History and Heritage: The Afterlife of Monuments

Curator: Prof. Himanshu Prabha Ray

Follow the River: Maps, Cartographic Truths, and Imperial Frontier-making in the Himalayas in the Long Nineteenth Century

Illustrated lecture by Prof. Sayantani Mukherjee, Assistant Professor, Department of History and Ashoka Centre for China Studies, Ashoka University 

How were the Eastern Himalayas constructed as a cartographic “truth”? When did the geography of this region become politicised? The spatial constitution of this region as a “frontier zone” emerged through imperial mapping projects that developed as socio-technological discourses in British India and Qing China, transforming how these empires asserted their territorial claims over land. Imperial surveys largely claimed that natural features such as mountains and rivers marked the “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. Therefore, this talk foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocuters of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors—exploring whose knowledge(s) could be considered authoritative, and when we might begin to think of the geography of this region as political.