topics: |  british-india | history | cartography | geography

[Note: Contrast with Friels' Translations, the postcolonial play about the
 mapping of Ireland and the naming of features into English names. ]

  BOOKLIST: captivating story about the Great Trigonometrical Survey of
  India. ... elegant style that brings to life the personalities of the
  surveyors. The survey was the brainchild of William Lambton, an
  idiosyncratic British army officer to whom no memorial exists save his
  crumbling tombstone in central India, which Keay had difficulty even
  finding. Keay dispels as much of Lambton's obscurity as the man's
  taciturnity about himself allows; but, when the subject was theodolites and
  trigonometry, Lambton was positively effusive. Clearly taken by Lambton,
  Keay recounts how he, through a fortuitous connection with Arthur Wellesley
  (the future Duke of Wellington), persuaded colonial officials to sanction
  his survey in 1800, officials who probably were clueless that Lambton
  intended to map all of India as a means of determining the exact shape of
  the earth--or that the survey would consume the better part of the
  century. The scientific cavalcade's tone altered markedly with the
  succession, after Lambton's death in 1823, by the more personally revealing
  but infinitely more irascible George Everest. Keay makes clear Everest was
  competent but disliked, lending a note of ironic oddity that his name,
  rather than Lambton's or some local name, became attached to the highest
  peak in the Himalaya. In Keay's hands, this once-obscure story makes for
 marvelous, cover-to-cover reading. Gilbert Taylor