A Tale of Two Maps: A Study of Western Cartographic Practices and Indigenous Pictorial Representation of Varanasi

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M. Gogate

Abstract

This paper argues that western cartography notions and practices have rejected mainly the Indian way of understanding the space and its distinct representational approaches. The map-making tradition in India visualises space as organic, complex and connected arrangements, exercises for mapping Varanasi city carried out by the British scholar James Prinsep in 1822, in contrast, relied on mathematical abstraction and land centric ideologies. The consequences of such contrasting styles and methodologies for visualising space, I argue, was made most acutely perceptible in the manner in which the river Gaṅgā was understood and positioned within the respective frameworks. While in western cartographic reckoning Varanasi was considered to be a dry space that was abutting the flowing Ganga river, in the indigenous representational formats the very same space was characterised as being a region where land and water met and interwove a continuum between the fluvial and the terrestrial.

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How to Cite
Gogate, M. (2021). A Tale of Two Maps: A Study of Western Cartographic Practices and Indigenous Pictorial Representation of Varanasi. International Journal of Geoinformatics, 17(3), 96–107. https://doi.org/10.52939/ijg.v17i3.1903
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