"The Great Arc" John Keay

A comprehensive and sometimes fascinating account of the project to map, by triangulations, most of British-controlled India, beginning in 1800 and ending in the early 1840s. Tigers weren't the only problem the Survey faced. Most of the surveyors suffered terribly from dysentery, malaria and a variety of jungle fevers. Triangulation requires one to see survey poles and flags from a distant theodolite so trees had to be chopped down, towers built (sometimes they piggybacked on religious monuments (such as the Jain statue shown below), to the anger of the locals; sometimes the surveyors were accused by local lords of spying on their women from the towers) and sometimes villages moved. Indian dust sometimes intervened anyway. And there are intrinsic problems with mapping which need correcting; these include:

• thermal expansion of the metal chains used
• refraction in the air causing sight lines to curve
• plumb lines don't hang true when they are near mountains

The first leader of this endeavour was a modest man called Lambton, who got on well with his staff and others (especially the ladies). His work was critical to the success of the mapping and he has been almost totally forgotten; the author uncovered his forgotten grave. His successor George Everest (pronounce Eve-rest) was a horrible man who took all the credit for the Surveys successes and blamed his subordinates when things went wrong; he was a dreadful man-manager and he has had the highest mountain on the world (which he never saw) named after him. Life is so unfair.

Selected quotes

• "Most of the rest of Africa remained shrouded in that mysterious 'darkness' which was simply Europe's ignorance." (Foreword)
• "Giving credit to his subordinates would not come naturally to George Everest." (Ch 1)
• "In 1802 'sea-level' was construed as high water, although later in the century a mean between high tide and low tide would be adopted as the standard." (Ch 3)
• "The people had not previously come across a European - let alone a breeding pair complete with offspring." (Ch 3)
• "If Hathipaon has a ghost, he may be sporting woolly underwear." (Ch 10)
• "By razing whole villages, appropriating sacred hills, exhausting local supplies, antagonising protective husbands and facilitating the assessment of the dreaded land revenue, the surveyors had probably done as much to advertise the realities of British rule and so alienate grassroots opinion as had any branch of the administration." (Ch 11)

By Kuldeep S - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72787861



It was regarded as the tallest monolithic statue until 2016.

It shows Jain guru Bahubali who stood still to meditate for so long that a vine grew around his legs.

June 2022; 172 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God