The Great Arc Read Online Free PDF Page B

of an upcountry neighbour in the stateof Mysore, roughly the modern Karnataka. There ensued no fewer than four Anglo – Mysore Wars, that of the Wellesleys and Lambton being the Fourth. It was also much the most one-sided. The gauntlet first thrown down in the 1760s–80s by Mysore’s Haidar Ali, a formidable campaigner, had come to look more like a glove-puppet when tossed into the ring in the 1790s by his quixotic son Tipu Sultan. By then the British, buoyed by their successes in Bengal, were capable of overwhelming any opposition and happily construed all but abject compliance as punishable defiance.
    Tipu Sultan had counted on French support. To this end he had reversed the one-way traffic of colonial diplomacy by despatching an impressive mission to Versailles. It had arrived in France in 1788 only to find Louis XVI desperately trying to stave off his own crisis – the deluge which within a year would plunge France into Revolution. No Franco – Mysore alliance resulted, and in India Tipu now stood alone against the mighty concentration of British power. He remained defiant. Dubbed the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, he delighted in a working model, complete with sound effects, of a tiger devouring an English soldier (now in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum). But in the Third Anglo – Mysore War of 1790 it was the tiger who was severely mauled; and in the Fourth of 1799 it remained only to despatch him.
    Lambton played his part in this war with distinction. By consulting the stars he was able to avert a disaster when during a night march General Baird mistakenly led his column south towards enemy lines rather than north to safety; and at the great set-piece siege of Tipu’s stronghold at Srirangapatnam he set a rather better example of derring-do than the future ‘Iron Duke’. The war itself, waged with such overwhelming superiority, proved little more than the expected tiger-hunt. It lasted just four months. Srirangapatnam was ravaged with an ardour worthy of Attila the Hun, and Tipu was found slain amongst the ruins.
    Rounding up the spoils took longer and was much more gratifying. The territories of Mysore stretched across peninsular India as far as the west, or Malabar, coast and south almost to its tip. Following Calcutta’s example in Bengal, Madras had at last acquired a sizeable hinterland of Indian real estate, most of which would henceforth be directly ruled by the British.
    It was while travelling with Arthur Wellesley and his staff across this fine upland country of teak woods and dry pasture, subduing a recalcitrant chief here and plundering a fortress there, that Lambton conceived his great idea.
    As when New Brunswick was settled, the country was virtually unknown to the British. To define it, defend it and exploit it, maps were desperately needed, and two survey parties duly took the field in 1799–1800. One concentrated on amassing data about crops and commerce. Its three-volume report, a rambling classic of its kind, would include such gems as an account of cochineal farming – or rather ranching, for the small red spiders from which the dye is extracted required only tracking and culling as they spun their way along the hedgerows, multiplying prodigiously.
    The other survey was a more formal affair, similar to surveys already undertaken in Bengal. It was equipped with theodolites for triangulation, with plane-tables for plotting the topographic detail, and with wheeled perambulators and steel chains for ground measurement. Colonel Colin Mackenzie, who conducted it, was another noted mathematician who had originally forsaken his home in the Hebridean Isle of Lewis to visit India in order to study the Hindu system of logarithms. His Mysore Survey was a model of accuracy and the maps which it yielded faithfully delineated the frontiers of the state as well as indicating ‘the position of every town, fort, village … all the rivers and their courses, the roads, the lakes, tanks [reservoirs],