Mapping the Great Game by Riaz Dean

 Also Called the ‘Tournament of Shadows’

The East India Company, was a joint stock company, listed on the London Stock Exchange, constituted to carry out ‘quiet trade’ in India and the East Indies. However, by a freak incident, it blundered into administration and governance following the Battle of Buxar in 1764, when it received the ‘Diwani’ (the right to collect revenue) from the Emperor Shah Alam II. How would you collect land revenue (property tax in current parlance) if you did not know the lay of the land? The answer lay in the Great Trigonometric Survey (GTS) of the Indian peninsula, by a technique known as ‘triangulation’. A certain Lambton- an undistinguished Company soldier, started the Survey in 1802, with the objective of determining the latitude and longitude of all major points in the subcontinent. Underlying the GTS, was the Topographic Survey as the country was not flat like a table top. At lower level still lay the revenue survey- the survey of agricultural land holdings. This last survey was the least sophisticated, but the most useful to the Company bent upon maximizing the collection of land revenue.

What is The Great Game?

Readers of this review in India, may take some vicarious pleasure in knowing that most wars fought in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were centered around the idea of invading India! By the late eighteenth century, the Company had begun to consolidate its rule over major parts of India. The frontiers of Russia, Britain’s bitter enemy, lay 2000 miles away from the Afghan frontier. Located in the area intervening the frontiers of the two empires were the Central Asian Khanates. Ruled by the sword of Islam, abhorrent of new knowledge, hostile to foreigners, ignorant of the rapidly changing world outside, these Khanates were a medieval anachronism who survived on the trade of Russian and Persian slaves. The two adversaries eyed this vast territory from their distant frontiers. Both sent spies to survey the area covertly. Eighteenth century spies were polyglots: soldiers, explorers, surveyors, geologists, archeologists, botanists, collectors, traders, mendicants, linguists, ambassadors- all rolled into one. These shadowy figures spent years on uncharted roads, risking disease, detection, capture, imprisonment and death. Many perished, others earned fame. The paths of the dramatis personae from both Britain and Russia, often crossed paths, they competed with each other, and many times cultivated strange camaraderie. The British called this The Great Game, and the Russians called it The Tournament of Shadows.

What is the connection between the GTS and The Great Game?

Once the Great Trigonometric Survey was completed within the Company territory, it was extended into the domain of princely states and surrounding friendly kingdoms such as the Punjab, Kashmir, Leh, and Nepal. But the problem remained beyond these boundaries from where the Russian threat was expected. Successive Tsars from Paul (1796-1801) to Alexander III (1881-1894) waved the red rag of an Indian invasion to the British bull, sending the latter into paroxysms of military insanity. The British adopted a policy of surrounding their Indian empire with friendly buffer states. In trying to install friendly regimes in Afghanistan, the British fought two disastrous wars (see my review of the book ‘Balochistan, the British and the Great Game’ by T.A. Heathcote), in each of which they lose a whole army and return to the very point they started. The other route the Russians could take to invade India is from the north crossing over from the Tien Shan mountain ranges and the Pamirs. To seal these passages, these areas had to be surveyed, and regimes changed to establish friendly buffer states; those that can engage the enemy much before they get to the gates of India. This means more wars: the campaigns of Hunza, Chitral, and Tibet, not to speak of the two elaborate Forsyth missions to Yarkhand in Chinese Turkestan. Much of this is well documented in the Great Game literature.

Relevance of the Current Book

While Central Asia and the trans-Himalayas were closed to Westerners, given the hostility of local rulers to Europeans, they were open to Indians and the hill tribes who trod the trade routes routinely carrying goods deep into Chinese Turkestan, the forbidden city of Lhasa, and to a lesser extent even the Central Asian Khanates. When Montgomerie came to head the GTS, after the tenure of his better known predecessors Lambton and Everest, he proposed the idea of utilizing literate natives to survey the buffer ground closed to Europeans. Literate natives, generally teachers- pandits in contemporary parlance, of both religions were recruited, and trained in the art and science of surveying. They kept distance by walking in measured strides and keeping count of their strides using the teller beads of a pilgrim. They hid their notes in prayer wheels. They concealed their survey equipment in their staff. They used mercury to mark contours, thermometers to determine the boiling point of water and estimate the height above sea level. They went as pilgrims, traders and mendicants. They went on the road for years at a time. If they were discovered, arrested and executed, no Government took responsibility for their actions. If they returned triumphant with crucial survey data, and military intelligence, they received no accolades, only some money and pension. These were the men who played the Great Game at the edge of civilization. Dean’s book is perhaps the very first in the Great Game literature to bring the moving story of the Pandits to the reading public. For this reason alone the book is recommended reading, for those interested in the history of the period.  

Aside from the chapters related to the methodology of the GTS, and the biography of the Pandits, Dean brilliantly encapsulates the two Afghan wars of the nineteenth century, and the Tibetan campaign of Francis Young Husband in separate chapters. For those who do not have the time to read 500 page-long books on each of these campaigns, this book provides excellent summaries.