How Professionals Became Natives: Geography and Trans-Frontier Exploration in Colonial India

Abstract

This dissertation examines a group of native explorers employed by the British from the second half of the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century to survey and explore regions beyond their territorial possessions in India. These explorers, from the outset of their employment by the British, were trained and constituted themselves as professionals in the art of exploration and in the production of the geography that emerged from it. By examining this process of training and professionalization, this dissertation argues that along with the development of geography as a discipline in the nineteenth century, there was a corresponding process whereby, even as they came to be recognized by the state as “native explorers,” the contribution of these professional explorers was largely effaced.

This dissertation elaborates on three processes. Firstly, although there were rich precolonial traditions of geography and map-making in South Asia that many native explorers were well versed in, they nonetheless constituted themselves as a new body of experts on a European paradigm of exploration and the geography it privileged. Secondly, the geography made available by exploration was inextricably linked with the political context of its production. By examining the gatekeeping of the colonial state as well as other scientific institutions like the Royal Geographical Society in relation to the geographical work of native explorers, we can understand how geography came to be stripped of its political context to develop as a seemingly empirical and matter-of-fact discipline by the end of the nineteenth century. Finally, these explorers navigated numerous roadblocks in their careers as they sought to meet the distinct but shifting professional norms put in place by the colonial state specifically for natives. Even as they skilled themselves as explorers, there was a parallel process through which their expertise was routinized and invisibilized by the state, giving us an insight into how collaboration between the British and Indians worked in the case of this new profession catering to the needs of the colonial state.