry.⁴⁷

As the teaching of Earth’s physical form to the learning child became the object’s primary function from the eighteenth century, the task once performed by such learned manuals—which had been largely mathematical and technical—was delegated to the elementary geography schoolbook. The latter’s opening chapters made Earth legible by offering preliminary terrestrial lessons: its spherical shape, its diurnal motion on its own axis and annual motion around the sun, the phenomenon of eclipses, and so on. The importance of such lessons is also manifest in the command to the child to memorize these facts, and in the instruction to teachers to test their pupils on their mastery of such facts. Often, such lessons took the form of the question-and-answer format, as especially illustrated by a subgenre called geographical catechism—also introduced into classrooms in colonial India—that mimicked an older Christian pedagogy now drafted into the service of the teaching as well of the natural and physical sciences.

With its roots in the eighteenth century, the geographical catechism was a subgenre that developed as primary education slowly expanded in the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, popularized especially by entrepreneurial writer-publishers like William Pinnock (1782–1843). In his discussion of the genre in early nineteenth-century United States, Martin Brückner notes that the catechism’s question-and-answer format rehearsed an established formal method of knowledge acquisition in which the interrogatory form was preferred for the young. It encouraged the pursuit of worldly knowledge by supplementing or substituting biblical history with terrestrial lessons. Most importantly, Brückner argues that the catechism’s exhortation to commit geographical lessons to memory was used at a time when visual aids, such as globes, maps, and pictures, were not readily available in the classroom. Instead, the catechism produced what he calls an inherently antivisual memory, as geographical truths and names were learned through acts of verbal repetition.⁴⁸

Even more prolific than the geographical catechism was another pedagogic genre called the use of the globes, also widely used in colonial Indian classrooms, as we will see.⁴⁹ In England, since the time of Milton, but especially from the eighteenth century, books bearing the title the use of the globes (or a variation) were meant as