Indian civilization has over 2500 years of mapping tradition. With the establishment of the Survey of India in 1767, British rulers initiated the mapping of colonial India with high precision and accuracy. They started mapping to establish British power and supremacy in the Indian subcontinent that portrayed a British image of India. Following independence in 1947, the Survey of India and other national agencies started mapping India for planning and development. Hence, questions have been raised that, how far British image of India have been transformed into an Indian image. In this context, in this paper an attempt has been made to analyse the mapping of India from the perspectives of transforming a colonial into a postcolonial image. The transformation occurred mainly in terms of purpose i.e. maps as a tool for the expansion of territory to planning, development and governance, from analogue to digital in method and in strategy from restricted to liberal access.
This paper seeks to look at the prose fiction and essays published in Hindi in North India in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century from the viewpoint of contemporary religious controversies and communal developments. It suggests a closer look at a few representative Hindi texts by leading Hindi authors (Bharatendu Harishchandra, Devakinandan Khatri, Kishorilal Gosvami). These littérateurs made quite special efforts to point out the religious backgrounds of the fictional characters in their works and, thus, to create a general awareness about the roles of Hindus and Muslims, both in contemporary Indian society and in the historical perspective. Being rather assertive Hindus themselves, they not only pointed out certain negative sides of “the other” community but, also—as in the case of Gosvami—severely criticized the erstwhile Islamic rulers of India. Why was the task of portraying Muslims so crucial for Hindi literature, especially at the time of serious socio-political and religious turbulences? How does this interest go along with the identity-forming agenda of the epoch? What are the ways to structure and generalize the relevant attitudes of the authors and to explain them from the point of view of the historical development of the post-Mutiny society in North India? These are some of the questions to be approached in this paper.
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