In this original and deeply researched book, Sumathi Ramaswamy wonders if the globe, the spherical model of the earth, has a similar history everywhere and, upon introduction as a pedagogical prop, the same kinds of effects. In what might be called an object-oriented history, Ramaswamy seeks to address this question by focusing on the abundant and diverse historical archive of British India from roughly 1700 forward. Terrestrial Lessons is organized as a spatial and temporal tour across the subcontinent, beginning in Madras in the late 1700s. It then moves north along the Ganges valley as the British expand westward, then to Bombay and finally Calcutta and its environs. As she tracks the paths of manmade globes, Ramaswamy offers a new and richly annotated narrative of the South Asian passage from colonial to postcolonial modernity.
In the early stages of the tour, the spherical globe and its material allies, such as maps, measuring and astronomical devices, and pedagogical primers, are made mobile by Protestant missionaries, themselves filled with a zeal to banish heathenism from ancient civilizations and bring light to the benighted. Evangelists invested the globe and its companions with extraordinary powers, ones capable of overwhelming indigenous cosmologies and beliefs, with their phantasms of a Puranic flat-earth-centered universe propped on the back of a turtle or some other mythical creature, and sciences supposedly indistinguishable from superstition.
Ramaswamy's methodology is to track down as many extant globes or photographs of them as possible, as well as to unearth a trove of textual references and visual representations of the object to be found in colonial archives, personal correspondence, publications of missionaries, and extant indigenous sources. As she follows the trails of these objects across India, we are presented with strategies of “cartographic evangelism” (propagating a heliocentric universe created and sustained by a Christian god); textbooks and science curricula in Indian vernaculars, and, increasingly, in English; and converts—a small number interested in Christianity, a much larger number persuaded by European science and mathematics. In the early days, those drawn to the spherical earth included an Indian prince who collected globes and their new knowledge, an Indian pandit who became a proselytizer of science, and a banker in Benares who founded a school to teach scientific truth while the government of India, according to one source, was still paying for the teaching of “Orientalist rubbish” down the road.
Perhaps the most bracing part of the study involves a set of photographs assembled from the collection of the British Library. Known for her sensitive reading of colonial visual culture sources, Ramaswamy analyzes a set of staged classroom scenes in which a globe and maps are prominently displayed. The most striking of these images is a “classroom” filled with women of various ages with their attention focused on a globe; why women and globes, Ramaswamy wonders? One obvious answer is that it is a sign of material transformations under colonial rule, one that highlights the British interest in liberating women from oppressive local culture. Another is that the globe offers up the proper order of the world as presented by what she terms “colonial scientific motherhood” (p. 195). Significantly, the photograph around which these arguments are developed was itself made mobile—it appeared in the Vienna Universal Exposition in 1873, where it displayed a claim for Britain's good works in India.
How effective was all this? Clearly the scientific elements of British colonial modernity sank deep roots in India. Ramaswamy uses Satyajit Ray's film Aparajito (1956) to emphasize this point. And yet, as she also shows, the old gods and the beliefs associated with them were hardly banished. Instead, various kinds of fusion images emerged after 1947. In mass-produced color posters, we see Indian gods appearing now with the spherical world balanced on their heads or positioned as a cosmic object over which they reigned.
Throughout Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy draws from theoretical work in art history, literary criticism, science studies, and anthropology. This makes the book especially appropriate for advanced undergraduate courses and graduate seminars in history and other disciplines. I would only add here that what Ramaswamy has uncovered in this wonderful and rich study, with its object-oriented methodology, seems to be part of a larger colonial ensemble of visual, mechanical, and print technologies that also included gazetteers, encyclopedias, and the Trigonometric Survey of India, all of which provided organizational schemes critical to pedagogical modernity in its imperialist form. As such, it would be intriguing to move the assemblage fashioned here into the more expansive setting of British Asia, Oceania, and Africa. The question then would be the extent to which the India project of cartographic evangelism, itself effectively institutionalized when the colonial state turned from mere extraction to improvement, provided a lexical model for other colonial settings. Did, in other words, this form of colonial modernity travel into “darkest” Africa, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China, and the insular settler colonies of the Pacific? And what effects did it have in these varied places?
