How Did India Shape The Modern Image Of India

It is an oft heard complaint that even seven decades after independence, india has been unable to shrug off it’s colonial burden. In most cases this colonial burden has been implied to be the form or system of governance – directly imported from the Westminster model; The constitution – which remains indian in spirit but draws from multiple western sources; and the usage of the English language.
Limiting ourselves to these would be merely skimming the surface of the large body of water that is india’s colonial legacy. From our food habits to our architecture and to an extent even our thoughts have been moulded and shaped by our colonial experience. It is in this aspect that we shall be looking at colonial practices which shaped present
The British held India as a single coherent self referential geographical entity and nationalists wholeheartedly accepted this idea of India coinciding with the British Indian Empire but predated British rule.
The Empire replaced multiple cultural and political components with single India.

The modern image of maps depict India as a single coherent geographical entity which coincided with the british empire but predates the empire.

The physical image of contemporary India has been indelibly painted upon our minds. This hard borders drawn upon maps restricts us from looking beyond those very borders upon territories which now remain alienated from the collective consciousness of post colonial India.

British map makers were influenced by the presence of the great Mughals. The British first entered India as a trading outpost and their influence was restricted to Calcutta, Bombay and Madras and they identified India as the extent of the Mughal empire. Their growth from a trading presence to a colonial power was led by the wars they won against the Mughal empire and its offshoots. The Mughal Empire was therefore coterminous with the British conception of
Post colonial India adopted the british sytem of governance and administration and thereby rely on their tools.

The british archives were created using rational processes which weren’t always the most useful but established a sense of confidence within the British as the ruling class in a position of total control.
Foucault terms the Great Trigonometric Survey as the ideal instrument of disciplinary control which physically involved the british cartographer looking down upon india from a position of physical height.
It was reminiscent of the Benthamite panopticon – an instrument of permanent, exhaustive and omnipresent surveillance.

State obsession with surveillance has continued after independence visible even today with the robust push for personal identification numbers such as AADHAR which initially begin as efficiency measures but eventually allow the state to access big data and infiltrate lives of its citizens; quite reminiscent of colonial surveillance practices which began with the establishment of Railways in the country, which with its ease of access allowed rapid movement acros territory implied a sense of lost control within the state thereby creating a necessity for the creation of verification processes such